Newsom’s Office Blasts Trump’s Homelessness Order as a Harmful ‘Imitation’

But Wan said it’s yet unclear what that will look like in practice.

“Does that mean we do drug testing?” she asked. “Do we ask people, ‘Are you sober?’ The devil is in the details.”

All Home Director of Policy Susannah Parsons called the order “a grab bag of some of the worst ideas out there for addressing homelessness.” Amie Fishman, executive director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, described it as a policy rooted in “cruelty, fear, and punishment.” But other observers have welcomed the move.

Paul Webster, a senior fellow at the conservative Cicero Institute, called it “a huge step in the right direction.”

He pointed to Los Angeles, where seven unhoused people, on average, died each day in 2023 — a rate that’s 4.5 times higher than the general population. Drug- and alcohol-related overdoses accounted for 45% of those deaths, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“We’ve known for years that homelessness isn’t just about housing but that it’s about folks who’ve got serious illnesses, addictions, mental health challenges, behavioral health challenges,” Webster said. “This is a humanitarian crisis on the streets of some of our largest cities, and we’ve ignored it for far too long.”

Newsom’s own executive order last year directing state agencies to clear encampments from state land, along with his calls earlier this year for cities to do the same, is an admission that the status quo isn’t working, Webster argued.

“California, because they are impacted the most from other states in the country, they’ve got to figure out how to do things differently,” Webster said, adding that’s meant “focusing more on the provision of treatment, focusing more on the fact that encampments are dangerous for everybody.”

Newsom also pushed for the adoption of CARE Court, an alternative mental health court designed to blockist people with untreated schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, and Proposition 1, which required counties to dedicate more money to housing and programs for people experiencing homelessness with serious mental illnesses or substance-abuse problems.