Appeals Court Voids Santa Ana Ban on Camping by Homeless

A state appeals court has ruled that a Santa Ana city ordinance prohibiting homeless people from camping on public property is unconstitutional.

The 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana said the ordinance is vague, imposes class-based restrictions on the ability to live and travel, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Advocates for the homeless in California and in major U.S. cities, including Baltimore and Miami, have been following the legal battle over the ordinance.

Charges against at least a dozen homeless people cited for violating the Santa Ana ordinance were dropped because of the appellate court decision, which was released late Wednesday.

“The court of appeals has said very plainly that the city cannot drive the homeless out,” said Harry Simon, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, which challenged the ordinance.

Santa Ana Assistant City Atty. Robert Wheeler said city officials are disappointed in the decision and will appeal to the California Supreme Court.

“The ordinance was adopted at a time when things were really out of hand in the Civic Center plaza” in mid-1992, Wheeler said. “It was a tent city. Yet that didn’t come out in the court’s opinion.”

The prohibition, approved by the City Council, went into effect in September, 1992, and the Legal Aid Society filed suit soon after in Orange County Superior Court. That court upheld the ordinance and Legal Aid appealed.

In December, the city passed a second, separate anti-camping ordinance, patterned after a U.S. Park Service law, to clear the homeless from the Civic Center area.

Simon asked Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert J. Polis to temporarily block police from enforcing that law in January, but Polis said the city’s second ordinance was likely to pass constitutional muster and allowed enforcement to begin.

However, advocates for the homeless still intend to challenge that ordinance in a few months, Simon said.

Under the ordinance that was struck down in the appellate ruling, homeless people were to “clear out of town by sunset; and that, of course is what this ordinance is all about, a blatant and unconstitutional infringement on the right to travel,” Justice Thomas F. Crosby Jr. wrote in the decision.

The court’s action was hailed by Christopher Mears, an attorney who has represented several Santa Ana homeless clients in civil and criminal cases.