Ban on homeless camping wins Fresno City Council approval

It soon will be illegal for homeless people to camp in tents or lean-to shelters on public or private property across Fresno.

An ordinance by Fresno City Councilman Steve Brandau was approved Thursday by the City Council in a 4-1 vote. Brandau was joined in voting for the measure by Luis Chavez, Clint Olivier and Paul Caprioglio.

Councilwoman Esmeralda Soria voted no. Oliver Baines and Garry Bredefeld were absent.

The new law, titled the Unhealthy and Hazardous Camping Act, must go through a second council vote before it takes effect.

An amendment offered by Chavez and accepted by Brandau would allow someone who goes to jail to be required, as a condition of probation, to go through a social service treatment program and upon completion have the offense and arrest stricken from their record.

The vote came a day after leaders of organizations that support housing for the homeless reported that Fresno’s homeless population rose by nearly 20 percent over the past year. The Point in Time survey, conducted by volunteers for the Fresno Madera Continuum of Care, estimated the city’s homeless at 1,572 people in 2017 – up from 1,319 in 2016.

Brandau said this week that the ordinance was inspired by complaints received by his office and those of his council colleagues from residents and businesses about nuisances, litter and unsanitary conditions created in their neighborhoods by homeless campers.

“We already struggle with poverty in general. We’re already on the thin line here,” Brandau said. “We just can’t let this problem continue to fester.”

Shawn Jenkins, chairman of the Fresno Madera Continuum of Care, said the magnitude of the homeless problem may not be as dramatic as some residents perceive it.

Prior to the breakup of large encampments on the outskirts of downtown near the Poverello House and Fresno Rescue Mission homeless centers, most of the city’s homeless were concentrated in that area, Jenkins told reporters Wednesday when he announced the results of the annual survey.

“When we stopped the encampments, that’s actually had homeless folks go out into other areas of the community,” he said. “So while we’ve had an increase, it’s probably not as large of an increase as the public thinks it is.”

Regardless of perceptions, Brandau said the bulk of the complaints are the result of about 600 people who are resistant to help and who he believes have chosen homelessness and camping as their way of life.

“We have 600 people holding a city of a half-million people hostage,” Brandau said this week. “That’s what I’m responding to.”

The law would make camping on public or private property without the owner’s permission a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine or by up to six months in jail, City Attorney Douglas Sloan said.

Alternately, illegal campers can opt to allow police to take them to MAP Point, a multi-agency clearinghouse for housing, shelter, health and social services based at Poverello House, instead of having their belongings confiscated and being booked into jail.

The idea, Brandau said, is to help residents and businesses by using the law to leverage homeless campers into the network of social services. “We want to get them into MAP Point where a case worker can figure out what is this person’s primary need,” he said.

Public concerns

Several speakers at Thursday’s council meeting, however, said Fresno lacks the resources to make the law practical.

“You can’t force 50 people into a place that only holds three and then criminalize the other 47,” said Christine Springer, who spent six months homeless. She decried the bill as “an afforont to decency, and in my opinion an insult to the intelligence of everybody on this board and everybody in this city.”

Nancy Griesser, who said she volunteers in a Fresno police district office, said MAP Point’s operating hours are limited to weekdays, and not nights and weekends when police officers are likely to be dealing with homeless campers. “It’s futile to give people a choice of jail or go to MAP when (officers) can’t take them to MAP.”

“If you do this, you need to commit resources for MAP to be open” 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Griesser added.

Business support

The Fresno County Farm Bureau submitted a letter to the City Council endorsing Brandau’s proposal. CEO Ryan Jacobsen said the organization’s office near Roeding Park in central Fresno “has experienced a significant increase of campers on our property and on the adjacent city property.”

“We have had our property defaced and damaged by these individuals who refuse to leave the area,” Jacobsen added. “While we understand this ordinance won’t be a solve-all, it will be a tool to help (the) Fresno Police Department combat this issue.”

Mark Capps, a businessman along Abby Street, said his shop was destroyed this week by a fire started by a homeless person. He urged the council to pass the ordinance.

“There are a lot of nice homeless people,” he said, describing his encounters with them as he tried to find out how the fire started. “But there are a lot of dirty ones and scummy ones.”

Questions resources

Don Eskes, CEO of the Fresno Rescue Mission, described the ordinance this week as “a strong encouragement; it’s tough love.”

“It’s a community health issue, with defecation and urination on the streets,” Eskes said. “The whole motivation of this is not to criminalize being homeless in any way. Homelessness is a symptom of a deeper issue most of the time, and we want to get them to a point where they will accept or want services to deal with those other issues.”

Fresno, however, faces limitations in what it can do – especially in housing – for the homeless, Jenkins said. While the city has emergency shelters and transitional housing programs for the homeless, people in those programs are still counted among the homeless because they’re not in permanent, stable housing.

“Nobody ever aspired to be homeless. … It’s a multidimensional problem,” Jenkins said. “You can’t paint every homeless person with the same brush. They are individuals, individual stories, individual reasons.”

Fresno’s unsheltered population – people who have nowhere to go but the streets – is estimated at 1,351, Jenkins said Wednesday when the homeless census was announced. His organization has an inventory of about 600 beds in permanent housing in which to place homeless individuals, “but those are already filled, and on top of that we have another 1,300 homeless,” Jenkins said.

“We don’t lack will,” he said. “We lack resources.”

Since 2009, funding from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development for the Continuum of Care has been stagnant at about $9 million, Jenkins said.

“It hasn’t increased with the population or increased with the need,” he said. “When we see our number for chronic homelessness on the rise, it’s because we weren’t able to house all the people who were homeless last year.”

This story was originally published August 17, 2017 at 9:42 PM with the headline "Ban on homeless camping wins Fresno City Council approval."