San Diego Will Spare No Expense to Criminalize Poverty
The Second Installment from "All-Rise," a New Community-Based Newspaper
By Mitchelle Woodson
“America’s Finest City” is San Diego’s famed tagline. We’ve got sunny weather year-round, beautiful beaches, and a blatant disregard for humanity. Widely ranked as the most expensive city in America, in the midst of a housing and homelessness crisis, San Diego continues to create more laws to criminalize poverty. Rather than investing in long-term solutions to stop the humanitarian disaster on our streets, government officials are doubling down on the harmful practices that got us into this mess in the first place.
The city of San Diego continues to invest considerably more in police — and the enforcement of laws that make it a crime to be homeless — than any other department. Mayor Todd Gloria’s fiscal year 2024 adopted budget reveals the most expensive general fund expenditure is the police, with an astronomical allocation of $622.9 million. The Fire-Rescue Department is the next in line with an expenditure of $351.7 million. Compare this to the only $34.2 million allocated for Homelessness Strategies and Solutions.
According to the 2023 Point in Time Count administered by the Regional Task Force on Homelessness, there are 10,264 people experiencing homelessness and 5,171 people living unsheltered throughout the county, up 25.9% from the previous year. There are nearly 2,000 unsheltered people living on the streets of downtown alone, an all time high. The juxtaposition between spending on SDPD versus sheltering people experiencing homelessness highlights the city’s inhuman priority.
Most recently, the mayor fully supported an ordinance by Councilmember Stephen Whitburn that bans homeless encampments in nearly all public spaces, including near homeless shelters. The grim irony? There are literally not enough shelter beds available for the amount of people living unsheltered. In response, Gloria has promised to add 1,000 more shelter beds, and on its face, this may seem like a positive step in the right direction. However, shelter beds only temporarily get people off of the streets and are a mere band-aid compared to the proper safety net that we need.
The ban on people experiencing homelessness from experiencing homelessness in front of homeless shelters is nonsensical at best and counterproductive. In 2019, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Martin v. Boise found that such an ordinance violates the eighth amendment of the U.S. constitution insofar as it imposes criminal sanctions against homeless individuals for sleeping outdoors or on public property when no alternative shelter is available to them. The ruling held that cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances if they do not have enough homeless shelter beds available for their homeless population, deeming it cruel and unusual punishment. Even so, San Diego County is now on its way to passing an ordinance similar to the city’s.
Gloria has even gone out of his way to file an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of a ban on homeless encampments in Grants Pass, Oregon. If the top court upholds the ban, it will set a dangerous precedent for people living unsheltered across the country. It would give cities the unbridled discretion to enforce laws that make it illegal for homeless people to exist in public spaces and engage in life sustaining activities, such as sleeping, even when they have no other alternative, either because they cannot afford one or because the city does not have any shelter options for them.
The paradox? Countless studies have shown that criminalization doesn’t work to end homelessness, and instead, it actually perpetuates poverty and entrenches people into chronic homelessness.
Nevertheless, in his recent State of the City address, Gloria vowed to support statewide efforts to amend Proposition 47. In an attempt to reduce mass incarceration, California voters in 2014 decided to reduce certain property and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. The ballot proposal was intended to alleviate the devastating effects of a felony record for low-level offenses and help people land jobs and housing and get generally back on their feet. Gloria plans to rollback this reform, stating, “We should be locking up criminals, not laundry detergent.” If people are really stealing laundry detergent, because they desperately need clean clothing, we must critically think about how the skyrocketing cost of living is impacting our quality of life and making poverty all the more likely in our communities.
The increased enforcement of laws that make it illegal to be homeless in San Diego while simultaneously failing to invest in adequate, low-barrier, permanent supportive housing solutions reveals a blatant disregard for humanity and a set of twisted values that tosses some aside so that others won’t have to ask Target employes for access to the toiletries behind plexiglass.
Mitchelle Woodson is the Pillars of the Community legal director. She will be speaking on “Civic Engagement and the Fight for Social Justice” at San Diego City College in MS 140 on Wednesday, May 1st at 11:10AM.
All Rise is a new San Diego-based newspaper of activist community journalism that acts as “A Thorn in the Throat of Authority.” The Jumping-Off Place will be partnering with them by posting selected articles for the near future.