California’s Encampment Fire Crisis

Los Angeles firefighters now respond to 46 homeless encampment fires a day, on average – more than double the rate from five years ago. Oakland’s numbers are smaller but just as stark: fires there still average roughly three a day, triple the 2019 rate.

In September 2018, a federal appeals court ruling froze encampment clearance across California for six years. When the Supreme Court lifted that freeze in 2024, sweeps finally surged – but the camps kept forming anyway, and so did the fires. Increasingly, the pattern isn’t just paralysis. It’s a choice about which neighborhoods absorb the consequences, and which don’t – and the neighborhoods absorbing them are, disproportionately, working-class ones.

California is the world’s fifth-largest economy. This is what it’s asking its working-class neighborhoods to live with.

“At least a couple times a week, I have to shut all my windows because an RV or other vehicle is on fire. It’s almost always connected to homeless encampments. These fires are extremely toxic, yet I have yet to hear a single environmentalist say a word about them. Sometimes Oakland feels like hell. Even our air is being poisoned by bad policy.”

– Seneca Scott, founder of Neighbors Together Oakland and 2022 Oakland mayoral candidate

Scott has been raising this alarm since 2021, when Oakland was already averaging three encampment fires a day. The numbers have not meaningfully improved. The reasons are not mysterious. They are political, and they are specific.

Who Pays

The costs of these fires are not distributed evenly, and the people absorbing them are, disproportionately, the people with the least power to change the policy that produces them.

In Los Angeles in 2024, an LAFD firefighter had his ear surgically reattached after an explosion at an Encino encampment. A Larchmont Village family lost their home and two dogs to a fire they believe was started by squatters next door – a comfortably upper-middle-class neighborhood, proof that no address is fully insulated. But Larchmont got a single fire and a news story. Other neighborhoods get this every day, and no story at all.

“I spoke to LAPD to kick them out and they did nothing, and my house burned and my dogs are dead.”

– Jonathan Galicia, homeowner

In San Jose, encampment fires caused more property damage last year than residential and business fires combined: $84.6 million from just over 4,000 non-structure fires. The fire fighters union president there described the smoke as a “toxic soup” that exposes crews to cancer-causing materials. LAFD Battalion Chief Joel Purma described a typical encampment call: “Typically, we’ll see combustible metals, flammable liquids, gasoline, diesel, and a lot of times these lithium-ion batteries. So, it’s inherently dangerous for ourselves as well as the public.”

In San Francisco, a small business owner on South Van Ness Avenue lost $30,000 in fire-related damage in 2024. He had surveillance video of a man deliberately igniting an adjacent encampment. He reported it to every agency he could reach. No single agency claimed jurisdiction. The message, effectively: call us when there is a fire. In Oakland in December 2024, a man was found dead in a burning RV on Wood Street. And in San Francisco, encampment fires doubled over five years, from around 400 responses in 2019 to more than 800 in 2023, killing a woman under a freeway overpass in 2022 and producing at least $2.5 million in documented property damage. When residents called 311 to report open flames, the city could not clearly say whether the fires were even illegal.

Oakland is the clearest case of this pattern becoming official policy, not just an outcome. Its new Encampment Abatement Policy didn’t just decide when camps get cleared – it drew a map of where they’re allowed to stay. City planners divided Oakland into “high-sensitivity” areas, off-limits to encampments, and “low-sensitivity” areas, where the city does not prioritize closure. Ninety-five percent of the city was designated high-sensitivity – including nearly all of the hill neighborhoods, which are more affluent and majority white. The low-sensitivity areas, where the city has effectively conceded the problem will continue, are concentrated almost entirely in the Flats of West and East Oakland, the working-class, majority-Black and Hispanic part of the city.

Residents there tried to change this before the policy passed, and couldn’t. At the city council meeting on the new policy, West Oakland business representatives asked the council to declare more of their neighborhood “high-sensitivity” – the designation that would have protected it. The council didn’t grant it. The same reporting notes that even though the policy was written to help residents of the flatland neighborhoods most affected by encampments, the low-sensitivity zones exempted from enforcement are “also largely located in these areas.” The neighborhoods the policy claims to help are the same ones the map quietly signs over to the crisis.

One Oakland commentary described the Flats as a “sacrifice area” – a place where city officials have effectively decided the encampment problem can continue, while wealthier, whiter neighborhoods are mapped out of the crisis entirely. Something close to this logic shows up elsewhere in the state without a formal map behind it: ahead of the November 2023 APEC summit, San Francisco Public Works flagged specific intersections for cleanup because officials were, in one internal official’s words, “concerned about historical encampments that are close to priority areas” – and reporters found every one of those intersections sat in the same two neighborhoods that have absorbed the city’s homelessness crisis for years. When the cameras and dignitaries are elsewhere, enforcement follows different rules than when they’re not.

The fire data bears out where this leaves people at the street level: a Harbor Freeway encampment in South LA generating 78 fire calls at a single station, a Wood Street encampment in West Oakland that has racked up hundreds of fires over the years, a South Van Ness business owner in San Francisco who couldn’t get any agency to claim jurisdiction over the encampment burning next door. These are not the addresses of California’s wealthiest residents, and their occupants are rarely the ones sitting across the table when the sensitivity maps get drawn.

The Policy That Built This

In September 2018, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Martin v. City of Boise that cities could not enforce anti-camping ordinances when the number of people without shelter exceeded available beds. In California, no major city ever had enough beds, so the ruling effectively made encampment clearance illegal across the state.

None of what followed had to happen this way. California could have conditioned its billions in homelessness funding on measurable reductions in unsheltered populations, or cities could simply have enforced basic public-order rules once conditions warranted it. Instead, the legal constraint became a permanent excuse, and cities settled into managed inaction – enough activity to claim effort, not enough to produce results.

Oakland codified the paralysis. In 2020, the city council passed an Encampment Management Policy requiring that every person be offered housing or shelter before any camp could be cleared. Oakland had 5,500 people experiencing homelessness and fewer than 1,300 shelter beds. The math made the policy a permanent freeze on clearance. That policy stayed in place until April 2026.

San Francisco got its own federal injunction in December 2022. U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu barred the city from enforcing anti-camping laws against “involuntarily homeless” people who had not first been offered shelter, relying on Martin v. Boise as the legal basis. The city could still sweep encampments where shelter had been offered and refused, and city data show sweeps actually ticked up slightly in the months after the injunction – but officials said the involuntary-homelessness carve-out and accompanying “bag and tag” property requirements slowed and complicated enforcement in one of the most fire-prone encampment environments in the country for a year and a half.

During those six years, the fires compounded. Oakland went from one encampment fire a day in 2019 to three by 2021, and still averages roughly three a day now – a 2024 dip notwithstanding, one the fire department itself attributes mainly to clearing a single mega-encampment on Wood Street, not to any citywide fix. Los Angeles went from 7,165 homeless-related fires in 2020 to nearly 17,000 last year – more encampment fires alone than Houston’s fire department logs for every type of fire, structure to brush to vehicle, combined, in a comparably sized city. Each of those calls committed an ambulance, pulling it away from surrounding neighborhoods.

California spent nearly $24 billion on homelessness and housing programs across nine state agencies during the five fiscal years spanning this period, according to a 2024 state audit and the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The unsheltered population did not meaningfully decline.

After the Ruling

In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, overturning Martin v. Boise, and cities could now enforce public-camping ordinances regardless of shelter availability. The San Francisco injunction was vacated within days. The legal barrier was gone – but what replaced it was a different problem.

Oakland’s encampment closures more than doubled in the months after the ruling, from 14.4 per month to 32.2, according to a UC Berkeley study published in the American Journal of Public Health. But 41% of closed sites were closed more than once. One location was swept 18 times in four years. The study’s own authors don’t dispute this: co-author Prabhleen Kaur has said the repeat-closure rate raises real doubts about whether the sweeps are accomplishing anything. Where the piece parts ways with that reading is on what to conclude from it: cities are clearing the same sites over and over with no lasting consequence for reoccupying them. A sweep with no follow-through doesn’t eliminate an encampment. It relocates it. The fires follow.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass responded to the Grants Pass ruling by calling it “disappointing.” Homelessness-related arrests increased 68% in the six months after the ruling, from 920 to 1,549, in the same city now averaging 46 encampment fires a day. Her department reached for the enforcement tool more, not less, once the ruling made it available – even as she publicly objected to having it.

In May 2025, the governor’s office released a model encampment ordinance for cities to adopt. It was entirely voluntary. A CalMatters analysis from August 2025 found California cities have a patchwork of wildly inconsistent policies: some have detailed 10-page frameworks, some have no policy at all, and the state provided no consequence for inaction.

The structural problem was never addressed: cities kept sweeping camps and letting them re-form in the same places, with no lasting consequence for either the camps or the officials who tolerated them. Oakland’s new Encampment Abatement Policy, which finally repealed the 2020 freeze, passed the city council 5-1 in April 2026 – nearly two years after the Supreme Court ruling that made it possible – over the objections of dozens of advocates who still called it “criminalizing homelessness.” The fires have been burning the whole time.

The Takeaway

There is a version of this story that attributes the crisis to poverty, housing costs, mental illness, and federal underfunding. All of those things are real. None of them explain why the 9th Circuit’s 2018 ruling became a six-year paralysis, why Oakland’s policy freeze lasted until 2026, why Mayor Bass called a Supreme Court green light disappointing, why the governor’s model ordinance came with no enforcement mechanism, or why Oakland’s own sensitivity-zone map happens to exempt the hills and target the Flats.

The pattern repeats at every level of government: officials treated legal exposure and political blowback as costlier than the fires themselves. Oakland kept its 2020 freeze in place for two years after the legal justification for it disappeared. Bass called the ruling that gave LAFD more tools “disappointing,” even while her department leaned on those tools harder than most cities in the state. The governor’s ordinance asked cities to act and built in nothing to make them. And when Oakland finally did act, it wrote a map that keeps the crisis out of the hills and concentrated in the Flats. Each of these was a specific, documented choice, not an accident of circumstance.

Residents breathed the smoke. Firefighters absorbed the carcinogens. Business owners paid the damage. People died in their RVs. And the agencies responsible cited case law, funding gaps, jurisdictional ambiguity, and the objections of advocacy organizations – until a Supreme Court ruling produced, in its first two years, record numbers of sweeps in Oakland and record numbers of fires in Los Angeles.

California is the world’s fifth-largest economy. It spent nearly $24 billion on a problem, made it worse, waited for the Supreme Court to fix its legal framework, and then moved slowly on that too.

This was not inevitable. It’s the product of governmental paralysis – and a growing willingness to formalize it on a map. Working-class Californians are paying for it in the air they breathe, the businesses they lose, and the lives that keep ending in burning RVs, while the crisis is quietly zoned away from everyone else.