One issue Trump and Newsom agree on? Homeless encampments

When President-elect Donald Trump moves into the White House in January, he will become a key figure in California’s homelessness crisis, holding the federal purse strings and setting policy at the national level. 

So what will this change of power mean for the state as it tries to move its nearly 186,000 homeless residents — the most in the nation — indoors? 

Housing and homeless services experts in California worry the Trump administration will cut federal funding in those areas, while also doing away with policies deemed too “progressive.” 

But surprisingly, based on what he’s said so far about one of the key issues regarding homelessness, Trump’s agenda isn’t much different from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s. Trump pledged to tackle the encampments that have made cities “unlivable” by working with states to ban urban camping and arrest those who don’t comply — something many cities in California started doing before Election Day, as Newsom encouraged them to clear camps.

“The homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs,” Trump said in a campaign video posted online in April, 2023. The video appears to be the last time he revealed specific homelessness policy intentions. 

“There is nothing compassionate about letting these individuals live in filth and squalor rather than getting them the help that they need,” Trump said. 

Newsom, who in most other arenas is one of Trump’s biggest foes, has said nearly the exact same thing.

“There is no compassion in allowing people to suffer the indignity of living in an encampment for years and years,” Newsom said in September before signing a package of housing bills. In July, Newsom ordered state agencies to ramp up encampment sweeps, and he threatened to withhold state funding from cities that fail to do the same.

More than two-dozen California cities and counties already have introduced or passed new ordinances cracking down on camps (or updated existing ones to make them more punitive), after the Supreme Court gave them the green light to do so in June.

Trump also said he would move unhoused people to tent cities staffed with doctors and social workers. 

That plan alarmed Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow for the National Alliance to End Homelessness. 

“We need to remember that involuntary carceral approaches don’t work and just delay our efforts to end homelessness,” he said.

If Trump pushes these policies at the national level, especially if he offers federal funding for sweeps and tent cities, it could spur California cities to further crack down, Visotzky said. 

As the Trump administration gets to work replacing the heads of federal agencies such as the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, there’s a good chance policies California has come to rely on will get tossed out along the way, said Sharon Rapport, director of California state policy for the Corporation for Supportive Housing. The new guard likely will scrap at least some policies viewed as the gold standard in California, such as “housing first,” which says unhoused people, even those struggling with an addiction or their mental health, should be offered housing with no strings attached, and then services to help them recover.

It’s also a good bet California would see large cuts to funding for federal housing and homelessness programs — including the voucher program that subsidizes rents for hundreds of thousands of Californians, Rapport said.

That’s worrying for organizations such as Abode, which provides housing and other services for homeless Californians in seven counties.

“Federal funding is the brunt of what we receive either directly or through other entities, so it could be really impactful if there’s a huge reduction,” said CEO Vivian Wan. “It’s just going to hurt all of our communities.”