UC Berkeley researchers published a study May 28 that found Oakland doubled their encampment closure activity since City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a Supreme Court decision allowing cities to sweep unhoused individuals with impunity and without needing to offer shelter.
The study used publicly available data on notices regarding full and partial encampment closures to analyze the rate of closures per month before the Grants Pass decision, from January 2021 to June 2024, and after, from July 2024 to December 2024.
The study found that the rate of encampment closures went from a mean of 14.4 closures per month before Grants Pass, to 32.2 closures per month after the decision. Forty-one percent of the encampments in the data had to be closed more than once, suggesting that closures are ineffective at resolving encampments, the authors claim.
Additionally, the authors found that while before Grants Pass there were more repeated closures of the same encampments, the opposite was the case post-Grants Pass.
The geographical range of closures also became larger as time went on. Furthermore, closures began occurring in neighborhoods with larger Black and Hispanic populations, as well as lower household incomes.
“One explanation (could be that) Grants Pass causes more closures, more people are displaced, so they have to move someplace else and then new encampments form in response,” said co-author Prabhleen Kaur. “Another way to explain (the trend in greater geographical range is that) … Grants Pass means the city can close more encampments, and they are able to close encampments that maybe weren’t the priority before.”
The authors’ paper was preceded by a study on the same topic — with the same dataset — by UC Berkeley alumni Maria Toldi and Cole Haddock. While the two studies approached the data differently, both affirmed the same conclusion: Encampment closure activity, or at least encampment closure notices, has increased since the Grants Pass decision.
According to Toldi and Haddock’s article, following Grants Pass, Gov. Gavin Newsom encouraged cities to take a hard line on encampments.
This was followed by a September 2024 executive order by Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao that allowed the city to sweep without offering shelter when in an emergency situation; this order was institutionalized through a policy that passed this April. In 2024, Berkeley passed a similar policy allowing the city to sweep without needing to provide shelter offers during a public health risk.
However, both cities have also used closures strategically to move large amounts of people into interim housing. Using Newsom’s Encampment Resolution Fund, both cities built interim housing that they subsequently filled with unhoused individuals swept with the intention of relocating them to said housing.
“While the Grants Pass decision did create an increase in the number of encampment closures in Oakland, other local policy decisions (such as the creation of Gavin Newsom’s Encampment Resolution Fund) have also heightened the number of sweeps happening in the East Bay and across the state,” Haddock said in an email.