The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors this week gave preliminary passage to an ordinance prohibiting camping on sidewalks.
On Augus19, the board members made no comment in approving making it a civil infraction to camp on, sleep on or otherwise remain overnight on public sidewalks within the unincorporated areas of the county. The ordinance imposes fines of $100 for a first offense, $200 for a second, and going up to $500 for subsequent offenses.
Left unclear is how the county intends to keep track of individuals cited, as the homeless sometimes lack identification and do not have any ties to a specific address.
The ordinance, listed on the agenda as item 72, defined camping as setting up or occupying a temporary structure or erecting a temporary shelter for the purpose of sleeping, staying, living, and violating the ordinance and thereby impeding public access to sidewalks, highways, trails, and public facilities. The ordinance further prohibits storing or using personal property in the same spaces.
The board of supervisors is scheduled to revisit the matter and give the ordinance a second reading, that is a final approval, on September 9.
In the staff report for the item, Community Development and Housing Department Director Carrie Harmon sought to provide a high-minded justification for what at least some others see as a low-minded and cruel practice of bullying those unfortunate enough to occupy the lowest strata within the region’s economic scale.
“With the county’s passage of the $72 million Homeless Initiatives Spending Plan in March 2023 and the establishment of the Board of Supervisor’s Homelessness Ad Hoc Committee, the county has taken substantive steps to address homelessness centered around the expansion of shelter beds and permanent supportive housing infrastructure,” Harmon wrote. “Specific investments include: 1) the establishment of the $40 million Housing Development Grant Fund; 2) investing $70 million in Pacific Village Campus Phase II, which upon completion will provide 58 units of permanent supportive housing, 32 recuperative care beds, and 16 substance abuse treatment beds; and 3) the acquisition of two motels that upon conversion will provide 50 units of permanent supportive housing for encampment residents and 130 beds of interim housing for homeless patients exiting care at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center [the main campus of the county hospital].”
Harmon continued, “Building upon these capital investments, the county is taking unprecedented steps to reduce homelessness by implementing a coordinated, multi-agency response that prioritizes getting individuals off the streets and connected to housing and appropriate supportive services. Multidisciplinary teams have been deployed that conduct outreach in encampments, provide case management, behavioral health support, transportation, and assistance with obtaining identification and public benefits. These efforts are paired with the ongoing expansion of shelter capacity and permanent housing resources to ensure that enforcement actions are grounded in compassion and aimed at long-term stability. The ultimate goal is to transition people out of environments that may be unsafe from both a public health and safety standpoint, while also protecting the well-being of county residents as a whole.”
Harmon continued, “The proposed ordinance addresses camping on County public property and County public rights of way and is specifically focused on mitigating public health and safety concerns. Adoption of the ordinance will be a critical first step in the County’s proactive approach to encampment abatement, in alignment with Executive Order N-1-24 issued by Governor Gavin Newsom on July 25, 2024. Executive Order N-1-24 encourages local governments to adopt policies and to use all available resources and infrastructure, including resources provided by the State of California’s historic investments in housing and intervention programs, to take action to humanely remove encampments from public spaces. The number of encampments on public property have increased across the county due to a rise in homelessness over previous years. These encampments pose significant public health and safety risks to residents, including those living within the encampments, and the environment. The impacts include increased fire hazards, accumulation of waste, and loss of life from exposure to the elements. The proposed ordinance will facilitate the abatement of encampments that most threaten the life, health, and safety of those around them.”
By citing them and jailing the county’s homeless population and then saddling them with fines that are heftier than what they have money to pay, Harmon said, the county is not hurting them but helping them.
“To fully address the impact of these encampments, county departments are committed to supporting encampment residents as they transition into shelter and housing, thereby reducing homelessness and the likelihood of new encampments being established,” she said.
There were more than a dozen county residents who disagreed, saying so to the board of supervisors as they considered and just before they voted on the introduction of the ordinance adding a chapter to the San Bernardino County Code, relating to camping on public property and obstructing public rights of way.
Faith Ajayi, a Columbia University graduate and medical student at Loma Linda University Medical Center, said “Anyone who researches the topic of homelessness will find that the evidence points clearly to housing first solutions as the most financially responsible and
ethical way of addressing homelessness. “Funding subsidized housing that includes access to wraparound services such as substance use treatment, job trainings, legal services and routine health care visits is not only the most humane solution, it is by far the cheapest. Studies on housing first solutions have shown that they lead to a drastic decrease in the amount of taxpayer money spent on the utilization of emergency services, meaning expensive police calls, ambulance calls, and emergency room visits that do nothing but put a temporary band-aid on the problem. The problem is that our homeless neighbors are dying in the streets from curable medical and psychiatric conditions. I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes, and anyone in this room who has been on the ground spending time with these people has also seen it and recognizes the humanity of our homeless neighbors. They’re not criminals, loiterers, or a problem that we need to sweep under the rug. They’re people. They’re battered women, senior citizens and even children. They’re crying out for help. And rather than answering that call, we look to criminalize their existence. We propose to use more of our taxpayer dollars to bulldoze their temporary shelters, trash their personal belongings and throw them into jail cells when it would cost less money to actually help them. As great men before us have said, the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.”
Fidel Chagoya, of San Bernardino who is involved in providing re-entry services to men and women being reintegrated into the community after having been incarcerated, said the homeless were already facing challenges in getting access to resources to assist themselves, and that creating a law that defines them as lawbreakers was going to worsen an already-bad situation.
“Criminalizing and creating these ordinances would just lead to additional collateral consequences when folks do come home,” Chagoya said. “Some of those consequences would be not being able to get housing, not being able to get employment. These are some of the things I have seen while working in re-entry. I am familiar with the barriers that come with living with a record today. That’s why I’m here, to ask that you oppose agenda item 72, because it will do more harm than good for our folks out there, instead of getting them the resources that they need. So, how is that going to assist our folks that are unhoused? All it’s going to do is criminalize them, keep them in the system. I think it costs over $13,000 to incarcerate an individual for a year.”
Peggy Lee Kennedy said she was opposed to the concept of the “criminalization of unhoused people. What you’re deciding to do will harm people.”
According to the county’s own statistics, Kennedy said, “44 percent of your count is chronically homeless. You don’t get that number because you’re doing a great job housing people. It’s great that you’re doing things and I applaud you for trying to assist people who are living outside and saying that you want to help, but making laws before you provide the solutions is cruel. It’s just plain cruel. A huge percentage of the people that you criminalize are elderly. They are disabled people. In your count, you have 21 percent [of the county’s homeless who] have mental health issues. I don’t know how many people are actually disabled in that category. But physical disability is 22 percent of your count. That’s a lot of people you want to criminalize with this law. So, if you look at such a huge number of people that are chronically homeless in this county that you’ve counted yourself, you can’t sit there and pat your back, saying you’re doing a great job and then make a law against being outside and think that’s okay. It’s harmful and it’s wrong and it’s inhumane. That’s not what God told you to do. Jesus did not tell you to criminalize the poor.”
Alice Herrera told the board, “Being unhoused should not be a crime. To arrest or institutionalize people for not having housing is cruel and inhumane. It also raises a lot of barriers for them to later gain housing, to get their life back on track. This is just another barrier to keep people down. You can’t go and tell people that they need to clean up their act in order to have housing and then criminalize them for sleeping outside because they don’t have housing.”
Of citations, Herrera said, each one proves to be “a mark on your record. And each one of those citation is money that you don’t have. If you can’t pay that, then that’s another citation into their system. Eventually, they’ll tell you you need to go to jail because of these citations.”
Teresa Willingham said, “I am a retired nurse. I’ve been a nurse for 30 years. I love San Bernardino County, and I love the effort that everybody’s putting in to help the homeless. I seriously am committed to serving the homeless. They trust the government and they want to trust” that the government will help them, Willingham said. Nevertheless, she questioned whether the county with the ordinance it was contemplating was going to be of any assistance to them.
“In this situation, it’s going to get worse, Willingham said. “It looks like we have to just really seriously think about where we putting our homeless population.”
The system is challenged because the need overwhelms the resources to assist the homeless, with the prospect that the disparity will grow in the future, Willingham said.
“The need is so great and in the years that are going to come, it’s going to be greater because we’re
releasing the children out on the street,” Willingham said. “They have no place to go. They have no place to go. They have no families. They’re laying on the sidewalk, they’re kids, our kids that we love. This is our generation that’s coming up and what are we doing? We’re putting in citations, we’re getting them put in jail. What we’re saying is that they’re homeless and they have to be off the street or else go to jail. Is that the way we want our life to go? Is that what we’re looking for? Is that the kind of future we’re going to have? So we need to really seriously think about the issue, increase the resources where they’re needed, put the money where it’s needed and make housing not only affordable but comfortable.”
Desiree Sanchez, said that instead of criminalizing the county’s homeless population, the board of supervisors should “instead offer permanent housing solutions medical, mental and recovery assistance to our unhoused neighbors struggling every day living outside in over 100 degree temperature.”
Kristen Malabi said, “I am the care management supervisor for the only street medical team here in the Inland Empire. I am with the homeless community every day. Your community of seniors are living in our streets. Your community of disabled are also living in your streets. I see it every day. People don’t want to be there People want to be inside. However, the options for being inside are practically non existent If you have some sort of standard for yourself.”
In this regard Mulabi said, there are businesses and landlords that are exploiting their tenants to the point of violating the law and that no effort to prevent that abuse is being carried out by governmental authorities, who instead are now intent on creating a law to punish the victims of those unscrupulous entrepreneurs who have driven many people into homelessness.
“Your room and boards are charging people $900 a month with four people to a room, claiming that they feed them meals, if you consider a peanut butter and jelly sandwich a meal,” Mulabi said. “You have room and boards that are infested with bed bugs and other things going on that can easily reinfect a patient who is being treated for open wounds, which most of your people are. Cellulitis is a number one thing that we see amongst most of your community not offered affordable housing. And when we say affordable, we mean affordable by percentage of someone’s paycheck, not based off of a standard income. That doesn’t work here. We have vets that only receive $1,100 a month for their service. I’m talking about veterans who have served. They are dying in our streets every day. We are the only medical team that treats here. Please hear us. The housing first model may work for some, but we do not have a mental institution. A lot of your community that people see on the streets confuse [drug] use for actually a mental condition. Please be aware of what’s actually the facts of the community living on the street.”
Alex Beltran said, “I believe that we’re all one layoff or one large medical bill away from being unhoused in these times right now. We all see the rising cost of groceries, obviously housing. Everything is going up, wages are staying the same and it’s hard to keep up. We need real housing solutions. A majority of unhoused people are over 50 seniors that most likely live off Social Security and they can’t keep up. So they end up unhoused and are looking for help and looking for a solution. They’re not trying to break the law and end up incarcerated. We need to help our unhoused neighbors and help our community instead of punishing them just for being poor and not being able to keep up.
Latoya Cipali said she was living on the streets at theage of 13. “If I would have been convicted as a criminal for being homeless during those times, I would have been robbed of my future, robbed of my opportunity to turn my circumstances around. I would have been in the hamster wheel cycle of homelessness, had I been convicted for being homeless. Although I was dealt a bitter hand at [that] my age, not being convicted of homelessness gave me the opportunity to better my situation and overcome it. It gave me the opportunity to have a chance in life. I thank God that not only did I overcome homelessness because everybody doesn’t have that luck, but I’ve also received and completed my college education, ran several businesses, including housing elderly that also were homeless, and I have been blessed to be able to feed our current homeless residents. So, criminalizing me for being homeless would not have been the answer for my future or our current homeless citizens’ future. I oppose agenda item 72 and pray that you would find it in your best interest in doing the same.”
William Cipali, who works as a social services counselor, recounted receiving phone calls from a high school faculty member concerned about the prospect of students being cited, fined and labeled as lawbreakers before they reach adulthood because their families have been reduced to living on the streets.
Living on the streets is bad enough Cipali observed, and county government wants to “throw the factor of criminalizing this too now as well. Are we going to give a record to this child who has nowhere to go, who’s caught, who’s reaching out to their counselor? They don’t have a place to stay. And now we’re going to criminalize that as well. Understand that I receive these phone calls on a daily basis. So, all we’re going to do is basically make it harder for them, for the door to shut for them to receive work, to receive jobs, just to be a normal, abiding citizen.”
Maribel Nunez expressed admiration for the county’s effort to redress the homeless problem, but called upon the board of supervisors to “modify [the ordinance] … in a way that is humane.”
Pastor Sharon Green told the board of supervisors, “Most people don’t choose to live in encampments. There are a number of circumstances that will lead someone to make that choice.” Green questioned whether the county government had the moral authority to throw people in jai for being homeless when it has been uncooperative in efforts to construct or otherwise establish homes and shelters for the dispossessed.
“This county has been an obstruction to the majority of those projects,” she said.
Marcos Orozco said, “I don’t see where criminalizing homelessness equals to solving the problem of homelessness. These people need help. I don’t understand why trying to make these homeless them criminals, by fining them, how that is going to solve the problem? I don’t get where that makes sense.”
Christina Trujillo, who said she was in a state of on-agin, off-again homelessness, was opposed to item 72 “because I’m out there every day doing the same thing everybody else is: trying to survive, trying to get by, trying to get back on my feet. It’s hard when you put things like this in front of us because now there are we’re more barriers we got to go over. We were housed and we were kicked out again. We’re in a motel.”
The voucher she has will expire before September 1. “By the end of this month, we should know if we’re gonna get housed or if we’re gonna end up back in a tent. I just hope that you guys will understand that we are trying our best to get off the streets. We’re doing our best. We’re meeting you guys halfway. We’re not asking for a handout. We’re asking for a hand up to lift us, help us lift ourselves up. And if you guys can make meet us halfway like we’re meeting you guys halfway, that’ll be great. But item 72 is not going to make it easier for us.”
Mario Garcia, who does mutual aid work with the homeless, said “Homeless people are just people just like anyone else. They don’t deserve to be put in this cycle where they’re constantly being put into jail. They’re given vouchers at hotels that then kick them out. These are all very temporary band-aid solutions.”
He called on the board of supervisors to oppose item 72 “as it further criminalizes people that are
just trying to survive on the streets and are in positions that are systemic and aren’t really individualized. No one wakes up in the morning and decides to be homeless. It’s through a series of events that gets them there. And I think further criminalizing these people wouldn’t really solve the
issue, especially when we’re proposing this without any solutions that haven’t been built yet.”
Albert Gutierrez said the ordinance contradicted the board’s state objective of helping the homeless.
“I believe that we forgot about ethics,” he said. “People that have voted for people to be in office voted for people to be a part of the people, right? I believe that we forgot that our neighbors, whether we’re homeless or not, we’ve already experienced hardship.”
He said that county authorities were overestimating the number of people who were homeless because of drug use, and were using the erroneous assumption that drug use is the basis of the homelessness problem to justify throwing everyone without a roof over their heads in jail.
“Do you hear me? I’m talking not about mental issues, drug substance abuse, none of that. There’s a lot of other percentages, you know, of individuals that are willing to come out of where they’re at.”
Fatima Baeza said, “Earlier this year, I started meeting and getting to know some of our neighbors that are unhoused. Hearing about their experiences with the services they are referred to and seeing what they have to go through every day to stay alive is enough for anyone to know that simply criminalizing living outside solves nothing unless the solutions you’re satisfied with are to make this subgroup of people out of sight, out of mind. A greater effort needs to be put into staying in touch with unhoused people needing help.”
That the county offers certain programs to the homeless population does not absolve it of the need to be compassionate with those who destitute.
“When people live on the street, they don’t always have access to a phone that they can contact the services they are referred to with, whether it’s because of their phone getting stolen or not being able to pay a phone bill that month. While accountability is important on both ends of the continuum of care, on one of these ends, there are people struggling to survive, having to split the little money they can get from donations between necessities like food, tarps for heat protection and shelter, personal hygiene items. Making it unlawful for an individual to dwell in the only places they can be in is especially cruel when the alternative being offered are services that do not have a track record of getting the majority of them into permanent housing. Banning encampments won’t get rid of them. It will only lead people back to living on the streets.”
Lorraine Enriquez said, “I think that the board of supervisors should be ashamed of yourself for even considering passing something like this. Back in 2021, you all had to return money to the State of California because you didn’t use the money for homelessness. Shame on you guys. You guys are really quick to support the sheriff’s department with helicopters, but where is the money for the homeless people? Criminalizing homeless will do nothing to help the population find housing and other needed services. Instead, it will force them into an endless cycle of incurring tickets they can’t pay, jail time they don’t deserve. This is really a waste of taxpayer dollars. The real solution to homelessness is building more affordable housing and investing in job training, mental health, drug treatment programs. Hear the people! Hear what we’re saying! Find other solutions and don’t vote yes on this ordinance.
Ashley Dial told the board it needs to hold those who are responsible for the homeless situation to account rather than punish those being victimized by the situation.
“A lot of my neighbors are unfortunately living in tent city because departments are allocating funds and they’re being stolen by corrupt landlords that people are allowing to come into these communities to take advantage of uneducated people. And it’s very unfortunate that homeless people are going to be criminalized.”
Said she is on the brink of being evicted herself because she is having a rough go trying to make her rent payments. “If I did have to relocate temporarily, I would be looked at as a criminal due to me not being able to afford the rent,” she said.
Joaquin Castillejos said, “Every person, no matter background, color, class, anything, deserves the opportunity to live and thrive in their community, and they deserve to have the conditions to do that. Criminalizing our homeless community is not going to put us on a path towards giving them opportunities for a better life, to find homes. That’s not the way we do it. It feels like the county has done a lot of half attempts to address the homeless issues in the past years, and now it’s almost like, ‘Oh, we’re giving up.” This is the solution now – criminalizing the homeless community. There’s solutions that exist, there’s organizations that are doing the work and we should be following their lead. The county should be following their lead, should be getting the guidance from folks who have been doing this work for years on end. There are policy solutions that exist to make sure that people are not pushed out of their homes, like rent freezes or rent caps. And those are the type of solutions we need to make sure that people don’t end up sleeping on the streets, that people don’t end up not being able to afford their rent. You could push people out from their encampments, but where are they going to go? You know, what we really have to think is the next steps after that: How do we solve that issue? Solutions [are what] we should be looking at, not just criminalization and pushing people away and not thinking about what happens next.”
After having heard from no one who supported the provisions contained in item 72 and 14 people who opposed it, there was no give-and-take between the board members or discussion with regard to the issues those opposing it raised. The sole inquiry mad with regard to the proposed ordinance was Board Chairwoman Dawn Rowe’s inquiry as to whether it would be applicable to county flood control property situated on unincorporated county land or within the boundaries of the county’s 22 cities within their city limits and the county’s two incorporated towns and their town limits.
County Counsel Tom Bunton responded to Rowe, stating, “The ordinance applies to the county, so it’s county property. The ordinance would apply in the unincorporated county, not in incorporated cities’ flood control property. My understanding is that the flood control property the county owns sometimes is in the county and sometimes in incorporated cities where this ordinance wouldn’t apply. But the county as a property owner obviously has the right to keep people from trespassing on flood control property that it owns in an incorporated city.”
The board then voted unanimously to adopt Item 72 on the agenda, adding Chapter 9 to the San Bernardino County Code to prohibit camping on public property and obstructing public rights of way.
Elsewhere on the agenda, item 34 called for the submission of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention Program Round 6 grant application to the California Department of Housing and Community Development by both the City of San Bernardino and the San Bernardino County Continuum of Care for funding, in the estimated amount of up to $5,185,585.08, to support regional coordination and provide immediate assistance to people experiencing homelessness in the region and for, separately, funding in the estimated amount of up to $4,855,338.58 to go to San Bernardino County to support regional coordination of homeless services and provide immediate assistance to people experiencing homelessness in the region. The board unanimously approved that application.
According to the 2025 San Bernardino County Point in Time Count conducted in January, there were 3,837 homeless people subsisting throughout the county, 1,201 of them who had no shelter.