Based on the success that San Francisco has had with the tactic, San Bernardino officials are vigorously contemplating providing homeless individuals currently living on the city’s streets with one-way bus or train tickets to distant locations in an effort to thin their local ranks.
The brainchild of now outgoing Mayor London Breed, the City of San Francisco’s strategy of dealing with unwanted masses of unhoused people in recent months has consisted of discontinuing its automatic policy of providing a shelter to the dispossessed who city officials encountered, instead asking them if there was an alternate location they could go to where they had a relative or friends with whom they might stay or some other place where they would rather be than San Franciso. If the individual is open to leaving the Bay Area, the city has provided him/her with a bus or train ticket, to locations both within and outside of California instead of putting that person up for the night.
San Bernardino, like San Francisco, has an immense problem with large numbers of destitute having taken up residence in paupers’ quarters on the streets, in alleyways, in the Santa Ana or Lytle Creek riverbeds or around them, flood control channels, abandoned buildings, under railroad trestles or freeway overpasses, or hidden in chaparral or landscaping along the freeways, its parks and on the city’s sidewalks and public areas.
Historically, in San Bernardino County as in its county seat, government officials have been divided on the issue of homelessness, with ones who want to ruthlessly do away with the problem by whatever means at their disposal including arrest and removal and others who want to house them and rehabilitate them at public expense. Those often described as “do-gooders” or “bleeding hearts,” were compassionate toward those who had fallen into such a state, and were against, generally, utilizing the power of the law to prohibit them from inhabiting public space. Other officials believed that such compassion was misplaced, and that the proliferation of those unable to fend for themselves by maintaining a domicile was a substantial factor in the deterioration in the quality of life of those who were not homeless, i.e., those citizens residing in homes in residential neighborhoods or districts that were both residential and commercial in nature.
Some official pushed for utilizing tactics that would make it very uncomfortable or difficult for the homeless to remain in one spot for long and which would encourage them to head out to points east west, south or elsewhere. This included passing and enforcing loitering ordinances, which were distinct from vagrancy laws. Another approach, one that was used by the City of San Bernardino, at least for a time, was to arrest those who remained in the city’s parks after sunset – generally meaning 8 p.m. in the summer and 5 p.m. in the winter and times in between in the spring and fall – and to transport them to the sheriff’s department jail in Rancho Cucamonga, known as the West Valley Detention Center, to be booked. In some cases, sheriff’s personnel might book the arrestees, but would immediately release them. Others brought in, particularly ones with no substantial previous criminal records, might be released without being booked. Generally, the only ones that would be incarcerated would be those who had outstanding warrants. Those arrested and transported to the West Valley Detention Center, booked or not, would then face the challenge of walking the 20 miles back to San Bernardino. By the time they would return, many would discover that their possessions – their tents and sleeping bags, camping stoves, clothes and whatnot, were gone, having been thrown out by the police or visitors to the park, appropriated by some other homeless individuals or removed by a person or persons or an entity unknown. After being subjected to this ordeal three or four or five times, many opted not to return to San Bernardino.
Nevertheless, San Bernardino, like all cities in the western United States, was, until very recently, constrained by the basic provisions embodied in the 1962 case of Robinson v. California and the 2018 case Martin v. Boise. In Robinson v. California, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits criminalization of a status, as opposed to criminalizing criminal acts, in striking down a California law that criminalized being addicted to narcotics. By extension, this applied to being homeless, such that it made applying traditional vagrancy laws difficult, problematic or even impossible. In this way, from that point on, at least until earlier this year, an individual could not be prosecuted for being homeless. In Martin v. Boise, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that city officials in Boise, Idaho, could not enforce an anti-camping ordinance whenever its homeless population exceeds the number of available beds in its homeless shelters. Since the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to this case in 2019, it became binding precedent within the Ninth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit includes the nine western states and all of the Pacific Islands.
San Bernardino more than two decades ago, when the homeless problem was far less acute than it is currently, had dubiously distinguished itself as the haven for more people living on the streets than any other city in the county, and by a substantial margin.
As was the case with the elected leadership in other cities, San Bernardino’s mayors and city council members over a long span of time were torn over whether the city should accept money available from the State of California for the support of various homeless assistance programs. There was a degree of debate and difference between the elected officials and the city’s residents with regard to accepting the funds. Some felt the city should accept whatever funding was available. Others were skeptical, believing that unless the programs for the homeless being undertaken proceeded all the way to creating housing that was sustainable and would reduce significantly or eliminate the homeless population, the city should not involve itself in such half, quarter, eighth or sixteenth measures. Others said many homeless were in that state by choice and did not want to be housed. Others argued that providing shelters for the drug addicted or alcoholics only enabled them in pursuing their proclivities. Others still asserted that successful homeless assistance programs would have a “magnet effect,” and would attract ever more homeless to the city.
In many cases, the solutions that were applied inolved little more than throwing money at the problem by hiring counselors and specialists who were paid hefty salaries but monopolized money that otherwise might have been utilized for building physical structures in which people could be housed. When the money went away, the counselors and specialists dis as well, leaving no physical quarters for those who yet had no roofs over their heads.
The City of San Bernardino, in particular, was left with a persistent population of homeless, who found themselves drawn to the city’s parks, including 44-acre Secombe Park, 68-acre Perris Hill Park and 14-acre Meadowbrook Park. Four years ago, then three years ago and two years ago, city officials made a concerted effort to push the homeless out of Secombe Park, which included making plans to develop a portion of the park’s acreage into an affordable housing project. That did not erase the city’s homeless dilemma, as most of those who left Secombe Lake Park migrated to Perris Hill Park and Meadowbrook Park, intensifying the concentration of the destitute there.
City officials sought to apply creative ways of getting the homeless to leave its municipal parks, with varying degrees of success. In February 2023, the city council declared homelessness a local emergency, using that declaration as a dictum calling for relocating the homeless off of public property.
In January of this year, Federal Judge Terry Hatter Jr. issued a preliminary injunction preventing the City of San Bernardino from removing unhoused people living in its parks and on the city’s sidewalks and public area. Judge Hatter’s ruling was made in reaction to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three specific men living in Meadowbrook and Perris Hill Parks who had been forced to leave in May 2023, at which time, the ACLU claimed, the city violated their constitutional rights by destroying or jettisoning their personal property, including medicine, vital documents medical equipment and tents. In his ruling, Judge Hatter made a finding that the city had done as alleged, and he barred the city from removing or displacing unhoused residents and their belongings pending further judicial review of the matter. He said he would consider vacating the order if the city can formulate a binding policy by which it replaces homeless encampments with housing options for those to be displaced.
In the summer of 2024, governmental entities were given far greater latitude with how they can treat the homeless. On June 28, 2024, The U.S. Supreme Court entered a ruling in the case of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which pretty much erased the protections under the law that the homeless enjoyed which stemmed from both the Martin v Boise or the Robinson v. California.
After the Oregon Law Center filed suit against Grants Pass for enacting a series of anti-camping, anti-sleeping, and parking exclusion ordinances which imposed civil fines ranging from $295 to $537.60 and imposed criminal penalties of trespassing on repeat violators who continued to reside on public land and the U.S. District Court in Oregon and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, relying on Martin v. Boise, rejected the city government’s defense of its ordinances and prevented the city from enforcing its anti-camping ordinance against homeless people, the U.S. Supreme Court in its June ruling upheld the city in the leveling of its punishments, fines and temporary bans of camping on public prperty, stating one-month jail sentences the city imposed were neither cruel nor unusual; that the Grants Pass’s anti-camping ordinances were neutrally applied against both the homeless and those who are not homeless and it was not established that the homeless had no place other than parks or parking lots in which to sleep. The upshot was that the Supreme Court held that local governments can ban the homeless from public areas. In early July, California Governor Gavin Newsom, during whose tenure as governor the state, between 2019 and 2021 spent $9.6 billion trying to alleviate homelessness and from 2020 onward spent another $3.7 billion on Project Homekey, a plan to fund local governments in their efforts to combat homelessness, grew acutely frustrated and impatient with the lack of progress in solving the homelessness crisis. He was going to cut off any further state homeless program funding to cities which had not shut down encampments and moved those in them to indoor shelters.
Within a fortnight, San Bernardino city officials who for years had been themselves frustrated in being unable to clear the homeless out of both high-profile and low-profile public places, felt as if the constraints, or most of them, had been removed.
In September, Judge Hatter dismissed the ACLU’s suit against the city when San Bernardino officials offered assurances, which the ACLU accepted that in carrying out its homeless camp cleanups, it would not destroy or throw the possessions of those being removed.
The departure of the homeless from the city’s parks, however, has not displaced the lion’s share of the homeless from San Bernardino altogether, as many have now moved into flood control washes, river bankis and dry river beds, beneath freeway overpasses, empty lots and empty buildings, alleyways and the like.
A solution the city is pursuing is paying people to take Greyhound buses from San Bernardino’s Grehound bus terminal or Amtrack from San Bernardino’s Amtrack Station to any destination of those people’s choosing.
This approach readily works for those who ended up in San Bernardino after they came here in hopes of an actual or prospective job opportunity which did not pan out or for those who have familial connections in another city or state.
There is concern, however, that city officials might seek to coerce those in San Bernardino to leave to someplace else, even though they have no reasonable alternate living or working arrangements there.
Some San Bernardino officials are enthusiastic about the approach because for a relative pittance – $35,000 to $55,000 – there is the real prospect that they can get 700 to 1,000 of the more than 1,400 homeless that are subsisting there to leave for places elsewhere, far less than the more than $20 million it will take to house fewer than one-fifth that number.