California is rapidly reshaping its approach to homeless tent encampments in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court ruling that allowed cities to enforce anti-camping bans even when people have nowhere else to go.

There are approximately 275,000 people living unsheltered in the US, with over half of them in California, and the Grants Pass v. Johnson decision has emboldened cities to break up such encampments and expand “interim housing” options, like tiny house shelters and motel rooms, to move people more quickly off the street.

Critics argue that this approach risks creating a two-tiered housing system that could mask rather than solve the crisis. Still, the fact that temporary housing units can be erected much more quickly than permanent supportive housing (roughly five months rather than five years) and cheaply ($50,000 to 100,000 per unit rather than $600,000 to $1 million per unit) has provided elected officials with an attractive policy solution to their mounting political problems.

In California, where homelessness has become both a defining political liability for elected officials and a national symbol of the state’s governance challenges, cities are particularly eager to demonstrate progress on their streets. Perhaps no California politician has been more enthusiastic about the potential of tiny house shelters than San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who proposed in 2023 to divert more than a third of his city’s housing funds to increase production. (San Jose is the largest city in Northern California, with roughly 1 million residents.)

Mahan campaigned for reelection in 2024 on clearing street homelessness, and since winning, he’s pledged to build more than 1,000 new temporary housing units by the end of 2025. More recently he declared that he wants to arrest homeless people who repeatedly refuse to go to shelter. “Homelessness can’t be a choice,” Mahan said. “Government has a responsibility to build shelter, and our homeless neighbors have a responsibility to use it.”

This more forceful approach is also being embraced in San Francisco, where the newly elected Mayor Daniel Lurie has been expanding interim housing options and moving people more quickly off the streets. Tent encampments are down in San Francisco — the lowest level on record since the city started tracking in 2019 — and crime has similarly plummeted. Arrests of homeless people are also up. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, nearly 120 homeless people were arrested in March, the highest recorded of any month in the prior seven years, and more than 700 people were arrested since August, following the Grants Pass decision.

“In the past it was only social services-led, and you’re just not going to social work your way out of this problem,” Kunal Modi, the mayor’s chief of homelessness policy, told me. “But you’re equally not going to arrest your way out of this challenge, so we’re trying to find the balance between the two.”

Elizabeth Funk, the CEO of DignityMoves, a nonprofit that........

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