A zeitgeist shift over laissez-faire homelessness, or “vibe shift” per the current colloquialism, is playing out in a longtime epicenter of the American epidemic: San Jose, California. The only way in which the Bay Area could reasonably be described as pathologically free-market is on this matter, right down to the “homesteading” of unoccupied land by REI tents and ipso facto “privatization” of public parks by hot plates and pit bulls.

The issue is causing political tension in the Golden State’s third-largest city, with just under 1 million people and a major Silicon Valley tech hub, located about 49 miles south of San Francisco. That’s because in California, all meaningful political action takes place among Democrats. Republicans haven’t won a statewide race since 2006, have only scant minorities in both legislative chambers, and hold just nine of California’s 52 House seats.

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So, Republican-tinged policies in the state’s major cities invariably come from Team Blue, not Team Red. The latest Democrat to be treated by critics as a Republican-in-all-but-name is San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. The Harvard graduate, 42, spent a decade in the tech industry and, in 2020, won a San Jose City Council seat.

Mahan, elected San Jose mayor in 2022, is now attracting scorn from Democratic Party activists to his left for his approach to what are increasingly called, given our euphemistic treadmill, the “unhoused.” Mahan wants to see homeless people who refuse shelter three times in a year and a half jailed.

“When shelter is offered, we expect people to accept it,” Mahan said, as reported by San Jose Inside. “If there is a place available, we expect it to be used. This is about compassion paired with accountability — recognizing that a path off the streets is both a right and a responsibility.”

Marking what he hopes to be merely an unfortunate hiccup on a greater teleological journey for urban California, Mahan wants to end what he calls the “era of encampments.” However, critics balk, claiming that the “responsibility” part of “right and responsibility,” as per Mahan, will deter the homeless from seeking help.

“Being homeless isn’t a choice; people don’t live outside in the wet and cold because they like it,” Shaunn Cartwright of Unhoused Response Group said in a forceful, albeit nonsequitur, response to Mahan’s announcement in early May of the city’s new approach to blight and outside living, taking a cue from a recent call by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) for the same statewide.

Cartwright believes Newsom’s at least rhetorical pivot on homelessness can be traced to his rumored 2028 presidential run. There is speculation regarding Mahan’s broader political ambitions as well. Of course, given the ubiquity of such ambitious politicians of all flavors, everywhere, all the time, the charge of cynical opportunism has fairly short legs.

“It’s clear that he’s having a public mask-off for the true conservative that he is,” complained fellow Democrat Alex Lee, who’s called out Mahan as a MAGA fellow traveler. Lee’s claim to fame is being the first openly bisexual member of the California State Assembly, representing a district that encompasses downtown San Jose.

But San Jose is facing ugly choices that pit one longstanding progressive concern about the liberties of the nomadic poor against another: the environment. The city’s Guadalupe Creek is home to the homeless, or rather, it houses the unhoused, and the population’s detritus is polluting the shoreline. Citations for trespassing and littering have been issued countless times.

“Encampments along waterways commonly generate large amounts of trash, debris, and hazardous pollutants that degrade water quality, obstruct fish passage, and damage and destroy fish and other wildlife habitats,” reads an online statement by Valley Water, the San Jose and neighboring Santa Clara region’s water authority.

Valley Water has spent nearly $800,000 since 2019 in a partnership with San Jose police to contend with the problem.

The encampment’s location near a future tiny home site, the ideal ultimate destination for many of the homeless in question, is a small irony.

Progressive Democrats who claim a lack of affordable housing is at the root of Bay Area homelessness aren’t totally off the mark. The same disabled, addicted, mentally ill, or temporarily down-and-out person one finds lingering near a gas station in coastal California is indeed more likely to be housed in Tennessee or West Virginia, where the cost of living is much lower. There, the demoralizing displays of dysfunction occur more often behind closed doors, and not in full public view.

In California, it takes much greater work effort, intelligence, conscientiousness, and self-discipline to get one over the hump into a minimum level of acceptable housing. In Arkansas, not so much. A modest apartment, room, or trailer can easily be had even with perpetual bouts of unemployment, problems with temperament, a lack of a college degree, and zero go-getter panache.

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Still, the rights of the non-homeless matter, essentially those robbed of the prospect of recreation and accommodating public spaces by the takeover of capital-L loiterers. It’s not incumbent upon what the Left once called the 99% to wait for the cost of living in California to reach Appalachian levels before justifiably howling about public disorder.

Likewise, the rise of public health, given to us by the original progressives over 100 years ago, incidentally, matters. If a lack of concern for housing regulation and building codes, which is what tolerating encampments means, and disregard for those who’d pollute rivers and despoil public spaces is now the neoprogressive position, then it’s conservatives who must provide at least one cheer for paleoprogressivism. And it just might be Matt Mahan to do the clapping.

Dain Fitzgerald, a San Jose State University alumnus, is a writer and “podtuber” in Diamond Springs, California, in the Gold Country of El Dorado County. His Substack is @mupetblast.