Reflecting frustration over the fact that years of adding resources to fighting homelessness had brought little progress, Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill making it significantly easier for authorities in three counties with 40 percent of California’s population to force the most severely troubled individuals into conservatorships. Those are arrangements in which after judges give their consent, individuals can be compelled to remain hospitalized and receive treatment for addiction, mental illness or both.

Senate Bill 40 was introduced by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. It allows the counties of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego to set up pilot programs under which police, social services and public health advocates can seek to have judges approve conservatorships for individuals after their eighth “5150” or emergency crisis hold within a year. The law sunsets in 2024.

But the driving force behind the concept has been San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who for years has argued that her city needs a more effective way to deal with the relative handful of homeless people responsible for extreme incidents that harm quality of life for city residents and tourists alike.

“We can’t compel anyone to do something if they don’t want to do it,” the mayor told the San Francisco Chronicle last week. “And in most cases, for someone who is mentally ill, they are not accepting what we are offering — which means the conservatorship legislation is going to be very helpful for a small group of those people.”

The ACLU of Northern California — one of the best-funded, most high-profile local ACLU chapters in the nation — strongly opposed the measure, faulting its due-process provisions as inadequate.

Targeted individuals found in need of involuntary detention under the new law would first be given a 28-day housing conservatorship and then six-month arrangements. It provides individuals opportunities to challenge authorities’ decisions in the courts. But the hardline elements of the law were too much for civil liberties groups.

“Fundamentally, care should not begin with handcuffs,” a coalition of groups including the ACLU told Wiener in April.

Counties may not have adequate facilities to use with law

Another sharp criticism was that none of the three counties had adequate facilities allowing authorities to get many troubled individuals off the streets.

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the San Francisco-based nonprofit Coalition on Homelessness, told Pew’s Stateline news service that “of course there aren’t [adequate resources]. … Look around the city. If there were beds, you wouldn’t see what you see.” Wiener’s law “doesn’t really do anything but sounds good to the public.”

Statistics cited in a recent Chronicle article back up this concern. It noted that two people who were already in an existing conservatorship program in San Francisco were being held inside of a locked hospital ward because of an estimated five-month wait time to get into a residential facility.

Former state lawmaker Kevin Murray, a supporter of more aggressive use of conservatorships with the troubled homeless, last month blasted the city and county of Los Angeles for inadequate facilities. A recent Los Angeles city audit offered similar concerns.

In June, San Diego County supervisors responded to years of criticism over its mental health and homelessness programs by beefing up spending in the 2019-20 budget. While the city of San Diego has won praise for its efforts to provide shelter to the homeless, it’s also been faulted for its sparse options on care for the mentally ill homeless.

Rushing to meet last week’s deadline for filing amicus briefs, dozens of local governments and other groups in California have jointly and separately beseeched the high court to uphold laws targeting sleeping in public. Such laws are seen as a key way to crack down homelessness.

The flood of legal filings came in support of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court filed by the city of Boise, Idaho. The city opposes a September 2018 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals that held that just as governments “may not criminalize the state of being ‘homeless in public places,’ [the city of Boise] may not criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless — namely sitting, lying or sleeping on the streets.”

In July, Boise hired attorneys Ted Olson and Theane Evangelis of the Los Angeles-based law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher for its appeal. The attorneys sought amicus briefs from affected local governments and stakeholders in the states bound by the 9th U.S. Circuit’s ruling: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

Lawyers for Boise say court overreached

Olson’s and Evangelis’ argued that the Boise ruling could create never-ending legal fighting by taking away a tool communities need to deal with homelessness, as well as create massive new fiscal obligations.

As CalWatchdog reported last week, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors backed joining an amicus brief prepared by the California State Association of Counties. Among the other government bodies that decided to back Boise:

• The city of Los Angeles. City Attorney Mike Feuer said last week that the ruling “could place the city at risk of litigation as leaders strive to fashion the humane, practical solutions this crisis urgently demands.” Mayor Eric Garcetti, an outspoken advocate of what he sees as a humane approach to homelessness, did not support Feuer’s decision.

• Riverside, Orange and Fresno Counties.

• The cities of Sacramento, Fullerton, Torrance and Newport Beach.

The decisions reflect a rift between high-profile politicians like Garcetti, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg who call for a compassion-first approach on homelessness and politicians who are responding to frustration and anger from their constituents over homeless encampments disrupting neighborhoods. Homelessness has gotten steadily worse in most California cities over the last dozen years, fueled initially by the Great Recession and then by the high cost of housing.

But the Boise ruling also is unpopular across the West. The Idaho Statesman reported that 20 amicus briefs supported by 81 different groups from a range of states had been filed with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers doubt high court will take case

The newspaper noted that one was filed by MaryRose Courtney, whose brother is homeless and mentally ill, and the Ketchum-Downtown YMCA in Los Angeles. Unlike many of the briefs, it didn’t focus on the fiscal and quality-of-life headaches that could result from the Boise ruling. Instead, Courtney challenged the notion that tolerating sleeping in public was humane.

This approach is “leading to more aggressive policing, as police prohibited from enforcing anti-camping laws turn to arresting homeless people for more serious offenses like public urination, public defecation and public nudity,” she wrote. “Court rulings like the 9th Circuit’s in this case do far more harm than good because they lead to deregulation and generate apathy and inaction, as well as a sense of frustration that discourages further efforts to help the homeless.”

But plaintiffs’ lawyers from Idaho Legal Aid Services and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty told the Statesman that they were skeptical the Supreme Court would take up the case because the ruling by the panel of 9th Circuit judges was based on earlier court rulings on homeless ordinances that had not been overturned. 

Plaintiffs have four weeks to prepare a response to the amicus briefs.

If the high court decides to take up the case, a hearing is expected in the spring with a ruling by the end of the court’s term in June, the Statesman reported.

Reporting from across California indicates that more college students are homeless than at any point in state history. While hard statistics are in short supply, surveys suggest the problem is so severe that the Golden State has far more than the overall total of 135,000

The stories hammer home how the housing affordability crisis isn’t just squeezing low-income families in California. It’s limiting how much help middle-income families can give children attending college. After paying for college costs and food, many students don’t have enough money for shelter.

In April, the New York Times reported that California State University estimated that 8 percent to 12 percent of its 470,000 students experienced homelessness in 2016 – at least 37,000 students.

”This is not just happening in urban poor communities,” Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California Community Colleges, told the Times. ”Homelessness now affects working-class and formerly middle-class families.”

In August, the Southern California News Group reported that a recent survey by the Los Angeles Community College District showed 18 percent of the 250,000 students at its nine colleges had experienced homelessness in the previous year. That’s about 45,000 students.

The report noted that Rio Hondo College in Whittier was taking unprecedented steps to address student homelessness, including encouraging students to shower on campus and planning to open a campus pantry to feed destitute students.

In August, a report in San Diego CityBeat detailed how officials at UC San Diego and San Diego State University and local aid agencies had ramped up efforts to help impoverished students with food and shelter. It noted that helping homeless college students was not a priority at local shelters.

Problem is worst in high-cost Silicon Valley

But the epicenter of California’s homeless college student problem appears to be in Silicon Valley, where housing costs are for the most part even higher than in Southern California. Last week, a nonprofit group that helps struggling young people in Santa Clara County – the Bill Wilson Center – released a study that estimated that 44 percent of community college students in the county were either homeless or lacked consistent access to stable housing.

Mike Pritchard, a homeless counselor in Santa Clara County, told the San Francisco Chronicle the high numbers were what he expected: “This is what I see all over the Bay Area and in many parts of this country. People are being forced out of their situations, rents are being jacked up. It’s getting worse, everywhere.”

The problems are not limited to areas close to the coast. In July, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported on a private Riverside County program that helped 600 poor college students at UC Riverside and Norco College to stabilize their lives, including help finding housing.

In an effort to determine the severity of the college housing crisis, state Sen. Janet Nguyen, R-Garden Grove, introduced Senate Bill 307 in February. It sought to establish a task force with representatives from the University of California, the California State University and the California Community Colleges to conduct “a study to determine the extent, causes and effects of housing insecurity and homelessness of current and future students.”

In May, SB307 passed three Senate committees and the Senate as a whole without a negative vote. But after it passed the Assembly Higher Education Committee in July on another unanimous vote, the measure stalled in the Assembly – without ever facing formal opposition from a lawmaker.