ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Myopic Action on Homelessness

The Santa Ana City Council is wrong if it thinks it gained even a partial solution to its homeless problem with this month’s passage of an ordinance barring encampments in the Civic Center area. At best, the city gained a bit of breathing space. It still needs a long-term plan to deal with the abundant, evident needs of people living on the streets. The new ordinance may well pass judicial muster. It is based on a federal statute upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and it does allow “short-time, casual sleeping.” But it bars anyone from cooking, making a fire or taking more than a brief nap in the Civic Center area.

Santa Ana previously tried to ban camping anywhere in the city, but that law was temporarily blocked by an appeals court, which said it wanted to consider the constitutionality of the measure. Restricting the latest ordinance to the area around the Civic Center is an attempt to avoid a judicial veto.

It is difficult to get accurate numbers on the homeless, but recent estimates put the Orange County total at 12,000, the Santa Ana figure at 3,000 and the number in the Civic Center area at 300. We in the county have to do more to reduce those numbers.

Before going the ordinance route, Santa Ana used police “sweeps” of the Civic Center, herding the homeless out of sight of the men and women working in city and county government offices.

It did remove people from whom we prefer to avert our eyes, and our thoughts, but it merely pushed them somewhere else. The homeless sued and won a $400,000 settlement from Santa Ana, money that would have been better spent on social services and housing.

One councilman has floated a plan for the city to contribute $300,000, or $1 for each Santa Ana resident, toward countywide homeless services such as shelters if nine other cities in the county agree to donate $1 for each of their residents.

That would be a start, but given the difficulty of getting Orange County cities to agree on such an issue, Santa Ana should be ready to act on its own even if other cities do not join in.