Date of Award

January 2026

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Medical Doctor (MD)

Department

Medicine

First Advisor

Marco Ramos

Abstract

Modern homelessness emerged in the 1980s due to political choices that cut the social safety net and decreased the availability of affordable housing. Medicalized views of homelessness that frame homelessness as driven by individual pathology, particularly mental illness and addiction, emerged in research, media, and politics at this time. Homelessness has persisted since and remains particularly high in regions, including California, where the housing markets are most constrained. In this context, California advanced multiple legislative changes between 2022 and 2025 that increased pathways to involuntary treatment and criminal-legal control over people experiencing homelessness. In this thesis, I demonstrate how legislators medicalized homelessness to advance three prominent policy changes in California: SB 1338 CARE Court, Proposition 1, and encampment clearing. The primary sources I analyze include legislative hearings from California’s 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 sessions, press releases, media and advertisements for California’s 2024 Proposition 1, amici brief filed on behalf of Governor Newsom to the Supreme Court regarding the Grants Pass vs. Johnson decision, the Grants Pass majority opinion, and the text of and statements around Governor Newsom’s Executive Order on encampment clearing. Building on scholarly work that describes medicalization as a form of social control, I argue that politicians used medicalization to rebrand shifts towards limited autonomy and displacement of people experiencing homelessness as progressive and compassionate treatment for medical pathology. These legislative changes additionally advance a broader political agenda of individualizing structural causes of inequality.

Comments

This is an Open Access Thesis.

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