What's at stake:
As Fresno expands its approach to encampments with more police, homeless advocates question whether adding more cops will reduce the number of people on the street.
For decades, Fresno’s response to homeless encampments followed the same playbook: send in police officers, clear the site, throw property away and move people along.
That process was supposed to change 20 years ago. But advocates say it has not changed at all, despite years of well-publicized promises from City Hall.
An October 2006 lawsuit effectively helped ban the practice, after a federal judge sided with advocates against the city and said it was illegal to repeatedly raid encampments, seize and destroy belongings including clothing, medication, tents, blankets and family photographs.
“The practice of announce, strike, seize [and] destroy immediately is against the law,” said Judge Oliver Wanger of the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of California in 2008.
The class-action settlement resulted in $2.35 million for hundreds of Fresno residents that year.
In the intervening years, Fresno has launched numerous “new” programs and policies aimed at eliminating problematic encampments while prioritizing social services and housing opportunities for the unhoused instead of criminalizing people automatically.
In recent years, the City of Fresno has tried its hand at addressing the most visible encampments, from Project Off-Ramp to anti-camping ordinances to the Homeless Task Force.
In 2022, Mayor Jerry Dyer said the city was ready to try an even more compassionate approach.
His administration launched the Homeless Assistance Response Team (HART), an effort meant to shift the city away from enforcement and toward outreach and connecting homeless people with services and shelter.
But now, four years later, Fresno-area housing advocates are adamant — the city has failed to deliver on its promise. And many advocates say the city’s policies only changed on paper. In practice, they say, very little actually changed.
“They weren’t doing anything radically different,” Brandi Nuse-Villegas, a longtime housing advocate, said. “It was an effort to communicate this idea of compassion, but the way it was designed didn’t allow that to happen.”
Advocates who spoke with Fresnoland say that HART uses excessive force, still discards people’s belongings without regard and regularly violates its own policies to keep encampment numbers down.
“I think there is a discrepancy in what officials have told the public, in their public documents, and what HART does,” Nuse-Villegas said.
But the city is doubling down on its approach, recently adding a second HART team to the budget to provide seven-day-a-week coverage, saying that the team “provides our most vulnerable residents with the resources they need,” in the budget document.
Phil Skei, assistant director of Fresno’s planning and development department, said the City of Fresno has received 7,500 service requests related to homeless encampments since September of 2026 – the majority of those on private property.
The initial proposal included funding for one police sergeant, four officers, five leased vehicles and equipment, at a cost of about $290,100 in personnel expenses, plus roughly $183,000 in vehicle, equipment and related operational costs. The adopted budget gives the amount $158,537 for the five new hires.
The HART expansion has drawn criticism from many community members who question whether additional law enforcement staffing is the best investment for addressing homelessness.
Fresnoland’s request to speak with all parties of the HART team was denied.
How HART works on paper, according to City Hall
In January 2021, just one month after taking office, Dyer said in a Facebook video that previous efforts to move large numbers of unhoused people from one location to another “only exacerbated the problem.” Dyer said the city would wait until housing became available and then relocate people into those shelter beds.
One year later, HART hired most of its staff and became operational in January, according to the city’s official announcement of the team, describing it as a “compassionate and responsive team.”
During the announcement, Dyer said that, when no shelter beds were available, HART would clean encampments on public property by picking up trash, pressure washing and making sure conditions are safe before allowing unhoused residents to come back to the site.
City officials also said encampments on public or private property would receive 10 days’ notice before a cleanup.
HART consists of four elements: HART-unit police officers, code enforcement, outreach workers from the Poverello House’s HOPE team, and the city’s solid waste division.
Skei said the HOPE team takes the lead on outreach. HART officers, he said, serve as a backup role, only assisting during encampment sweeps.
HART primarily responds to homelessness-related complaints submitted through Fresno’s 311 system or FresGO app, evaluating how to respond to each request based on the number of people, whether the property is public or private and which agency has jurisdiction, Skei said.
How HART responds to encampments on public versus private property varies.
On public property, the city can remove an encampment, including disposing or storing belongings. HART does not need to provide advance notice, but Skei says the HOPE team still reaches out first.
But HART’s approach changes on private property – and that’s where the majority of encampments are reported, according to city data provided by Skei.
The city does not automatically clean up the site, and property owners are responsible for bringing their land into compliance and paying for cleanup.
The outreach team isn’t called in to provide services, unless a property owner requests it.
Housing advocates expressed concern when HART was first announced in 2022 that the city’s then-new effort could criminalize people living outside.
And after HART began their work, homelessness increased by roughly 7% in 2023 compared to the 2022 point in time count. The number of available shelter beds fell by 25%, from 5,101 in 2022 to 3,814 in 2023.
In response to criticisms about HART’s actions on outreach, brought up by longtime homelessness advocates, Skei responded that “our outreach team attempts to make contact with everyone experiencing unsheltered homelessness, on both public and private property.”
There is one exception for larger encampments. Under Fresno’s administrative code, sites with 10 or more people that have remained for at least 10 days require the city to notify both the property owner and encampment residents at least seven days before HART moves against the encampment. Skei said these larger encampments are relatively uncommon.
In 2025, HART addressed 9,395 encampment-related service requests on both public and private properties and coordinated with many other public agencies.
HART outreach workers also conduct an informal city-wide quarterly count of people experiencing homelessness to track locations where encampments keep popping up, Skei said.
But ultimately, what’s supposed to set HART apart from previous approaches to encampment clearing – is outreach and services.
A recent state grant application from the city says the HART team uses a “non-enforcement model” to “maintain safety and cleanliness, ensuring residents remain engaged rather than displaced. Ongoing sanitation, mobile showers, and supportive services stabilize the area until residents transition to housing.”
“That’s always our goal,” Skei said. “To ensure that outreach and all services that we offer are provided before an enforcement action is ever taken.”
Unless an item falls under the city’s prohibited categories, Skei said staff generally allow residents to keep or store their property. If no owner can be identified, items are inspected and anything that has “apparent value” is stored.
Staff are also supposed to leave an informational receipt explaining that a cleanup occurred and where and how someone can retrieve stored belongings.
Typically, outreach begins through referrals across Fresno from 311 and FresGO, seven days a week, said Sara Mirhadi, Poverello House’s chief programs officer. The HOPE team also makes regular visits to areas where they have contracts, while a different outreach team goes out seven days a week to provide services.
“We’ll start off with ‘hello, how are you?’ to build rapport,” Mirhadi said. “We do little things like snacks and water just to get people to talk to us.”
She said most people accept Poverello House services “of some sort, and will work with us.”
“Generally speaking, we have a pretty good acceptance rate simply because we’re not law enforcement,” Mirhadi said. “I feel like HART gives us a lot of opportunity to do non-law enforcement activity before law enforcement has to come in.”
When enforcement happens Mirhadi said it is often because people have repeatedly refused offers of assistance or are violating city laws.
Many unhoused people are offered a spot in emergency shelters along Parkway Drive, according to the city’s draft action plan for this year. But housing advocates say shelters are often full and aren’t equipped to accommodate individuals with more than one pet.
Skei said, “at any given time this year,” the city has about 1,400 shelter beds.
Across the city, shelters are closing as the state and federal government have diverted funding from shelters to build more permanent supportive housing instead. The city announced in August plans to use $32 million in California Homekey+ funding for the Valley Inn to build 84 apartments.
The city has no money — or authority — to provide behavioral health treatment for unhoused residents struggling with mental health or substance abuse disorders. HART refers people to Fresno County’s Behavioral Health Department for such services.
But even under the most generous microscope, city leaders acknowledge they are not close to declaring any meaningful victories.
“Success for us, obviously, is ending chronic homelessness,” Skei said. “We haven’t achieved that, but every time we see those numbers go down, we view that as a measure of success, but not the only measure.”
Fresno’s response to homelessness ‘falls short’
Advocates for the unhoused say City Hall’s “more compassionate” approach amounts to little more than another broken promise.
Nuse-Villegas said HART discards belongings during cleanups, something she says she’s documented hundreds of times since 2016.
She told Fresnoland that she doesn’t typically see outreach workers at routine encampment clearings – just law enforcement.
Lethal, who asked to be identified by her pseudonym for safety reasons, is a mutual aid worker and lead street navigator with the Fresno Needle Exchange. She has spent years witnessing homeless encampment sweeps across Fresno and said she has never seen outreach workers present during them.
She said that HART constantly breaking up encampments makes it difficult for mutual aid workers like herself to help people.
A 2024 American Public Health Association study found that forcible displacement of encampments “is a temporary cosmetic fix and does little to effectively connect unhoused people to services and housing.”
Lethal said she stopped attending City Council meetings because she said the city ignored concerns on HART and law enforcement. She said the prospect of the city adding a second HART team, with more officers focused on encampment enforcement, is “terrifying.”
“[Dyer’s] making them more invisible for people like me that are putting their boots on the ground to do wound care and mutual aid,” Lethal said. “He’s not housing people. He’s not sheltering people.”
She said that has even seen police officers, who are not associated with HART, harass homeless people, for years.
“They talk to them like a bullied kid. They talk to them like they’re lesser.”
Stacy Williams, owner of BB’s Gelateria on Tuolumne in downtown, said she would never call HART if someone experiencing homelessness is on her property because she’s witnessed encampment sweeps where HART officers threw away prescriptions, food, blankets and clothing.
Williams said some initially viewed HART as a promising change but said she was skeptical that the approach would be different.
“We have heard and seen this before,” Williams said. “It’s like putting lipstick on a pig. You just gave the same violent police officers lipstick. You just gave them a cute name. Nothing is going to change.”
Williams said her concerns about Fresno’s approach to homelessness began before she became a downtown business owner. From 2022 through the end of 2024, she worked at United Way Fresno and Madera Counties and Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission (EOC), where she said she was outspoken about how unhoused people were treated.
Other business owners who spoke with Fresnoland say the City of Fresno’s 311 system is frequently nothing more than a documenting service that does little to quickly help businesses.
Christopher Johnson is a co-owner of a downtown parking garage at Kern Street and Van Ness, where homelessness has become an increasing challenge. People repeatedly entered the garage, built makeshift shelters and left garbage that property owners were forced to clean up.
Johnson said the ownership group regularly used 311 to document recurring problems and alert the city to the need for resources.
“We’re told to make sure there’s a call for service because that’s how the city maintains and understands the areas that need more resources or concerns,” Johnson said. “There’s not a big expectation that we’re going to get somebody out right away, but we’re making sure they know we’ve got another issue.”
The owners eventually worked with HART and the Downtown Fresno Partnership to designate the garage a police “hot spot.” Now, private security handles most removals, with police called when someone refuses to leave. The owners also schedule routine cleanups and monitor the garage to prevent larger encampments from forming, meaning the city and the business have a routine response, but nothing has solved the problem permanently.
The city previously made other efforts to clear encampments including Project Off-Ramp in partnership with California Highway Patrol and CalTrans, targeting areas such as Highways 41, 180 and 168. The effort was the first major action under the newly elected mayor and a way for the city to “stay away from any type of enforcement, citations,” Dyer said.
Housing advocates said they view Project Offramp as part of the first efforts of HART. Shelter beds were reserved for those projects, but demand for them continued to outpace availability. Nuse-Villegas said the resources were limited to people staying near freeways and others were left without access to those services.
“It wasn’t even five weeks later that they started going back to the process of just throwing away people’s belongings without outreach,” Nuse-Villegas said, referring to a February 2022 sweep she documented and Fresnoland reviewed. “Completely not what they’re saying.”
Sentiment about the city’s homelessness began to change, at least by outward appearances, in 2018 when some city leaders said the first response to helping unhoused residents should not come from law enforcement.
Two years later, the now disbanded Fresno Commission for Police Reform recommended the abolition of the Homeless Task Force in their final report on police reform, after the national outcry in response to the murder of George Floyd.
The report addressed that Fresno experiences a “widespread recognition that the current approach to addressing homelessness in the City is not effective.”
“There is broad agreement that law enforcement should not be addressing the social issues of homelessness,” the report says. “The Commission recommends new partnerships with community-based organizations in response to these concerns.”
And the Homeless Task Force was disbanded in early 2021, the same year Dyer championed HART.
Nuse-Villegas said those interactions have intensified since Fresno adopted its 2024 “no camping” ordinance, after a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court opened the gates for cities and counties to penalize people sleeping in public. In her view, the city’s efforts to clear visible encampments have pushed people farther from public view, “making them more invisible,” while leaving them on the streets.
Encampments down, but homelessness persistent
At this year’s point-in-time count news conference, Dyer said Fresno has effectively eliminated encampments, at least under the city’s official definition of an encampment.
Yet he acknowledged how the sit-lie-sleep ordinance, which prohibits sleeping or camping on designated properties and carries penalties, has not reduced the city’s homeless population in any meaningful way.
A lawsuit filed in December 2025 argued the city’s ordinance is discriminatory because it targets the unhoused with arrests and malicious prosecution. Facing intense criticism from community members over Fresno’s new anti-encampment law, city leaders held a news conference to unveil what they described as a “creative solution.”
The initiative, called the “Treatment First Program,” allows people facing illegal camping arrests to avoid criminal penalties by committing to drug or alcohol treatment through one of three local faith-based service providers. And 16 months after Fresno passed the anti-encampment ordinance, the program ultimately showed poor performance.
Right after the city passed its anti-camping ordinance, Fresno also passed an ordinance granting private property owners more options for getting rid of trespassers.
Nuse-Villegas says city officials often blame unhoused people for refusing services or temporary housing, a narrative she says is used to justify HART’s enforcement actions while deflecting from the city’s shortcomings in addressing the root causes of homelessness.
Wait lists for a shelter bed can sometimes be months long, and the number of shelter beds is on the decline in the city as state funding is redirected towards permanent housing, which is already scarce in Fresno.
Without enough affordable long-term options, Nuse-Villegas argued, Fresno’s efforts to address homelessness will continue to fall short.
In Fresno County, gains made in reducing evictions during the pandemic have largely been erased, according to state superior court and county sheriff’s office records — a trend seen across much of the county. But available eviction data still fails to capture the full scope of housing insecurity.
Fresno continues to have one of the hotter rental housing markets in the U.S., after decades of being considered the “cheap” part of California. Rents rose 2.6%, according to Apartment List, continuing a trend seen in previous years and remaining above the national average.
Nuse-Villegas said there is no single path into homelessness, and there is no single solution. People’s circumstances and needs vary widely, she said, requiring a range of responses rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
There is no single explanation for California’s homelessness crisis. The California Department of Housing and Community Development points to a persistent shortage of housing as a key driver of homelessness. The department also says many people face insurmountable barriers to securing housing, as California continues to account for a disproportionate 22% of the nation’s homeless population.
But researchers have also examined the role of changes to the criminal justice system and access to behavioral health and substance-use treatment. A new report from Public Policy Institute of California found that Proposition 47 – which reclassified certain offenses from felonies to misdemeanors – likely contributed to an estimated 10% increase in street homelessness between 2015-2019.
But when community members have raised concerns about encampment abatements and the city’s homeless response teams, they have been ignored and criticized, advocates say. The city previously approved an ordinance restricting the presence of advocates during an encampment abatement, but the courts overruled this.
“They say doing sweeps without having shelter available will not succeed, and we know that there has not been shelter hardly ever,” Nuse-Villegas said.
“Maintaining the person’s humanness is probably the biggest part of the solution.”
This story is part one of a series exploring how the HART team’s response to homelessness. The following stories will touch on police escalation and homeless people’s experiences with HART.
