One morning in downtown Santa Ana, outreach workers encountered a man sleeping outside a storefront who said he had recently been told to leave Irvine. With no transportation and no connection to local services, he had nowhere to go next. For outreach workers trying to move people from the streets into housing, stories like this are painfully familiar.
When cities clear encampments without housing solutions, people experiencing homelessness don’t disappear. They move. Often, they move to cities like Santa Ana.
Orange County counted more than 7,300 people experiencing homelessness in its most recent Point-in-Time survey, with more than half living unsheltered in cars, tents or other temporary conditions. That crisis spans the entire county, yet responsibility for addressing it is far from evenly shared.
In Irvine, one of Orange County’s wealthiest cities, officials have spent years debating whether to build the city’s first homeless shelter. In 2024, the city council voted to purchase two buildings for what would have become Irvine’s first shelter. But in a dramatic reversal just weeks later, council members canceled the purchase shortly before the deal was finalized, leaving the city without a dedicated shelter facility.
More recently, Irvine entered into an agreement allowing unhoused residents to access available beds at Costa Mesa’s bridge shelter — paying the neighboring city for space when beds are open. While this partnership may provide short-term relief, it also highlights a broader regional problem: cities addressing homelessness through enforcement and relocation rather than building long-term housing infrastructure of their own.
When encampments are cleared without housing placements, people often relocate to cities where services already exist. In Orange County, those services are often concentrated in cities like Santa Ana.
Santa Ana has long invested heavily in outreach teams, emergency shelters and housing navigation programs. These systems are designed to connect people with medical care, mental health treatment, and long-term housing options. But they depend on stability. According to city reports, Santa Ana outreach teams conduct hundreds of contacts with unhoused residents each quarter, connecting individuals to shelter, healthcare and housing programs.
When individuals are displaced from other cities without coordinated referrals or documented service connections, outreach workers must begin again — rebuilding trust, reconnecting people to medication, and re-entering them into housing systems. That instability makes it harder to move people off the streets.
The burden of this fragmented approach falls disproportionately on communities already carrying much of the county’s homelessness response. Santa Ana’s median household income is roughly $85,000, far lower than Irvine’s median income of more than $120,000. Yet cities like Santa Ana often provide many of the services that help people transition out of homelessness.
To be clear, Irvine residents deserve clean parks and safe public spaces. Every city in Orange County faces legitimate concerns about encampments and public safety. But enforcement without housing is not a solution. It is displacement. And displacement shifts responsibility rather than solving the problem. Homelessness is not a municipal issue that can be pushed across city lines. It is a regional crisis requiring coordinated policy solutions.
Cities that enforce encampment removals should also demonstrate adequate shelter capacity or verified housing placements. Regional agreements should ensure that transportation and service referrals are documented so that people do not fall through bureaucratic cracks. And funding models should ensure that cities benefiting from displacement contribute fairly to the housing and outreach systems needed to address homelessness.
Without those safeguards, the current system unintentionally rewards cities that move homelessness out of sight while placing greater pressure on communities already investing in solutions.
Santa Ana has stepped forward to build programs that help people transition from the streets into stability. But solving homelessness will require more than a few cities carrying the burden. It will require shared responsibility across Orange County.
Because homelessness does not disappear when it crosses a city line.
It simply becomes someone else’s problem.
Grace Schwiederek is a Master of Social Work candidate at the University of Southern California. This commentary was written as part of her course Policy and Advocacy in Professional Social Work.
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