Suit Challenges Homeless Bans in 3 O.C. Cities

Public interest lawyers Thursday sued five cities in three Southern California counties challenging the constitutionality of ordinances that prohibit the homeless from camping in public places.

“Making homelessness a crime cannot eliminate the problem of homelessness,” said attorney Harry Simon of the Legal Aid Society of Orange County. “These ordinances are not a magic wand that will prevent people who lack housing from living on the streets.”

Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Aid Society and the National Lawyers Guild announced they had filed suit against the cities of Fullerton, Long Beach, Orange, Santa Ana and Santa Barbara on the grounds that the municipalities’ “anti-homeless” ordinances are unconstitutional.

Ringed by cameras and reporters, the attorneys announced the legal challenges in the Plaza of the Flags in the Santa Ana Civic Center, where the day before police quietly shooed away the remnants of an encampment that had grown to a couple of hundred in the past several years. The makeshift tent-and-shack city had been erected in parking lots and public spaces that surround the seat of city and county government.

Police were armed with a Santa Ana ordinance, which took effect Sept. 3. The city gave the homeless a week of warnings before two officers at daybreak Wednesday, accompanied by a city worker with a video camera, warned the 30 to 40 homeless men and women who remained to break camp.

The lawsuits filed Thursday claim that banning camping by the homeless subjects them to “cruel and unusual punishment” and deprives them of their constitutional right of “freedom of movement.”

Santa Ana City Atty. Edward J. Cooper said there is no merit to the lawsuit. “These kinds of laws have already been upheld at the state and federal supreme courts,” He said. “I’m not concerned.” Fullerton City AttyK. Fox said he had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment.

In arguing the position of the homeless, Los Angeles ACLU attorney Robin S. Toma said cities in the past have been unsuccessful in criminalizing begging or the solicitation of jobs by day laborers, “speech used by the poorest and the politically powerless of our society for survival.”

“Now these cities have gone one step further with anti-camping laws. . . . Your mere existence as a homeless person, surviving, living and sleeping on the streets, has become a crime,” he said.

Attorneys for the homeless said that financially strapped cities will spend money they don’t have “to arrest, jail and prosecute homeless people” under the new ordinances. That money, they said, could be better spent to help the homeless.

“The problem of homelessness cannot be solved by inhumane and Draconian criminal prosecutions,” said James Lafferty of the National Lawyers Guild of Los Angeles.

The suit against the city of Santa Ana, Mayor Daniel H. Young, and Police Chief Paul M. Walters was brought by two homeless men, Archie Tobe, who lost his apartment when he was laid off as a welder, and Robert Bickel, who has cerebral palsy and spinal arthritis, and whose Social Security disability payments allow him to rent housing for 18 days a month.

Noting that they had filed no suit against the city of Santa Monica, the attorneys warned Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner and Santa Monica that they too would be sued if the homeless were prosecuted for sleeping in public places in that city.

Tuesday night, during an explosive public meeting, the Santa Monica City Council fired veteran City Atty. Robert M. Myers for not cracking down on the homeless. Myers had refused to enforce that city’s new anti-camping law.

Also speaking at the press conference was Donald Sims, a homeless man from Long Beach, who warned that many people are just a paycheck away from poverty.

“No job is safe today,” he said. “You too could be out of a job and not be able to make your house payments. You could be just like me, a homeless person.”

Simon of Legal Aid said the solution to the homeless problem lies with Washington and Sacramento, which should provide more money for low-income housing, drug treatment, alcohol rehabilitation and mental health programs.

“If we can do it in Florida where we cared for 250,000 we can do it nationally,” Simon said, asserting that the nationwide phenomenon of homelessness has its roots in “the disintegration of the economy,” the loss of millions of units of low-income housing and the “gutting” of public health services from medical clinics to mental health treatment centers.

Pointing to the need for regional solutions, he said: “If homeless people are forced out of Santa Ana, they will only appear in greater numbers in Huntington Beach, Venice or elsewhere. . . . It is time to hold local communities to a standard of responsibility greater than ordinances that try--in vain--to say, ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ ”

Simon said the legal groups are challenging the ordinances on the grounds that punishing the homeless because they have no place to sleep is cruel.

“Making it illegal for the homeless to conduct essential life activities within these cities punishes homeless persons who exercise their constitutional right to move to these cities or to remain within these cities . . . a right protected by our state and federal constitutions,” he said.

Seven legal service organizations initiated the unprecedented regional legal challenge against the five cities. They were: Legal Aid Society of Orange County; Legal Aid Foundation of Long Beach; Public Counsel, Legal Defense Center of Santa Barbara; Western Center of Law and Poverty; National Lawyers Guild, and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California.

Times correspondent Maresa Archer contributed to this report.