One morning in downtown Santa Ana, outreach workers encountered a man sleeping outside a storefront who said he had recently been told to leave Irvine. With no transportation and no connection to local services, he had nowhere to go next. For outreach workers trying to move people from the streets into housing, stories like this are painfully familiar.
When cities clear encampments without housing solutions, people experiencing homelessness don’t disappear. They move. Often, they move to cities like Santa Ana.
Orange County counted more than 7,300 people experiencing homelessness in its most recent Point-in-Time survey, with more than half living unsheltered in cars, tents or other temporary conditions. That crisis spans the entire county, yet responsibility for addressing it is far from evenly shared…