Anonymous
A homeless encampment near downtown Santa Barbara train station (Photo: John Palminteri / file photo)
Source: City of Santa Barbara
Over the last two years, an interagency partnership has led to the successful clean-up of 93 unauthorized encampments on city streets, freeway on/off ramps, and railway areas in order to address the public health, safety, and access concerns encampments pose to the community. City Departments are leading the effort in coordination with California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and Union Pacific Railroad.
In an effort to meet growing encampment clean-up needs, the City has taken three new steps to improve and expand its services:
1. Added 50k in funding for fiscal year 2020.
2. Identified chronically inhabited areas and developed a systematic clean-up schedule to address these locations.
3. Implemented two new options for reporting of encampments through its Illegal Encampment Clean-Up Request Web Form at santabarbaraca.gov/encampment and the Illegal Encampment Clean-Up Request Hotline at 805-564-5558.
Encampment clean-up requests made through the new web form or hotline will be logged, assessed, and dispatched according to size and threat to public health and safety. Requests made for clean-up locations that are not under the City of Santa Barbara’s jurisdiction will be forwarded to the corresponding agency responsible for that location.
Social services to those in need of housing are provided through the City’s Community Development Department. For more information on those services, contact Laura Dubbels, Housing and Human Services Manager.
New Reporting Options:
- Illegal Encampment Clean-Up Request Web Form: santabarbaraca.gov/encampment
- Illegal Encampment Clean-Up Request Hotline: 805-564-5558
This was not needed. City officials are quite aware of the locations of these camps but have failed to do anything. This just allows them to say “nobody reported it so we didn’t know”. Another layer of paperwork delay added to avoid doing their jobs.
Watch KEYT News tonight. Palminteri interviewed activist near the location of the fire on Bath Street exit. Learn the truth that Murrillo does not want you to know.
Just an excuse to hire more people for the city. It’s not as though these camps are secret or hidden.
Be careful taking photos. Make sure you’re doing it on the sly. It would only take one off-his/her nut to go on the attack and put you in some serious danger physically.
Please extend to include Goleta, Carp, and coastal south SB county. Das? Laura?
Just like the SF Snap Crap App……. lets us feel like we are doing something. But the police know very well where the encampments are, and by requiring a phone number on the form they take away the option of anonymous reporting.
Santa Barbara isn’t the only place experiencing increases in the transient population.
In Austin, TX, the city recently allowed camping on city streets. Within a month the problem of people setting up camp sites on sidewalks & parks, sleeping on the streets & street gutters, relieving themselves (1&2) on the sidewalks & gutters, and having sex on the sidewalks has increased tremendously ever since the camp anywhere edict came down from city council. I’m guessing transients from other areas heard about Austin’s open camping edict and are coming in to town. Begging is common at all street corners (was bad before the camp anywhere edict). Violence between the transients is also increasing.
The city is now facing backlash from tax payers and businesses are considering moving out of downtown Austin because it is affecting customer traffic. In a month period, downtown Austin has gone from prime real estate to questionable. Reversing this degradation of the downtown area will take years, perhaps decades with the namby-pamby city council that is in charge.
City council is responsible for the homeless mess. Hold them accountable. Vote each of them out as soon as feasible. Replace them with others better equipped to run the city.
I follow Edhat to see how the other half lives … It is far better to read about all the problems on the East side than actually still live there. I have not had the cops visit me in 7 years but I saw them at least weekly dealing with my meth dealing neighbor on Punta Gorda … oh the memories !
That 50 K aien’t going to last long….
why not just post the camps on an online map rather than require a call or formal report- oh that right, they are not interested in solving the problem, they just want to make it look good and get some additional $$
You and your attitude are a threat to civil society. Help clean up the town by moving away. There are people who would be happy to help you move along.
Great idea! Charge ’em rent! I love it!
As far as humaneness, SB is verrry generous with the miscreants as well as the unfortunate. One alternative would be to put some of them up in your private back yard. Oh the humanity….
I’m sure glad I left S.B. 7 years ago before the homeless camps exploded.
I have never seen a homeless camp in Shasta county, although we must have some ?
Why do liberal cities have so many homeless camps they can’t do anything about ??
I’d really like to see the city do something about the homeless that our ruining our beautiful parks and beaches. If the city is concerned about tourism $ that should be at the top of the agenda.
Law enforcement is the most expensive item in our city budget, bar none except for disguised employee pension payments. At least 50% of police time is spent weakly trying to manage vagrants, drugs and alcohol calls. There will be plenty of money in the city budget once we get rid of the vagrants, along with their drug and alcohol abuses. $50K is just seed money – taking our expensive law enforcement time that now just holds open a revolving door instead of actively eliminating this blight is the best city budget investment we can make. Do not even think about setting up illegal camps within our city limits. Not going to happen.
There is voter will to spend even more money to permanently rid this city of the vagrancy take-over. Not one more inch of our city public spaces will be passively surrendered to vagrants ever again. They have taken over our parks, streets, open spaces, downtown, tourism attractions and transportation right aways. Voters are done. No more coddling of this growing blight that has now spread everywhere due to enabling politicians. They will be thrown out in the next election..
Not sure SEA DOG probably the same reason people continue to follow local news blogs for places they left 7 years ago. The world is a weird and wonderful place.
This is a step in the right direction. I used to live in Portland and it has changed dramatically after their misguided mayor let the homeless camp one year and then the word got out and it’s never been the same since. If Santa Barbara lacks funding to really keep after this, I’d be happy to contribute to a non-profit dedicated to working with the city to keep our city safer and cleaner. Anyone know of one? I know “Heal the Ocean” does some work in this area.
Don’t know if it is a non profit or not but there are skinhead groups out there who go after homeless people. They certainly would be happy to help you get these threats to city tidiness and cleanliness out of our town.
This is such a waste of time and resources. Midair nailed it. All this does is pass the buck and adds to the ever growing list of local officials who are inept and incapable of their duties. Just watch this play out. The city will gather the data, and then requests a $500k budget increase to hire a consultant to tell them what they should do… And here I was thinking that the city’s massive number of employees actually have eyeballs and can write and use their own devices to note the location of these cesspools of humanity. Dumb me! I guess all those people working for the city, out and about, are not capable of seeing what we all see everyday so instead we have to augment their jobs, pay them overtime and ultimately listen to their excuses as to why they are not able to do anything related to their duties… Forget that. Just send the locations and the demands directly to Murillo. Since she is a “hands-on” leader, maybe she’d actually do something and get off her lazy butt and go clean up her town. No. Not a chance. She’ll just attend another luncheon, ignore the problem and continue planning her next election… Worst mayor ever. Cathy you really suck. If you really cared about SB you would resign.
Where do you get your “facts”? Yes the police (and fire) are the major city budget item (and, their retirement is the major share of the city pension obligation) but who knows how much of their time is spent as you describe and who knows how much of these calls are homeless derived. The city has encouraged drunk zone tourism and managing impact of the bars and restaurants in the lower State Street and Funk Zone is reportedly the major use of police resources over the years. And, what you you have to say about the private use of city sidewalks by bars and restaurants? How is that different than the private use of these spaces by the needy? If we want fewer poor people in public view we need to offer them alternatives which are more humane.
There are homeless camps in Anchorage during the winter months. We will always have the poor among us.
Homeless encampments. Hmmm. These are people with names and backgrounds and histories, people made in the image of God. We talk of them as deplorable things. They are deserving of dignity and value. There go I except by the grace of God.
Regarding the comment, perhaps now deleted, perhaps not, ” there are skinhead groups out there who go after homeless people. They certainly would be happy to help you…” if they are implying violence then the likely escalation might lead to consequences you might not like. First they came for the gypsies, then next in line are journalists, “the Jews”, and didn’t we fight a world war against this entire attitude of middle class violence against itererant poor? Not to mention our own civil war which included a check against the confederacy with its local yokel attitude toward “Yankee carpetbaggers”. Well, it is up to Edhat whether to delete that comment, they might just delete my comment, neither, or both. But what goes around comes around. Now that we have attacks on the Press, called “fake news” similar to how they had been called “lugenpresse [lying press]” I find it odd that Edhat has deleted my comments whenever even vaguely critical of its comment board policies, and yet it has not yet deleted the thinly-veiled encouragement of skinhead harassment of the homeless.
It’s kinda hard to remember that when one of them walks up to you pulls a knife on you and threatens to kill you if you don’t give up your cash, and yes that happened to me right out front. I see your point and I think of them as Brothers and Sisters from other Mothers that doesn’t mean they cannot be an ash hole.
@8:48 are you being sarcastic/cynical or are you seriously promoting violence against homeless people?
maybe you would feel desperate, too, if you were in their position. Ash holes are not confined to certain groups.
No one said they didn’t have problems, feel desperate, and insecure. That comes with not having a safe place to reside. As for “ash hole”s, you can find them anywhere. . . look at politics.
9:51. Myhonorstudent, et al: My comment about “skinheads” was in response to this post: ” If Santa Barbara lacks funding to really keep after this, I’d be happy to contribute to a non-profit dedicated to working with the city to keep our city safer and cleaner.” The comment is a form of sarcasm known as “hyperbole”. If anyone is promoting Nazi like behavior it is this form of coded language urging action against a group deemed undesirable by the burghers.
What is absolutely shocking is the fact that they are willing to put so much effort energy and resources into this temporary patch job well completely ignoring the underlying actual problem which is the fact that homelessness in this area is so rampant to begin with.
In the long run, it would be far cheaper to permanently house the homeless in tiny homes on a designated piece of land permanently then it would to continuously payout for programs such as this to clean up the area which again just moves them from one spot to the next, paying for their ongoing medical bills as a direct result of living outside in the elements, incarcerating them, or having them babies. At homeless shelters that exist currently which are frankly inefficient in terms of Rehabilitation and unnecessarily micromanaged.
This is why the US has the highest rate of homelessness of any civilized country and why European tourists are always completely shocked and baffled by the fact that we actually have homeless people here.
Ask any one of the Irish students that come here every year oh, and they will quickly tell you they’ve never seen a homeless person in their life before they came here. What does that really say?
SOCIALSEO – where do you figure we should permanently house the homeless here? Are you aware of some free property large enough to house the hundreds or thousands of local homeless we have?
This is silly. The City and Police know where the encampments are – as they always have. They just did a citywide count of the homeless a few months ago. They know where to find them.
@Facto- The cops hands are tied- They work in a City that is uber liberal. The City Attorney , County District Attorney and their Staff, City Administrator and Mayor are all AFRAID of the ACLU threatening the City with ridiculous lawsuits. I say bring it on. Take back the City. Let Cops do their jobs. How is it that a vagrant can literally “set up a camp “with a tent and rock boundaries right off the bike path on East Beach and get away with it…? If a local family (with an income and roots to the area) decided to “camp” for the weekend on East Beach, they would be ticketed, fined and thrown off the beach…
Do you understand what the term drug addict means? It means they are addicted to drugs and can’t make rational decisions any longer. They are not making decisions based on less stress in their lives. Yes some services are being offered to some people, but I bet that there are not enough resources to offer services to everyone that could use them. Just take a look at the really long waiting list for Section 8 housing! And those people are trying to stay engaged in the system.
I agree! Also, look at the dude in the tent. He looks like he’s in his 30s, why the hell cant he get a job?
Sadly, they’ll just get re-elected as long as they support taxpayer money giveaway to the unions. That’s what got us into this mess and will continue to keep us here.
PITMIX. Please stop condoning these peoples’ life choices. No-one forced them to take drugs or drink to excess.
Watch “Seattle Is Dying” then you’ll understand everything.
PITMIX. They don’t have enough services for everyone because not everyone will accept the help? Why would you create enough transitional housing for 1000 people when only maybe 100, if even that many will accept it.
What kind of help do you want them to receive? They can get drug addiction help, mental health services, job placement programs, and transitional housing until they can get back on their feet and rent their own place. If by help you mean give them free permanent apartments, free money so they can buy drugs with and continue to live their same lifestyle but just in a house, then you’re not helping them. You’re enabling them.
I’m glad Mother Teresa didn’t have the same attitude that many display here. She dug in and got the work done. And she lived to a ripe old age. Maybe attitude has a lot to do with this situation.
Watch “The Advocates” and you’ll understand everything.
The extremists posting on this site make homelessness sound so lucrative and appealing that they are probably encouraging a bunch of people to give it a go. Free rent! Free food! Free medical care! No set hours! No problems with cops! Very appealing lifestyle choice, apparently.
They are not “homeless”. They are squatters on other peoples property. They choose to live this way.
It doesn’t sound lucrative to me or you, but it must be to drug addicts who don’t want any responsibility in their lives. It’s definitely less stressful than waking up every morning to go to work, pay rent or mortgage every month, bills, and keeping your house clean so it doesn’t get condemned. If it wasn’t lucrative don’t you think these people would accept the help that is offered to them?