• Across the West Coast, cities and counties are still figuring out their approach to homelessness roughly a month after the Supreme Court gave them the OK to ban people from camping and sleeping on the street. In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would go so far as to withhold state funds from local governments that don’t comply with his order to clear homeless encampments. It’s a mandate that’s divided local leaders on how to manage one of the most complex issues facing the state. Sydney Johnson, a reporter covering homelessness for San Francisco NPR station KQED, talks about how the Supreme Court’s ruling is playing out in California.
• And in headlines: Voters in Arizona and Missouri will get a chance to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions this November, Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz forcefully pushed back against Republican attacks on his military career during his first solo campaign event in Los Angeles, and the Democratic National Committee says it will stream next week’s convention on social media.

Show Notes:

• Check out Sydney Johnson’s reporting – https://www.kqed.org/author/sjohnson
• Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8
• What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast

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TRANSCRIPT

Priyanka Aribindi: It’s Wednesday, August 14th. I’m Priyanka Aribindi.

Juanita Tolliver: And I’m Juanita Tolliver and this is What a Day, the show where we bring you all of today’s news in a way that’s very demure, very mindful, very approachable. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Very, are we spending too much time on TikTok? I don’t know, you be the judge. 

Juanita Tolliver: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. 

Priyanka Aribindi: You go on for two seconds. You will know what we’re talking about. And if you don’t, I’m sorry?

Juanita Tolliver: [laughing] Sorry, not sorry. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Maybe good for you. But no, this one is fun. [music break]

Juanita Tolliver: On today’s show, citizens in two more states will have a choice to vote for reproductive rights in November. Plus, Governor Tim Walz defends his military record at his first solo rally. 

Priyanka Aribindi: But first, the impact of a recent Supreme Court ruling on homelessness is being felt throughout the West Coast. Late last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters that he will withhold funds from local governments that don’t comply with his order to clear homeless encampments. 

[clip of Governor Gavim Newsom] The State of California is doing more than ever. We’ll continue to do more, but this will be my final words on this. If we don’t see demonstrable results, I’ll start to redirect money. I’m not interested in status quo ante any longer. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Newsom issued his order last month after the Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v Johnson made it easier for local governments to criminalize homelessness. Last week, the city council in Grants Pass, Oregon, the city at the center of the court’s decision, passed a new ordinance that will fine people for sleeping outside and could lead to jail time. We reached back out to Jeremiah Hayden, a reporter for Street Roots who’s been reporting on homelessness in Grants Pass. And here is what he said has been happening to unhoused people in the city. 

[clip of Jeremiah Hayden] I spoke with a few people in Grants Pass who told me nothing has really changed a whole lot since council passed the ordinance last week. That’s not to say anything is great. People are still being moved once a week. There are no fully operational overnight shelters and the public is still quite angry. Helen Cruz told me that the water is still shut off in parks and the restrooms have been closed. She is a formerly and intermittently homeless resident in Grants Pass who goes out and delivers water to people. But a few weeks ago, temperatures reached 113 degrees and there was no water available for people in the parks. One of the ongoing fears here is this Park Watch group who enters the parks to harass people sleeping there. And this is a common thing that happens with these groups who just want to see people out of the parks. 

Juanita Tolliver: I think this is a truly heartbreaking and preventable reality that unhoused people are experiencing right now, and these policies seem to lack humanity or authentic solutions that will help them get into safe, consistent housing. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Right? Absolutely. 

Juanita Tolliver: Back in California, local leaders are divided over the right approach to homelessness. San Francisco Mayor London Breed has been ordering sweeps of encampments this month, despite the fact that recent data showed the number of unhoused people in San Francisco was far greater than the number of beds available in the city’s shelters. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Meanwhile, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has voiced her concerns over Newsom’s order, saying that officials need to focus on housing and services before sending in law enforcement. For more on how the Grants Pass ruling is playing out all across California, I called up Sydney Johnson. She is a reporter for KQED who has been covering homelessness in San Francisco. She told us that the city is conducting at least two encampment sweeps a day, every day. I started by asking her what Mayor Breed’s homelessness policy looked like before the Grants Pass ruling, and how it’s changed ever since. 

Sydney Johnson: Going back before the Grants Pass ruling, San Francisco was going through a lawsuit where a group called the Coalition on Homelessness actually sued the city of San Francisco for not following its own policies related to how it clears homeless encampments. So San Francisco had policies on the books, still does, that say when the city forces a group of people or a person sleeping in a tent on the sidewalk to move, they have to do a couple of things. One, they had to offer shelter. They had to offer some other place to go. And in addition to that, the crews of workers, which include street cleaners, but also police and outreach workers, it’s a whole group of folks that go out in these scenes. They are also required to what’s called bag and tag people’s items before tossing them away. The idea was essentially to give folks who maybe are sleeping, or maybe walked away from their things, perhaps to go to work, perhaps just to walk around the corner to give them a chance to actually go back and retrieve their items. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Right. 

Sydney Johnson: Rather than having them just thrown out in a truck. And this is really important. You know, I think a lot of times people say, why? Why does that matter? You know, stuff is just getting thrown away. It’s garbage. We’re talking wheelchairs. We’re talking–

Priyanka Aribindi: Right. 

Sydney Johnson: –medications. We’re talking family heirlooms. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Yeah. Anything. 

Sydney Johnson: You know this is really important stuff for some folks. So those were two policies that San Francisco had, and the city was facing this lawsuit, essentially saying, hey, San Francisco, you haven’t been following these policies. And then the city was under a court order to essentially follow those policies that are on the books. And that was happening up until the Grants Pass ruling. And so the ruling in Grants Pass was very much related to this, because Grants Pass was obviously about whether or not you can require someone who’s unhoused to move without having an alternative shelter available. So San Francisco was essentially being held to its own policies when it really couldn’t fulfill some of those, because the city doesn’t have enough shelter beds, it doesn’t have enough permanent supportive housing units to move people into from off of the streets. So now that the Grants Pass ruling has come down, San Francisco and other West Coast cities have a lot more flexibility to carry out these encampment clearings, even though there is not alternative shelter available all the time. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Right. I want to follow up on something you mentioned in that answer. City officials say that the sweeps are meant to move unhoused people into temporary housing, but local advocates say that the city doesn’t have the resources to ensure that. What do the numbers look like there in terms of like what is needed in terms of housing versus what they actually have? 

Sydney Johnson: The point in time count, which is the federal survey of the number of people who are experiencing homelessness. This is a national survey that every city has to do, found that there are several thousand people living on the streets in San Francisco any given night. What we know is that the shelters in the city are at 90% capacity. I just checked the waitlist online right before this call, and there were nearly 200 people on the waitlist. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Wow. 

Sydney Johnson: Those are just people who have the resources and know how to sign up also. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Yeah. 

Sydney Johnson: You know, that’s just one way of looking at it. That’s just talking about shelter. If we’re going to talk about permanent supportive housing, the city still does not have enough units to meet the demand there either. 

Priyanka Aribindi: If there isn’t housing available, what options does an unhoused person have once their camp has been cleared in San Francisco? I know Mayor Breed has introduced an executive order that directs city workers to buy bus tickets for unhoused people to send them to other cities. What does this look like for them? 

Sydney Johnson: I monitored one of these sweeps last Friday and spoke to folks who were forced to move in the morning, and basically what happened was it was a Friday morning. I got there around 7:30 a.m., and crews typically arrive around eight. The folks who were living on this particular alley had received a notice on Monday morning that crews would be coming, so they did have a heads up. By the time the crews actually got there and theoretically would be able to potentially offer shelter if there was any available, all but one person had left the area, so there was about eight people who were living there the night before, and most of them left because they knew that the offers weren’t something that they wanted to say yes to. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Right. 

Sydney Johnson: Two people that I spoke to said that they actually had encountered these crews multiple times in the last month, and that they had accepted shelter. They stayed in a shelter for over a week at one point. One of the women said she experienced sexual harassment in the shelter and she didn’t feel comfortable going back there. And so her partner and her just said we’re avoiding it now. There was a woman who was on her own with a dog, and she said that she did accept the shelter option that day. She said she just wanted a quiet place to go, figure out her next moves. But when I asked her what those next moves were, she didn’t know. She had been living in the south of Market neighborhood, on and off the streets for the last five years, and having someone come by and tell her to move and give her a short shelter stay wasn’t answering that longer term question of how do I–

Priyanka Aribindi: Right. 

Sydney Johnson: –actually have a long term stable housing? It is possible that housing slots will be available at the right time, but it’s just so rare that that all lines up. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Yeah. 

Sydney Johnson: When it should and when it’s needed. 

Priyanka Aribindi: How have other mayors in California kind of reacted to Governor Newsom’s order to clear the encampments so far? You know, can we expect to see more of these kinds of sweeps throughout the state? 

Sydney Johnson: I think so there were certainly other mayors and certainly other Democratic mayors that celebrated this Supreme Court decision alongside Breed, which it should be pointed out, too, that this was a conservative majority Supreme Court ruling. So, you know, the contrast of these deep blue mayors celebrating that win is is really striking. I do think we’ll see it in other cities, you know, perhaps Sacramento or Stockton or San Diego, a notable city that’s bucking the trend with this, at least in terms of how government officials are responding, is actually happening in L.A.. Mayor Karen Bass has kind of taken the opposite approach, right, in terms of her response to this. She said that the city is not planning to arrest people who are experiencing homelessness, while Breed has said we’re going to ramp up citations. We have evidence to see that that is happening. Breed has also said that arrests are possible, and we’ve heard from attorneys representing people in jail for this right now that that has happened as well. So it’s very likely, I think, that we’ll see more of these sweeps across the West Coast, especially in cities that are like San Francisco. Maybe this has become a politicized thing and it’s an election year, but we won’t see it everywhere. And like, I think it’ll be really interesting to pay attention to those other cities and what they are doing. Are rates of homelessness actually going up and down differently in different cities? You know, this is such a huge, sprawling issue and no individual city is going to solve it on their own, I don’t think. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Right. 

Sydney Johnson: But if there’s different approaches that are being taken, I think we’ll really have to watch and see what happens on the local level. 

Priyanka Aribindi: That was my conversation with KQED reporter Sydney Johnson, who’s been covering homelessness in San Francisco. 

Juanita Tolliver: That’s the latest for now. We’ll get to some headlines in a moment, but if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and share with your friends. We’ll be back after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Juanita Tolliver: Let’s wrap up with some headlines. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Juanita Tolliver: It is official, Arizona voters will get a chance to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution this November. The Arizona Secretary of State’s office on Monday said it had certified nearly 580,000 signatures turned in by the coalition Arizona for abortion access. That’s way more than what was needed to qualify for the ballot. Arizona currently bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. It’s also a major swing state Democrats hope to win in November, and the measure could help boost election turnout. Abortion rights advocates in Missouri won a similar victory on Tuesday. Voters there will get a chance to reverse the state’s near-total ban on abortions this November and guarantee protections in their state constitution. Both Missouri and Arizona’s abortion laws went into effect after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion in 2022. And just like we saw in the elections in 2022 and 2023, abortion rights are absolutely going to be a winning, mobilizing issue for Democrats. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Absolutely. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz held his first solo rally since being named vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. On Tuesday, Walz spoke in Los Angeles at a convention for one of the country’s largest labor unions, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. During his speech, Walz talked about the Harris ticket’s support for unions. He also defended his military service, something the Trump campaign has spent the last week trying to discredit. 

[clip of Tim Walz] I am damn proud of my service to this country. [cheers] And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person’s service record. To anyone brave enough to put on that uniform for our great country, including my opponent. I just have a few simple words. Thank you for your service and sacrifice. [cheers]

Priyanka Aribindi: Walz spent more than two decades serving in the Minnesota National Guard before retiring in spring in 2005 to run for Congress. A few months after his retirement, his unit was told it would deploy to the war in Iraq. Walz’s Republican counterpart, Ohio Senator JD Vance, who is also a veteran, has accused Walz of misrepresenting his service and retiring to avoid deployment. Walz and the Harris campaign strongly refute this claim. 

Juanita Tolliver: As the daughter and granddaughter of people who served in the U.S. military, every person’s military service is valuable and worthy. Like, it’s really disgusting, these attacks from J.D. Vance. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Absolutely. Especially when you’re um standing next to Mister bone spurs over there, like, what are you doing? 

Juanita Tolliver: Do you know who you’re running with? [laugh]

Priyanka Aribindi: Like, come on, come on. 

Juanita Tolliver: Iran is continuing to signal its plans to launch a retaliatory strike against Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh was killed late last month in Tehran. On Monday, the US and several allies released a statement calling on Iran to, quote, “stand down its ongoing threats of a military attack against Israel.” Then on Tuesday, a spokesman for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a response saying that the demand made by the Western powers, quote, “lacks political logic and contradicts principles of international law.” Also on Tuesday, three senior Iranian officials told Reuters that if a ceasefire deal is reached between Hamas and Israel, Iran would hold off on retaliating. Cease fire talks are supposed to resume on Thursday, but a Hamas official told Reuters the militant group will not be sending a representative to this week’s talks, and instead want to see a plan that would put President Biden’s cease fire proposal from May into practice. 

Priyanka Aribindi: The DNC is getting with the times and coming to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube with a more modern look. On Tuesday, the Democratic National Convention Committee announced that for the first time ever, the DNC will be streaming vertically on the social media platforms. Okay. Very modern, very hip for the DNC. People have been doing this for a while, but okay. 

Juanita Tolliver: I mean, a win is a win. A win is a win, okay? 

Priyanka Aribindi: A win is a win. All right. Convention organizers hope to reach younger viewers by offering the vertical view that users are used to on the popular apps. The convention will also be streaming on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Roku. And for the boomers out there, you can still catch it on Facebook. What are you doing there? No, no. [?]

Juanita Tolliver: I I mean, they’re looking for horizontal views, right? I feel like Facebook is set up for horizontal while everybody else is vertical. But also I’m excited about this. I really hope they do some type of collaboration with our homie, very demure. [laugh]

Priyanka Aribindi: Oh my god. 

Juanita Tolliver: Very approachable. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Did you see how Vice President Harris came to the stage? Very demure, very mindful. And those are the headlines. 

[AD BREAK]

Priyanka Aribindi: That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, protect Tim Walz at all costs and tell your friends to listen. 

Juanita Tolliver: And if you’re into reading and not just the massive number of Arizonans who signed the Abortion Access Ballot initiative like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Juanita Tolliver. 

Priyanka Aribindi: I’m Priyanka Aribindi. 

[spoken together] And the DNC says hot to go to the polls. 

Juanita Tolliver: I don’t know what that means. What does that mean? 

Priyanka Aribindi: Oh my God. Juanita. Chappell Roan. Please.

Juanita Tolliver: I just know she dressed up like a WWF wrestler. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Is that what that costume was? 

Juanita Tolliver: Yeah. [laughing]

Priyanka Aribindi: Oh. [music break]

Juanita Tolliver: What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Bill Lancz. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. We had production help today from Michell Eloy, Tyler Hill, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.