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San Diego to renew enforcing laws against homeless encampments

In this photo from Jan. 31, a row of tents lines a stretch of a homeless encampment on Sports Arena Boulevard in San Diego.
In this photo from Jan. 31, a row of tents lines a stretch of a homeless encampment on Sports Arena Boulevard in San Diego.
(Hayne Palmour IV / For The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Crackdown will include area on Sports Arena Boulevard where hundreds have set up tents

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Police are expected to resume enforcing laws against homeless encampments on public property this week, but don’t expect large tent cities to suddenly disappear.

Ashley Bailey, strategic communications officer for public safety and homelessness at the city of San Diego, said people in encampments will receive multiple visits from homeless outreach teams and be offered shelter and other services before citations are issued.

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The crackdown will include a large encampment on Sports Arena Boulevard between Rosecrans Street and Pacific Highway, where about 200 people have been living for the past several months.

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“The city continues to emphasize a compassionate approach,” she said in a statement. “However, it will balance that with the need to address the health and safety issues that persist in encampments of this size.”

The enforcement will start about two weeks after city crews began cleaning the Sports Arena Boulevard site, where a two-day effort removed 10 tons of material, including soiled mattresses, rotten food, improperly contained fuels and other items that could be hazardous.

At the time, some residents and business owners in the area said they were disappointed that the city did not clear the encampment and allowed people, tents and makeshift structures to remain after crews left.

City officials said the cleanup was not intended to displace people, but to make the site less hazardous to people’s health. Bailey said resuming enforcement actions at encampments was not in response to the recent actions on Sports Arena Boulevard, but rather was happening because more shelter beds were becoming available for the people there.

The city stopped enforcing laws about illegal lodging and encroachment in 2020 in response to the pandemic. The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention had advised against clearing encampments under the assumption that people in them could be safer from the coronavirus if they were allowed to stay in one place.

With the number of tents in downtown San Diego growing dense, however, city officials last year were concerned about other health risks, such as a hepatitis A outbreak like the one that occurred in 2017. A large outreach that included multiple agencies was launched last summer in an effort to reduce the number of tents, and progressive enforcement resumed afterwards.

Enforcement policies changed again as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus caused a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases. City shelters stopped taking new clients out of concerns of the outbreak spreading, and enforcement of laws about encampments was paused Dec. 29.

Without shelter beds available, cities face a legal challenge in citing people in encampments. In 2019, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court’s decision in the case Marvin v. the city of Boise, Idaho, which ruled that people could not be cited for sleeping on public property if they had no other options.

With COVID-19 cases decreasing, San Diego shelters this week again began accepting people, and enforcement will resume Monday.

Bailey said the progressive enforcement model that will be followed at encampments will mean people will be offered a shelter and services at every interaction before any enforcement action is taken.

People at the Sports Arena encampment have been reluctant to accept offers of shelter in recent weeks, however. As of this week, only eight out of 180 people contacted at the Sports Arena Boulevard encampment have accepted a shelter bed, and most of those were at the newly opened harm-reduction shelter for people with addictions or mental health issues.

Homeless advocate Michael McConnell said he agrees there are extreme cases where enforcement is needed, but in general he sees any crackdown as exacerbating the problem.

“The city is resorting to the criminalization of homelessness, the same policy that has failed over and over,” he said.

While enforcement of laws against encampments can be used as leverage to get people to accept shelter or other services, McConnell said the practice is ineffective because many people will continue to reject the offers and end up with citations that will make their lives more difficult.

“The resources they’re offering are inadequate, and that’s one of the reasons people don’t take them up on it,” he said. “If they’re going to keep offering the same crappy shelters and subpar services, then people are going to keep refusing them and we’re going to continue to have a growing homeless population. The only difference will be is they’ll be a homeless population that will be routed through the jails and end up with a criminal record, which will make it even harder to house them.”

McConnell has advocated for more alternatives to shelters, such as hotel rooms or legal, safe camping sites as a way of moving people off the street.

Karen Andersen-Thatcher, whose family owns Walter Andersen Nursery just off Sports Arena Boulevard, said she has lost business because of the encampment and is glad to hear that enforcement is resuming.

“I heard more beds have opened up, and I hope that they accept the help, because what we see out there daily is really sad,” she said.

Andersen-Thatcher said she is sympathetic to the plight of people living on the street, but at the same time she is frustrated about the issues the encampment is causing for her staff and customers.

“I know that they’re not going to come through and boom, it’s going to be instantly gone,” she said. “I know that’s not going to happen. Obviously we’d like to see it happen quicker, but as long as there’s some kind of progress and movement being made, we appreciate that.”

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