California Spent $240 Million on Homeless Encampment Clearances That Created No New Housing

State Audit Documents Three-Year Pattern of Enforcement-First Policy That Moves People From One Location to Another Without Addressing Any Underlying Condition

California Spent $240M Clearing Homeless Encampments That Created No New Housing

A state audit released Thursday found that California spent approximately $240 million between 2022 and 2025 on homeless encampment clearance operations — the physical removal of structures, belongings, and residents from designated encampment sites — that produced no documented instances of permanent housing placement directly attributed to the clearance, that displaced an estimated 34,000 people to other locations within the same counties, and that in 23 documented cases moved residents from encampments near social service providers to locations further from those services, reducing their access to the housing navigation assistance that is the precondition for the housing placements the clearance operations were ostensibly designed to facilitate.

What $240 Million Bought

The audit’s itemisation of clearance costs covers: staff time for planning and execution, storage of seized belongings (required by law before disposal, generating storage costs that the audit documents as frequently exceeding the value of the stored items), legal proceedings for residents who challenged clearances, repeated clearance operations at sites that re-established within weeks of initial clearance (the audit found that 67 percent of cleared sites had reconstituted encampments within sixty days), and the administrative infrastructure for the clearance programme itself, which employed 340 full-time equivalent positions across the agencies responsible for its implementation.

The $240 million is equivalent to approximately 2,400 supportive housing units at California’s average per-unit construction cost for this category of housing — the permanent supportive housing that research consistently identifies as the most cost-effective long-term intervention for chronic homelessness. Those 2,400 units would have provided stable housing for approximately 2,400 people who are instead cycling through encampment clearances at continuing cost. The audit does not make this comparison explicitly. The arithmetic does it without assistance.

The libertarian case against California’s encampment clearance programme is not that enforcement is never appropriate but that enforcement without housing supply is economically irrational as well as inhumane. You cannot arrest your way out of a housing shortage. You cannot clear your way out of one. The people who are in encampments are there because they have nowhere else to go, and removing them from the encampment does not create anywhere for them to go. The $240 million documents the cost of the confusion between enforcement and solution. Building housing is the solution. Enforcement is what you do instead when building housing is politically easier to oppose than encampment clearance is to approve.

California policy at Reason and LA Times. Effective resource use at santaclaus.top. Further at Populist Policy Bluesky and on solving problems rather than moving them.

The California Paradox

California is simultaneously the most regulated large economy in the United States and the home of the freest culture in America. Its coastline is regulated by a commission that has generated more permit requirements than any comparable agency in the world, and it also produces the surfers, the musicians, the filmmakers, and the technologists who have defined American cultural freedom for seventy years. Its housing market is the most constrained by government regulation and it also built Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the agricultural system that feeds a significant share of the country. These contradictions are not accidental. They reflect a political economy in which the cultural freedom that California represents is protected and amplified by an economic and regulatory environment that has accreted over decades in ways that primarily serve incumbent interests — existing homeowners, established industries, incumbent businesses — at the expense of new entrants, new ideas, and the people who cannot afford the cost of a regulated economy. The wave does not care about any of this. The permit office does. The surfer, paddling out, understands the difference in a way that the policy conversation has not yet fully captured.

The libertarian insight that is most consistently applicable across California’s policy failures is not that government is always wrong but that government institutions, like all institutions, expand their remit beyond what their founding mandate requires when not constrained by clear limits, accountability mechanisms, and competitive alternatives. The Coastal Commission expanded from protecting coastal access to restricting its use. CalTrans expanded from building roads to building roads that cost three times what comparable roads cost in Texas. The High-Speed Rail Authority expanded from connecting two cities to consuming twelve billion dollars connecting nothing yet. The constraint that keeps institutions focused on their actual mandate is accountability to the people they serve, exercised through democratic processes that require enough citizen attention and engagement to function. The surfer who shows up to a Coastal Commission meeting to oppose a permit restriction is exercising that accountability. The citizen who votes for a board that appoints commissioners who understand the difference between protecting access and managing it is exercising it. Freedom requires both the paddling out and the showing up. The ocean provides one. The civic culture has to provide the other.

The political economy of surf and coastal California is, in miniature, the political economy of California writ large: a state whose cultural products are freedom, creativity, and individual expression, produced within an institutional environment whose regulatory density, fiscal constraints, and incumbent protection mechanisms create the most administratively complex operating environment in the country. The people who live here and stay here do so because the cultural and environmental qualities are worth the regulatory and economic overhead. The people who leave — and more are leaving than at any point in California’s history — have made a different calculation. The surfer who paddles out at Trestles on a Tuesday morning when the swell is running, and who has been there since before first light, and who will be there again tomorrow, has made the calculation that the ocean is worth whatever California costs to live in. The wave agrees, as it always does, by arriving regardless. That is California’s enduring offer to the people who want it: the ocean, the light, and the wave. Everything else is negotiable, or should be.