Housing Crisis Update: Unhoused People Are Living In Elaborate Cave Networks Now

For years now, California’s lack of affordable housing has led people to seek shelter in public parks and cars, along roads and highways and on sidewalks. More recently, people have been forced underground, digging caves into riverbanks and building out rooms with ersatz furniture and home decor.

A local CBS News affiliate reported this month on elaborate caves dug along the side of the Tuolumne River in Modesto, California, where a homeless encampment has taken root. Video shows hooks and pictures hung on the wall and belongings scattered about. Eight caves were cleared by the Modesto Police Department and local environmental groups, who were concerned that the cave could collapse and injure encampment residents, and that trash was spreading into the river, according to the CBS affiliate. A similar encampment was found in the same area in 2022. 

Encampment residents had cleared a dirt path leading to the cave and constructed makeshift steps. After the encampment was cleared, officials put up tiny barricades and caution tape along the river bank.

Another encampment was found later in the week along the Stanislaus River, just north of Modesto, CBS reported last Thursday. The outlet reported that unhoused people have been digging caves along the river and near several highways for years, with officials periodically clearing them.

News reports about the caves state that they were “discovered” by local volunteers, a word that evokes anthropologists stumbling upon cave writing from thousands of years ago. But far from being a peek into the past, they are a voyeuristic look at unhoused people trying to survive as best they can in a post-apocalyptic present.

It is not hard to understand why this is happening: The state has a well-documented housing crisis and far more unsheltered residents than housing and shelter space. 

Meanwhile, even the most elaborate tent city lacks indoor plumbing, and humans have congregated near water sources for thousands of years to address basic needs.

Residents told CBS that they’ve even spotted people near the caves with water pumps and power generators.

Modesto is in Stanislaus County. Last year, the county found 2,091 people were without housing on one night in January, 949 of whom were unsheltered. The county has only 716 shelter beds.

Because the county does not have adequate shelter capacity for its unhoused residents, it would be covered by previous court decisions in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that held unsheltered people cannot be criminalized for sleeping outdoors or for using rudimentary shelter when they have nowhere to go. 

But those court decisions do not prevent cities or counties from enforcing other rules, including state rules that let officials clear unsafe structures where there’s an imminent health and safety threat.

The Supreme Court will soon hear a case that seeks to overturn both Ninth Circuit decisions and could empower state leaders to arrest or cite people for sleeping outdoors even when there is no other shelter or housing available. The Supreme Court took up the case after a bipartisan push by conservative think tanks and Republican and Democratic lawmakers, including Governor Gavin Newsom.

If future anthropologists find these caves thousands of years from now, they may wonder why such structures were necessary in one of the richest states in the richest country in the world.