In the Wide Open and Desolate ARTIC, Can Orange County Find Overnight Haven for the Homeless?

By
Greg Diamond
– December 31, 2014Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice

ARTIC protestors lying down 4

Most of Orange Juice Blog’s local readers, I’m going to guess, have homes — so the worst thing that was likely to have happened to them during last night’s storm and cold snap would have been if their power went out.  And then, so long as they had walls and windows and a roof, they would still be in better shape than this county’s unsheltered homeless.  I both wonder if any of them didn’t make it through the night — and whether, if they didn’t, it would even make the news.

By coincidence, this morning I happened to come across some photos posted by Anaheim activist Mark Daniels, taken of a protest (including a lie-down protest at various moments) against police misconduct in the public space at Anaheim’s new ARTIC train/bus/bicycle station.  Wait, check that — I’m resolving in 2015 not to call these rallies “against” anything, but FOR police accountability.  (Ideally, police are also for police accountability — and if not then they probably shouldn’t be given the power to police our communities.)

But that’s not the story I want to tell today.  I’m going to show you some of Mark’s photos of this protest rally, and you tell me if you notice anything unusual.  Hint: it’s not the signs; you’ve seen those in these virtual pages before.

ARTIC protestors lying down 3

ARTIC protestors lying down 1

ARTIC protestors lying down 2

What strikes me is the ROOM!  Just LOOK at all that room!

Orange County is looking for places to keep the homeless alive.  (At least, I presume that we are.  If not, what exactly is our plan for them?)  And ARTIC — not during the daytime, when it will (supposedly) be busy, but at night, at least from 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. — is a place that could keep them out of the elements.

Frankly, with news that both the financial protections and the frequency of travel projections were probably highly overblown, Anaheim’s “Regional Transportation Imtermodal Center” may not be doing a whole lot else.  But perhaps it will someday, and if and when it does — when an overnight homeless community cannot readily co-exist with a large commuter travel community — then a different solution would be required.  But it was county transportation money, city officials often remind us, that went into building ARTIC, and isn’t it fitting that ARTIC serve a purpose that meets one of Orange County’s greatest needs?

It may help if you think of ARTIC as being more than one facility.  “Daytime ARTIC” will (hopefully) turn out to be useful for travelers and “Evening ARTIC” will hopefully be useful for the restaurants that are being booked into it in a mad dash to make up lost revenues.  But “Overnight ARTIC” — that’s just sitting there radiating heat into the atmosphere.

Several good things about using ARTIC as an overnight shelter may not occur to you right away:

  1. Sanitation.  Yes, these may be a greater need for bathrooms — but bathrooms, which can include portable toilets, are a small part of the total price.  And remember, these people are excreting solid and liquid waste anyway — so the benefit here is that the County can have them doing it someplace with a working sewer connection.  That’s good, right?  “But what about the smell?”, I sense some of you muttering.  Good point!  Perhaps there should be showers and laundry facilities set up as well.  Are we as a county going to be better off, or worse off, if our homeless are well-showered and able to wear clean clothes?  Use of ARTIC overnight would certainly make things easier for churches and other charities — barbers and hairdressers, anyone? —  that wanted to serve the needs of the homeless.
  2. Isolation.  What we hear over and over again, whenever we consider placing a homeless shelter in this or that neighborhood, is that the neighbors are up in arms against it, that it will destroy their property values, etc.  Well, nobody lives right near the ARTIC station!  So long as the presence of large numbers of homeless can be segregated — both physically and chronologically — from most travelers, no one is really put out.
  3. Transportation.  This is supposed to be Orange County’s transportation hub, right?  Well, it seems to me that Anaheim would be doing its part for the county simply by hosting it.  (The rest of the county, in my opinion, should be willing to defray the costs of its operation and maintenance.)  And, frankly, compared to downtown Santa Ana and Downtown Fullerton, this is not really going to be a great place for the homeless to stay all day.  But given its location, it would be an excellent place to take the homeless from and to.  Santa Ana and Fullerton, both of which currently host a lot of homeless both day and night, could fulfill their obligations to the rest of the County by being drop-off and pick-up points for the homeless commuting to ARTIC.  If other cities — Orange, Garden Grove, others further away (yes, including Brea) — wanted to discharge their responsibilities to the homeless with their actions rather than their taxes, they could do that as well.  I doubt that Newport Beach, Villa Park, Yorba Linda, or Rancho Santa Margarita — anti-tax as they are — would be clamoring to host homeless during the day in lieu of funding their larger neighbors doing so.  They want insulation from the homelessness problem?  Well, then they can bloody well pay for it.  It would be better than what we have now!
  4. Convection.  Yes, as is “heating.”  Being in a space with lots of other people during the overnight hours will naturally tend to heat it up.  (Each of us is, after all, in essence an almost 100-degree water bottle.)  Having a bunch of people in one place is one of the best ways to keep them warm.  In the summer, many homeless may not want to stay there — but I would guess that most homeless families would prefer indoor to outdoor accommodations.  Even if air conditioning ARTIC on summer nights half to way to shopping mall temperature would be cost effective — presuming, once again, that we do want our fellow human beings to go on living.
  5. Education, Rehabilitation, and Other Service Administration.  If we want to take children to and from school, if we want people to be able to get to doctor’s appointments, rehabilitation appointments, and social service administration appointments, including, let’s recall, Veterans’ benefits.  (By the way, if you’re wondering who’s going to be able to provide security in ARTIC under such a program — how about hiring the homeless vets?)  Frankly, we don’t want them living in remote bushes and riverbanks unless that’s truly what they prefer.  Remember, many of these are families who would otherwise be living in their cars — if they have cars, and fuel, and the good fortune not to be hounded away by local police.  A large and centralized overnight facility would make it easier for us not to treat the unfortunate among us like trash.
  6. Humiliation — or rather the lack of it.  For the homeless — again, especially families — who can “clean up well,” being able to be based in such a space may well leave them in a condition where they would not be readily distinguishable from other travelers moving through ARTIC.  (In fact, they might look a lot better than some of the air travelers.)  ARTIC might be a place where people can maintain their dignity — and, especially for those with children, that is a very very good thing to offer them.  Furthermore, much of the costs of maintenance — such as laundering and replacing bedding, washing off portable cots to ward off unwanted creatures, etc. — are things that the homeless themselves could be paid for nominally.  Giving a bunch of people $10 a day to make things work — or even chits for the lower-tier local eateries there that would enjoy turning a guaranteed profit — would pump money into the local economy a lot more effectively than the dubious plans that have routinely gotten approved in Anaheim in recent years.

Now here’s the big question: am I really freaking serious about any of this?  I don’t entirely know.  I expect that some people would laugh at it — but those people, I suspect, really have no answer to the question “where should the poor and homeless go?”  It would be easy to, with a laugh and a sneer, rule out this part-time use of ARTIC as easily as most other plans for serving the homeless have been ruled out.  I’d ask that it be judged not by the standard of “is this something Orange Countians would positively LIKE to do?” — as with most any service program for the poor, it probably isn’t — but by the standard of “if we’re serious about these problems, how does this stack up against our other options?”

That judgment requires us to be honest with ourselves about a few things.  First of all, ARTIC is a failure.  Maybe someday — if High Speed Rail does somehow get built and includes Anaheim — it won’t be, but a happy ending where ARTIC proves to have been worth the huge investment (that instead might have gone towards fixing a pothole near you) seems more and more remote.  The justification for building a huge new electronic billboard to bring in more money — especially if you scratch down through the surface of the explanation, which most Orange Countians (or even Anaheimers) as yet have not — testifies that the critics of the ARTIC boondoggle were right, that “Pringle’s Folly” would turn out to be a money pit.

That, basically, is the starting point from which to analyze this proposal.  It ARTIC just going to be — I don’t know how better to put this — “a mostly empty shell,” or will the space be put to work to serve Orange County’s real and serious needs?  It may have been built as a vanity project to fulfill a pipe dream, but at some point — and why not now? — we have to accept that that dream has ended.  But as the Rolling Stones reminded us, while “you can’t always get what you want,” it’s also true that “if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.”

And an overnight haven for the homeless is something that Orange County really needs.  Perhaps this “place without people” can become a kind of home for people without a place.

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)