Orange County will continue using the two National Guard armories as temporary homeless shelters during the night for another 90 days, a move deemed necessary to meet a federal judge’s wishes to shelter the people displaced from longtime encampments at the Santa Ana River and Santa Ana’s Civic Center.

The California Military Department gave its approval earlier this week to the rare request.

The winter shelter programs at both the Santa Ana and Fullerton armories were scheduled to end Sunday, April 15 with the arrival of warmer weather, as typically happens every year at all 10 armories used as homeless shelters statewide. But county officials asked for another 90 days to continue operating the facilities as a place for homeless people to sleep at night.

Lt. Col. Tom Keegan, the military department’s director of public affairs, said that only once in the past four years, as Southern California homeless populations were dramatically expanding, has a locality asked for longer use of an armory: Pomona was granted an extension for the past winter shelter program.

Pomona, entangled in its own legal issues over homelessness, had hoped to open a year-round emergency shelter and service center by November 2017, but the planned opening of the shelter was pushed to sometime this year.

Armories as shelters

Among the 10 cities where armories are used as winter shelter for homeless people, eight are located in three Southern California counties: Inglewood, Lancaster, Los Angeles and Pomona; Fullerton and Santa Ana; and Ventura. When the winter shelter program began in 1987, 16 armories were used as shelters. That grew to 26 armories in the 1996-97 season, seven of them located in Los Angeles County.

Orange County’s request is driven by concern that existing county-run and county-contracted shelters would not be able to handle a sudden influx of people resulting from recent actions to clear the county’s two largest homeless encampments. Fullerton officials joined the county in supporting an extension of the winter shelter program, as did state Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, who contacted both the National Guard and Gov. Jerry Brown.

Fullerton Mayor Doug Chaffee said he would go beyond the 90 days if possible: “I’d like it to be year round. It’s not like we’re guarding anything there, really.”

But both the Santa Ana and Fullerton armories, where people sleep on mats on the floor, will be off limits to the winter shelter program from Wednesday, April 11, through Sunday because of military needs. The county will do pickups at existing designated spots to transport homeless people each night to the Free Evangelical Church of Fullerton on Brea Boulevard until the armories are again available.

It costs $9,000 a night to operate the program at both armories. The county anticipates the three-month extension will cost $600,000 to $800,000, according to Susan Price, the director of care coordination who began overseeing the county’s planning and execution of homeless services in 2016.

Neither armory in Orange County, which each can sleep around 200 people, has reached capacity on any night this past winter. The Santa Ana peak was 125 on Feb. 27 and Fullerton hit 159 on March 27, according to county figures.

But more homeless people could turn to the armories as the tent encampments disappear, Price said.

The last of 234 homeless people living in tents on the Santa Ana Civic Center’s Plaza of the Flags were relocated on Thursday. A fence now encloses that area.

Some homeless people will not go to placements that require setting goals, seeking treatment for mental health and substance abuse, and creating housing plans. Such requirements can be overwhelming and seem like insurmountable barriers, Price said.

“There’s people that go to the armory that have been homeless for awhile,” she said. “You’ll see them year after year. You don’t see them at the other shelters. What they really want is meals, a warm bed, some human contact.”

Finding shelter

Cities are trying to identify locations for emergency shelter and housing at the behest of U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter, the presiding judge in a civil rights lawsuit over the dismantling of the riverbed encampments.

As motivation, Carter has threatened to suspend anti-camping and trespassing laws that cities use to discourage homeless people from staying in public spaces.

At a court session last week attended by representatives from cities around the county, Carter said he would like to see at least one site in each of the three regional planning areas — south, central and north — that Price has established.

An April 19 meeting of south Orange County mayors to be held in San Clemente is expected to focus on the judge’s call for cities other than Santa Ana and Anaheim to do more in providing shelter and housing for a homeless population estimated in 2017 at more than 4,700 people, at least half of them sleeping outdoor.

The county’s request to extend the armory shelter programs, Price said, “is buying us some time while the cities deliberate in the regional planning areas.”

Carter has expressed concern about overcrowding at the two county-operated shelters, Bridges at Kraemer Place in Anaheim and the Courtyard Transitional Center in Santa Ana, lending an even greater sense of urgency.

The effort to clear the tent encampment at the Plaza of the Flags area in Santa Ana’s Civic Center entered its second week Monday. About 200 people were being moved from in and around the Civic Center mall at the request of Carter, who, as he did at the riverbed, emphasized humane treatment of the people being dislodged.

Staff writer Alicia Robinson contributed to this report.