FEMA trailers — the kind of shelter that’s deployed when hurricanes and wildfires leave people stranded — could soon be put to use for a different disaster: California’s homelessness crisis.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom hopes to use 100 former trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for emergency shelter in cities with dire homelessness problems. Some of the state’s trailers are currently being occupied by response staff from the Camp Fire disaster in 2018 — which partly contributed to a rising homeless population in some cities. But those trailers will be vacated soon and could be deployed elsewhere in the state.
Newsom signed an executive order last week to activate response teams and deploy trailers across the state, but only Oakland has the trailers so far. Certain California cities could also use the sort of medical triage tents often used after natural disasters to care for the homeless, according to KABC-TV in Los Angeles.
California needs all the solutions it can get for the state’s rising affordable housing issues, and the resulting homelessness crisis. Its homeless population jumped by 16% last year to about 151,000 people, a quarter of the entire national homeless population. Newsom called for more than $1 billion in new funding to address homelessness in his budget proposal this month.
