At LAT, "In fighting homeless camp, Irvine's Asians win, but at a cost":
In fighting homeless camp, Irvine's Asians win, but at a cost https://t.co/1yuRFguKhc pic.twitter.com/e7al7CDi8y
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) April 1, 2018
One by one, the buses pulled up to the Orange County Hall of Administration last week carrying posters with messages such as "No Tent City" and "No Homeless in Irvine."Irvine's working with the county to develop some kind of transitional housing, other than that, I don't see much effort or support for policies that will help these people. We're not talking about endless welfare. It's about helping people get cleaned up and healthy. Getting them some place to stay, a safe and dignified place, while helping them transition to long-term residential security.
Many of the hundreds on board were immigrants, and this would be their first experience joining a political protest.
A week earlier, county officials announced that they were considering placing emergency homeless shelters in Irvine as well as in Laguna Niguel and in Huntington Beach. All three cities immediately fought the plan, but the opposition was most fierce in Irvine.
Many of the loudest voices in the movement to block the shelter plan were Chinese Americans who came together through social media apps and various community groups. They were joined by immigrants from South Korea, India, Mexico and the Middle East, along with some whites.
They rallied to protect their community from what they see as the ills of homeless camps, which many argued don't belong in their famously clean, safe, family-oriented planned community. Their protests helped persuade the Orange County Board of Supervisors to overturn the shelter proposal, leaving the county without a homeless plan at a time when the population is growing and officials are shutting down tent cities along the Santa Ana River.
It was a big political victory for the diverse opposition from Irvine. But it also came at a price, with some accusing the residents of intolerance and simply wanting to keep the homeless out of their own cities without offering an alternative solution....
A regional problem, local politics
Officials in Santa Ana, where homeless camps have overwhelmed the Civic Center area, have argued that other communities need to help share the burden. Irvine is now the third-largest city in Orange County, behind Anaheim and Santa Ana. The sweeps of homeless camps along the Santa Ana River began after complaints of filth and crime by residents in the nearby cities of Santa Ana, Anaheim and Fountain Valley.
Lili Graham, a homeless advocate and litigation director for the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, described the Irvine effort as "amazing" but misguided. The proposed shelter site in the city had already been zoned "and determined to be appropriate for emergency shelters," she said.
"It was a loud group, but in a county of 3 million, it's one group. There was a lot of leadership there — and there needs to be a lot of leadership on the county level to solve this issue," she said.
But some Irvine residents said the solution should not include their city.
"They need to put them somewhere, maybe somewhere else in California," resident Angela Liu, who owns a legal services company, told the Board of Supervisors. "I really don't know where they can go. But Irvine is beautiful, and we don't want it to get destroyed."
Her view was far from isolated. Officials and residents in Huntington Beach and Laguna Niguel expressed similar sentiments. U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa) said he joined "the outrage that we are assuming responsibility for homeless people, taking care of their basic needs and elongating their agony."
Still more.
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