Fresno’s Homeless Assistance Response Team was supposed to mark a turning point — a shift away from police-led sweeps and toward outreach workers connecting people to shelter and services. Four years later, housing advocates say the program hasn’t delivered on that promise, alleging that HART still uses excessive force, discards people’s belongings and regularly violates its own policies.
A Program Born From a Promise to Change Course
Mayor Jerry Dyer launched HART in 2022 with the stated aim of shifting the city’s response to homelessness toward outreach and connecting people with services and shelter, according to Fresnoland. The team became operational that January and includes four elements: HART-unit police officers, code enforcement, outreach workers from Poverello House’s HOPE team, and the city’s solid waste division, per the same report, first detailed by KVPR.
But housing advocate Brandi Nuse-Villegas says the design never matched the message. “It was an effort to communicate this idea of compassion, but the way it was designed didn’t allow that to happen,” she said, according to Fresnoland’s reporting. Nuse-Villegas has said she documented HART discarding belongings hundreds of times since 2016, per the same account.
Allegations of Force and Discarded Belongings
Advocates broadly allege that HART uses excessive force, discards people’s belongings without regard and regularly violates its own policies, the article notes. Stacy Williams, who worked at United Way Fresno and Madera Counties and the Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission from 2022 through 2024, said she witnessed HART officers discard prescriptions, food, blankets and clothing. Williams said HART represented the same police approach under a new name.
City officials describe a different protocol. HART staff are supposed to store items of apparent value if no owner can be identified and leave receipts explaining cleanup procedures and how to retrieve stored belongings, per the same reporting. Outreach is meant to lead, not follow, enforcement — assistant planning and development director Phil Skei has said outreach and all offered services are intended to precede any enforcement action, and that HOPE team outreach workers lead HART’s outreach efforts while police officers serve as backup during sweeps.
A History That Predates the Current Team
Fresno has used police to clear encampments, discard property and move people along for decades, long before HART existed. An October 2006 lawsuit effectively helped ban the practice of repeated raids and seizure and destruction of belongings, with Judge Oliver Wanger declaring that the approach of “announce, strike, seize [and] destroy immediately” was against the law. A class-action settlement that followed resulted in $2.35 million for hundreds of Fresno residents.
The city’s prior homeless task force drew its own criticism. The Fresno Commission for Police Reform recommended abolishing it in a 2020 report, and the task force was disbanded in early 2021. Dyer said at the time that moving large numbers of unhoused people from place to place only exacerbated the problem — a rationale that fed directly into HART’s creation the following year.
Thousands of Requests, a Second Team Added
The scale of HART’s workload has grown substantially. The team addressed 9,395 encampment-related service requests on both public and private properties in 2025, and Skei said the city has received 7,500 more service requests related to homeless encampments since September 2026 alone, the majority concerning private property. The city recently added a second HART team to the budget to provide seven-day-a-week coverage, according to Fresnoland’s reporting.
Not everyone welcomes the expansion. An advocate identified as Lethal said adding a second HART team with more enforcement officers was terrifying, and said she had never seen outreach workers present at encampment sweeps in Fresno. Property owners, meanwhile, remain responsible for bringing private land into compliance and paying for cleanup themselves, with the outreach team called in for private-property services only if the owner requests it.
Notice Rules and the Limits of Treatment First
City officials say Fresno gives 10 days’ notice before cleanup of public or private encampments, though larger encampments — which Skei described as relatively uncommon — require at least seven days’ notice to owners and residents when 10 or more people have stayed at least 10 days. A partial excerpt of the city’s Administrative Order 6-23 echoes that the city shall seek to provide at least seven days’ advance notice for encampments lasting longer than 10 days, though the available text does not establish additional conditions or exceptions.
Separately, Fresno’s 2024 anti-camping ordinance bans sleeping, sitting, lying or storing personal property in public spaces, according to The Fresno Bee. People arrested under the law are encouraged to enter drug treatment as an alternative to facing charges through the Treatment First program. From September 2024 through the end of January 2026, Fresno police issued 826 arrests or citations under the law, and just 18 people opted into Treatment First — and as of January 29, 2026, the city said it had not been advised that any of those 18 had completed the program, Fresnoland reported separately.
The Numbers Behind the Crisis
Homelessness in Fresno increased by roughly 7% in 2023 compared with the 2022 point-in-time count, even as available shelter beds fell from 5,101 in 2022 to 3,814 in 2023, according to Fresnoland. Regionally, verified data showed homelessness in the Fresno-Madera region increased 9.2% between 2023 and 2025. Preliminary 2026 results counted 3,254 people experiencing homelessness in the region, split nearly evenly between sheltered and unsheltered individuals — though officials cautioned that a changed counting methodology means the 2026 figures shouldn’t be compared to previous years.
Research beyond Fresno suggests the stakes of displacement extend past property loss. A study of survey data from people experiencing homelessness in Denver found involuntary displacement was significantly associated with increased self-reported infectious disease, substance and alcohol use, and worsening mental health, according to a Johns Hopkins University Health Notes analysis. The same analysis found strong evidence that involuntary displacement disrupts access to health care, treatment and social services, making chronic conditions harder to manage.
Back in Fresno, Skei has acknowledged the program’s limits directly: ending chronic homelessness is HART’s goal, he said, and the city has not achieved it.
