https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/us-homeless-encampments-companies-profiting-sweeps

"Ortega moved to the Crash Zone in 2015 after losing his job as a property manager. At the time, there were just a smattering of tents across the fields. When the population of the camp exploded to about 300 people in the first year of the pandemic, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it would withhold funding for airport improvement projects if the city didn’t clear it out.

In recent years, California has approved more than $700m of funding for camp clearance, part of its strategy for grappling with a growing unsheltered homeless population of 123,000, according to a recent count.

...

[San Jose's] contracts and purchase orders with Tucker [Construction] total more than $10m in the past decade. Part of this money was drawn from federal emergency funds intended to combat Covid-19... the largest single contract unearthed was a $23m deal with the Singh Group, a major construction firm, to clear camps along state-maintained roads in the cities of Berkeley, Oakland and Emeryville."