Encampments have become a permanent part of California’s urban landscape.
For the past decade, the state has maintained one of the largest unsheltered homeless populations in the nation. In 2022, nearly two-thirds of the state's homeless population slept outside—45% of the nation's unsheltered population, according to that year’s Point in Time (PIT) Count. Insufficient shelter capacity, a shortage of permanent and deeply affordable housing, and recent nationwide cuts to HUD funding have made the process of securing stable housing nearly impossible. With nowhere for unsheltered people to go, encampments have become the de-facto solution. Meanwhile homelessness has consistently ranked among Californians’ top concerns since 2021. As a result, cities face mounting pressure to act—quickly.
But how? To manage unsheltered homelessness, local governments work within a complex apparatus of government programs, private contractors, and nonprofit service providers to provide housing, food, water, medical care, and other resources. This network is under-resourced, and badly-needed services are often limited. Waitlists for affordable housing vouchers stretch for months or years. Many people remain outside indefinitely. Meanwhile, cities face mounting pressure from the public to address blocked sidewalks, the accumulation of debris, and public fear.
The path to housing—the permanent end to unsheltered homelessness—is long. Counties in California, working through HUD’s Continuum of Care (CoC) system, typically control referrals into permanent supportive housing and rapid re-housing through the Coordinated Entry System (CES), leaving cities with little direct authority over placement.
For a person experiencing homelessness, this often means navigating multi-year waiting lists for the extremely limited openings in housing resources including permanent supportive housing, Section 8 vouchers, and public housing. These delays are also driven by severe housing shortages. Alameda County for example, needs over 17,000 affordable housing units to end homelessness, yet since 2018, of the 4,538 total units of housing created, only 1,400 have been created specifically for homeless individuals. While the ultimate solution to homelessness lies in the long path to housing, cities are continually tasked with finding short-term fixes, resulting in a chronic mismatch between the time it takes to exit homelessness and the urgency with which cities are expected to make encampments disappear.
Cities have developed distinct systems of homeless management: administrative day-to-day responses to homelessness outside of long term interventions. Many of these mirror one another, but are not completely alike.
Of the tools cities deploy under homeless management, encampment management is the most direct, most visible, and most contested. It encompasses the day-to-day administrative and field operations cities use to manage the presence and impacts of unsheltered encampments on public space — outreach to connect residents to services, maintenance of basic sanitation and hygiene, and enforcement of municipal codes and anti-camping ordinances. In practice, these functions are often split across multiple agencies, governed by overlapping and complex rules, and carried out with little public explanation of how decisions are made.
This series is an attempt to map those structures. It provides a city-by-city outline of the local policy response to homelessness in Richmond, Berkeley, and Oakland, particularly when it comes to encampments. It looks at the main government bodies involved, the municipal codes and regulations that guide encampment responses, and the historical developments that have shaped current policy frameworks. And, it endeavors to answer a question we have often come back to:
When it comes to the growing number of people who are sleeping outside, who’s in charge and what are the systems that guide their response?