The homeless campground is dirty. and ugly. It seems unsafe for those who are near them and even for some people living there.

They are, sadly, wrongly, wrongly - for those who are not helpless in the second, third, or even fourth chances, sometimes they make mistakes, sometimes because they are just far from living, it is a battle, it is a battle. Although we tend to be homeless in soup pots and mental illness and drug use, the horrible fact is that nearly half of the people living on our streets are over 50 years old because they are unable to pay their rent due to bad luck.

"At the end of the day, we're having a homeless crisis because we don't have enough housing," said Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and director of the Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UCSF Benioff. No one in the state really has a better understanding of the camp and its residents.

That's why I was frustrated with Gavin Newsom's efforts on Monday to encourage cities and counties to cancel camps and even provide local governments with a convenient Dandy sample creation ordinance. No matter how gentle or cleverly he packs the truth, it brings California closer to criminalizing the homeless.

Or how politically expedient it might be.

"It's time to go back to the streets. It's time to take the sidewalks back. It's time to take these camps and provide alternatives," Newsom said. "It can't continue at all. It can't be a way of life, on the streets, on the sidewalks, almost become permanent structures, hindering the flow of people, hindering our children's ability to walk on the streets and in strollers, or the elderly with disabilities and consignments, and even allowing them to move on."

From a political perspective, that tirade is on the spot. The clock has ticked in mid-2026, which coincides with the end of his term as California leader. Newsom is not only going to stare at his next move, president or not, but Democrats are watching the situation in California and whether Trump and his supporters can use it as an example of everything wrong in the United States, just like they did in 2020 and 2024.

Even Kushel, who hears the heartbreaking reasons people are homeless every day, knows that camp is not the answer.

"I do think the camp was a disaster," she said. "I hope they're gone, too."

But, it's not to make things worse, it's to break them down without letting people do it. Newsom's draft decree does not criminalize people, but requires more than "every reasonable effort" to provide shelter for those displaced - fully understand that we do not have enough shelter beds.

It also talks nicely about not throwing people’s belongings unless they have bugs or feces on them - even if the bundle may contain your ID or medication, it’s true, they may be real, they may be dumpsters.

This constant loss, constant movement not only restores people more, but also breaks trust and makes people more invisible and social. So when you have a shelter bed or treatment center, you have lost the cooperation of the people you want to help. Even if it is less visible, homelessness becomes more dystopian.

“I’m actually worried about getting people to move every day, threatening them to be arrested, all of these things will make the problem worse than better,” Kusel said.

One might recall that it was not cruel or unusual to have the punishment that the Supreme Court ruled that the grant and Johnson ruled that the cancellation of camping in public places would not allow municipalities to cite or arrest those people, which began last year’s new era. Newsom's office takes one side of Grants Pass, Oregon, briefly introduces supporting more law enforcement powers. Since then, Newsom (sometimes towed with camera staff) has cleaned over 16,000 camps on state land.

Some cities have followed their own tough laws, including San Jose. But other cities also rejected Newsom's frustration.

In the grant, things didn’t go as planned. Currently, it is currently violating its enforcement of camping laws after Oregon’s disability rights sued the city. Tom Stenson, the organization's deputy legal director, told me that the organization has seen the problem of anti-nutrition laws for people with physical or mental disorders, many of whom are older.

When the housing crunch hit the state, the low rents his plaintiffs lived in “disappeared and then had nowhere to go, which just forces them to be directly homeless.”

California’s struggle for homeless people has been dark eyes and a controversial sentiment for years, and even the most sympathetic person of Californians is tired of filth and pain. A recent poll conducted by the Politico and Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research at UC Berkeley found that about 37% of voters support arresting people if they refuse to accept asylum, while male voters and Republicans jump.

Homelessness is undoubtedly “as Newsom puts it, “a question that defines the anger and frustration of Californians.”

On the same day, Newsom released his legal template for cleaning up the camp, and he also announced $3.3 billion in funding for 124 mental health facilities across the state. Voters passed the money from Proposition 1 last year, which would add 5,000 residential treatment beds and more than 21,000 outpatient slot machines to put us in a distressed mental health and substance abuse treatment system.

Grants include $65 million in Los Angeles, renovating Norwalk’s Metropolitan State Hospital campus into a psychiatric subacute facility for transitional youth, a huge demand for the region.

Stealing from history classes, Newsom gave the state’s 37,000 mental health beds in locked facilities in 1959, inspired “a nest flying over a cuckoo.” Not ideal.

Therefore, the state canceled them through a series of necessary reforms. But it never built the promised community-based system. Now California has dropped to 5,500 locked beds, a bunch of overcrowded, understaffed, outdated prisons and prisons that have become our de facto mental health treatment centers, as well as the streets. Not ideal.

This investment in a strong community care system, providing substance abuse and mental health treatments in one place is a huge win for all Californians and will be a game-changer in about 10 years. Newsom optimistically demonstrated the beautiful effects of facilities that will be built with funds and are even expected to open next year. But people, construction takes time.

Still, Newsom deserves all credit, because one problem has been overlooked for decades and does something meaningful around it. I have seen him act thoughtfully, cautiously and vigorously on the issue of homelessness.

This makes the right-wing swing of this camp more apparently political and not worthy of our policy.

Despite these camps, homelessness in California is actually getting better and better, although you have to dabble in these numbers to see it. According to federal data, 187,000 people lived in the state last year, a record. About 70% of these people live in Los Angeles, with more than 45,000 people.

Despite the large number of homeless people, their influence increased by about 3%, while national growth was about 18%. Nationally, but not in California, families are the largest group in the year to grow.

So we are doing things that leverage policies that prioritize housing and meeting people are working. Newsom's work to build a community care system is overdue and revolutionary.

But the truth remains that California does not have enough housing. Cleaning up camps can be a political solution to ugly problems.

But there is no place to move people, it is just optics.