Santa Rosa may change laws to deal with homeless

As construction crews make progress on Santa Rosa’s new $12 million central square, downtown businesses leaders have begun openly questioning whether the city can keep the new park from becoming a haven for the homeless.

While the number of homeless in the city is down, their presence has become more visible in public places and business districts because creek cleanup efforts and projects like the construction of the SMART commuter rail line have forced them out of camp sites.

That has city leaders, downtown merchants and others wondering how the city plans to keep the newly reunified Old Courthouse Square, set to open in December, from becoming a place where large numbers of homeless residents congregate.

“We literally have people living here on Fourth Street,” said jeweler Timothy Patrick. “It we don’t do something, that $12 million park is going to become another Prince Memorial Greenway.”

And he doesn’t mean that in a good way, noting the challenge the city has faced in keeping the creek walk crime-and graffiti-free.

Patrick was one of several business leaders who attended a meeting of the City Council’s downtown subcommittee this week to share their thoughts and get an update from the Santa Rosa Homeless Collective that’s brainstorming solutions to the problem.

Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Ryan Corcoran, the head of the city’s downtown enforcement team and a member of the homeless collective, told the committee officers often don’t have the tools to address the homeless issues concerning merchants.

Panhandling, yelling at passers-by, sleeping in the park and even storing large piles of personal property in public places are not against the law, he said.

“People just walking down the street yelling for no reason is one of the biggest detractors downtown,” Corcoran said, citing a recent survey of downtown businesses. “But that isn’t technically a crime.”

Even the storage of personal belongings in a public place, like the man who hangs out and sometimes plays music on a bench in front of Peet’s Coffee on 4th Street, isn’t against the law, Corcoran said, because it’s not blocking pedestrians.

“It’s not illegal to store all of your personal belonging in a planter box in the city of Santa Rosa,” he said.

He noted some cities, like Los Angeles, have robust rules related to homelessness police can enforce, but Santa Rosa doesn’t. And even if it did pass more rules, there is neither the political will, the budget in the District Attorney’s Office nor the interest on the part of judges seeing homeless folks slapped with fines they can’t pay.

The result is that while officers regularly arrest people downtown for penal code violations like fighting, public intoxication or probation violations, many infractions and misdemeanors go unenforced.

“A lot of this nuisance behavior has increased in frequency because there hasn’t been any enforcement related to it,” Corcoran said.

A number of ideas were broached at the meeting this week for how to address the problem. Though preliminary, they include:

Developing a “hot list” of the top 10 or 15 homeless troublemakers and finding ways to give them extra attention or services;

Upgrading some infractions from misdemeanors to increase penalties and allow police to make arrests for behavior observed by witnesses;

Making it illegal to store personal items in public places;

Hiring additional staff in the City Attorney’s Office to prosecute violations of city ordinances;

Invoking Laura’s Law, a state law allowing for court-ordered assisted outpatient treatment for people with mental illness;

Discouraging panhandling by installing special downtown meters providing a way to donate to a program to help homeless people;

Hiring homeless people to clean the downtown area, such as sweeping streets or sidewalks; and

Increasing the number of volunteer police officers who serve as downtown ambassadors.

These and other suggestions highlight a growing awareness that while many homeless benefit from new programs - like Catholic Charities’ Homeless Outreach Service Team and the Palms Inn’s housing for 120 formerly homeless people, for example - others don’t want to change.

“It’s the 10 percent of people who are not interested in services, who are causing 90 percent of the problems,” said Councilman Chris Coursey.

Police Chief Hank Schreeder stressed these and other ideas are, at this point, suggestions of the public-private partnership homeless collective organized by City Councilman Tom Schwedhelm.

Some may never make it out of committee, Schreeder said. And those that do should not be viewed in a vacuum, and wouldn’t be implemented without other strategies aimed at solving the underlying problem.

For example, before the city would pursue new rules against storage of personal property, it also would provide a way to help people find a place to store their belongings. He noted, for example, the city just expanded its Community Homeless Assistance Program to allow private groups, like churches, to offer property storage programs.

But he acknowledged the ideas are coming forward because merchants want to see progress.

“Downtown is definitely frustrated,” Schreeder said.

Jennilynn Holmes, Catholic Charities’ director of shelter and housing services and a member of the homeless collective, said she hopes the recommendations the group ultimately puts forward focus more on long-term solutions than criminalizing homelessness.

Corcoran summed up the fundamental challenges of devising new programs without solving the underlying housing issue.

“We can have the greatest programs on earth, but until we actually have a place for people to go who want to go somewhere, we are not going to be successful with any of the programs,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 707-521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com.