Davis, CA – The Davis City Council will hold a special meeting this evening to receive information about recent changes in laws regulating homeless encampments in response to the Supreme Court ruling in the Grants Pass case .
At the most recent “Point-in-Time” count, a snapshot of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January, Davis had an unsheltered homeless population of 161, though this number is “widely acknowledged as an undercount.”
The Supreme Court decision “overturned an early decision by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which barred cities from enforcing camping ordinances in most public and private areas whenever the number of unsheltered people in a jurisdiction exceeds the number of ‘practically available’ shelter beds.”
The Supreme Court’s decision, staff noted, “provides considerable discretion as to a municipality’s ability to enforce reasonable health, safety and welfare ordinances, including camping ordinances, that apply to all people.”
Governor Newsom in July issued an order establishing an “imperative” to act “with urgency to address dangerous encampments, which subject unsheltered individuals living in them to extreme weather, fires, predatory and criminal activity, and widespread substance use, harming their health, safety, and well-being, and which also threaten the safety and viability of nearby businesses and neighborhoods and undermines the cleanliness and usability of parks, water supplies, and other public resources.”
That order also directs state agencies “to immediately enforce camping restrictions on State property.”
It “encourages” local governments to do the same. The result was that many jurisdictions increased enforcement of local encampment ordinances.
“San Francisco, Sacramento, Berkeley and other communities in the Bay Area and Sacramento region are now enforcing camping ordinances, leaving Davis as the only Yolo municipality operating under different ordinances,” staff noted.
Davis also reported an overall increase in camping complaints from 18 in June, down to 11 in July, and then up to 20 in August and 33 in September.
“Many of these complaints have also included individuals living in vehicles, campers, and RVs parked throughout the city,” staff reported. “This is only expected to increase as the State and other regional entities enforce their ordinances and laws more strictly.”
However, staff reiterated, “Despite the changes in law and approach, the City of Davis does not view the criminalization of public camping as a way to solve the continuing housing crisis.”
However, they emphasized that “regulating camping on public and private property is needed to ensure the community can access and use public areas for their intended purpose.”
To achieve a thoughtful approach to encampment resolution, staff added that “any camp management must proactively connect campers to supportive services and, ultimately, to suitable housing.”
The staff report cites the UCSF Homelessness and Housing Initiatives Encampment Resolution Guide by Mark Dones and Marisa Espinoza which recommends, “The role of law enforcement in any homeless services endeavor should be approached with care and sensitivity … Creating clear agreements and working with a law-enforcement partner to provide trauma-informed, housing-focused services can lead to strong collaboration and resource sharing.”
The City and its partners are “working together to inform the community about the various policy changes and explain how we will maintain the safety of our downtown, local businesses, community and public spaces.”
The City, staff claims, “will accomplish this while ensuring the unsheltered are offered resources and treated with dignity.”
Staff outlines a multistep approach:
- Step 1: Outreach and Engagement: Engagement is the initial path to services and self-sufficiency for the unsheltered who are often experiencing trauma and for whom trust requires time. Additionally, a subsequent goal of outreach is to prevent encampments from becoming too large or unsafe, which are much more complex and require substantially more City resources to resolve.
- Step 2: Compliance: To keep personnel, service providers, businesses and others safe, the engagement teams often partner with the Davis Police Department in specific situations. If someone appears to be in crisis or disoriented, the embedded mental health clinician will co-respond with an officer to make an assessment and referral to the appropriate agency. Code enforcement will also respond to enforce city ordinances related to illegal camping and abandoned materials.
- Step 3: Enforcement: If engagement and compliance are ineffective, law enforcement is called in to protect people and property, maintain public order, and enforce the law. The city-staffed Homeless Outreach Team, Downtown Streets Team, and County Mobile Outreach deploy daily throughout Davis to offer the unhoused a path to meeting basic needs, health/mental health care, and employment. Enforcement and encampment clean-up require substantial Police Department personnel resources and large encampments often require the assistance of other City departments.
Staff notes, “The City has long prohibited camping in parks and open space areas, and those ordinances were routinely enforced prior to court decisions invalidating their enforcement in most situations.”
Nevertheless, Code Enforcement “continuously noticed and removed encampments during that time, but were left without the tool of enforcement as a way to further prohibit camps that were nuisances or unsafe.”
The proposed ordinance staff wrote “revises and adds to the existing no camping ordinances, which currently cover only parks and open space areas. The proposed revisions better refine the definition of camping and camping paraphernalia and add other public and private properties not currently included to the list of locations where camping is unlawful.”
