Content warning: This episode includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 9-8-8.

Jazmine Mapes has spent most of her life on the move. 

When she was a young child, she shuttled from city to city in Southern California as her parents broke up and got back together. Her dad was abusive, Mapes said, and around age 9, she and her younger brother started bouncing around the foster care system. 

Now 31, Mapes has spent much of her adult life homeless, living in riverbeds and tents on the sidewalk. She’s dealt with regular “sweeps” — police officers and other city workers ordering her to leave so they can clear the area.

Mapes has lost clothes, sleeping bags and — perhaps most importantly — medications for her anxiety and depression. One cleanup crew threw away a photo album filled with pictures of the four children she gave up for adoption.
After a sweep, “I would just stay in my depression,” Mapes said. “I would stay getting high because getting high was a way of me coping. Me not feeling.” 

A photo shows Jazmine Mapes, a Native American woman with long dark hair, wearing a white sweater, holding onto a chain link fence with one hand and holding her infant son in the other.
Jazmine Mapes holds her son by the fence where she once lived in a tent while unhoused, just across the street from Los Angeles City Hall. Credit: Zaydee Sanchez for Tradeoffs and The Marshall Project

Local governments across the U.S. have increasingly turned to sweeps and arrests as the number of people living on the nation’s streets exploded by nearly 60% between 2015 and 2024. But growing evidence shows that forcing people to move can harm their health. That’s prompting several cities to try a new approach in some cases, which experts on homelessness say can get rid of encampments, while also protecting the health of people living there.

City and county officials say they need to clear encampments to clean up excessive trash, address open drug use, and make parks available to neighborhood kids. Elected leaders often face pressure from surrounding businesses and residents to respond quickly.

More than 200 cities have outlawed sleeping outside, and arrests for homelessness have spiked since a 2024 Supreme Court decision gave local governments the green light to disperse folks without offering them shelter. President Donald Trump upped the pressure this summer with an executive order that threatened to pull federal funding from any city that didn’t make it harder for people to set up encampments. 

Proponents of clearing encampments say it’s inhumane to let people live outside in dangerous and unsanitary conditions. Local officials argue sweeps give people a chance to move inside and receive medical and social services. 

But advocates who work with homeless populations say people often remain unhoused following a sweep. And numerous studies in recent years have found that clearing encampments without offering people shelter can worsen their mental and physical health.

Related stories

Growing evidence of health consequences of sweeps

Mapes remembers one cold and wet November morning in 2023, when Los Angeles city workers demanded that she and about 65 others leave the tents they’d been living in across the street from City Hall. The previous evening, Mapes’ ex-boyfriend had burned down her tent. “I was covered in ashes and dirt,” she said. 

She was also pregnant. Her stomach ached as she tried to save what she could of her torched possessions. Mapes said a police officer grabbed her arm and pulled her across the street. At a nearby bathroom, she started digging through her purse for soap to clean herself up. Instead, her hand landed on a bottle of pills.

“I’m done,” Mapes recalled thinking. “I’m done with everybody judging me. I’m done with fighting against the world. I’m tired of missing my kids.” 

She swallowed “just about the entire bottle of pills.”

A friend who had also been staying in the encampment found Mapes slumped over on a toilet. The friend forced her to vomit the pills.

“Had that person not found me, I probably wouldn’t be here,” Mapes said.

LEFT: Knots used to tie tarps above tents for rain protection are still visible on the fence where Jazmine Mapes set up her tent while she was unhoused. RIGHT: The black char from the tent fire where Jazmine Mapes once lived while unhoused remains on the sidewalk. Credit: Zaydee Sanchez for Tradeoffs and The Marshall Project

Researchers in recent years have documented the health impacts of sweeps. When folks with chronic conditions are forced to move, street medicine teams who had been caring for them often struggle to find them again. Important medications and medical supplies — like wheelchairs or walkers — regularly get thrown away in sweeps. And the repeated displacement can aggravate mental health problems and decrease people’s trust in future offers of help.

A large national study published in JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association in 2023 estimated that sweeps increase the risk of infection, hospitalization and overdose among people who live on the streets and inject drugs. Lead researcher Josh Barocas said the team also found that displacement increased a homeless person’s likelihood of dying prematurely.

“We’re looking at substantial numbers of deaths,” Barocas said — as much as a 25% increase over 10 years, according to the findings. “It’s hard to ignore that from a scientific perspective.”

Barocas said some city officials criticized the study, calling it misleading because the researchers assumed that people are not offered housing or services when they are forced to leave an encampment. The study is also based on limited and imperfect data from a handful of large cities that may not be applicable to the rest of the country. And it says nothing about the potential benefits of closing encampments to the broader community.

“We’re not trying to tell you that [removing an encampment] is going to add three more deaths or decrease risk by 12.2572%,” Barocas said. “We’re just trying to give you a sense of what might work and what might not work. If you continue going down the path of sweeps, then it looks like we’re going to cause more harm to people than if you were to go down a different road.”

Is it possible to do a “good sweep?”

In recent years, several cities have used a handful of best practices that officials — and some experts on homelessness — say can clear encampments while limiting the potential health consequences of traditional sweeps. 

Marc Dones led the Regional Homeless Authority in Washington’s King County, which includes Seattle, and is now a senior advisor for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. Dones said a core principle of these new approaches is to make sure, as often as possible, that people go from an encampment to long-term housing with appropriate services — as opposed to going to large shelters or just moving to another sidewalk.

The first step, Dones said, is spending time getting to know the people in an encampment. “I need to know everyone who lives there. I need to know what their needs are and what motivates them,” Dones said. This includes figuring out who has a serious mental illness, who needs addiction treatment, and who has a job that depends on access to public transit.

A tent in a small homeless encampment in Los Angeles.
A tent in a small encampment in Los Angeles. Credit: Ryan Levi/Tradeoffs

The next step is matching people with the right kind of housing. Traditionally, cities have offered people spots in large congregate shelters when clearing encampments. But shelters offer little privacy, and they often don’t work for people with significant health or addiction issues, or people who want to bring their partners or pets. Many cities in California — including Los Angeles, San Jose and Berkeley — are converting old motels into temporary housing to give people their own space and access to services while they wait for something more permanent. 

Once housing is found, Dones said, cities should give encampment residents multiple weeks to prepare to leave, and then move folks out gradually. Helping people who may have been homeless for years make the move inside is often complicated and overwhelming, so Dones recommends moving only five to six people per day. 

Dones acknowledged that many communities need to include law enforcement to plan clearings, but Dones argued police and sheriffs should have a limited role in actually interacting with people in encampments. Research shows that police interactions can be stressful for people living on the streets and undermine trust in offers of support. Several local officials said they try to lead with non-law enforcement staff during sweeps, though one analysis showed a significant spike in homeless-related arrests and citations in the last 18 months across California.

“If you run it the right way and attach people to the appropriate supports and services,” Dones said, “you can get people on a path to stability and community reintegration, and that’s what we want.”

Clearing an encampment using this model, Dones said, usually takes six to eight weeks.

Limited resources require cities to make compromises and tough choices

That process is not easy. Emergency situations, such as an infectious disease outbreak, or rising public pressure can prompt local officials to decide to clear encampments more quickly, and without offering unhoused people a place to go. That’s true even in cities with best-practice policies, according to San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.

“We have to measure and understand the health impacts of allowing encampments to grow and persist, as well as the health impacts of moving people,” he said. “We find that the longer a given encampment persists, the more likely we are to have serious issues of public health and public safety.”

Peter Radu, who oversees Berkeley’s homeless response, says this work is crisis management. “I hate to say it, but that oftentimes means choosing the least bad amongst terrible options.”

Radu described an encampment that cropped up in a popular park in Berkeley last year. His team resisted calls to clear it immediately, instead doing outreach and trying to connect the unhoused residents to services. 

But as the encampment grew to around 20 people, so did neighbors’ frustrations — especially after a high schooler was groped near the park. Radu knew it would take weeks, if not months, to figure out everyone’s needs and line up housing for all those in the encampment.

“We had to make the unfortunate decision,” Radu said, “that we didn’t have that luxury.” 

The city gave folks in the encampment a few weeks’ notice and offered them short-term motel vouchers before clearing the park this past April.

“We were doing right by them, I think, to offer them a temporary respite from the streets,” Radu said, “but we knew that was a Band-Aid. We knew full well that once those motel stays were up, folks were going to be back out on the streets. And they were.”

More housing is needed

Radu and other local officials said the biggest barrier to moving people to long-term housing is the lack of available low-income units and places for people with significant mental health and addiction issues.

“We know more housing is what’s going to solve this problem,” Radu said. “That is the root-cause intervention.”

Cities rely heavily on federal grants to help them build more housing for homeless people. But the Trump administration moved to change the rules for some of that funding earlier this year. It wants to require local governments and nonprofits to align with the administration’s ideology around denying support to transgender people and undocumented immigrants, for example. That’s a nonstarter for many California cities. Advocacy groups sued, and a federal judge has temporarily stopped the new rules from going into effect.

The federal government also announced plans last week to cut billions of dollars that cities have historically used to get homeless people into permanent housing. Experts say that could push as many as 170,000 people nationwide back into homelessness. 

In the absence of more permanent housing, cities are spending millions to get people into temporary spots. In early 2025, Berkeley earmarked $10 million for a four-year lease on a motel that can house 26 formerly homeless people and offer them medical and social services. 

The city of Los Angeles has spent more than $320 million on Inside Safe, its encampment resolution program, over the last three years. That has helped the city move 5,200 people inside. About one-quarter of those individuals have found permanent housing, but more than a third are back on the streets, according to the city.

The rest are in interim housing, including Jazmine Mapes. 

Jazmine Mapes holds her son, trying to shield him from the rain, as she walks outside Los Angeles City Hall, reflecting on the time she spent living in a tent across the street. Credit: Zaydee Sanchez for Tradeoffs and The Marshall Project

A few days after a sweep pushed Mapes to try to end her life, representatives from Inside Safe offered her a spot in a motel near Dodger Stadium. She moved into her own private room a few weeks later.

“That was my time of very much ‘finding me,’” Mapes said, “and starting to be okay with Jazmine again.”

Moving inside brought its own challenges, including flare-ups of anxiety and depression. But she’s been able to stay on her medications, in therapy, and off street drugs much better than when she was living outside. 

And she’s been able to raise her infant son, she said, without fear that someone is going to come by without warning and tell her to move along.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

Episode Transcript and Resources

Episode Transcript

Dan Gorenstein (DG): A note before we get started. This episode includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 9-8-8.

DG: It’s a cool, clear morning in Los Angeles, middle of October. With a view of the Hollywood sign, a handful of open-air tents and hodgepodge structures dot the sidewalk.

It’s messy: an office chair, bags, a bicycle, food containers, more bags. A city worker in his tractor scoops it all up, dropping it into a teal garbage truck.

Until this morning, people lived in those tents, and that was their stuff.

A Supreme Court decision in 2024 gave cities the greenlight to forcibly remove people from the streets, even if there was no shelter or housing available.

That was welcome news to many elected officials and residents who have become increasingly frustrated by the growing number of people living outside.

News clip: City and state leaders are fed up with the growing homeless encampments 

News clip: My child is 7, and she thinks she’s picking up lego pieces, and it’s not lego pieces, it’s needles.

News clip: I’ve talked to a lot of residents in the area, they gave up on this park years ago

News clip: I think we need to get a handle on this issue, before it gets any worse in the city.

DG: But evidence suggests that so-called “encampment sweeps” can be harmful to people’s health.

Josh Barocas (JB): We’re looking at substantial numbers of deaths. 

DG: Today, we dig into the health consequences of forcing people to leave their homes on the streets and how cities can minimize those risks while still clearing encampments.

From the studio at the Leonard Davis Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, I’m Dan Gorenstein. This is Tradeoffs.

****** 

DG: Jazmine Mapes has been homeless off and on for most of her adult life.

The 31-year-old says sweeps are just part of living in tents and riverbeds in L.A.

Cops, sanitation workers constantly telling her ‘c’mon, it’s time to go. You gotta leave.’

Jazmine Mapes (JM): A lot of times I would lose everything. I mean everything.

DG: Her sleeping bag, her medications for anxiety and depression. One time she lost a photo album with pictures of her four kids. Kids she’d given up for adoption.

It still tears at her.

JM: I remember trying to run back to the tent and telling them, please let me just grab just that. Nothing else. I won’t grab anything. Please just let me grab that. No, if you grab it, you will be arrested.

DG: Sometimes, these sweeps came with offers of shelter or treatment for her addiction to crystal meth.

Those were the exceptions.

Often, she says, the sweeps basically blew up whatever stability she’d managed to scrape together.

JM: You know how they say, oh, you take five steps forward and you get knocked ten steps back. That’s how I felt all the time.

DG: Maybe one of her lowest moments came on a cold, wet November morning in 2023. She’d been up for hours, her ex-boyfriend had burned down her tent in the middle of the night.

JM: My hands were completely black. I was covered in ashes and dirt. 

DG: Now, all around her, clean up crews barked at people to leave the encampment – across the street from City Hall.

JM: That’s all trash. Just leave it there.

DG: Jazmine asked one of the sweepers to pour water over her hands.

JM: I remember the person just looking at me. And they looked away and walked away.

DG: Jazmine had learned over the years that these sweeps destabilized her, could push her deeper into depression, deeper into drugs.

She started to feel herself spiral. She’d lost her tent. Now the sweep. She says a cop – at some point – grabbed her arm, pulled her across the street.

JM: I didn’t feel like a human. It felt like how much lower could I get?

DG: Jazmine wandered to a nearby bathroom to regroup, to clean herself up.

JM: I went into one of the stalls and as I’m digging through my purse looking for soap and shampoo and stuff, I found a bottle of pills.

I’m thinking to myself. I’m done. I’m done with everybody judging me. I’m done with fighting against the world, myself. I’m tired of fighting my addiction. I’m tired of missing my kids. And I swallowed just about the entire bottle of pills.

DG: Josh Barocas has met a lot of people like Jazmine. He’s treated them as an infectious disease doctor at the University of Colorado. He’s interviewed them as a researcher.

Josh says as cities started ramping up sweeps six or seven years ago, he felt a growing urgency to answer a simple question. 

JB: Is it harmful to people’s health to be forcibly displaced?

DG: The question, though, is more tricky than it may seem at first.

On one hand, there’s comfort and safety to having a predictable place to live, even if it’s a tent.

Losing that tent, along with your wheelchair or medication, can be harmful. It can also mean losing touch with medical providers like street medicine teams.

On the other hand, leaving encampments in place means allowing people to live in what are often unsanitary, dangerous conditions.

JB: There are lots of well-meaning city officials who think getting people out of the elements is going to definitely be better than letting people stay outside. And they think sweeps are a good way to do that.

DG: About 5 years ago, small studies started coming out showing that sweeping people can harm their health. 

But Josh says city officials often dismissed that research as too narrow or too city-specific. 

So Josh and several co-authors took the results of a few of those studies from Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco, along with more general data on homeless people from 23 other cities.

They put all of that information into a computer model to estimate the impact of sweeps nationwide.

The team then compared what happens to people’s health if they are allowed to stay in their encampment, versus being forced to move on, without any offer of a place to stay.

JB: Sometimes we have small little findings. This was unambiguous.

DG: The researchers found that the sweeps increased people’s risk of infection, hospitalization, overdose and death.

JB: We modeled thousands and thousands of different scenarios. And under no circumstance did sweeps improve health and in fact under no circumstance was their effect even neutral.

DG: The study was published in the journal JAMA in 2023. Immediately some advocates and researchers ran with it. They said it proved how harmful it is to clear out homeless camps this way. 

Josh said some mayors called the results misleading because the researchers assumed that people are not offered services as part of the clearings.

There’s limited data on how often sweeps come with such offers.

But in the 18 months since the Supreme Court allowed communities to remove encampments without offering people a place to go, more than 200 cities have outlawed sleeping outside.

JB: Our study was meant to look at what is, I think the the most prevalent practice in the United States, which is just moving people, getting rid of their tent without any additional services.

DG: Josh is quick to agree that the study has limitations. Getting a definitive answer, he says, on the harms of sweeps is hard.

But, to him, the work clearly shows that the threat to some people’s health is real, adding evidence to a tricky policy question that carries serious stakes.

JB: We’re not trying to tell you that it’s going to add three more deaths or going to decrease risk by 12.2572%. We’re just trying to give you a sense of what might work and what might not work. And if you continue going down the path of sweeps. Then it looks like we’re going to cause more harm to people than if you were to go down a different road.

DG: So what does that different road look like? Allowing encampments to exist carries its own risks. 

Can cities address concerns about people living on the street while avoiding the harms of sweeps? More on that, and what happened to Jazmine Mapes, when we come back.

BREAK

DG: Welcome back. I’m joined now by Tradeoffs managing editor Ryan Levi. Hey, Ryan

Ryan Levi (RL): Hey there, Dan.

DG: In the first half of the show, we talked about some of the health harms that can come with sweeps. 

The distress it can cause people like Jazmine Mapes and the evidence that it can lead to increased risks of infection, hospitalization, overdoses and deaths.

Some cities around the country are trying to figure out how to minimize the harms and still clear these encampments. 

Ryan, you’ve been talking to folks about how to best thread this needle for the last few months. What have you learned?

RL: Basically I wanted to find out if there’s such a thing as a ‘good sweep.’

And while there’s very little research on the question, I did come across a handful of “best practice” guides.

One of them was co-authored by Marc Dones who is at the Benioff Homelessness & Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco.

Marc Dones (MD): We should resolve encampments. And the word resolution here is the idea that you resolve a person’s episode of homelessness.

RL: Marc told me they developed this guide after running a homeless program in King County in Washington state.

Up there, policymakers agreed sweeps had consequences. But they weren’t really sure what to do about it.  

MD: We know that this is not nice. We know that it doesn’t like solve the problem, but like what else is there? You know, this question of like, if not this, then what was a real one?

RL: Marc cleared several large encampments in the Seattle area and they distilled that experience down into 36 pages, complete with flow charts, tables and protocols. A bureaucrat’s dream.

DG: Ryan! No 36 pages, right?! We do not have time for the flow charts!!!!

RL: Fair enough, Dan, I hear you. Marc boiled it down for me to four basic steps.

First: Make a list of everyone in the encampment.

MD: I need to know everyone who lives there. I need to know what their needs are and what motivates them.

RL: Things like how many people have a serious mental illness? How many need addiction treatment? Who has a job they need to be close to?

Step two: match people with the right housing. Marc says ideally that’s something permanent.

But as we know, Dan, low-income housing is pretty tough to come by and few places have mental health services or social services attached.

So lots of cities are converting old motels into temporary housing units where people can get access to some of those services before something more permanent opens up.

DG: Got it. And what about step three?

RL: Step three is moving day, or as Marc says, moving days.

MD: The important thing is don’t try to move everyone out at once. Maybe every day you want to move five people. Or maybe Monday through Thursday, you do five people. And then Fridays you do one very complicated case.

RL: Finally, Dan, once everyone is moved out, the last step: prevent the space from becoming an encampment again.

Cities often do this by standing up fences with barbed wire. But Marc says there’s room for creativity here.

MD: I worked with one landowner who was like, oh, like, well, maybe we can turn this area into a skate park. It’s super cool, right? Like that’s great. That’s great for the community. The kids will love it. But a skate park is also not a place where people are going to set up tents.

DG: So just to recap here, Ryan: Step one, assess people’s health and social needs.

Step two, find housing that matches those needs or at least get people indoors and direct services their way.

Step three, move a few people at a time to minimize disruption and chaos.

Last step, prevent the spot from becoming an encampment again.

RL: You’ve got it, Dan.

DG: And absent any research on this, Ryan, what’s the theory why this approach could be better for people’s health?

RL: The basic idea I got from talking to Marc and others is that a more tailored, human approach is more likely to actually get someone off the street. 

You learn what folks need, for example, do they have a partner or a pet? Because if they do, offering them a bed in a shelter probably won’t work.

DG: But a private room in an old hotel might be a good fit.

RL: Exactly. And instead of having a few hours notice, people have time to prepare so they’re more likely to organize their stuff like medications or IDs and hopefully they’re less likely to feel dehumanized like Jazmine Mapes did.

DG: Ryan, I’m curious, how often are cities following this playbook or playbooks like this?

RL: Marc flagged Houston, Denver and Los Angeles County as good examples.

And I talked to policymakers in four California cities and counties — L.A., San Jose, Berkeley and Santa Cruz — that all have policies that are roughly in line with what Marc has laid out.

They all do outreach in encampments, they pay for motel rooms.

The tricky part, though, is that this approach takes time, Dan — weeks, sometimes months. And there are people living around these encampments, and they often have reasonable concerns about wanting things to happen more quickly. 

Peter Radu, who oversees Berkeley’s homeless response, says that puts cities like his in a hard spot.

Peter Radu (PR): As we work towards the longer term solutions of building more housing, we find ourselves with crisis management, which is really trying to I hate to say it, oftentimes choosing the least bad amongst terrible options.

DG: Choosing the least bad among terrible options. 

RL: Yeah. Peter told me about an encampment in Berkeley’s most popular park that cropped up about a year ago. Peter got calls from neighbors to clear it almost immediately, but they held off.

PR: We tried to do assessments and get people connected to services.

RL: In the meantime, the encampment kept growing, as did neighbors’ frustrations.

Then a homeless person groped a high schooler near the park.

PR: There was a town hall meeting. I think 200 people came out to voice their concerns about this encampment. 

RL: Peter knew most of his resources were already earmarked to close a different encampment across town. 

And it would take weeks – if not longer – to help the 20-odd people living in this park.

PR: We had to make the unfortunate decision that we didn’t have that luxury.

RL: Peter says they did the best they could – gave folks a few weeks notice and short-term motel vouchers before they swept the camp.

PR: We knew that that was a Band-Aid, that once those motel stays were up, folks were going to be back out on the streets. And in fact, they were.

RL: Peter told me that no one in Berkeley was really happy with this compromise, Dan.

Neighbors felt their park had been taken away from them for months. And those 20 people were no closer to finding permanent housing.

DG: It sounds like the bottom line is cities have limited resources and unless there are more housing options, even the best intentions will often only lead to Band-Aids like this. 

RL: I think that’s right. And most people I talked to think resources are only going to get tighter.

The Trump administration is cutting billions in federal funding for permanent housing, at the same time that many cities and counties are facing budget shortfalls.

DG: How much do these programs cost, since you bring that up?

RL: Well, a couple of examples, Dan, Los Angeles County spent $166 million on this over the last two years.

The city of LA spent another $320 million over the last three years.

Research has consistently shown that housing people is more cost-effective than caring for them in jails or emergency rooms, but these programs are definitely feeling the squeeze in this moment of belt tightening.

DG: One other question I want to ask you, Ryan, that I’ve been thinking about as we’ve been reporting on this issue.

As we’ve said, living outside is bad for people’s health too.

How do officials weigh the harm that comes from leaving someone in an encampment versus the disruption that comes from a sweep?

RL: Several people brought this up, including San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.

Matt Mahan (MM): We have to measure and understand the health impacts of allowing encampments to grow and persist as well as the health impacts of moving people.

We find that the longer a given encampment persists, the more likely we are to have serious issues of public health and public safety.

RL: Rodent infestations, infectious disease outbreaks. These are the kinds of reasons, Dan, that cities will often decide to move more quickly to close an encampment.

Basically, they’re making the call that those are more serious health risks to the people living there and to others in the neighborhood than the potential harm of forcing someone to move.

DG: So let’s tie this all together, Ryan.

We’ve got research that shows that kicking someone out of an encampment without giving them a place to stay can hurt their health.

We have some best practices on how cities and counties can try to avoid those health harms or at least minimize them.

But we also have political and financial realities that make things tough.

If I’m a city manager in Dubuque, Iowa, or a city councilmember in Tulsa, Oklahoma, what’s the bottom line from all your reporting?

RL: Your question, Dan, makes me think of Marc Dones, who put together one of these best practice guides.

Marc said they did that because well-meaning public officials would say “I know sweeps are bad, but what’s the alternative?”

Are these best practices perfect? No. Will they magically create all the housing we need to get people off the street and into better health? No.

But they show policymakers there are ways to increase the chances that people can hold on to their wheelchair, maybe reduce the trauma that comes from clearing an encampment. At a minimum, Dan, it provides a path to treat people with a bit more dignity.

DG: Ryan Levi, thanks for your reporting.

RL: My pleasure, Dan.

DG: Jazmine Mapes got lucky. That cold, wet November day back in 2023, a friend from the encampment that had just gotten cleared came looking for her.

JM: She looked under one of the stalls and she had said that she had seen my feet. So she crawled under to see if I was okay, and I was on the toilet, leaning against the wall.

DG: Jazmine’s friend stuck her fingers down Jazmine’s throat, helped her cough up the bottle of pills she’d swallowed. 

Jazmine stayed with her friend in a tent a few blocks from their old encampment.

A few days later, city workers showed up. Instead of an order to clear out, it was an offer to move in.

JM: I was like I’m tired of being out in the streets. Waking up and finding people I didn’t even know in my tent. And so when they offered housing, I said, okay, let’s do this.

DG: That offer came from Inside Safe, a city-run program. Since launching three years ago, Inside Safe has moved nearly 3,000 people into permanent or temporary housing. 

Jazmine is hoping something permanent opens up soon. Until then, she and her 11-month old son Noah are in a motel near Dodger Stadium.

You can hear the relief in her voice.

JM: Before coming into Inside Safe, I was just existing. I wasn’t living. Every day I would be surprised that I was waking up another day.

DG: Jazmine’s honest about it – moving inside has come with its own challenges. Flare ups of her anxiety and depression.

She knows lots of people who have come in through the program, only to end up back on the streets. But for Jazmine, she’s managed raising her son, not worrying that someone will tell her to move along.

I’m Dan Gorenstein, this is Tradeoffs.

Episode Resources

Additional Reporting and Resources on Health and Homelessness:

Episode Credits

Guests:

  • Josh Barocas, Associate Professor, University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine
  • Marc Dones, Policy Director, Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, University of California San Francisco
  • Ryan Levi, Managing Editor, Tradeoffs
  • Matt Mahan, Mayor, City of San Jose
  • Jazmine Mapes
  • Peter Radu, Neighborhood Services Manager, City of Berkeley

This episode was reported by Ryan Levi, edited by Dan Gorenstein,  Deborah Franklin and Manuel Torres, and mixed by Andrew Parrella and Cedric Wilson. Additional reporting and audio production support from Kate Mishkin.

The Tradeoffs theme song was composed by Ty Citerman. Additional music this episode from Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound.

Special thanks to Kimberly Barnette, Ricky Bluthenthal, Lisette Carmona, Jennifer Carroll, Katia Cnop, Brett Feldman, Ryan Finnigan, Nichole Fiore, Jesse Goldshear, Laura Hamilton, Jack Hinton, Lillie Hudson, Keith Humphreys, Devora Keller, Anetta Kidane, Clara Krager, Margot Kushel, Lena Miller, T.K. Monzon, Francisco Muñoz, Robert Ratner, Eric Rafla-Yuan , Kim Roberts, Jonathan Russell, Kaitlin Schwan, Michelle Schneidermann, Alex Visotzky, Dhakshike Wickrema, Heather, Michelle, Monique and Vanessa.

Tradeoffs reporting for this story was supported, in part, by the California Health Care Foundation and the Sozosei Foundation.

Ryan is the managing editor for Tradeoffs, helping lead the newsroom’s editorial strategy and guide its coverage on its flagship podcast, digital articles, newsletters and live events. Ryan spent six...