Citations for feeding people in parks. Arrests for sleeping in public. Jagged landscaping that makes it impossible for anyone to find a place to rest.

These are just some of the steps cities in San Diego County and elsewhere have taken against homeless people.

The actions are commonly condemned by homeless advocates who see them as criminalizing homelessness. But they also demonstrate how cities face the challenge of protecting property owners while also helping their most vulnerable citizens.

Most recently, El Cajon had a public relations nightmare when about a dozen people were arrested Jan. 14, the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, for violating a city ordinance against feeding people at Wells Park.


“Right now, a lot of people are screaming about how we hate the homeless, and I patently disagree,” said El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells.

While the arrests were condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties, Wells was not dissuaded.

“If this comes back to me again, I’d do the same thing,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Wells said the city was not trying to keep food away from hungry people — there are numerous places in El Cajon that provide free food to the needy — but was trying to protect them from a hepatitis A outbreak that was killing homeless people.


This was far from the first controversy involving a local city’s efforts to enforce laws about homelessness.

San Diego has been sued at least three times for laws targeting the homeless, with one suit still pending.

In Oceanside last year, the city considered but did not adopt a law that would have prohibited anyone from sitting or lying on a downtown public sidewalk during business hours.

Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project in San Francisco, said the proposed law was similar to ones many cities try to enact, with varying degrees of success.


“They’re actually very consistent,” he said about laws that cities adopt. “These laws, like no feeding, they travel from city to city.”

The research and coordinating group works with organizations in California, Colorado and Oregon, and Boden said interviews with 1,600 homeless people found the three top criminal offenses they’ve faced were sleeping, sitting and standing still.

Working with the UC Berkeley School of Law in 2015, the organization researched 82 California cities, including San Diego, and found 820 different laws and more than 1,000 municipal codes having to do with food sharing, camping, sitting, standing still and other actions. There were 106 different laws just about sleeping in cars, he said.

San Diego had five laws against standing, sitting or resting, four against sleeping, camping and lodging and five against begging and panhandling.


Oceanside had 15 laws and 19 restrictions about homeless, more than any other city in San Diego County on the list, which also included Carlsbad, Chula Vista and Escondido.

The National Law Center on Homeless and Poverty also tracks trends in laws targeting homelessness.

“We’ve found a really graphic rise in ordinances targeting homelessness,” said senior attorney Tristia Bauman with the Washington, D.C.- based organization.

Of the 180 cities the organization tracks, 6 percent have some type of food-sharing ban, she said.


The center’s Housing Not Handcuffs report from 2016 found 32 percent of cities surveyed prohibit loitering city-wide and 54 percent prohibited it in specific places. Twenty-seven percent prohibit panhandling city-wide and 61 percent prohibit it in specific places.

Bauman said cities also have used hostile landscaping to keep homeless away from certain areas, including in San Diego, where jagged rocks were placed below an overpass in 2016.

Officials in Spokane, Wash., installed boulders to keep homeless people from sleeping in a park and Santa Cruz set up a “mosquito box” that emitted a sound intended to keep homeless people away from an area.

While federal courts have ruled against some laws about homelessness — panhandling was found to be a protected form of free speech — David Loy, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties, said other laws about homelessness can stand because they address types of unacceptable behavior.


As an example, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that loitering itself is not a crime, but cities can have laws about loitering with intent to commit a crime, he said.

While laws that target homeless people may look cruel, sometimes they have the support of homeless advocates. For example, service providers in San Diego and other places discourage bringing food to homeless people on the street because, they say, the outdoor meals keep them away from services that can give them long-term help.

Some city actions also come in response to demands from constituents. In San Diego, the jagged rocks installed below an overpass came after Sherman Heights residents complained that they felt unsafe walking through a homeless camp to get to downtown.

The mayor of El Cajon said he hears constituents’ complaints about homeless people every day.


“I spend at least an hour a day with people saying, ‘Why don’t you do something about this?’” he said. “I explain to them that there’s just so much you can do.”

While El Cajon was blasted for what some saw as a cruel act, Wells said the city does more to help the homeless than any other city per capita in the region, including serving 500,000 a meals annually at the East County Transitional Living Center.

The feeding ban was temporary and will be lifted when the county declares the hepatitis A crisis over, he said, and it was put in place because groups were serving food in a park where homeless people defecate, which could spread the disease.

Wells said activists exploited the city’s actions for their own gain, creating a misperception of what he said was an act intended to protect homeless people.


“If you’re an elected official, you have to understand that you have to protect everybody,” he said. “That includes people with alternative lifestyles who can’t find a home. I think the way to deal with them is always compassion. We’re not arresting people for being homeless, but we have to have some rules.”


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gary.warth@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @GaryWarthUT


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