Vanessa Rancaño [00:01:30] So the basics are that it bans camping on public property citywide. It also bans camping on private property, and that includes residential property for more than three consecutive nights. The piece that’s really alarmed some people is that it prohibits anyone from, “permitting, aiding, abetting, or concealing camping” on any of that property. A violation of the ordinance is punishable by up to six months in jail or a fine of up to $1 ,000.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:14] Oh, wow. Okay, so when I hear aiding and abetting, I mean, are we talking about people giving a homeless person a blanket or having someone couch surf in your house? Like, what exactly do we mean when we say aiding and abetting?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:02:38] Well, it’s very unclear in the language of the ordinance itself, which is one of the huge issues that a lot of people have with this ordinance. City officials say that they intend to apply it narrowly, but that language is not in the ordinance itself.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:03] I mean, Vanessa, has there ever been a camping ban quite like this in California, like the one Fremont just passed?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:03:09] So the legal experts I talked to say no. There are certainly laws that ban camping on public property anytime, anywhere, but certainly in California, they say that there is no camping ban that includes this sort of aiding and abetting language.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:31] When you hear from city officials about why they passed this ordinance, I mean, how do they talk about the intention here? What do city leaders say about that?
City Council Meeting [00:03:42] Good evening, everybody. I’d like to call the city council meeting to order for February 12th.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:03:49] At the city council meeting where council members were considering adopting this ordinance, they brought out a number of city officials to answer their questions. So the head of economic development spoke about some of the impacts of homelessness on the business community. People in charge of homelessness services laid out all of the city’s different efforts around homelessness and the amount of money being spent, which they said is roughly around $8 million a year. And the chief of police, Sean Washington, spoke about how he intended for his officers to use this ordinance, like how they would enforce it.
Sean Washington [00:04:33] The intent will never be to arrest someone for being unhoused. And in fact, our policies prohibit us from doing that. This ordinance is another tool to bring some balance to where there’s conflict or a hazard or a safety concern to our community.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:04:59] They frame it as an attempt to take a, quote, balanced approach to dealing with homelessness. So they point out all of the investments that the city has made in providing services, roughly $8 million a year, rental assistance, financial coaching. I mean, there’s mobile health services. As a result, the mayor is proud to point out that they’ve reduced homelessness by more than 20 % from 2022 to 2024.
Sean Washington [00:05:39] What, I guess, is the fear here that you’re hearing, especially from advocates of the unhoused?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:05:45] For a lot of people, this ordinance came as a bit of a shock.
Vivian Wan [00:05:51] It’s a sweeping ban that criminalizes homelessness.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:05:56] I talked to Vivian Wan. She’s the CEO of Abode Services. They’re a provider that runs a shelter and some other housing programs in Fremont.
Vivian Wan [00:06:04] We have decades of evidence that that bans like this don’t actually solve homelessness and they actually don’t help cities and communities either.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:06:14] She was very worried that just performing core job functions like handing out water, blankets, things that her outreach workers do all the time could violate this law.
Vivian Wan [00:06:29] If we don’t disclose where someone is sleeping outside, would that be concealing? So it’s just so egregious in every way.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:06:38] Legal experts and advocates, services providers all talked about how vague the language in this ordinance is, right? They said your intentions, no matter how clearly you council members or you police chief or you city attorney say that the intention of this ordinance is to do one thing, the ordinance will be interpreted by courts based on the language that is in it. The language is so broad that people find that very scary.
Vivian Wan [00:07:14] Yeah, and I guess as someone who knows very intimately what homelessness looks like in Fremont as someone who’s working with unhoused folks, what do people like Vivian think the city should be doing instead?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:07:29] She points to research evidence that laws like this can have a cascade of negative consequences.
Vivian Wan [00:07:38] People are going to be moving more and not actually working towards their housing goals, you know, hiding more, more scared to actually, you know, get services and move towards housing.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:07:49] People talk about the stress of constantly moving as really destabilizing for people living on the streets, right? That that can exacerbate mental health problems, it can worsen addiction and that pushing people to more hidden areas takes them away from services. Providers could make it harder for outreach workers to find them. And that can be really harmful in terms of a person’s progress towards finding housing.
Vivian Wan [00:08:20] It’s not that people don’t want to come inside and you need a stick to get people come inside. There is a lack of resources, a lack of a lack of housing resources. And if there is a ban, it’s not going to solve either one of those.
Vivian Wan [00:08:37] I mean, what have you heard from people who live in Fremont about how they’re feeling about this idea?
City Council Meeting [00:08:47] At this time, we will open the floor for public comment. How many cards do we have?
City Council Meeting [00:08:53] One hundred and ninety four.
City Council Meeting [00:08:55] Okay.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:08:56] Yeah, there were more than 70 people who spoke during public comment at this meeting. And there were many, many more who wanted to speak, but didn’t get the chance because of the time limit that was imposed.
City Council Meeting [00:09:08] Have personally supported homeless outreach efforts. And I believe in compassionate solutions, but allowing encampments is not a solution. It’s neglect.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:09:17] And the people who spoke in favor of this law were really appealing to the council to deal with trash and noise and loose dogs. They talked about not being able to open their windows because of campfire smoke from encampments. They complained about parking lots that reek of urine and people showering in their yards or stealing stuff out of their backyards.
City Council Meeting [00:09:43] My neighbor has people defecate their front porch, their door continuously for two weeks.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:09:55] There were also business owners who talked about their customers complaining to them about encampments surrounding the businesses or just deciding not to patronize those businesses. The public appeared to be deeply divided because a lot of people also spoke during public comment against this ordinance.
City Council Meeting [00:10:16] I have sympathy for the businesses and residents experiencing the negative effects of some of the unhoused, but most unhoused folks are not creating these problems.
City Council Meeting [00:10:27] Criminalizing the unhoused and those who help them is inhumane and wrong in every way for a city that claims to be compassionate.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:10:41] I mean, so a lot of competing opinions here, it sounds like, but how did the council ultimately vote on this ordinance, Vanessa?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:10:50] After about four and a half hours, they passed it six to one. It was just the vice mayor, Desiree Campbell, who voted against it.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:11:02] Well, Vanessa, I want to step back just a little bit and just ask you, I mean, why is this happening in Fremont and why is this happening, I guess, now?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:11:14] As you probably remember, last summer, the Supreme Court ruled that enforcing laws banning public camping is not a violation of the constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. So cities can fine and jail people under these laws, whether or not there’s alternative shelter available. And a lot of officials, including Governor Newsom, a lot of mayors around California, really welcomed this decision because they said it was going to allow them to do more to clean up encampments.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:11:55] Zooming in on Fremont, it’s also one of those cities in the Bay Area that doesn’t have enough shelter beds for the number of people who are, in fact, houseless, right?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:12:05] That’s right. So city staff went over shelter figures at this city council meeting. And according to them, there are 111 year -round shelter beds in the city, plus another 18 reserved for victims of domestic violence. And at the last point in time count, there were around 800 people experiencing homelessness in the city. 600 of those are unsheltered.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:34] That doesn’t seem particularly unique, but what is your sense of why this is happening in Fremont in particular?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:12:43] The city has a new mayor, Raj Salwan. He was elected in November and he ran on the promise of change and common sense solutions. So he pitched himself as kind of a problem solver. And homelessness and public safety were among his top issues.
Raj Salwan [00:13:01] You know, frankly, this is complaint driven. So nobody’s going to go around trying to see if somebody’s sleeping outdoors. That’s not the goal. The goal is to address the health and safety risks.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:13:11] He told me when I interviewed him that his constituents talk about homelessness a lot, but it’s like one of the things that they most want addressed.
Raj Salwan [00:13:22] And we’ve heard concerns about fires and safety and dogs running wild. So we just need a little bit of a code of conduct to kind of rein things in a little bit.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:13:36] He acknowledged that it’s not a solution. He said the city would continue to invest in services and shelter and affordable housing, but he talked about wanting to do something for his constituents who have so many complaints about homeless encampments.
Raj Salwan [00:14:00] This is what our community is seeking. They want to help our unhoused individuals, but they also want to be able to walk to their normal park and feel safe. And so that’s kind of what we’re trying to do.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:14:18] What do unhoused people that you spoke with say about how they’re feeling about this ordinance and what it’s going to mean for them?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:14:26] I went to an encampment at the edge of the city. It’s along this creek. And one of the people I talked to was a woman named Jasmine Grijalva.
Jasmine Grijalva [00:14:34] It’s just kind of bizonk though for them to try to tell us that we don’t have the right to try to figure out how we’re going to live.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:14:42] She estimated there are around 30 people living around this creek, and she said that they had ended up there because it was sort of hidden.
Jasmine Grijalva [00:14:51] What are we supposed to do? Just stand around on corners or in front of the stores or in making beds in front of the stores? They don’t want that either. So where do we go?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:15:02] She appealed to people to recognize the humanity of unhoused people and to try to find a way to live in harmony with people who, in her view, don’t have another option. They don’t have an option to be indoors.
Jasmine Grijalva [00:15:20] They don’t like looking at us. They don’t want to deal with us. But we’re also, we’re humans.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:15:29] Often I hear unhoused people talk about the idea of sanctioned encampments, you know, some sort of safe space where they can continue to live outside in community, but not worry about being policed and pushed from place to place.
Jasmine Grijalva [00:15:46] If you’re going to kick us out, give us somewhere else that we can be at. Give us something. Don’t just take it all away.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:15:59] Seems like it’s not necessarily about one person, one new city leader, sort of trying to push this forward, but really a reflection of what people in Fremont want and sort of where they’re at and how they want the city to deal with homelessness. And it seems like people are asking for more punitive measures here.
