Nothing says “public order” like turning a blind eye to skyrocketing rents, ignoring the shortage of mental health care, and pretending safe parking and shelters are mythical creatures.
The City of Goleta has gone with the far more “innovative” solution of making it a crime to exist when you’ve got nowhere else to go.
City leaders insist that fining people who live in their cars or camp in public spaces will somehow “connect” them to services.
I am typically aligned with the City Council’s efforts to support individuals experiencing homelessness. But let’s be clear: you can’t fine someone into stability, and you can’t punish people out of poverty.
What this policy really does is deepen despair, push people further from help, and shift the visible crisis from one neighborhood to the next.
Under this new system, anyone who declines an offered sheltered bed or service faces escalating fines of $100, $200 and then $500.
For people already struggling to survive on low incomes, those penalties are absurd.
People living in their car aren’t going to magically produce hundreds of dollars for the city. They’re instead going to sink deeper into debt, lose their cars and be left even more vulnerable.
Even worse, enforcement will be complaint driven, meaning the city is deputizing frustration.
Residents who don’t like seeing homelessness in their community can trigger enforcement with a phone call to “men with guns.”
It’s a system that comforts people who already have housing, not for those who don’t. It replaces compassion with controlled punishment.
The policy also strips away what little dignity people have left. Encampment residents now have just 48 hours to vacate, and the city has slashed the threshold for storing belongings to $50 from $100.
Medications, identification and family photographs — the delicate lifelines that connect them to a distant hope they pray to one day reclaim — can be cast aside with barely a ripple of consequence.
This isn’t governance, it’s cruelty in procedural form.
California’s own service-first model rejects this approach for good reason: criminalization doesn’t work.
Cities that have tried ticketing, towing and displacement have only churned misery from one block to another.
A good pathway out of homelessness is through housing, outreach and sustained support, not citations and threats.
If Goleta really wants to be helpful, maybe the city could try treating people like human beings instead of slapping them with consequences because of their ZIP code.
The city’s new citation policy fails to help homelessness, it simply hides it — at the cost of our shared humanity.
“Strategic planning” is not simply rolling the dice and crossing your fingers.
What could go wrong?