Callous Cruelty in Santa Ana

The Santa Ana city government is offering a model of how a city can cruelly mishandle situations that it could avoid with a more understanding public policy.

The contradictions are evident in two official city actions. While Santa Ana rousts the homeless sleeping in parks and other downtown civic center areas, seizing their property in an obvious effort to drive them away, the city is in court defending a restrictive city ordinance that helps put people onto the street.

The lawsuit, filed in 1986 in response to the eviction of two low-income Latino families, has been reinstated by the state appellate court; it overruled a Superior Court judge who dismissed the suit because the tenants moved out of the apartment building a month after the suit was filed.

The suit, testing Santa Ana’s limit on the number of people who can live in one residence, was filed by the families after they were served with eviction notices in 1986 because four to five people were living in the one-bedroom apartments. According to the city ordinance, which immigration-rights leaders label as discriminatory and one of the most restrictive in the state, the “habitable room” is figured on a formula that considers only bedrooms as usable living space. That approach completely disregards the use of a folding bed or a sleeper-couch in the living room, or bunk beds in the bedrooms, or even youngsters sleeping together--all of which are ways to which many larger families have resorted for generations without adverse affects.

We can understand the city’s wanting to crack down on overcrowding and the rental of small apartments to large numbers of individuals. But allowances should be made when the occupants are all members of an immediate family. Affordable housing in Orange County is too scarce to impose intransigent formulas against large, lower-income families and to displace them when they have no money to cover moving costs, rent deposits and the higher rents that they are being forced to pay.

Santa Ana does little enough for the homeless in its midst without callously enforcing arbitrary regulations that help put people onto the street in the first place.