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Garden Grove City Council members are pushing to clear out homeless camps in the city after a recent landmark Supreme Court decision gives cities across the country power to do so again.
Now, City Councilman George Brietigam and his colleagues are looking to give local police officers an ordinance to clear out homeless encampments in Garden Grove.
Brietigam, who spearheaded the proposed ordinance, said at Tuesday’s city council meeting that the city has done a lot to reach out to homeless people and connect them to services, pointing in part to the regional homeless shelter in Garden Grove that opened in June.
“We’ve got a lot of carrots, but I think it’s time to give our police department also the stick so they can compassionately and respectfully offer people services, but they also have the authority to say you just can’t keep staying here,” he said.
City council members voted 6-0 to direct the city attorney to come back within three months with an ordinance prohibiting camping on public property. Councilman John O’Neill was absent.
Brietigam’s request comes after the Supreme Court overturned a case requiring cities to offer shelter to homeless people before they were allowed to push them off the streets.
[Read: Is Orange County About To Enforce Anti-Camping Laws Again?]
Tuesday’s direction also came after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order at the end of last month calling on local leaders across the state to clear out encampments.
[Read: Gov. Newsom Calls on Local Leaders to Clean Up Encampments – Will They?]
But advocates for homeless people like David Duran, a founding member of the People’s Homeless Task Force Orange County, warn efforts to clear our encampments could lead to the criminalization of people sleeping on the streets – something they say will worsen the crisis.
[Read: What Does The Future of Homeless Camping Enforcement In Orange County Look Like?]
“California is suffering from a housing crisis that is continuing to grow because of rising rents and housing costs so it makes absolutely no sense to spend millions on displacing and criminalizing victims of this,” Duran said in a July text message about Newsom’s executive order.
“A jailhouse is not a home and will cost far more than doing the right thing by creating a more humane form of public housing.”
Earlier this year, county leaders reported 7,322 homeless people in Orange County – a close to 2,000-person increase in the county’s homeless population since 2022.
Over 4,100 of those people are unsheltered.
[Read: Orange County Homeless Population Continues Growing]
According to the latest count, there are 239 homeless people in Garden Grove and 163 of them are unsheltered.
Cracking Down on Homeless Camps in OC
Last week, Aliso Viejo officials became some of the first in the county to tighten their local anti-camping law following the Supreme Court ruling.
[Read: Aliso Viejo Strengthens Anti-Camping Law After Supreme Court Ruling]
Elected officials in other cities are also calling for homeless encampment crackdowns.
Santa Ana Mayor Valerie Amezcua said last month it was time for the city to enforce anti-camping laws and crack down on public intoxication.
At last week’s city council meeting in Santa Ana, Amezcua said the Supreme Court ruling has led to more homeless people in the city and the city manager is putting together a plan to address public safety concerns.
“We cannot afford that,” she said at the Aug. 6 meeting. “If you’ve got a better answer, again, I would say, take them to your home because they’re defecating on people’s yards. They’re masturbating in front of children. They’re running around naked in front of children.”
Meanwhile, a recent Voice of OC investigation found local homeless shelters are struggling to move people into housing and county leaders are reporting a bottleneck at shelters due to a lack of affordable homes in Orange County.
Amid the bottleneck, people continue dying on the streets of Orange County.
This year, the Orange County Sheriff’s department released a report that showed close to 500 homeless people died in 2022 – an increase of 25.6% from 2021.
In Garden Grove, 32 people died in the streets in 2022, according to the report.
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.
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