Orange County leaders have been facing questions from homeless advocates for months on when they were going to open an emergency shelter for the thousands of homeless residents on the street.
Now – a month into winter – Anaheim is set to receive just over $137,000 from the county to house 50 homeless people spread across a series of local churches with the help of Love Anaheim, a coalition of faith groups and other nonprofits focused on helping the city, according to their website.
“We have an amazing partnership with Love Anaheim to administer the program utilizing several churches spread out throughout the city, hosting between 5-15 beds,” said Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken in a text message. “With the weather turning cold and rainy, this program will fill a service gap that could save lives.”
The shelters will be available from February 1 through April 15 during cold weather and winter storms when the city chooses to activate them.
The shelters are also set aside exclusively for Anaheim residents grappling with homelessness, with a city staff report noting that staff would confirm the homeless residents had ties to Anaheim before transporting them to shelter.
It’s one of the smallest emergency shelter programs ever offered by county leaders, who used to offer up 400 beds in the cities of Santa Ana and Fullerton every year at the National Guard armories.
It also comes after a 2022 report released by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department showed homeless deaths have continuously increased over the past decade, going from just 85 in 2010 to nearly 400 deaths in 2021.
At the same time, housing costs have skyrocketed and scores of residents have been wrestling with evictions.
Nearly 500 homeless people died on the streets in 2022 and 2023, according to Father Dennis Kriz, who tracks the data and posts the names of the dead monthly on Voice of OC’s community opinion page.
Members of Housing is a Human Right OC, a coalition of volunteers from nonprofits focused on ending homelessness, read many of the names of those who died over the past year at Tuesday’s supervisors meeting and asked for more housing vouchers.
“These are some of the people who didn’t get a voucher. These are some of the people who didn’t get housing. And they died while living on the streets because they were neglected by the Board of Supervisors,” said David Duran, one of the coalition’s co-founders.
Kriz also spoke up, noting that the 10 year waiting list for vouchers wasn’t going to save anyone on the streets.
“The mortality rate last year for those without fixed abode was 8.3%, which means in 12 years everybody on that list would be dead,” Kriz said.
But for the last two years, Orange County leaders haven’t had an emergency shelter ready in time for the fall and winter months, leaving thousands without a place to go during heavy rains and cold nights.
Last year, a shelter wasn’t opened until February when Fullerton offered to host it after Santa Ana leaders threatened to sue the county if the shelter was placed in their city again, saying wealthier cities needed to pick up the slack.
[Read: OC Homelessness Policy Lands Back In Court, Santa Ana Stops Opening of County’s Walk-in Shelter]
While the armories in Santa Ana and Fullerton used to hold up to 400 homeless people, neither of those facilities have been discussed this year.
Anaheim entered the discussion after the county’s Commission to End Homelessness, where Anaheim City Manager James Vanderpool sits as a board member, sent a letter to every city in the county asking someone to host the homeless.
Only six cities responded to the letter, according to Doug Becht, director of the county’s care coordination office.
At Tuesday’s board of supervisors meeting, supervisors unanimously approved the funding for the shelter plan in Anaheim, with both county Supervisors Don Wagner and Vicente Sarmiento praising Vanderpool for getting the plan moving.
On Tuesday night, Anaheim City Council members also approved the proposal, praising the churches that offered up space for the homeless, with some hoping the program would continue beyond this year.
“I want to publicly thank the churches who stepped up and offered to provide the space for beds,” said Councilwoman Norma Campos-Kurtz. “You are working hard to find ways to take care of our homeless.”
Editor’s note: Ashleigh Aitken’s father, Wylie Aitken, chairs Voice of OC’s board of directors.