Kat MacKay is tired of screams erupting around her at night. She’s tired of the outbreaks of syphilis and stomach flu in the nearby tents, the stench of trash, the rats and mice chewing anything resembling food.

MacKay is one of 300 people living at the biggest homeless camp Sonoma County has ever seen, a mile-long sprawl of tents alongside Highway 12 at the southwest end of Santa Rosa on county parkland. Still, there are two things the 19-year-old likes about the settlement: She can stop hunting for places to sleep, and she has lots of company in her misery.

“This is the only place where they don’t hassle you for being homeless,” she said the other day as she pulled a sodden hoodie over her forehead in a steady downpour near her tent. “But it’s awful out here. It smells bad, it’s not sanitary, it’s not safe. I wish the county would give us a real spot to be in.”

Those anguished sentiments are shared by the village-size encampment’s housed neighbors and nearby shopkeepers as flummoxed city and county officials cast about for solutions to the crisis.

There isn’t enough shelter or low-cost or supportive housing for all those people, and a court injunction says they can’t be forced to move until there is. So after months of watching the camp grow from a dozen people last summer to its gargantuan size today, neighbors are fed up, business owners are irate, and everyone from the Santa Rosa City Council to the county Board of Supervisors feels urgent heat to clean things up.

Police have taken nearly 250 calls for disturbances at the camp since early August, with more than two dozen resulting in arrests on outstanding warrants, but no major crimes have been reported. The most acute complaints come from neighbors who say they are afraid to use the trail, and local business owners who say shoplifting has spiked.

Officials have dispatched regular police patrols and more than 20 county homeless outreach counselors to the camp every day, resulting in about 70 people placed in various types of housing since October. The county also posted a sign at the edge of the camp advising visitors “to use an alternate route.” Meanwhile, homeless advocates have paid for eight portable toilets to be installed at the camp — and increasingly pressured elected officials to resolve the situation.

“We have to get people into shelter, somehow, some way, and fast,” said county Supervisor Shirlee Zane, long a leader on homeless issues. “It’s taking up a beloved trail and preventing people from using it, and the camp has become a safety issue. We can’t wait for months to go by without taking action.”

The board directed county homeless officials last week to present proposals at this Tuesday’s supervisors meeting, and they are expected to include plans to expand shelter beyond the current 880 beds maintained in the county. The biggest emphasis for the long term, though, is expected to be on finding housing or residential rehabilitation spots for the campers.

“People ask me, ‘Can we solve this?’ And I am confident we can,” said Geoffrey Ross, who as head of the county Community Development Commission oversees homelessness efforts. “We know what works. We have been very successful in housing people, and though whatever we do will involve an expansion of shelter, we will be focused on housing.”

The camp has overrun a section of the Joe Rodota Trail, a popular biking and walking path on county park land next to a shopping center. That spot has long had a handful of homeless campers on it, but since August the settlement steadily swelled to its current size — to the surprise of few involved locally with homelessness. It’s just the latest manifestation of 2-year-old problem.

Previously, the biggest homeless encampment in the county was a 150-person sprawl behind a Dollar Tree store about a mile away from the current camp, and it had grown to that size partly because many of the occupants were burned out of their former settlements by the 2017 Wine Country fires. When that camp was dismantled in April 2018, the 75 or so people who didn’t get housing or shelter said they were heading to the trail.

They were stymied at first, because police and park patrols enforced anti-camping laws to quash settlements as roving homeless bands tried to set up outposts in the area. But that changed in August, when a lawsuit filed over the teardown of the Dollar Tree camp resulted in a federal court injunction preventing officials from rousting homeless camps unless they had shelter and storage for campers’ personal belonging.

Word soon spread, and little by little the wandering homeless folks began to settle on wide ribbons of parkland on both sides of the paved part of the trail. County outreach counselors estimate that 60% of campers spent time at the Dollar Tree site before it was swept. There are women fleeing violent boyfriends, ex-cons who have trouble finding work, drug addicts who stumbled out of society, and hard-luck cases who lost jobs.

“Nobody wants to live here long term,” said Reyvon Hill, 39, who wound up at the camp after fleeing an abusive boyfriend and finding no rent she could afford. She gazed up and down the line of soggy, often tattered tents surrounded by piles of bike parts, chairs, couches and more. “The mice were playing football with the stuff here,” she said, pointing to one heap. “I’ve revived four people with Narcan. People look at us and just see homeless, just see mess.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. “We are so much more than that,” Hill said. “You’ve to address a lot of issues out here to help each person individually, but in the meantime we are a community here. We feed each other, help each other. We need jobs, we need a chance, we need to have somewhere better to live than this.”

Housed neighbors say they are desperate to see the campers provided with another, safer place to live.

“We used to ride our bikes on the trail, play there, but we can’t do that anymore,” said Nicole Stephens, who lives nearby with her 4-year-old daughter. “Last week a neighbor had to chase someone away who wouldn’t leave their front door, another neighbor rode his bike on the trail and got beaten up. In the middle of the night I heard a woman screaming about her crack pipe, wanting someone to give it back.

“I have all kinds of sympathy for them, and there’s no easy solution, but unfortunately the city and county will have to provide something for them. This can’t go on like this.”

There is little appetite among county or city officials for simply turning the camp into a sanctioned settlement. A more structured shelter approach is likely, and Santa Rosa Mayor Tom Schwedhelm said housing everyone there who’s willing to move inside will be the biggest emphasis.

That might be a reachable goal. Sonoma County’s homeless population actually grew 4% from 2017 to 2019, to 2,951 people — but Ross pointed out that latest tally is 35% lower than in 2011. Over the past two years, he said, the county has housed 3,100 homeless people, “through two fires and one flood.”

“We can do this, and treat people with the dignity and support that everyone in our community deserves,” he said.

Homeless advocates are also hopeful but skeptical.

“They’ve been sweeping people out of camps for a year and a half in what I call a ‘revolving door of self-perpetuating misery,’ and only stopped because of the injunction,” said Kathleen Finigan, a member of the Homeless Action advocacy group, which helped file the lawsuit resulting in the injunction. “So now, they have to come up with something real. And it won’t be housing right away — that is going to take years to build, and the fire victims are first in line.

“No, they need to supply a safe place to be, where people have proper sanitary services like bathrooms and shower, medical services, case management. I don’t care if it’s tents, their RVs, tiny homes, as long as it’s safe. And it’s best if it’s a smaller community.”

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron