Domestic violence survivor K, left, her name withheld for confidentiality, sits with her son for dinner in their new sparsely furnished apartment, Thursday, Aug. 13, 2015, in New York. After leaving her husband who beat and controlled her for years, she and her little boy spent the next three years homeless because she couldn’t afford New York City rents. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

New Hampshire state Rep. Ellen Read remembers how trapped she felt as an 18-year-old in her native Tennessee, enduring the physical and emotional toll of an abusive relationship.

The abuse Read suffered — which included being held captive in an apartment for days and hit by her abuser’s car — lasted years after she left the relationship, while her abuser stalked her.

In 2016, Read won election to the New Hampshire House of Representatives. That same year, she recalled to Stateline, her abuser died by suicide after 16 years of prolonged stalking.

Now, a bill authored by Read would allow victims of domestic and sexual violence — including stalking — to break their rental lease agreements early if they provide a police report or are in the process of obtaining documents such as a protective order following an incident.

“My hope is that this increases the boldness of people living in these abusive situations and that they know if they leave, there will be a path forward for them and they won’t be forced to stay with their abuser or at the home they were abused in,” said Read, a Democrat. The bill has been sent to Republican Gov. Chris Sununu after passing both chambers.

The pandemic lockdown that began in March 2020, coming alongside the nation’s worsening housing crisis, has prompted state lawmakers to help victims of assault who are struggling to move away from their alleged abusers. Domestic violence incidents in the United States increased by 8.1% in the months following the imposition of pandemic lockdown orders in 2020, according to a 2021 report released by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice, a group launched by the Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank.

More than a dozen states have passed measures in the past five years bolstering rental protections for survivors by allowing them to break their leases if they provide evidence of stalking, sexual assault or an abusive domestic relationship. Many of those laws, which were enacted or strengthened during the pandemic, give victims more leeway in how they can document the abuse.

Many cities and states are looking to help survivors with new housing in other ways, such as by obtaining grants to develop transitional housing or offering housing vouchers to victims.

“It is deeply traumatizing and harmful to force survivors to continue to live in the same home where the harm occurred,” said Kate Walz, associate director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project, an advocacy group that trains legal services organizations. “It can retraumatize and compound the harm over years, if not decades.”

Several states are addressing the issue this session. Efforts to add early lease termination laws for victims in Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina have yet to either make it past committees or both chambers.

While Pennsylvania’s effort to pass these protections statewide has stalled, the Pittsburgh City Council approved a bill in October that requires landlords to allow domestic abuse victims to exit their leases without penalty, and also change a tenant’s locks upon request, though at the tenant’s expense.

Nicole Molinaro, president and CEO of the Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh, one of the country’s first domestic violence shelters, called the legislation “monumental.”

Molinaro hopes the state will eventually enact similar protections. She said that the trauma of domestic and sexual violence can be “crippling,” and that some victims may need to leave their neighborhood or cities altogether if their abuser also has roots there.

“A driving factor for survivors of domestic violence is making sure that there is somewhere safe for them to go,” Molinaro told Stateline. “And that often means a survivor cannot move back to the neighborhood they were in if the abuser still has connections there.”

The post-separation journey

When New York City resident Stephanie Woodbine and her adolescent daughter left a two-year abusive relationship in 2017, she wasn’t sure where they were going to live.

Woodbine told Stateline that on top of emotional abuse, she also suffered economic abuse — a form of abuse that New York City last year officially recognized as domestic violence. She found housing, then was evicted after losing her job.

“I really didn’t have a lot of money to pay for housing because the mental trauma made it hard to live a normal life, keep a job,” Woodbine said.

She didn’t qualify for the domestic violence shelters because she wasn’t in an “active domestic violence situation,” she recalled, so she stayed in hotels and lived a life of “hidden homelessness” with her daughter.

“There are so many decisions that make leaving any abusive situation hard, but when you leave you find out just how hard it is to survive when you feel your options are limited,” said Woodbine, who eventually received an emergency housing voucher and has secured permanent housing.

“There’s a lot of post-separation abuse that is also contributing to survivors’ instability and their mental trauma,” added Woodbine, who now sits on the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence. “It’s why we want to expand protections for survivors post-separation, and that includes providing permanent housing.”

Intimate partner violence is a major driver of homelessness, and researchers have found that housing is among the most common needs for survivors. Currently, 10% of shelters and transitional housing are targeted to domestic violence victims and their families, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

As the U.S. Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of homeless camping and outdoor sleeping bans, cities that have passed bans argue that outside encampments are dangerous not just for the public, but also for people staying there.

But Walz, of the National Housing Law Project, fears that if these bans are deemed constitutional, they’ll have a major impact on women and children fleeing domestic violence situations.

“Gender-based violence is both the cause and consequence of housing instability. Housing instability increases your risk of it, and housing instability comes as a result of it,” said Walz. “If we don’t recognize that and craft our policies to be responsive to it, we are guaranteeing continued violence and increase of it.”

More cities are working to include housing as a key service for survivors.

Woodbine credited city-based nonprofits for navigating her through the emergency voucher process — an intimidating process for those in need of housing.

New York City is hoping to provide such protections and, most importantly, housing through a pilot program funded with a $300,000 grant — from the NYC Fund to End Youth & Family Homelessness — that aims to help 100 families affected by domestic violence find homes.

Saloni Sethi, acting commissioner of the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, told Stateline that the pilot program addresses the need for safe and stable housing for survivors in a place where secure housing can be scarce.

“Survivors are often sort of faced with this really impossible choice of, ‘do I give up my own safety or do I destabilize myself and my entire family by leaving home?’ … We anticipate this pilot can finally provide that stable, fresh start,” Sethi said.

Many cities and states have become more intentional about building or reserving housing for survivors, with increasing support from the federal government. Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women awarded 81 grants, worth $43 million, to programs offering housing for six to 24 months for survivors.

Breaking the lease

If Read’s bill is signed by Sununu, New Hampshire would become one of 40 states to have early rental lease termination protections for victims of domestic or sexual abuse.

In post-lockdown years, Oklahoma passed early termination laws for domestic violence victims. Utah amended its early termination law in 2023, reducing the termination fee from 45 days of rent — one of the highest in the nation at the time — to a month’s rent.

Read’s bill, which she based on a similar one in Tennessee, stalled in committee when she first introduced it last year.

During early debate, New Hampshire landlord groups raised concerns about the financial burden they carry when tenants break their lease early — a position that irritated Read.

“Nobody will say in today’s society here that they are in favor of domestic violence,” Read said. “But put your money where your mouth is when it comes to allowing them to make that decision to exit their lease early even at a financial loss, or else it’s just lip service.”

But every time a new tenant comes in, it costs money to clean up and turn over the home, said Nick Norman, a real estate owner who serves as government affairs chair for the Apartment Association of New Hampshire. The bill’s original language also could have left a landlord responsible for things left behind, including damages.

The legislation now on Sununu’s desk is “drastically different,” Norman said. “The housing provider advocates and tenant advocates came together as we usually do to find a solution that works best for both parties.”

Read likewise credited the Senate for adding measures that would make qualifying for an early termination lease easier.

Some states, including Kansas, North Dakota and Utah, may allow landlords to charge fees or forward payment of rent for breaking the lease early in cases of intimate partner violence. And many states require documents from an outside source, such as a police report or court protective order.

Many landlords see such requirements as a necessary step in good faith to break a lease early. However, Walz thinks that these requirements are a barrier for survivors, given how underreported domestic and sexual violence is and how hard it can be for victims to obtain a report without escalating violence from their abuser.

“First and foremost, we must believe survivors. This means in action taking their own stories and experiences to be true and not requiring any form of third-party proof,” Walz said.

“Assumptions, stereotypes and bias — towards not believing survivors and perceiving that it could be made up in order to exit a lease — play into state policy responses and often result in a litany of requirements, including orders of protection, police reports, third-party statements,” she said.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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In this March 30, 2020, file photo, resident Marie Salas, left, sets a banner on her home fence reading "Squatting is not the Answer," across the street of a formerly vacant home that was recently taken by a group of homeless mothers in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles. A new group of homeless people who had taken over several empty, state-owned houses in Los Angeles was forcefully removed by California Highway Patrol officers hours later amid protests by dozens of community activists. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

Across various news channels and outlets, a visceral fear of some property owners — that an unwanted guest could move into their vacant home, refuse to leave, and then claim ownership — has been a trending story.

These squatter horror stories have reached a fever pitch in the past month after a migrant TikTok influencer, Venezuelan national Leonel Moreno, encouraged people to squat in homes across the United States. Moreno was arrested in Ohio in late March by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

So far, lawmakers in at least 10 states have floated legislation this year that would address squatting by revoking tenancy rights, making it easier for police to remove squatters or making squatting a criminal offense. Several have quickly enacted new laws.

The bills, typically sponsored by Republicans but often garnering bipartisan support, come at a time of heightened housing anxiety: The shortage of housing is worse than ever, with affordability at a new low. Meanwhile, migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border reached a new monthly high in December, and nearly 80% of Americans think that situation is either a “major problem” or a “crisis.”

Oklahoma state Rep. Ross Ford, whose legislation advanced days after Moreno posted his TikTok video, said he began thinking about the issue several years ago after hearing of incidences in rural areas of the state.

But Ford, a Republican, also told Stateline the recent wave of bills across the country is likely in response to Moreno’s video.

“For me, I heard complaints about squatting from property owners … accounts of individuals scouring newspapers for death notices in search of a place to occupy,” said Ford. “But when that came out, I think it really blew this whole issue up for lawmakers in other states.”

For the most part, squatting — when someone moves into a vacant building or onto uninhabited land — is considered a civil matter, so police officers aren’t empowered to remove someone at an owner’s request. Homeowners can file eviction notices through the courts to remove an unwanted squatter, a process that can take weeks or months.

So far, Florida and West Virginia have enacted laws that classify squatting as a criminal act. Florida’s law creates a process for sheriffs to remove squatters. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp this week signed a similar bill into law.

Several other states — including Alabama, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina — have pending legislation. The anti-squatter fervor also has spread to Capitol Hill, where a U.S. House bill would make squatting a deportable offense.

Proponents of these bills have singled out migrants and immigrants in the country without authorization as squatters, frequently referring to Moreno’s video but otherwise presenting scant data to show that it is a widespread problem.

“After video evidence of their plan to take over homes emerged, we’re ensuring Floridians are protected from this egregious and brazen scheme,” said Florida Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody in a news release when that state’s bill became law. She criticized President Joe Biden’s border policy in the same release.

In Oklahoma, Ford’s bill would allow county sheriffs to immediately remove an alleged squatter from private property.

“When this happens in Oklahoma, the process to get an unwanted person off your property gets bogged down in civil courts for evictions and it may be months to get that person out of your house,” said Ford. “I’m hoping we can make this process of removal quicker and cheaper for the landowner.”

The Oklahoma House approved the bill earlier this month; it is now being considered in the Senate.

‘Manufactured crisis’?

But Eric Dunn, director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project, which advocates for tenants’ rights, called the anti-squatting bills a “manufactured crisis” that exhibits the power of the landlord lobby in U.S. statehouses.

“This TikTok video gave some landlords cause to say, ‘We have a squatting crisis,’ without any data or evidence, or cause for there to be legislation to address a matter that’s already handled by an eviction court,” Dunn said. “It’s indicative of how well organized and connected landlords are in political circles, and how effective they are in getting lawmakers to act on their behalf.”

Kris, a transgender woman from Florida, said in an interview with Stateline that her parents kicked her out of their home in 2022. She found a community of squatters online and has been on the road ever since. Recent news coverage has been reckless and could embolden a property owner to hurt someone, said Kris, who asked that her last name not be used out of concern for her safety.

Traveling through states — including Tennessee and Texas — on her way to the Southwest, Kris said she usually holes up in vacant buildings, never a home that appears occupied, for up to three months at a time. She doesn’t feel like she’s a threat.

“I’m reading stuff on some sites saying the homeowners need to protect their homes and that squatters are just violent vagrants that need to be dealt with,” she said. “It creates a dangerous environment, where a majority of us who are only trying to find shelter in abandoned buildings are now enemies of paranoid homeowners.”

In most states, Republicans are leading the charge on anti-squatting legislation, but in at least one state, New York, Democrats are at the forefront.

New York Democratic state Sen. Jessica Scarcella-Spanton, who represents Staten Island and southern Brooklyn, acknowledged there is little data to support claims that squatting is on the rise, or even that it happens that often.

But Scarcella-Spanton told Stateline that “once is enough” and that there needs to be a quicker way to remove squatters.

Her proposal, which made it into the state’s 2025 budget signed by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, spells out clearly that squatters don’t have tenants’ legal rights related to evictions. Proponents say that will make it easier for police to remove squatters from properties.

“Some people will make the argument that this is a very rare occurrence. But I think if it happens once or twice, it’s unacceptable,” Scarcella-Spanton said. “It’s always good to have data when we’re trying to push legislation, but most importantly, I think that just seeing the cases that we’ve seen over the last couple of months in the news is reason enough to move forward with legislation.”

Some landlords and property owners in blue states are hoping their lawmakers join the anti-squatting movement.

In California, Cynthia Chidester’s run-in with a squatter at her 95-year-old mother’s home led to a prolonged legal battle that required a domestic violence order to get the squatter evicted in April.

In an interview, Chidester said she wants lawmakers to take the issue more seriously, including passing laws to expedite the eviction process for squatters or unwelcome guests.

Alexandra Alvarado, director of education and marketing at the American Apartment Owners Association, an industry group, told Stateline that squatting has been a “nightmare situation” for landlords and property owners since the pandemic, when many offices emptied and vacation rentals sat vacant.

The removal process needs to be “more efficient,” with housing courts backlogged since the pandemic, she said.

“In our industry, squatting has always been an issue. I think what’s changed is the media’s attention to it,” said Alvarado. “We think there’s been a rise in squatting. It’s difficult to show because we don’t have the numbers, and a lot of these cases aren’t handled much differently than a standard eviction case.”

Eviction protections

But Dunn, of the National Housing Law Project, worries the recent bills could lead to a rollback of eviction protections. Landlords spanning 10 states and 34 cities filed nearly 1.1 million eviction cases in 2023, a year-to-year increase of more than 100,000, and 500,000 more than in 2021, according to Eviction Lab, a Princeton University research group that tracks evictions.

According to Eviction Lab, a Princeton University research group tracking nationwide eviction data, landlords spanning 10 states and 34 cities filed nearly 1.1 million eviction cases in 2023, a year-to-year increase of more than 100,000, and 500,000 more than in 2021.

“It’s not like tenants have great protections in a majority of states as it is,” Dunn said. “It behooves tenants to pay attention to state and local governments when bills like these are proposed, and push back, or they’ll see their rights eroded by a thousand cuts.”

Marc Roark, a law professor at the University of Tulsa who studies squatters and homelessness, described the anti-squatter bills as “low-hanging fruit for political points. It’s a way for legislators to say, ‘Look, I’m doing something to protect your property,’ instead of any substantive housing policy.”

Roark and other housing experts have found that squatters rarely gain ownership of a property. In most states, the period of occupancy required to claim ownership ranges from five to 20 years.

However, Amy Starecheski, a cultural anthropologist at Columbia University who has documented the stories of squatters in New York City, noted that some who take shelter in derelict and abandoned buildings eventually do end up owning them.

“So many people are in need of basic shelter and there are people who are squatting intentionally to challenge private property as a legal and cultural institution,” Starecheski said.

“This might be a moment when people freaking out about squatting are actually freaking out about access to housing, and who gets to own a home and who doesn’t get to own a home.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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Gift card displays, such as this one in a CVS in Harlem, N.Y., have been a source of concerns for lawmakers hoping to combat gift card fraud. “Card draining,” or stealing numbers from poorly packaged cards, is one of the costliest and most common consumer scams, and states are trying to combat it with consumer alerts, arrests and warning signs on store displays. (Robbie Sequeira/Stateline)

When Denise Brown peruses the tightly packed gift card display at her local CVS in Harlem, New York, she sees the perfect present for her grandson: a Sony PlayStation gift card.

Others, acting in bad faith, see these gift card displays as easy money in one of the country’s costliest and most common consumer scams: card draining.

Scammers drain a gift card by obtaining the bar code, CVV number, PIN number or activation code from beneath the slim cardboard packaging. They reseal the card, wait for a consumer to buy it and load it with money, and then spend the balance before the consumer can.

In 2023, card draining and other gift card-related fraud made up $217 million of the record-high $10 billion in money lost from scams nationwide, according to the latest data released by the Federal Trade Commission.

State attorneys general and legislatures are trying to combat gift card scams with consumer alerts, arrests and warning signs on store displays. Some are even telling gift card makers how to package their products. Retailers and card manufacturers, though, are pushing back — saying the micromanaging isn’t necessary and would hurt small businesses.

Gift cards, which are easy to find at almost any big box retailer, are a popular gift for holidays, birthdays and graduations. Scammers love gift cards because they’re money that can be easily moved, often irreversibly, with few protections for consumers, according to fraud specialists.

Maryland state Sen. Benjamin Kramer thinks new packaging requirements might help. He authored a bill that would require secure packaging to conceal the bar code and other information that could be used to activate it. Maryland lawmakers approved Kramer’s bill earlier this month and sent it to Democratic Gov. Wes Moore.

“Once they see these displays, con artists get all the numeric information off those gift cards and then put them back,” Kramer, a Democrat, told Stateline. “That’s the scam. Because then the consumer comes, puts $500 onto the gift card and it immediately gets drained by the scammer, who’s got all that information from when they pulled the gift card off the rack.”

Kramer said trying to legislate against ever-evolving frauds and scams is like a game of “Whac-A-Mole.”

“Scammers are always very creative in how they scheme to get their money,” he said. “This fraud is becoming more and more prevalent.”

Card draining is only one way that scammers capitalize on the popularity of gift cards. Some fraudsters, instead of grabbing information from gift card displays, masquerade as government officials or a friend in an emergency and intimidate victims into buying gift cards and giving them the card numbers and PINs, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Brown thinks the notices posted at the CVS checkout counter are a good idea, especially for older adults like her.

“I’m not too wise on how people are scamming these days,” Brown said. “I don’t want to be taken advantage of, because I know a few friends who have been hoodwinked out of a few hundred dollars.”

States step in

According to a 2022 survey conducted by AARP, the advocacy group for older adults, 34% of U.S. adults said they or someone they know had been targeted by scams seeking payment by gift card. Of those who were targeted, 24% followed through by purchasing gift cards and sharing the activation numbers with a scammer.

A quarter of respondents said they’d given or received gift cards that had been drained.

In the past few years, several states have acted against the scams. In 2021, New Jersey enacted a law requiring sellers of gift cards to train employees to identify and respond to gift card scams. New York in 2023 enacted a law that requires retailers to post notices warning consumers of gift card fraud. A Rhode Island law enacted last year also requires warning signs, and it imposes a $250 civil fine on retailers who don’t comply.

This year, Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are considering similar legislation, with varying civil fines and penalties.

“Will this legislation end gift card scams? No, but it could make a significant difference. If we can educate and assist consumers in spotting a scam, we can further empower them to stop a scam,” Suzan DeCamp, president of AARP Nebraska, testified at a state Senate hearing earlier this year.

“We have an epidemic of fraud plaguing Americans, particularly older Americans, and we all need to do our part,” DeCamp said.

But Christian Reyes, who works at a Best Buy in the Bronx, was skeptical that most shoppers would notice warnings posted at checkout counters.

“Checkout lines already have so much going on that I don’t think the average person even notices that those signs are even there,” Reyes said. “And I don’t think I’m trained or well-versed enough to spot someone, at the moment, being scammed to buy a gift card.”

Reyes, who has been working at Best Buy for the past two years, said he has not received any training on gift card scams.

Opposition from retailers

Meanwhile, retail and industry groups that receive steady revenue from the roughly $200 billion Americans spend on gift cards every year have pushed back against some of these measures.

In Maine, retailers helped defeat a bill that would have required them to provide verbal or written warnings of gift card scams. Nate Cloutier of HospitalityMaine testified at a March hearing that the bill targeted retailers — including a $500 penalty for non-compliance — without adding meaningful protections for consumers.

Curtis Picard, president and CEO of the Retail Association of Maine, testified that the bill was
“wider ranging than it needs to be.”

“These scams most often take place at retailers where multiple cards are sold, or that sell some specific types of cards like iTunes, Google Play or other brands that are recognized across the country or across the world,” Picard testified. “It is not likely that these scams are targeting smaller, Maine-based or regional retailers.”

In the hearing on the Nebraska bill, Rich Otto, testifying on behalf of the Nebraska Retail Federation, argued that the legislation unfairly singled out gift cards.

“There’s nothing in this bill that targets payments through Bitcoin or other digital assets, peer-to-peer payments, nothing that targets social media sites that are complicit in the process of the scammer being able to reach out to the customer and those getting scammed,” Otto said. “Businesses that sell gift cards want to help customers from being scammed.”

Under the Maryland legislation, retailers who want to sell gift cards that are not in secure, enclosed packaging must only sell chip-enabled, numberless cards that can be safely activated by the consumer via the card issuer’s website.

InComm Payments, a major manufacturer of gift cards, has been a prominent opponent of that bill. InComm is best known for its so-called open loop gift cards — which often appear under Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover branding — that can be used at any store.

InComm spokesperson Anthony Popiel said the Maryland bill would bind gift card issuers into packaging rules that couldn’t be changed without further legislative action.

InComm’s packaging also has come under fire in California, where San Francisco last year filed a lawsuit alleging that “lax security features” in its packaging made it easy for scammers to access activation information. The lawsuit also alleges that InComm has routinely refused to refund scammed consumers, as required under state law. InComm denies the allegations.

“While the vast majority of cards we sell are not impacted by fraud, our highest priority is supporting our customers who have been affected,” InComm said in a statement to Stateline.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

The post As consumers lose millions to gift card scams, lawmakers pressure businesses appeared first on New Jersey Monitor.

FILE - A biker stops to look at a pile of e-bikes in the aftermath of a fire in Chinatown, which authorities say started at an e-bike shop and spread to upper-floor apartments, Tuesday June 20, 2023, in New York. Federal officials are looking into cracking down on defective lithium-ion batteries that power hoverboards, scooters and motorized bicycles because of a rash of deadly fires caused by exploding batteries. The effort comes as New York City implements new laws meant to reduce the number of fires, injuries and deaths in a city where e-bikes have become ubiquitous. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)

For a decade, Illinois state Sen. Sue Rezin has recognized the technological and economic potential of lithium-ion batteries. Rezin, a Republican who serves in a district that is a major chemical and energy industry hub southwest of Chicago, also recognizes the possible dangers.

In June 2021, a Morris, Illinois, warehouse in her district with roughly 184,000 pounds of lithium batteries caught fire. The blaze forced a three-day evacuation of the city’s residents and a monthslong cleanup and response effort by the state Environmental Protection Agency.

“I saw what a battery fire looked like up close and personal. It’s unlike any fire I’ve ever seen, from the thickness of the smoke to the hours and hours of fire response,” said Rezin, who is proposing legislation that would ban the disposal of lithium-ion batteries in mixed-recycling bins.

Rechargeable lithium batteries power our daily lives: They’re in phones, laptops, electric scooters and e-bikes. But if they ignite, they burn hot, explosively and with a tenacity that makes them difficult to extinguish.

Those challenges, and a recent rise in lithium-ion fires, have many policymakers across the country filing bills, updating fire codes and passing new housing regulations in an effort to prevent disasters. Fire safety experts are encouraging the changes, but some also warn that state and local legislators are once again playing catch-up

“There’s a level of complacency among the public and policymakers when it comes to fire safety. If you don’t see anything burning right outside your door, it doesn’t rise to the top of your list of things that you’re focusing on,“ said Lorraine Carli, vice president of outreach and advocacy at the National Fire Protection Association, an industry and advocacy nonprofit.

“These batteries are powerhouses,” she said. “They will continue to evolve in our technology, and we need policies that evolve with it, rather than react to it.”

Lithium-ion battery fires tend to garner a lot of publicity, but experts say there likely are more of them than is commonly known, because fire agencies don’t systematically track them.

Several high-profile, deadly fires in New York City prompted the City Council to pass rules last fall prohibiting the sale of mobility devices and storage batteries that fail to meet UL Solutions safety standards. Still, an e-bike fire at a Harlem apartment building earlier this year injured 17 and killed one, 27-year-old journalist Fazil Khan.

Also this month, San Francisco updated its fire code to limit the number of power-charged personal mobility devices such as electric scooters to four per dwelling and to ban the use of extension cords for chargers.

In Maryland, Republican state Sen. Jason Gallion sponsored a bill, passed unanimously by the Senate, that would establish a commission on lithium-ion battery fires.

“We’re seeing what’s happening in other states when it comes to these types of fires. We know that we’re going to need to put something in place to make sure it doesn’t happen here,” Gallion said about the proposed commission, which would include state fire safety and environment experts, along with members of a lithium-ion battery trade group.

Fast-moving fires

Lithium-ion batteries have been in consumer products since the early 1990s and are widely used today in items including laptops, children’s toys, vaping pens and power tools.

But many of the nation’s current building, electrical and fire codes have not kept up with the shift to lithium-ion batteries in so-called micromobility vehicles such as electric scooters and bicycles. The rise in fires, industry experts told Stateline, is exacerbated by shoddily made batteries and cheap chargers.

When lithium-ion batteries ignite, they release their own oxygen, producing fast-moving fires that aren’t easily extinguished with water or firefighting foam, said Adam Barowy, lead research engineer at UL’s Fire Safety Research Institute, a nonprofit that promotes fire safety.

Peter Sunderland, a professor of fire protection engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, said some of the steps that might prevent fires are problematic for other reasons. Requiring outdoor charging for e-bikes and e-scooters, for example, would be safer but would make the vehicles vulnerable to theft. And banning the vehicles might just create an underground market of subpar equipment.

The challenges were evident in 2022, when the New York City Housing Authority proposed a ban on micromobility vehicles in public housing. After pushback from residents — many use those e-bikes and e-scooters for work — the housing authority amended its guidelines this year to focus on safe charging and storage.

The University of Maryland, where Sunderland works, is among many campuses that ban parking of electric vehicles inside campus buildings. Yet just this month, an electric skateboard and an e-scooter caught fire in a computer science building and a residence hall, respectively. No one was hurt.

Sunderland doesn’t see any easy solutions.

“There’s so much power packed in these batteries that I think these fires are going to grow in scale and continue,” he said.

Thinking ahead

But Carli, of the National Fire Protection Association, said there are a few safeguards that cities and states could adopt immediately.

They might, for example, limit how many lithium-ion powered devices can be stored in a single building and the number of chargers that can be located in a particular area. They also could require that all lithium-ion products be laboratory certified for safety.

A New Hampshire bill would prohibit the sale of lithium-ion batteries, electric bicycles and electric scooters that have not been certified by a nationally recognized testing laboratory.

In New York state, meanwhile, UL Solutions — the lab that certifies electronics safety — testified that similar proposed legislation wouldn’t go far enough, noting that it only focuses on the battery and ignores other mechanisms such as a device’s wiring, motor and control circuitry.

Rezin, the Illinois senator, said governments also can focus on battery recycling programs. “We need recycling plans that don’t just include being dumped in a landfill, because that’s not acceptable,” she said.

Rezin’s bill, which has yet to have a committee or floor vote, would allow municipalities to require signage at recycling facilities alerting first responders to the presence of hazardous materials. Another Illinois bill would require that battery storage sites with 5,000 kilograms or more of used batteries — such as the facility that ignited in Rezin’s district in 2021 — be registered with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

More than 5,000 fires occur every year at recycling facilities across the nation, according to the National Waste and Recycling Association, with many of the fires linked to lithium-ion batteries.

A new North Carolina law prohibits the disposal of lithium-ion batteries in landfills. And a Wisconsin bill would require the state’s Department of Natural Resources to provide educational materials on recycling of rechargeable batteries.

Lawmakers in other states are hoping to better equip their firefighters, with bills in New Jersey and Rhode Island that would offer money for training on how to respond to lithium-ion battery fires.

Jon M. Williams, an energy expert and CEO of Viridi, a battery energy storage system, told Stateline that such policies are encouraging manufacturers to build safer products. Still, he added, lawmakers should think ahead about how to prevent disasters when new products — and knock-off alternatives — hit the market.

“When government doesn’t set the rules, it’s like the Wild West, right?” said Williams. “If I can make a scooter and sell it to you for $10 and the safer one is $40 dollars, which one is the consumer going to buy?”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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Minnesota state Rep. Kaela Berg, a Democrat, listens this week to testimony on a mental health education bill during a House Education Policy Committee meeting at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn. Berg, a single mother and flight attendant without a college degree, is one of the few state lawmakers across the nation who qualify as “working class,” according to recent research. Michelle Griffith/Minnesota Reformer

In her first few months as a Minnesota state legislator in 2021, state Rep. Kaela Berg often wondered: “What the hell am I doing here?”

A single mother and flight attendant without a college degree or prior political experience, Berg now had a seat at the legislative table, shaping policy decisions in her home state.

As she ran against a former two-term Republican representative — a commercial real estate agent — she also was struggling for housing and living in a friend’s basement.

“I’m living in [her] basement, running for office, and the pandemic hits,” said Berg. “I went from three jobs to one. … I found that while I can pay my bills, I can’t qualify for a new apartment because you have to show two or three times the rent and I can’t do that.”

While it was gratifying to receive support from working families in her district, her transition to state policymaker felt overwhelming.

“I had the worst case of impostor syndrome,” Berg, a member of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said in an interview. “I’m thinking, ‘Who do I think I am? I’m a working flight attendant. I don’t have a college degree. Why did I let somebody talk me into this?’”

Berg is a rarity in politics: a working-class state legislator.

Just 116 of the nearly 7,400 state legislators in the United States come from working-class backgrounds, according to a biennial study conducted by Nicholas Carnes and Eric Hansen, political scientists at Duke University and Loyola University Chicago, respectively.

The researchers define legislators as “working class” if they currently or last worked in manual labor, service industry, clerical or labor union jobs. They found that 1.6% of state lawmakers meet that definition, compared with 50% of U.S. workers. Only about 2% of Democrats and 1% of Republicans qualified as working class.

Ten states — Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — have no working-class state lawmakers.

The dearth of working-class legislators raises concerns that economic challenges such as wage stagnation and the rising cost of living will get short shrift in state capitols.

Working-class politicians are more likely to have personally experienced economic hardship, so they are more interested in policies to mitigate it, Carnes said. And they often propose solutions that differ from those put forward by colleagues who aren’t working class, even if it means diverging from party doctrine.

“State legislatures make consequential decisions, and if you have an entire economic class of people that are not in the room when policy decisions are being made, that’s going to tilt the kind of problems politicians pay attention to,” said Carnes. “It also dictates the kinds of solutions they consider against the interests of whoever’s out of the room.”

Working-class representation in state legislatures has always been low, he noted, but the most recent count is even lower than it was two years ago, when the percentage was about 1.8%.

The state legislature with the highest percentage of working-class lawmakers is Alaska, with 5% — that’s three of 60 lawmakers. Maine has the highest total number of working-class legislators, eight of 151 legislators, with a transportation worker and a bartender among the ranks.

Working-class issues

After a 32-year career as an electrician, Democratic state Rep. Nate Roberts was part of a new wave of first-time Idaho lawmakers entering office in 2023.

Roberts knew that it wasn’t just his relative political inexperience that separated him from the rest of his colleagues.

He also was one of the only state lawmakers who had worked a union job. And during his first few weeks in office, he was shocked by how rarely issues such as wage theft, low pay and housing affordability had been talked about in committee meetings.

“That’s when I realized that the only person that’s going to advocate for working-class people is a working-class person,” he told Stateline. “When I moved from state to state working different jobs, I realized how differently states were influenced when it came to policies for working people.”

Roberts learned the power of unions as a journeyman — and fighting to increase worker protections has become his life, he said.

Idaho is one of 26 so-called right-to-work states, where no person can be forced, as a condition of employment, to join a union. Such laws limit unions’ bargaining power.

Roberts would like Idaho to follow the lead of Michigan, which in 2023 became the first state in decades to repeal a right-to-work law. That is unlikely in Idaho, given the state’s conservative political orientation. But Roberts also is pushing to update Idaho’s child labor laws, which were enacted in 1907 and have been superseded by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Roberts said his experience as a laborer in his younger years has emboldened him to speak out against legislation such as a Senate bill that would repeal limits on the number of hours and how late in the day a child under the age of 16 can work.

“I’m still shocked when I get pushback for going against these bills, particularly ones that I feel regress our child labor laws,” said Roberts. “I’ve experienced it. We need to not only protect our kids, but we also need to protect our workers.”

The political climate is far different in Minnesota, where the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has controlled the governor’s office, the state House and the state Senate since January 2023. Last year, the state enacted a major package of labor-friendly laws.

Minnesota also passed a slew of tenant-landlord laws, with protections favoring the state’s renters.

Berg said the backgrounds of working-class legislators like herself can inform statehouse conversations, even if lawmakers with different backgrounds support pro-labor policies.

“I don’t think there’s enough value in having people with lived experience in the legislature,” Berg said. “When you take someone who … still lives paycheck to paycheck, they are bringing that personal experience to fight for a bill that will impact working families.”

For Wisconsin state Rep. Jenna Jacobson, joining the legislature in 2023 was a lot like “drinking from a fire hose,” she recalled.

One of her policy priorities — expanding aid for free school meals — was influenced by her experience as a schoolkid.

“I was one of the kids on free and reduced lunches growing up. I had the special colored cards because of that,” said Jacobson, a Democrat. “I know so many of our kids who are in a similar spot.”

Barriers abound

For working-class Americans, financial and societal barriers are a major disincentive to pursuing state offices, said Amanda Litman, co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something, a progressive organization that recruits candidates for down-ballot races.

A 2021 national survey by Tufts University found that local candidates who experienced poverty in their youth felt especially constrained.

“Structurally, it’s really hard for people who aren’t already rich, or already independently wealthy, have rich partners or rich families to enter politics,” Litman said. “And the gatekeepers at the state level have typically recruited candidates who were safe bets, which is a candidate who can independently raise money.”

The eligibility criteria for statewide office vary greatly by state. Only five states — Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine and Minnesota — allow public financing options for candidates vying for state legislative seats.

Becoming comfortable wielding political power as a working-class person is a transition that can take a while, Indiana Republican state Rep. Peggy Mayfield told Stateline.

Mayfield, who worked as a secretary at the insurance company she and her husband owned together, is now a 12-year veteran in the legislature who knows how to navigate state politics and get bills passed.

But running for office, much less holding state office, is time-consuming and requires sacrifices, she said.

“If I had an employee who came to me and said, ‘I wanna run for office,’ I’m faced with saying, ‘I’m gonna let you off four months a year,’ or make a difficult choice,” said Mayfield, describing how hard it is for many workers who don’t have that privilege. “Running for office itself becomes a full-time job … and for some in the working class it may not make sense to go into politics, if they can pursue more profitable opportunities in the private sector.”

Some states have worked to raise legislative pay, which could entice more working-class people to take a shot at elective office.

Earlier this year, Kansas raised salaries for rank-and-file lawmakers from about $29,000 to $57,000 after some said the lower pay wasn’t enough to live on. Arizona, Kentucky, New Jersey and Vermont are among the states with measures this session that could increase lawmakers’ pay.

New York passed legislation in 2022 that made its lawmakers the highest paid in the country. Pennsylvania has cost-of-living adjustments.

Roberts, the electrician-turned-lawmaker in Idaho, said: “We don’t do this for the pay, and some of us certainly aren’t getting rich off this job. Some of us are making ends meet.

“But we have residents who are also making ends meet, and they rely on us to speak on the issues affecting them, and that’s what keeps you going,” Roberts added.

Lawmakers in Idaho make $19,927, after a pay raise passed in 2022.

Another barrier for would-be working-class lawmakers, Carnes said, is running a viable campaign against more established political candidates. The working class needs infrastructure and coalition-building to compete politically, he said, similar to women candidates who get support from EMILY’s List (a pro-abortion rights group).

“The solution is pretty straightforward,” said Carnes. “If you commit to working-class people and partner with labor unions and political parties on recruiting and training working-class people to run for office — it’s possible you will see more working-class state legislators.”

In Minnesota, Rep. Berg soon realized that her best legislative asset was her ability to vouch for the working experiences of everyday Minnesotans.

A flight attendant for Endeavor Air, Berg has signed on to a bill that, among other provisions, would delete the exemption for air flight crews in the state’s law on employee sick time. Her experience allowed her to confidently explain to legislative peers how the exemption had hurt flight crews.

“Government works best when all types of personal experience are at the legislative table,” Berg said. “I knew that I was uniquely able to speak on issues that my other colleagues never experienced.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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File - Construction workers install roofing on a high rise in Manhattan's financial district on Tuesday, April 11, 2023, in New York. On Friday, the U.S. government issues the April jobs report. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)

Last month, city council members in Fort Worth, Texas, decided developers that received massive tax breaks to build affordable housing would no longer be able to buy their way out of the obligation by paying a $200 annual fee in lieu of each unbuilt low-income unit.

In Columbus, Ohio, leaders voted in December to expand the city’s tax break program for affordable housing. And in Cincinnati, builders can now get an automatic property tax exemption for some affordable housing projects, rather than having to apply.

Tax abatements have long been a tool cities use to encourage developers to build homes low-income residents can afford. Developers pay lower property taxes in return for setting aside homes or apartments for potential residents with lower incomes. Cities lose that tax revenue, but they gain affordable housing.

As the nation’s housing crisis continues, many cities are altering their policies. Some are making the programs stricter; some are offering more money or extending tax breaks for more years. No matter the approach, municipal leaders say they’re trying to figure out how to get more of their residents safely housed.

“As a city, we can’t force developers to make housing affordable. But we have tools,” said Sarah Odle, neighborhood development coordinator for the city of Fort Worth.

“The name of the game for a developer is to make money,” Odle said. “And the name of the game for us is if we’re going to give you incentives, then we want something substantial in return — and that’s housing that is truly affordable.”

Expanded tax breaks

In Fort Worth — which attracted nearly 50,000 new residents from 2020 to 2023, the most of any city in Texas — tax abatements have driven affordable housing for years. Developers can receive a five-year tax break if they build in designated zones and set aside 20% of their units as affordable housing.

Last month, however, the Fort Worth City Council removed the option that allows developers to pay an annual $200 fee per unit in lieu of building affordable homes. Developers are now required to set aside affordable housing if they want the tax breaks.

In December, the Columbus City Council in Ohio expanded the tax abatement program beyond certain neighborhoods to include the entire city, granting developers a 100% tax break for 15 years.

A spokesperson from Columbus’ Department of Development told Stateline that housing building permits are projected to be down 10% from last year. But officials expect the expanded tax incentive to accelerate affordable housing in all areas of the city — including in historically underinvested areas.

An hour and thirty minutes away in Cincinnati, an ordinance passed by the city council last month allows affordable housing developments funded by public-private partnerships there to get an automatic property tax exemption without council approval, streamlining the building process.

In their bid to spur more affordable housing, cities also are trying to boost the post-pandemic trend of downtown office-to-housing conversions.

In 2022, D.C. expanded tax breaks for developers converting downtown offices into housing, with tax exemptions for up to 20 years if they meet affordability requirements.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, a Democrat, last year also announced a public-private partnership that expands tax breaks for conversions to housing. Developers must reserve at least 20% of their new units as affordable, with some space for federal voucher holders as well.

Chicago and Pittsburgh have put similar tax deals in place in the past two years, with affordable housing stipulations attached.

Washington state legislators recently held a hearing on proposed legislation to offer affordable housing tax incentives for conversions statewide.

Washington state Sen. Yasmin Trudeau, a Democrat who represents Tacoma and who sponsored the measure, said her bill is a quick approach to address Seattle’s need for more housing, which is estimated at 1 million new units over the next 20 years.

Trudeau is optimistic about the bill’s chance of success this legislative cycle, as it passed a Senate committee in January. But some aspects of her legislative package didn’t advance, including a tax incentive for converting market-rate apartments to affordable units, as well other legislative levers to maintain affordability.

“There’s a larger conversation we’re not having about ways to maintain affordability, such as rent stabilization or transit-oriented development, which are built-in affordability measures,” she said.

‘Double-edged sword’

Tax abatement deals might not always live up to expectations, according to David Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference, a Washington, D.C.-based affordable housing advocacy group.

“I think tax abatement is a double-edged sword. If you have it, you can create fairly significant incentives to create and maintain, to create and preserve affordable housing where you don’t have it,” said Dworkin.

However, he said, new construction can displace current residents with low incomes, and oversight is needed to ensure that developers follow through on promises of affordable units.

In a review of New York’s affordable housing tax incentives, the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, suggests increased abatements hurt cities by removing their primary source of revenue, handicapping them to handle other costs associated with rising populations and burdening school districts.

Meanwhile, some states are seeing conflicts between legislative action and local goals.

In Florida, for instance, a law passed with bipartisan support last year, the Live Local Act, offers developers sweeping tax breaks in exchange for building affordable units for people making up to 120% of the area median income. Developers that participate also can override local zoning rules to build in commercial and industrial areas.

Developers have rushed to take part, according to The Wall Street Journal.

But Pasco County, on Florida’s west coast, is aiming to change the law, arguing that the cutoff for affordable housing should be at 80% of median income to help more families in need.

The law puts local governments in a financial bind, county officials say. In Pasco’s case, commissioners had made plans for their industrial zones and are trying to lure more employers — not residents — to the suburban bedroom county outside of the Tampa-St. Petersburg area.

The Pasco County Attorney’s Office told Stateline in an email that the Live Local Act “forces the county to make these sacrifices for housing” with no guarantee of homes that will be affordable to residents.

In various meetings on the issues, Pasco County administrators have discussed imposing a moratorium on all multifamily development if no change is made to the law.

Other states have sought to rein in local tax breaks.

This year, a Republican bill in the Arizona legislature would halve the period a property can receive tax breaks from eight years to four.

Last year, Texas lawmakers approved a revision to how tax breaks are used for affordable housing. The law closes loopholes that allowed some properties to be tax- exempt for years and requires regular audits for future tax deals.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

The post Desperate for affordable housing, some cities sweeten tax breaks for developers appeared first on New Jersey Monitor.

Workers apply sheathing to the exterior of a new multifamily residential building, Friday, Nov. 3, 2023, in the East Boston neighborhood of Boston. On Friday, the U.S. government issues its November jobs report. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

The United States needs an estimated 7 million more homes to house everyone who needs shelter. But to build all those homes, experts say, America would need many more construction workers.

“The biggest challenge that the construction industry is facing, to put it tongue in cheek, is that people don’t want their babies to grow up to be construction workers,” said Brian Turmail, vice president of public affairs and strategic initiatives at the Associated General Contractors of America, an industry group that’s been calling for more workforce development.

For decades, Turmail said, many educators and policymakers have been encouraging students to go to a four-year college, leading to a shortage of skilled tradespeople such as electricians and plumbers. Most of the tradespeople he knows, Turmail added, got into the business because of a personal contact.

And now, following both the Great Recession of 2008 and the construction cutbacks of the COVID-19 pandemic, more workers are leaving the industry than entering it, according to the National Center for Construction Education and Research.

“If there are fewer workers available, construction takes longer,” said Lily Roberts, managing director for inclusive growth at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C.

The construction industry says it is experiencing a workforce shortage and has been since well before the pandemic. Employment isn’t growing fast enough, said Erika Walter, director of media relations for Associated Builders and Contractors, a national industry group.

An analysis released earlier this month by the Associated Builders and Contractors found that at the end of November there were about 459,000 job openings in the industry. The 5.4% job opening rate was the highest since 2000.

Several states have taken steps in recent years to boost their construction workforces. They’re funding apprenticeships, investing in community college programs and offering grants to benefit specific industries, all in hopes of building a domestic pipeline of skilled construction workers. In Montana, nearly 3,000 apprentices are now working through a state program that links students to industry sponsors.

“The big surprise in 2023 for me was that all of a sudden these governors did more than just pump money into the labor shortage problem,” said Karl Eckhart, vice president of intergovernmental affairs for the National Association of Home Builders. “We need to expedite this process so we can at least get shovels under the ground.”

The problem

The U.S. construction industry lost nearly 30% of its workforce during the Great Recession of 2008, and had barely recovered before the COVID-19 pandemic hit it again, as outlined by a study shared last spring by economists at the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The authors attributed much of the shortage, however, to the federal Secure Communities immigration crackdown of the Obama administration.

“If a shortage of lower-skilled labor makes it more difficult to find workers to finish framing a house, this will also reduce demand for electricians and plumbers required at the subsequent stage of construction,” the authors wrote.

But another issue is that the industry’s labor force is headed toward retirement. More than 1 in 5 construction workers are 55 and older, and much of the workforce will be retiring in the coming decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For now, though, roughly 68% of construction firms say their job applicants lack the skills they need, according to an Associated General Contractors survey last year.

“We’ve invested hundreds of millions into workforce training, because not only do we need homes, but the average age of an electrician in America is around 50 years old,” said Eckhart, of the National Association of Home Builders.

“If you’re, you know, Gen X or younger, your guidance counselor never said, ‘Hey, you should become an electrician.’ Now the industry has lost that potential pool of talent.”

Building a workforce

Among the challenges, experts and studies say, is that the construction industry isn’t doing enough to recruit different types of people.

According to a 2022 U.S. Department of Labor report, many apprentice programs for construction and trade-based skills often have sponsors who do not recruit or hire individuals from underrepresented groups — and may not even be aware of how to recruit members of those groups.

“In the construction industry, a generally untapped group of potential employees is women, including women of color,” Roberts, of the Center for American Progress, said.

Women and people of color are underrepresented in the construction industry and especially in the higher-paid, higher-skilled trades, according to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Rose Khattar, director of economic analysis for inclusive economy at the Center for American Progress, said some jurisdictions have taken steps to expand the diversity of their workforce through training.

And in recent months, several states have touted new investments in trades education.

In November alone, for example, New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that more than $12 million in grant money would be invested into training roughly 2,000 workers in various fields, including programs for welding, machine maintenance and construction work.

Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine announced that 35 Ohio high school programs would receive almost $200 million in grant money to expand training facilities in areas including the electrical trades, welding and carpentry.

And Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, signed an executive order requiring officials overseeing state construction projects of more than $5 million to consider using contractors participating in registered apprenticeship programs.

“I think the stigma of the construction industry is that you’re going into building trades because you couldn’t do anything else,” said Shelly Bell, vice president of workforce development at Florida’s Tallahassee Community College, which has a trades education curriculum tied to a larger, state-sponsored program.

There’s plenty of need, she pointed out, and long-term job security given the country’s housing shortage. “We want our students to see a career in construction that includes upward mobility and professional fulfillment,” she said.

Policymakers should take heed of ongoing workforce needs for another reason as well, Eckhart said.

“If you’re not investing in training skilled workers, that only hurts the consumer,” he said. “Less-skilled workers means homes that won’t be stable and functional, and you can’t afford to make shortcuts when it comes to building homes.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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One man, young homeless sitting on the street and begging. Getty Images

In pushing for a bill of rights for homeless Michiganders, Democratic state Rep. Emily Dievendorf encountered a “cruel irony”: A homeless constituent providing advice on the measure was denied entry to the state Capitol because he didn’t have a photo ID.

Under Dievendorf’s bill, homeless people in Michigan would have the right to “move freely” in parks, on sidewalks and in other public spaces, and could not be denied employment for lacking a permanent address. They also would be guaranteed emergency medical care, privacy protections for their personal belongings and access to the official documentation required to cast a vote in Michigan — in other words, a photo ID.

“As a society, we have to admit that it takes time for folks who are struggling and don’t have a roof over their head to stabilize themselves while they wait for housing opportunities to happen,” said Dievendorf. “This bill is about a baseline of humanity and respect that we should give humans who are unhoused.”

Connecticut, Illinois and Rhode Island have similar measures on the books. And this past summer, New York City became the first city in the nation to pass a homeless bill of rights. It includes the right to shelter, the right to sleep outside and the right to vote.

But the state laws were enacted a decade ago, and homeless advocates say they are often ignored. In the years since, efforts to pass bill of rights measures in at least a half-dozen other states have fallen short. In New York City, Democratic Mayor Eric Adams is fighting to suspend the city’s separate, 4-decade-old right-to-shelter policy, under which it has to provide temporary housing for every homeless person.

Dievendorf’s bill, introduced last year, hasn’t advanced out of committee in Michigan’s Democratic-dominated legislature.

As the homeless population has grown and become more visible, many cities and states have pivoted from a focus on the rights of homeless people to the rights of local residents and businesses that are being forced to contend with homeless encampments and other fallout from the nation’s shortage of affordable housing.

In the past two years, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas have approved statewide camping bans on public property (though the Missouri Supreme Court last month struck down that state’s law over a technical issue). In Georgia, a new law requires cities and counties to enforce existing bans on public camping; steers money toward transitional housing that requires drug treatment; encourages the creation of sanctioned camping areas; and calls for a “performance audit” of spending on programs for homeless people.

San Diego and Portland, Oregon, recently tightened their camping restrictions. And San Diego has joined left-leaning cities including Albuquerque, New Mexico; Honolulu; Las Vegas; Milwaukee; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Seattle in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to give them more authority to dismantle homeless encampments.

“The friction in many communities affected by homelessness is at a breaking point,” those and other cities wrote in an amicus brief supporting Grants Pass, Oregon, which was sued by three unhoused residents who argued the city shouldn’t be allowed to punish them for sleeping in public when there is nowhere else for them to go.

“Despite massive infusions of public resources, businesses and residents are suffering the increasingly negative effects of long-term urban camping,” the brief continues. Among them: “enormous volumes of garbage, human waste, and other health hazards like used needles.”

Grants Pass is appealing a 2020 district court ruling that its ordinances regulating homelessness are unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court could decide this month whether to take the case.

‘Criminalization’ of homelessness?

A “point-in-time” count released last month by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that about 653,100 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2023, up 12% compared with 2022. Sixty percent of those people were in emergency shelters, transitional housing or other sheltered situations, while the remainder were on the streets or “in places not meant for human habitation.”

The number of homeless people has spiked since the COVID-19 pandemic, but city efforts to crack down on camping, loitering and panhandling predate the public health crisis. Between 2006 and 2019, there was a sharp increase in the number of citywide bans on camping (up 92%), sitting or lying in public spaces (78%), loitering (103%), panhandling (103%) and living in vehicles (213%), according to a 2021 report by the National Homelessness Law Center.

The group also tracked a 1,300% increase in the number of homeless encampments and noted that Black and Native American people are overrepresented in the homeless population.

Even in Rhode Island, one of the three states that have a homeless bill of rights, advocates say authorities often ignore the law in their zeal to get homeless people off the streets. Providence is one of the cities asking the Supreme Court for more authority to clear encampments.

“A [bill of rights] law without enforcement has no teeth,” said Juan Espinoza, communications and development manager for the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness. “It’s especially dangerous when the individuals who are supposed to benefit from the law are disconnected and unaware of what rights they may have, just because they lack a stable home.”

The National Homelessness Law Center and other advocacy groups argue that state and local policies that “criminalize” homelessness only make the problem worse.

“Because people experiencing homelessness are not on the street by choice but because they lack choices, criminal and civil punishment serves no constructive purpose,” the report states. “Instead, arrests, unaffordable tickets, and the collateral consequences of criminal convictions make it more difficult for people to exit homelessness and get back on their feet.”

Steve Berg, chief policy officer for the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said he expects more cities and states to take a punitive approach this year.

“We’re worried about states implementing criminalization and fines as a way to address homelessness, when there’s evidence that it doesn’t work,” Berg said in an interview with Stateline. “We’ve seen these laws challenged in court and our belief is that due process would prohibit that kind of criminalization.”

Instead, advocates argue, the solution to homelessness is more housing and behavioral health services for the many unhoused people who are struggling with mental illness or substance use.

A complex problem

But even many progressives argue that housing and services must be combined with enforcement. In a separate amicus brief supporting Grants Pass, the left-leaning California State Association of Counties and the League of California Cities point to the billions of dollars public officials have spent on supportive services, outreach teams, emergency shelters, rental subsidies, micro-dwellings and safe camping sites with 24-hour security, bathrooms and storage. It hasn’t been enough.

“Homelessness in California is a complex problem with many root causes, and it demands a comprehensive solution,” they argue in the brief. Enforcing camping restrictions, they say, “is a critical component to the overall well-being of the community.”

In August, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom used stronger language in criticizing a court order barring San Francisco from clearing homeless encampments, calling it “preposterous” and “inhumane.”

“People are moving out of the cities. Businesses are shutting down. People are dying of overdoses because of this,” Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Ultimately, everyone’s going to blame me for everything. … But damn it, they need to be accountable as well. These judges are wrong on these overriding sweeping orders.”

In conservative states with recently enacted camping bans, legislators have relied on model legislation drafted by the Cicero Institute, a Texas-based think tank founded by Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of tech firm Palantir and managing partner at the venture capital firm 8VC.

The new Georgia law is the most far-reaching. It goes beyond a camping ban by steering the state away from the “housing first” strategy embraced by many advocates. Under that approach, people experiencing homelessness are provided with free permanent housing first — before they receive help with mental health issues, substance use or job placement. Lonsdale and other critics say that given the high percentage of homeless people experiencing those problems, housing first usually fails.

The law also takes aim at what Lonsdale and other critics refer to as the “Homeless Industrial Complex,” or the array of homeless-service providers that, they argue, benefit from the status quo. Under the Georgia law, the state will examine the awarding of contracts and grants to service providers to determine whether they are meeting metrics of success.

Bryan Sunderland, executive director of policy at the Cicero Institute, said the group isn’t advocating the criminalization of homelessness. Rather, it is trying to prevent the worst outcomes of street homelessness.

“I find it laughable when some people say that it’s better to leave someone on the street because we know where we can find them to help them later,” Sunderland said in an interview with Stateline.

“It boggles the mind, and I don’t want to impugn anyone’s motivations, but the folks that often make those arguments are the ones that are collecting millions of dollars from the federal government to continue running the nonprofits that they run.”

Multiyear effort in Michigan

In pushing for a homeless bill of rights in Michigan, Dievendorf is resurrecting legislation that died in 2016 and 2017.

Lisa Chapman, policy director for the Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness, said it’s unfortunate that a bill to give homeless people basic rights is even necessary. A person’s housing status shouldn’t dictate whether they are protected under the law, she told Stateline.

“The bill is aspirational,” Chapman said. “Of course, we want everyone to have the same rights. But in reality, people experiencing homelessness aren’t being treated equally, and there have been cities in the state responding to rising homelessness with criminalization.”

She also cited the increasing use in Michigan of so-called hostile architecture on city benches to physically prevent people from sleeping on them.

In July, the Grand Rapids City Commission approved two ordinances designed to crack down on street homelessness. The first bars loitering in public or private buildings — including doorways — and prohibits “accosting” another person who is using an ATM, waiting at a bus stop or eating or drinking outdoors.

The second ordinance prohibits the storage of unattended or “excess” personal property in public rights-of-way and parks, and allows the city to impound such property, without prior notice. The ACLU of Michigan criticized both measures as unconstitutional.

“The proposed amendments criminalize behaviors fundamental to the experience of being unhoused: keeping personal property in public, using tents, and spending time (“loitering”) in public places,” the ACLU wrote in a letter to Democratic Mayor Rosalynn Bliss and the other members of the commission.

“This approach only pushes our unhoused neighbors further into the margins of society, exacerbating their struggles. Indeed, we fear that may be the goal, because it is uncomfortable to be confronted with the reality that others have so much less.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

The post As homeless people become more visible, some cities and states take a tougher line appeared first on New Jersey Monitor.

One man, young homeless sitting on the street and begging. Getty Images

SAN DIEGO — Tracy Bennett has packed up and moved her tent and possessions so many times when the city periodically clears her sidewalk encampment, she jokes she could run her own moving company.

The black canopy that she’s wrapped in blue tarps and filled with blankets, food, a coloring book and the rest of her belongings, stood on a sidewalk on a Friday morning this month, a few blocks from the Gaslamp Quarter, a downtown San Diego nightlife hub. Her shelter had a bit of holiday flair: On the corner of her tent, near its entrance, sat a stuffed elf and two red stockings tied in green and red tinsel.

But a couple feet down from her small Christmas decoration, a city worker taped a neon green notice to her tent telling her and the rest of the homeless encampment that in 24 hours they would have to break camp and move, or their belongings would be impounded or thrown away.

The sidewalk encampment had around 30 mismatched orange, blue, gray and red tents, tarps tied to parking lot fences, packed carts and a community of people — some old, some young, some with a variety of physical disabilities or mental illnesses — sitting on curbs, bicycles or walkers. It ran along an intersection that had one portable toilet, a women’s shelter and several social workers assisting any way they could.

Bennett, 54, folded blankets outside her tent, one hand on the leash of Mamacita, a friendly pit bull wagging her tail at the activity.

She said she is used to these city-mandated cleanups; they’ve happened countless times in the three years she’s been on this corner and in the seven years she’s been without a home in what might be America’s most expensive city. Each time, she gathers her stuff and carries it across the street with the help of friends. When the city crew and police leave, she’s back, along with her unhoused neighbors.

“It’s redundant, stupid and a waste of taxpayers’ dollars,” she said. “It doesn’t do anything to fix the problem. It doesn’t even put a Band-Aid on a bullet hole.

“We’re not bad people. We’re just in a bad circumstance.”

The next morning, a frantic energy crackled through the encampment. Residents unsheathed tent poles and folded up blankets and tarps as a dozen city workers in white hazmat suits began to sweep up all the bottles, garbage, feces, needles and tents left behind, stuffing the refuse into the back of a white garbage truck.

Two police officers stood by, encouraging people to hustle before the cleaning crew reached them. People gathered their tents and belongings in carts, on bikes or in their arms, and left. Workers power-washed the sidewalk with water and disinfectant. Bennett stood by with two friends, watched the cleanup unfold and ate a bag of Cheez-Its as a garbage truck crunched tent polls in its rear-end compactor.

This scene plays out in cities across the country.

More than 653,000 Americans are experiencing homelessness, according to a count released this month by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a 12% increase from last year. Among the people experiencing homelessness, 64% are unsheltered.

As tent encampments continue to dot urban landscapes — strewn around parks, along sidewalks, lining highways or sometimes abutting schools — many cities have increased their sweeps, some governors have announced funding to clear encampments, and several states have outlawed the tent communities altogether.

Without significant investment and solutions coming from federal and state governments, local leaders are on their own to manage this crisis, said Samantha Batko, a principal research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

“Sweeps are a way to diminish the visibility in a specific area — not overall, but in a specific area — in the short term,” she said.

City leaders from Minneapolis to Las Vegas say the sweeps are intended to reduce health hazards for those living in the camps and for the surrounding community, while also connecting homeless people with case workers and shelters. A rise in complaints from homeowners who worry about their property values and safety have added political pressure to move the camps out of commercial and residential areas.

Housing experts and homeless advocates argue such sweeps are cruel, displace people from needed social services and community, risk the loss of their few possessions and don’t solve the root of the problem, which is the need for more affordable housing.

While cities and the unhoused wait for that housing to emerge, elected leaders are trying to find ways to alleviate the uncomfortable visuals of countless rows of their constituents sheltered in tents. They are greenlighting more sweeps, going to the courts to expand their power to clear camps and adopting “safe” camping options such as city-designated camps.

Cities embrace sweeps

In California, home to nearly a third of the nation’s homeless population, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom last month announced $300 million in grants for local jurisdictions to help clear homeless encampments, building on the $415 million that his administration already has spent on sweeping camps and housing people.

Touting the 5,679 encampments the state has cleared since July 2021, Newsom said camps “are not safe for the people living in them, or for community members around them.”

Local leaders agree.

“It is completely inhumane to allow people to perish on the sidewalks in squalor,” San Diego Councilmember Stephen Whitburn said in an interview at his City Hall office. “We have an obligation to get people out of the encampments and to provide a better option for them.”

Whitburn, a Democrat, sees the problem every day, as homeless people congregate in the plaza behind City Hall and the adjoining sidewalks in downtown San Diego.

In June, he shepherded through an ordinance that bans camping within two blocks of schools and shelters, in parks and along waterways. It also prohibits camping on sidewalks if there are shelter beds available. The camping ban accompanies local initiatives that seek to add more shelter beds and affordable housing. Before the camping ban, the city used sidewalk encroachment laws to ticket and clear homeless encampments.

Camping bans have attracted interest in other cities, such as Portland, Oregon, where a ban went into effect last month. In cities such as Denver and Houston, homeless encampment sweeps come with an option to move indoors into hotels or other shelters.

San Diego city workers in hazmat suits clean up refuse left behind at a homeless encampment in December, including some tents. Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

Since San Diego’s camping ban went into effect in July, there are 1,200 fewer unhoused people downtown — a 45% decline, according to the San Diego Downtown Partnership.

But the local homeless crisis is still acute; homelessness in San Diego County rose 22% last year, especially affecting women, older adults and veterans. For every 10 people who found housing and exited homelessness in San Diego over the past year, 16 became homeless, according to the Regional Task Force on Homelessness.

Local housing advocates have lambasted the camping ban. They say the city is criminalizing homelessness and displacing people from familiar communities.

People in homeless encampments often look after one another or keep an eye on someone’s possessions when they have to go to a doctor’s appointment, renew their food stamp cards, snag a bus pass or run to the grocery store, said Janis Wilds, a volunteer homeless advocate with Housing 4 the Homeless, a local nonprofit that runs a shelter for older people.

“It’s causing people to become mobile,” she said. “And though encampments are detrimental to the wealthy that have to see poverty, they’re actually helpful to the people who are in them. The police are just telling people, ‘Just go somewhere, just go somewhere else. Don’t be here.’ But there is absolutely nowhere for people to go.”

That mobile lifestyle may work for people who are young and don’t have a disability, she said; it doesn’t work for many others. Often, it puts at risk women who could add a lock to the zippers of their tents at night and prevent being sexually assaulted, said Wilds, who hands out food, hygiene supplies, tents and sleeping bags on the street twice a week.

But Whitburn doesn’t buy the argument by a “vocal minority” who say the city is somehow criminalizing people experiencing homelessness.

“Most people think that it is perfectly reasonable to say if we have a suitable bed or other option available for you, then you shouldn’t be allowed to just pitch a tent on the sidewalk,” he said. “The status quo is not acceptable.”

Ongoing legal fights to expand sweeps

The San Diego City Council voted to join cities from Milwaukee to Seattle to Honolulu that are coming together to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to give them more authority to conduct sweeps.

While a 2018 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances if they do not have enough shelter capacity, it hasn’t stopped municipalities from pursuing camping bans.

Cities have raced to sign on to an amicus brief in favor of more city power to clear camps. Even Newsom, in California, has chimed in, writing that judges have “paralyzed” cities’ response to clearing encampments. The California State Association of Counties and the League of California Cities have filed their own brief asking the court to give counties and cities more power to conduct sweeps.

The U.S. Supreme Court could decide next month whether to take the case.

At the same time, some states are trying to prohibit encampments. Over the past two years, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas have enacted laws banning public camping on public land. This year, Georgia lawmakers passed a law requiring cities and counties to enforce existing bans on public camping.

Earlier this week, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down the state’s law that banned sleeping on public land over a technical issue with how the law was written.

Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a proposed public camping ban bill this year, writing in her veto letter that the legislation did not address root causes for homelessness or offer alternative paths.

Phoenix recently was ordered by a judge to clear one of the biggest encampment zones in the country. The zone had nearly 1,000 people camped there, according to news outlets. The city said 718 people were offered services and 585 of those accepted placement at an indoor location.

Anti-camping laws are about public safety, not criminalization, said Bryan Sunderland, executive director at the Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank that offers model policies for public camping bans.

“It’s a tragic situation for the people left on the streets,” he said. “Leaving people on the streets is not a compassionate situation. It is not a good thing. It’s not good for the community or those who are homeless.”

He suggested short-term shelters, where rehabilitation and treatment for substance use is prioritized.

As cities and states try to expand their sweeps policies, local American Civil Liberties Union chapters have filed lawsuits against Albuquerque, Honolulu, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Seattle. Chapters have sent warnings to city leaders elsewhere.

Lawyers for the ACLU argue these sweeps violate constitutional protections that prevent cruel and unusual punishment and the seizure of property by the government.

“They are displacing homeless folks, giving them no real alternatives of where they can be and at the same time destroying their belongings summarily without any form of due process,” said John Do, a senior staff attorney for the Racial and Economic Justice Program at the ACLU of Northern California, who is leading the lawsuit in San Francisco. That case is in the middle of discovery, and the trial is set to begin next October.

‘By every measure, the homeless sweeps failed’

Across the country from San Diego, on a crowded Metropolitan Transportation Authority commuter train into downtown Manhattan, 54-year-old Geraldo Jones is trying to perfect his singing pitch. For the past two years on most mornings, Jones sings Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” to commuters in hopes of earning a few dollars.

It’s a subway hustle that can earn him a few meals for the week.

“My voice is all I have left,” said Jones, who has been experiencing chronic homelessness since 2015. “Sometimes, I’ll make enough to get a few burgers for the next few days.”

In August 2022, his home — a tentlike setup in Washington Square Park — was swept away by the New York Police Department as a part of encampment cleanups implemented by Democratic Mayor Eric Adams.

In addition to losing the home that had been his most consistent living space since 2021, Jones said his belongings, including photos of his deceased wife and contacts for the city’s homeless providers, were destroyed.

“That was my home. My memories. All I had left. To others it may look like trash in their public space or mud in their tourist trap, but it was my home,” said Jones. “Where do they want me to go? I’ve been moving from awning to awning, subway station to subway station.”

Jones can carry a tune. But few commuters drop a few dollars and cents into his “coin purse,” a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup.

New York City’s encampment sweeps led to the forcible removal of 2,308 people from their outdoor spaces from March to November 2022, according to an audit from the New York City Comptroller’s Office. Of those, only 90 stayed in shelters for more than one day. As of January, 47 people remained in shelters, and just three people secured permanent housing.

“The evidence is clear: by every measure, the homeless sweeps failed,” said Comptroller Brad Lander in the report.

Homeless encampment sweeps simply do not work, said Steve Berg, chief policy officer for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

“The idea that you take people who are homeless and scatter them someplace else around whatever city they’re in, it just makes it harder for them to maintain whatever relationships they had with any sort of provider that was trying to help them,” he said.

While people of all backgrounds experience homelessness, advocacy groups such as the National Health Care for the Homeless Council have found that sweeps disproportionately impact non-white people and people with disabilities.

“Homelessness is also a racial equity issue,” said Etel Haxhiaj, the council’s senior policy manager. “One thing I want lawmakers to note is that the people who are being swept away in these sweeps are often people of color who already have a hurdle in accessing housing.”

Several academic papers have found that homeless encampment sweeps can lead to adverse mental and physical health effects for displaced people. On top of that, sweeps come with a high price tag.

A 2020 federal report examined sweeps from nine U.S. cities — Chicago; Fresno, California; Houston; Las Vegas; Minneapolis; Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; San Jose, California; and Tacoma, Washington. The report found that those sweeps were expensive, costing cities between $1,672 and $6,208 per unsheltered individual per year.

Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee recently warned that the state’s program that clears homeless encampments and helps put people into housing is running out of money.

Inslee is asking legislators to approve $140 million for homelessness programs, after allocating $143 million last year, as a part of recent budget proposal. Of the 1,034 people living in the encampments who accepted housing as part of this initiative, 816 are still in the housing offered by the state, according to a Department of Commerce database.

As the Urban Institute put it, homeless encampment sweeps are “draining” municipal budgets.

But seeing that outdoor living is one of the only options for a growing U.S. homeless population, some cities are looking to allow encampments on their own terms.

The ‘safe sleeping’ alternative

On the southern end of Balboa Park — San Diego’s 1,200-acre central park — and cushioned between the Naval Medical Center and Interstate 5, 136 red ice-fishing tents sit on each of three flattened sections of a rusty dirt hill. Across the street, another 136 tents have been erected in a city operations parking lot.

San Diego, nicknamed “America’s Finest City,” now offers what it’s calling “safe sleeping” campsites on publicly owned land. Up to 750 people can stay here each night.

The sites have become a beacon for people who don’t like shelters, want a modicum of privacy and have sought some assistance and access to social services, said Teresa Smith, CEO of Dreams for Change, one of the nonprofits that are helping to operate the sites.

“They can live their lives in an environment that provides the things that we’re looking for around dignity, privacy and, in many ways, client empowerment,” she said.

Sacramento, California, has operated a similar site for the past two years, holding 60 tents. Smith said she had phone conversations with that site’s organizers before the San Diego site opened.

In Utah, Salt Lake City opened the state’s first sanctioned homeless encampment, offering pods in the shape of tiny houses that can hold two unhoused people and that are searched regularly for drugs and alcohol.

The San Diego site uses ice-fishing tents, which lack a bottom tarp layer because they’re traditionally staked by anglers atop the frozen lakes of northern states. The tents, instead, rest on 4-inch wooden platforms off the ground.

They can hold two people, and they come with sleeping bags. Residents receive breakfast and dinner and have access to showers, laundry facilities and power outlets to charge their phones. There’s also a shuttle that can take people downtown or to public transportation hubs.

The sites are home to a revolving door of social service providers offering medical help, general case management and mental health and harm reduction assistance. Site officials are trying to keep existing encampments together at the new city-designated sites to help foster community.

Darhonda Newbill, an Illinois native who has been without housing off-and-on for nine years, spent five nights at one of the safe camping locations. But she said she is not sure whether she’ll come back.

“It’s just very cold at night,” said Newbill, 36. “It has a big opening at the bottom. That’s more ventilation.”

Standing with Bennett and another friend as city workers cleared the homeless encampment in downtown San Diego earlier this month, Newbill said she felt like she’s being made a criminal because she lives on the street.

“We just don’t really have any choices,” she said.

(Sequeira reported from New York.)

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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In this Saturday, July 17, 2021, photo, a copy of a covenant for property now owned by Fred Ware is seen in Manchester, Conn. Fred and Dave Ware recently found a whites-only covenant on his property dating back to 1942 when researching the title chain. The covenant described as letter "F" states that "No persons of any race other than the white race shall use or occupy any building or any lot, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner tenant." (AP Photo/Jessica Hill)

Lisa Boccetti is horrified by the restrictive covenant that is in the deed to her 1950s ranch house in Raleigh, North Carolina: It states that the land cannot be sold or occupied by Black people.

The property “shall not be sold to negroes or to any person or persons of negro blood, and said premises shall not be occupied by negroes or persons of negro blood, except domestic servants and their families, employed by the occupants of the premises,” the original deed states.

She and her husband, Bob Williams, would like to remove the offensive language, which hasn’t been legally binding for more than half a century, but North Carolina doesn’t have a process to do so. In 2021, two state senators filed legislation to give homeowners a way to erase such covenants, but the bill was sent to a committee and died.

“It’s infuriating, because unless your state has a process in place through legislation to remove or repudiate the contract, there’s nothing you can do to make it go away,” Boccetti said.

In recent years, more than a dozen states have passed laws repudiating historical, racially restrictive covenants embedded in property deeds that prohibited the sale of those homes to Black residents or, depending on the community, to immigrants from certain countries such as Poland or Ireland, or to Jews or Asian Americans.

In some states, new laws now allow the historical wording to be removed altogether.

Lawmakers have touted the new laws, passed with bipartisan support, as a formal rebuke to segregationist housing policies and the symbolic closing of a dark chapter in American history. The U.S. Supreme Court declared the covenants unconstitutional in 1948; the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed them.

Covenant clauses that prevented non-whites from buying or occupying land were a tool that enforced segregation in U.S. communities across the country in the early to mid-20th century, led to discrimination by banks and, researchers note, have lingering effects today.

“I emphasize all the time that efforts to discharge the language in these covenants needs to be the start of a conversation, not the end of a conversation,” said Michael Corey, a researcher for the Mapping Prejudice project at the University of Minnesota, which focuses on the causes of segregation in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

“We can’t erase history because it makes white people uncomfortable,” Corey said in an interview. “We have to understand how this history has disadvantaged minority populations from access to wealth building.”

Historians and researchers praise one state’s covenant law for looking to the future as well as the past: Washington state’s measure not only recognizes the harmful effects of past real estate discrimination but also seeks to rectify it, at least in part.

The law, which Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed in May, levies a fee of $100 on all real estate transactions to fund a so-called covenant homeownership account.

That account will provide down payments and closing cost loans to certain first-time homebuyers who were, or would have been, prevented from buying properties prior to April 11, 1968, when the Fair Housing Act became law.

The descendants of people who were or would have been harmed by the covenants also are eligible. All recipients must have incomes at or below 100% of an area’s median income, however. The fee is projected to generate between $75 million and $100 million annually, according to a legislative analysis.

Washington has yet to determine how much assistance qualifying homebuyers will receive, and under what conditions, but the new fund is supposed to begin disbursing money next July.

Upon House passage of the bill, sponsor state Rep. Jamila Taylor described it as a “focused and thoughtful” approach to help “right the wrongs of the past.”

“The deliberate and harmful barriers preventing Black homeownership impact intergenerational wealth and housing security,” Taylor, a Democrat, said in a statement on her legislative site. “Because this racial discrimination was targeted, the solution must also be targeted.”

The homeownership rate among Black, Hispanic, Asian and Indigenous people in Washington state is 49%, 19 percentage points lower than that of non-Hispanic white households, according to a state report released last year. Only 31% of Black households own their homes, the report said.

“History has taught us that it took generations of systemic, racist, and discriminatory policies and practices to get to where we are today,” the report states.

It cites restrictive covenants but also redlining, or the denial of loans to people residing in poor or minority neighborhoods. It also blames so-called blockbusting, in which real estate speculators preyed on white fears by introducing a Black family to a neighborhood, persuading fleeing white homeowners to sell at below-market rates, then reselling those homes at high prices to new Black families.

During the debate over the Washington state bill, at least one Republican argued that the $100 transaction fee would harm the first-time homebuyers and lower-income people the legislation was designed to help.

But James Gregory, a history professor at the University of Washington, said paying for compensation “is a central piece of what the model legislation would look like if states were actually trying to restore the harms of these covenants.”

“These covenants not only caused segregation, but it limited homeownership opportunities for generations of people,” Gregory said. “If you’re trying to undo those harms, you need to take measures to reopen those opportunities that were never available.”

Richard Rothstein, whose 2017 book, “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” documented how federal, state and local policies explicitly created racially homogenous neighborhoods, told Stateline that merely removing racist covenants won’t address current housing disparities. He described the covenants as “the least important of these policies affecting systemic barriers in housing, especially after they lost enforcement power.”

But Rothstein, a fellow at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, praised the Washington bill as “a justifiable measure to restore harm done through those covenants.”

Washington’s law is the exception, however.

In Nevada, which enacted a law renouncing racist covenants earlier this year, sponsor Sen. Dallas Harris said she would have liked to emulate Washington state’s approach. Harris said the covenants “created systemic barriers to homeownership and capital” in her state, and that while she knew they had existed before she began pushing her bill, she didn’t realize how extensively they were used.

But Harris said a bill similar to Washington’s was a nonstarter in Nevada, which has a Republican governor.

“It was important for me to find a way to strike hurtful and harmful language, without making attempts to erase what the damage that these covenants caused,” she told Stateline. She said a law such as Washington’s is “the ultimate goal.”

“Taking action steps and providing actual compensation for the harm that’s done is good policy,” she said. “But it may be hard to do that in some states, financially or politically.”

In the Raleigh area where Lisa Boccetti and Bob Williams live, nearly 74% of white residents own their homes, while less than 46% of Black residents and about 47% of Hispanic residents are homeowners, according to census data.

Boccetti and Williams, who are white, are voluntarily leading a project to pore through property record books and catalog racial covenants to create a searchable database for the Wake County Register of Deeds, where Raleigh is located.

Tammy Brunner, a Democrat and the register of deeds, told Stateline the project can help explain how today’s neighborhoods were shaped.

“We strongly believe that once we pull out all of the restrictive covenants, we will create a map of redlining in the county and we’ll find that the underserved communities were created by these covenants,” she said.

Boccetti hopes the effort helps to spur covenant legislation in the GOP-controlled legislature.

Discovering the restrictive covenant in her deed and the struggle to remove it “has been a learning experience,” she said.

“It’s allowed us to see the ways why our neighborhood has been shaped the way it is,” she said. “It’s something we must grapple with, even if it makes us uncomfortable.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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