LOS ANGELES (AP) — Three years ago, Joel Hernandez built a small wooden shack beneath the 405 freeway across Los Angeles.
With the help of a friend who lived in his cabin, he painstakingly dug out soil from the hillside a few flights of stairs and reinforced it with wooden planks.
Hernandez is calm about the fact that her temporary housing on state land may be running out after state and city officials have cleared homes like her for years in an effort to clear out homeless camps. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that he plans to close the facility. A presidential decree was issued He directed state agencies to begin removing homeless camps on state land, including land under highways.
“You get used to it,” Hernandez says, “having to recreate it every time.”
Many people living in these camps expressed a similar sentiment of quiet resignation, some simply wondering where else they could go.
The order follows a U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this summer that allows cities to ban camps in public places even if there are no available shelter beds.
Governor Newsom’s order directs state agencies to act quickly and follow the lead of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), which has removed 11,188 encampments and more than 248,000 cubic yards (189,600 cubic meters) of debris since July 2021, primarily along state rights-of-way roads and highways. Caltrans Oversee a large portion of the land Under or near state highways and main roads.
But in most cases, the people living in those camps return after the authorities leave.
“I couldn’t find a better place,” said Hernandez, who has been on a waiting list for a shelter for three years. At least here he lives near friends and gets along with most of the people at the camp, he said.
Hernandez and others acknowledge it’s not the safest place to live: Recent fires have destroyed many of the underpass shelters and left the underside of the highway blackened and littered with burnt trash, broken grills and abandoned shopping carts.
Eska Guernon lives with her dog Champion, next to the highway, away from the underpass. Sometimes people ransack her tent and steal her belongings while she sleeps, but she always returns after the camp has been cleared.
“They take their bikes or whatever they have and go over there and get it taken care of,” Gernon said, pointing across the street. “They don’t know where to go, so they come back.”
On Friday, an outreach team from Hope the Mission in Van Nuys, California, handed out bottles of cold water and snacks to Gernon and her friend. They plan to return in a few days to begin the intake process and get on a waiting list for a shelter.
“We’re building trust with them,” said Armando Covarrubias, the group’s outreach team leader. It takes multiple visits before someone accepts an offer to help, he said.
Covarrubias said Governor Newsom’s executive order does nothing to reduce the homeless population, who are forced to remain outdoors while waiting for a shelter bed.
“This is not a solution. It’s not fair to them,” Covarrubias said. “It just puts more stress on them.”
Newsom and supporters of the governor’s order, including many businesses, say the encampments pose health and safety hazards for both homeless people and neighbors and cannot be allowed to continue.
Newsom said his executive order was intended to “provide local governments with the sense of urgency they need to get the job done.”
