California Senate committee votes down bill that criminalizes homeless encampments

A bipartisan California bill that would make it a crime for a person to sit, lie, sleep, or camp on a street or sidewalk within 500 feet of a school, park or major transit stop was voted down following a hearing in the Senate Public Safety Committee Tuesday morning.

Senate Bill 1011 was co-authored by Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, R-Santee, and Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas. A similar bill, Senate Bill 31, also introduced by Jones, failed last year.

This time, the bill met with resistance from committee lawmakers, including Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, and Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Hayward, who chairs the committee.

Skinner said she couldn’t support a statewide measure to clear homeless camps, adding that local governments already have the power to do so if they wish.

“But for us to put it in law, it’s like trying to make a problem invisible versus addressing the core of the problem,” she said.

For 50 years, Skinner said, local governments worked to suppress the supply of housing, and the senator said that they bear some responsibility for the state’s homelessness crisis.

Though the bill has the support of a handful of interests — California Baptists for Biblical Values, the California State Sheriff’s Association, the cities of Carlsbad, Exeter and Oroville and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office — it is opposed by several dozen others.

Among them: ACLU California Action, Disability Rights California, the Vera Institute of Justice, the Western Center on Law and Poverty and many pro-housing and homeless advocacy groups.

Jones spoke Tuesday on behalf of SB 1011, saying it would “help protect our most vulnerable populations: children, seniors and families.”

The bill, which Jones called compassionate, would require enforcing authorities to give unhoused people 72 hours notice before clearing their encampments. It also would make creating such an encampment a misdemeanor or infraction offense.

Jones said Tuesday that the goal was not to criminalize homelessness.

Jones and Blakespear said that their bill was inspired by an ordinance passed by the City of San Diego last year. The lawmakers said that it had led to fewer unhoused encampments in the downtown area.

A report by CalMatters found that while encampments were less common in high-traffic areas such as downtown, the city’s main park and around certain schools, encampments are still prevalent, perhaps even moreso, near freeways and along the banks of the San Diego River.

“The city’s homeless shelters are full, often with no beds for people who want to avoid a citation. There’s no evidence the city’s overall homeless population has decreased in the eight months since enforcement started,” according to the CalMatters report.

But support for the bill was clearly lacking Tuesday.

Wahab said that she could not support the bill.

“Just because people that are unhoused make people uncomfortable, does not mean it should be criminalized,” Wahab said.

Sen. Kelly Seyarto, R-Murrieta, spoke in favor of the bill, saying that when public spaces are taken up by encampments, they are no longer public spaces. He said those spaces “should be available to everybody.”

Seyarto expressed frustration with the bill’s critics.

“We’ve had a slough of people come out and tell us what we shouldn’t be doing. Well what the hell should we be doing?” he asked.

Wahab, Skinner and Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, voted against the bill. Seyarto voted for it. Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, abstained from voting.