Orange County Screws Over the Homeless

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Orange County is an affluent county in southern California that is home to Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, and much of the state's wealthier conservatives.

Like most areas of populated costal California, it has a fairly large homeless population, which has grown in recent years due to sky rocketing housing prices.

California has a lot of wide dry river beds and it's not uncommon for homeless encampments to spring up in them. Authorities typically ignore them for a while and only clear them out when it's about to rain or they become a public nuisance.

Orange County recently decided a large homeless encampment within it's borders reached that point. Rather than just clearing everyone out this time because they would just redistribute around the cities, authorities declared they would set up a number of shelters and give people motel vouchers in the meantime. Initially Orange County of residence for on board with this plan because in their eyes it meant removing the blight from their beautiful cities. However once the encampments were cleared away, when authorities started looking for places to set up the shelters, residents backtracked and began to protest plans for shelters in their neighborhoods.

O.C. pushes homeless off the street but can't find anywhere to shelter them

I think it's pretty apparent that a lot of the residents of Orange County are inclined to see homeless individuals as human trash rather than human beings. Here are some gems from the article.

Miss Any place but MY neighborhood
""They need to put them somewhere, maybe somewhere else in California. I really don't know where they can go. But Irvine is beautiful and we don't want it to get destroyed." - Angela Liu.

Mr. It Hurts People To Help Them
"As a parent who owns a modest home in an Orange County neighborhood, I join the outrage that we are assuming responsibility for homeless people, taking care of their basic needs and elongating their agony by removing the necessity to make fundamental decisions about the way they live their lives," - . U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa)

Miss At Least She is Honest
"We are not elected to handle this crisis. I just don't want to be near the homeless." - Abby Moore

But a lot of these people are overlooking is that the homeless individuals in their communities are actually long-time members of their communities who grew up there but cannot afford housing there. They overlook the fact that drug addicts and criminals are only a small part of the homeless population and the bulk of the homeless population wants clean, safe places as much as non-homeless people do, but people can't be clean without access to hygiene facilities and people can't be safe when they have no doors to lock at night and police see them as a problem rather than citizens worthy of being protected.

That's sad, but considering the underpinnings of what it is to be human it's not particularly surprising. On the part of seeing them as human trash - they do and they don't, depends I suppose on which level we're addressing. It's similar to how we have a difficult time sorting out 'fellow human' from 'dog eats dog' in other domains, the two don't mesh well and which one wins tends to have a lot to do with how much personal sacrifice (including real estate value) is involved.

Here are two of the encampments the residents took issue with.

Yet nobody does anything about housing affordability.

The parts of the country that are affordable are mostly boring, repressive red states that are either hurricane magnets, in Tornado Alley, or highly blizzard-prone. So nobody wants to live there, even if the economy is excellent in those places.

Final solution?

Well yes. But they could try a more affordable county in California to afford a one bedroom apartment. But you have understand, much of the chronic homeless population are addicts and they aren't ever interested in doing such a thing. Most of these people are totally spaced put in their own world. I see it everyday in Canada. They can't stop using and likely never will. There has to be some type of warehousing strategy for such people.

I issue here is to fold.

1. Authorities made a promise to these individuals and then backtracked on it leaving them in limbo. Had they just told them they had to clear out, these individuals would have had the opportunity to make other plans.

Some of these individuals, thinking they were going to be housed in a long term shelter, may have abandoned their tents and tarps, and now have no accommodations when they get evicted from the motels.

2. The perception by the housed residents of Orange County that these homeless individuals are more akin to vermin than law abiding citizens. If you look at these particular encampments, they are clean and organized. These particular homeless individuals are likely not individuals with mental health problems or drug problems, but individuals who either lost their job are on fixed incomes or disabled and could not make enough to afford the skyrocketing rents in the area. In other words, most of these individuals are probably their former classmates and neighbors. A survey of the homeless population in Huntington Beach found that contrary to popular perception that the majority of homeless individuals inhabiting the parks were not transients but largely native inhabitants of Huntington Beach.

There are plenty of conservative communities who have empathy for their neighbors who fall on hard times, but the Orange County conservative communities are clearly not of that nature. Once a person falls on hard times and loses their home they vermin in the eyes of their former neighbors.

Neighborhood leaders in these communities assembled 1200 people in 22 coach buses to protest the creation of the long-term shelters in their neighborhoods. They are protesting against housing people who just can't afford rent in the area as if they are sex offenders.

<---Human vermin, just trying to get a leg up in society.

Moral of the story – Never expect anyone to keep a promise made only to you if you’re not able to make them regret dearly breaking it.

What do you mean by “warehousing strategy “?

Most of these people in these encampments probably weren't drug addicts.

One problem with most parts of California is there is a lot of sprawl but little public transportation. These people would not be able to live in the very cheap parts of California because they do not have cars. Heat is also a consideration. Most of the cheap areas of California are in the desert, where it's not safe to leave an air conditioned environment for long during the summer.

In a fairly populated desert or central valley city with some public transportation, rent for an apartment can still be $1,000 per month. Typically one has to come in with first month, last month, and a security deposit. This would be about $3,000. Most of these people probably don't have that and probably wouldn't be able to bring in the rent for whatever reason.

In any case, they are probably doing the best they can.

One solution is to buy them bus tickets to other cities.

I saw this on the news when I lived in Colorado Springs.

"As many as 500 people are estimated to camp in tents in Colorado Springs because they don’t have a place to sleep"

"Homeless people in Colorado Springs are getting their one-way bus tickets paid for if they want to move to be near family or friends".
https://www.denverpost.com/2010/01/28/c ... kets-home/

Most of these individuals are probably Orange County natives and are already near the people they know.

Some of them may be "working homeless" meaning they have jobs but just not enough to pay rent on their own. These people tend to go back and forth between being homeless and living with roommates who come and go and cause them to be evicted, then after a while no one will rent to them.

Doesn't Orange County have a bad rep for being politically right wing, and even racist?

It was predominately conservative until 2016 but still votes largely conservative.

Sad but true: a promise is only as good as the leverage used to keep it.