Neon green signs taped to fences and signposts tell homeless San Diegans they have 24 hours to clear their encampments. Aldea Secory, who has been homeless in San Diego for the last five years, said she’s gotten used to it.
“Every other day, pretty much, they make us clean up and move,” she said.
She and her husband tried keeping the area around their camp clean. Police and other city staff were still moving them three days a week, she said.
Secory has lost a lot during the sweeps.
“I had a brand new $35, $40 bag of dog food just thrown away,” she said. “Beds, clothes — it doesn’t matter. Birth certificates, medication. Doesn't matter. They just throw it away.”
So they moved, crossing a fence from city to state property the California Department of Transportation, or Caltrans, maintians. They found they could stay there for longer periods of time.
“We were on the side of the freeway for, like, a month down by 17th Street,” Secory said. “That was okay, you know? And then more people started to come.”
San Diego has prohibited tent camping in public spaces for more than a year. Now, city leaders say tent encampments near freeways are a growing problem. Outreach workers with the Father Joe’s Villages Street Health Program say it’s more difficult and more dangerous to reach patients there.
During more than a month of reporting, KPBS saw tent encampments along freeway on-ramps, off-ramps and under overpasses. Sometimes a curb was all that separated cars from people in tents.
Cassandra Hasten said she’d been living on state property for two months.
“Where I’m at, by the freeway, they don’t mess with us up there,” she said. “Yeah, I have safety concerns. Cars, car accidents, stuff like that. But I'm kind of nestled in between some trees right now.”
On a recent visit to patients in downtown San Diego, Tuesday Moon, a member of the street health team, passed granola bars through a chain-link fence separating a city sidewalk from the grass lining a freeway onramp.
“We try to encourage folks to come out for health care outside of the fence. But since the encampments have moved on to the Caltrans areas and behind fences near freeways, it scares me more on a personal level,” she said. “The deeper in they are, the harder it is for us to get them care.”
The street health team provides things like wound care, substance use disorder counseling and prescription management. If they can’t reach their patients, Moon said, minor health issues can have serious consequences.
“Let’s say an ingrown hair for someone like me or you turns out to be a huge infection,” she said. “That small, ingrown hair turns into an abscess. If we can’t find them in that interim, it goes from being a mild wound care situation to an antibiotic situation.”
Keeping track of patients has become more difficult since San Diego’s unsafe camping ordinance went into effect in July 2023, said Jenni Wilkens, who manages the street health program.
“On one hand, I have seen where people have been more willing to accept help or take advantage of alternate opportunities because they're tired of being shifted and moved around and displaced so regularly,” she said. “I've also seen where people have retreated into the recesses and they're never to be found. And so we're left wondering what happened to them, where they went, are they okay.”
One of their patients, Lee Alirez, has high blood pressure. She’d been dealing with headaches, blurred vision and chest pain before she got diagnosed. Moving her camp frequently has made it hard to stay in contact with the health team.
“There was a couple of different times they couldn’t find me, and I was just literally across the street and around the corner,” Alirez said. “And that was in the midst of all that, trying to figure out what was going on with my blood pressure.”
The Father Joe’s team monitors her blood pressure and makes sure she has her medication.
“I have noticed that it helps considerably,” she said of her medication. “At first, I was hesitant to realize that it was working or helping. But then, when we started seeing the results in the blood pressure readings, they were more normal, and I wasn't getting headaches like I was.”
City leaders say the camping ordinance has helped them connect people to shelter services. Franklin Coopersmith, deputy director of the Environmental Services Department’s Clean SD Division, said the city’s homeless outreach team recently spent several days at an encampment at the Chollas Parkway Open Space.
“They were able to get 16 of the 20 people into some type of housing option,” he said.
Before the ordinance, the city gave 72 hours’ notice before clearing an encampment. Now, they give 24 hours.
“We found that as a really good middle ground of trying to be compassionate while also addressing public health and safety,” Coopersmith said.
After 24 hours, he said, city staff take photos of the site and look through any remaining bags, boxes and other containers that might have items of value, such as paperwork or medication. The city says they’ll store those items for 90 days and take them back to the owner.
“Any remaining items soiled with moisture, food, human waste, pet waste, insect infestation, drug paraphernalia or in disrepair are then discarded,” their policy reads.
The ordinance prohibits tent camping on public property if shelter beds are available, and near homeless shelters, schools, parks and transit centers regardless of shelter availability. Once people move onto state or private property, the city can’t enforce it.
“It's an imaginary, real line that exists right there, and they know they can go on the other side,” Coopersmith said. “And that's where our resource stops. We don't go onto state, we don't go onto private, we don't go onto county property to do the abatement process.”
In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered state agencies to clear encampments from state property.
Caltrans District 11, which includes San Diego, declined an interview request. A spokesperson wrote in an email that Caltrans prioritizes removing encampments that present “a threat to infrastructure or people.” The agency gives a 48-hour notice to people in an encampment before a sweep, unless there’s an imminent safety risk. They said they typically give social service providers and local governments two weeks’ notice so they can reach out to people staying there.
The city gets about 300 complaints each month about encampments on state land, according to San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s office.
Steve Shebloski, captain of the San Diego Police Department’s neighborhood policing division, said he’s talking with state authorities about how they can work together.
“We can only do so much, and we have to focus on city property,” he said. “I don't know if we can get into the world of policing 151 miles of state highways within the city. We just don't have enough resources.”
Last week, State Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, introduced a bill she says would make it easier for Caltrans to seek assistance in clearing encampments. The bill would require Caltrans to coordinate with local governments to address encampments and allocate funds for cleanup efforts, outreach programs and shelter services.
Gloria co-sponsored the bill.
“While cities like mine are making progress in clearing encampments on city-owned property, we’re seeing more and more encampments along our freeways — state land where cities have no authority to act,” Gloria said in a statement. “My hope is this bill leads to a streamlined abatement process, formalizes an agency coordination process, and develops innovative funding solutions to address this growing problem.”
Secory hasn’t experienced a sweep in a while. She is still living in a tent, but now it’s at one of the city’s Safe Sleeping sites. She can keep track of her belongings and stay with her husband and their dog.
“Having somewhere to keep your stuff and not worry about it getting stolen or messed up, it’s a big help,” she said.
It’s also easier for the street health team to find her — a growing challenge as other homeless patients move out of reach.
