FREMONT — With the Fremont City Council expected to discuss another camping ban next month, homeless residents are left wondering where they will have left to go.

Mayor Raj Salwan, in a recent interview, said the ban could come before the council as early as Feb. 4. The exact language of the new legislation is still under review, though a draft of the ordinance was presented during the council’s Dec. 17 meeting.

The draft ordinance “creates explicit enforcement authority for abatement of personal property left on public property for 24 hours,” according to the document. It would also ban camping and storing personal property “on public land, including any street, sidewalk, city building, park, open space, waterway or banks of a waterway.”

If approved, the city could spend over $1 million to add more police officers fielding complaints about encampments and additional “waste management” services for encampment clean ups, according to the city.

The issue has divided Fremont: dozens of residents have appeared at recent council meetings to oppose the proposal, while other residents have gathered more than 1,300 signatures in an online petition in favor of it.

“The hope is that with this new law we can actually get them to cooperate, which I think most people will. Nobody wants to get a citation,” Salwan said. “In Fremont, we’ve been very responsible. We have never ran away from the problem. We don’t try to push people out.”

A part of the homeless encampment near Quarry Lakes Regional Recreation Area is seen in Fremont, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group) 

Fremont, a city with a population of more than 226,000 people, had an estimated 612 homeless people living without shelter last year, according to the Alameda County 2024 Point In Time Count, a homeless data census. The county had 6,343 people total living unsheltered during the count, with 9,450 total experiencing some form of homelessness according to county data. Of those living unsheltered in Fremont, 62% live in a vehicle or RV, and 20% live in a tent or other makeshift shelter.

In November, the City Council unanimously passed a 72-hour parking ban on large trucks and other “oversized” vehicles, including RVs, requiring the vehicles to be moved at least 1,000 feet within 24 hours. The city currently has a safe-parking program which allows less than two dozen vehicles to park at local churches overnight.

Fremont has one homeless navigation center, which began providing temporary shelter to unhoused people in September 2020. It provided housing for 233 local unhoused residents as of June 30, 2024, according to city data, and helped 55 people obtain employment.

Many opponents of the new ban say the city doesn’t have enough resources, including temporary or permanent shelters, to serve Fremont’s total homeless population.

“That’s not a way to solve the problem,” unhoused resident Lisa Dooley, 64, said in an interview. “They’ll still be out there.”

Dooley, who said she is a homeless U.S. Army veteran, camps near Fremont’s Quarry Lakes Regional Park, along a ravine that flows into Arroyo Park in neighboring Union City. On Tuesday, she sat with her 6-year-old Border Collie and American Bullie-mixed dog, Ginger, at her friend’s camp, just a short distance from her own camp.

Lisa Dooley, 64, an unhoused resident of Union City, talks during an interview at the homeless encampment near Quarry Lakes Regional Recreation Area in Fremont, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2025. Dooley lives on the other side of a ravine that runs between Fremont and Union City. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group) 

Dooley estimated more than 100 unhoused people were living in the encampment across the street from Fremont’s Quarry Lakes. Fremont provides some supportive housing services, along with other nonprofit groups, such as a few port-o-potties and trash collection. Physicians also sometimes visit the area to provide health services for homeless residents at the camp.

A few years ago, the city swept the place and Dooley said she found herself with a free two-week stay at a hotel in Hayward. She returned to the area immediately after her two weeks was up, and has camped in the same spot since 2018, she said. Neighbors in nearby homes sometimes bring her food and supplies, she said.

“If they had a problem with me, I wouldn’t still be there,” Dooley said.

Dooley said she has been waiting for the Veteran’s Affairs department to provide her with housing support – a process she admittedly had tried going through before. She wasn’t ready at that time to get into a permanent home, Dooley added.

“I’m ready now,” Dooley said. “I’m tired of this.”

Houses on Barnard Drive are visible from the homeless encampment near Quarry Lakes Regional Recreation Area in Fremont, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group) 

Lorenzo Luckey, 39, who lives nearby below a bike trail behind a row of two-story homes, had not heard of the city’s new ban until Tuesday. He’s been homeless in the area for around four years, he said.

“If they kick us out, we don’t have anywhere to go,” Luckey said.

He said his neighboring campers, who live in the waterway beside him, are “not homeless, they’re houseless.”

His partner, LaTonya Baxter, shares a tent with Luckey, where they have built a custom garden and warm themselves on cold nights using a gasoline-powered generator, which they estimate costs them at least $200 for one night of heat.

“We’re blessed here. People have been nice to let us stay here,” Baxter said. “Our job is really to not be seen. We do our best.”

Mayor Salwan said the proposal is meant to “allow us the power to change behavior.”

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“The goal is not to criminalize people. We don’t want to arrest anybody,” Salwan said. “We just want to change their behavior in some cases.”

He called the mass encampment at Quarry Lakes one of the city’s most significant areas of concern. Salwan said the area has had brush fires and pollution in the creeks and waterways. In 2022, police arrested two men suspected of killing a homeless man and burning his body on the Union City side of the encampment, allegedly in retaliation after one of the suspected killers said the homeless man had raped his mother.

The city doesn’t “have any plan right now to sweep the place,” the mayor said.

Tree branches cover a part of the homeless encampment near Quarry Lakes Regional Recreation Area in Fremont, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group) 

“It’s mostly complaint driven. We don’t have the resources to remove every homeless person,” Salwan said. “We have to be surgical, like a scalpel.”

Vivan Wan, the CEO of Abode Services, a Fremont-based homeless services agency, told the council during its Jan. 7 meeting that “it is clear to me that you want to make a political statement” with a new camping ban proposal. She ridiculed them for suggesting it would solve Fremont’s homeless problems.

“It’s clear to me that we all want a magic wand. We all want to end homelessness. But you are selling a bill of goods that’s false to everyone here. This ban will not solve the crisis,” Wan said.