SANTA ANA, Calif. – The City of Santa Ana continues with a comprehensive approach improving the quality of life of all residents with new measures to ensure public spaces are safe, clean and accessible, as well as providing more resources to help people experiencing homelessness.
On Tuesday, December 17, the Santa Ana City Council approved amendments to the Santa Ana Municipal Code that create new enforcement mechanisms to address loitering, camping, and the storage of personal property in public areas. The City has heard ongoing concerns from the public that access to public and private property is being impeded by people camping and storing personal items in public spaces like sidewalks and parks, as well as using the public right-of-way to sit, sleep and lie down.
At the same meeting, the City Council authorized a more than $3.7 million agreement with City Net to provide homeless outreach services and non-emergency, non-medical dispatch services for homeless-related calls. This program provides a non-law enforcement response to help unhoused individuals access shelters, treatment facilities, social and health services, and case management support.
“This is a matter of quality of life for the City of Santa Ana,” Mayor Valerie Amezcua said. “In Santa Ana, we all deserve to be safe, we all deserve to be able to walk at night, we all deserve to live in a place where it’s quiet and we can get sleep.”
Key provisions of the quality-of-life ordinance include:
- Loitering and sleeping: New provisions make it unlawful to loiter, sleep or lay down on public benches, bike racks, or bus benches outside of bus service hours, or in public restrooms, aiming to maintain public spaces for their intended use by the community.
- Obstruction of public rights-of-way: The ordinance broadens the scope of obstructions in public rights-of-way, including obstructing or impeding passage as provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act; within 20 feet of driveways, fire hydrants, ATMs, and entrances to parks, public restrooms, and public trails/paths; within 50 feet of an entrance or exit to a store, restaurant, office building, or other establishment that is open to the public; within 10 feet of a sidewalk ramp or street corner; within 200 feet of a college, school or daycare center; and other areas.
- Camping and storage of personal property: The amendments introduce a clearer definition of “camp” and “camping,” as well as provisions restricting the storage of personal belongings on public property.
- Enforcement: The City may charge offenders with a misdemeanor or an infraction for violations of the ordinance.
The City remains committed to ensuring the safety, health, and general welfare of all of its residents, visitors, and businesses through a comprehensive approach to quality-of-life issues.
Santa Ana is at the forefront of addressing homelessness in Orange County, operating a 200-bed homeless navigation center with supportive services — the largest facility of its kind run by a local jurisdiction in the county. The city also hosts the County of Orange’s largest shelter, which offers 425 beds. Furthermore, Santa Ana is leading efforts to build permanent supportive housing for homeless individuals, having funded 234 units over the past five years, with an additional 221 units currently under construction.
In the 2023-2024 fiscal year, under its contract with City Net, the organization engaged with 4,873 individuals, successfully assisting 874 people in exiting homelessness. Additionally, City Net’s dispatch services redirected 10,609 non-emergency, non-medical calls away from the Santa Ana Police Department to homeless resources, preserving critical police capacity.
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