“Anywhere But Here”: Understanding the Influence of Antihomeless Coalitions on Street-Level Bureaucratic Discretion and Judicial Nullification

Street-Level Bureaucracy

Three important components of street-level bureaucratic theory are (1) the use of discretion, (2) supply versus demand of services, and (3) the dilemmas that street-level bureaucrats encounter in the field. In this study, focus is placed on discretion and its effect on homelessness policy. Street-level bureaucratic discretion serves an important purpose, and it is essential to the work of government and the everyday state. Street-level bureaucrats are charged with providing direct service to citizens often needing a quick turnaround to solve everyday problems that influence public health, public safety, and other important issues. This decision-making ability is what translates abstract legal text that exists as “nothing but paper” into policy outcomes (Pressman and Wildavsky 1973). Discretion is the freedom to make decisions or have latitude of choice (Vinzant and Crothers 1998). Street-level bureaucrats are often forced to make decisions concerning problems brought to them by the citizenry and since these decisions cannot be expeditiously reviewed by supervisors, street-level bureaucrats exercise enormous discretion, which can lead to over and/or underenforcement of policies (Coslovsky 2016). However, because of the magnitude of the issues they encounter in the field, this discretion is vital to the day-to-day work of the government. In homelessness services and enforcement, these discretionary decisions often determine whether a person is able to access basic needs like food or medical assistance.

The second component of street-level bureaucratic theory is demand. In his study of how prosecutors and public defenders enforce urban planning regulations, Coslovsky observed that because demand is so much greater than their supply, bureaucrats are forced to “ration their services” as it relates to discretion (Coslovsky 2016). This is certainly a challenge in providing services to the unhoused, as the need for services always exceeds the budgets. This leads to different coping strategies on the part of bureaucrats in order to be able to get work done, for example, by coming up with routines or “rules-of-thumb” that are used as simplification devices (Feldman 1992). These can include some negative simplification devices, such as stereotyping, classification, discrimination, morality judgments, and ideologies (Baumgartner 2015; Handler 1992).

Dilemmas constitute another component that affects discretion, determining who does and does not get latitude or service from street-level bureaucrats. Lipsky has referred to this as “creaming,” a process in which street-level bureaucrats favor those they believe will be successful (Lipsky 1980). Common examples in homelessness service delivery are social workers who aid or recommend only those they deem “worthy” or “deserving” of assistance programs. Still, street-level bureaucracy theory also emphasizes that these frontline workers are working under extreme restrictions. In this context, institutions “bear down” on them, often creating conflicts between their desire to help clients, the needs of clients, and the demands of the institution. These in turn compel such bureaucrats to use their discretion to negotiate ongoing tension (Watkins-Hayes 2009).

Discretion, demand, dilemmas, and the way in which bureaucrats negotiate them have remarkable effects on the policy outcomes for individuals and policy more broadly. As Lipsky has explained, “[s]treet-level bureaucrats make policy in two related respects. They exercise wide discretion in decisions about citizens with whom they interact. Then, when taken in concert, their individual actions add up to agency behavior” (Lipsky 1980). In essence, whatever street-level bureaucrats decide to implement based on their discretion is the agency's policy—regardless of whether it is intended by those who wrote that policy. In other words, discretion at the street level is the reason that formal policy is not always delivered as expected by policy makers. This is a well-studied phenomenon; however, very little research has looked at when politicians and others take advantage of it to ensure a policy is implemented in a particular way or not implemented at all, resulting in the on-the-ground or local nullification of policy via street-level bureaucratic discretion.

Judicial Nullification at the Street Level

The concept of judicial nullification, or simply nullification, in legal scholarship holds that states have the right and obligation to declare federal law null and void if that law is unconstitutional. Therefore, under the theory of nullification, each state is sovereign and can determine if federal acts, judicial decisions, executive orders, and treaties are constitutional and can decide not to implement them within their borders (Read and Allen 2012). Nullification happens at all levels of government, from juries that nullify laws, state agencies that refuse to implement federal or state law, school boards that find ways to bring religion or politics into the classroom, and street-level bureaucrats that let bias influence the way they administer entitlement programs.

And even though we can observe it at multiple levels, nullification is widely characterized as a “discredited” concept (Fritz 2013), a “repudiated doctrine” (Read and Allen 2012), and an antiquated idea of the Civil War-era South (Jeffries 2001). This is in large part due to the Supreme Court decision in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), which ruled that a state may not nullify a decision of the Supreme Court. Specifically, the court ruled that Arkansas had to abide by the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). At the time of the ruling, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka encountered such resistance that several Southern states sought to nullify the ruling within their borders (Bartley 1999). However, this has not stopped states from attempting to use the principle to resist federal policy that they do not agree with. After the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), for example, many states have refused to repeal their outdated laws banning gay marriage, and in some cases, street-level bureaucrats like Texas Justice of the Peace Dianne Hensley have used their discretion to refuse to marry same-sex couples (Moreau 2020).

Historically, nullification has been used by supporters of all political ideologies to attempt to undermine the power of the court. The most notable example on the right is that of the resistance to Brown v. Board in the late 1950s (Read and Allen 2012). On the left, the examples most often cited include abolitionist resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and, more recently, the Sanctuary movement, which began in the early 1980s to provide shelter and resources for Central American refugees (Simonis 2019). In 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) with their ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), progressive states quickly began efforts to resist the ruling. While critics of nullification argue that it is a discredited theory, the reality is that these efforts at the legislative level have historically enabled states to subvert federal law and deny or allow citizen’s rights.

In this way, judicial nullification by state legislative entities is well understood by researchers and advocates. As recently documented by Herring in regard to the Right to Rest Acts in states such as California, Colorado, and Oregon, homelessness advocates often attempt to nullify local antihomeless ordinances by moving these struggles from local governments into state legislatures (Herring 2020). As we will see, this strategy is also effective when struggles are moved into the federal arena, such as federal district courts. This is what happened with Martin v. Boise (2019), a decision that legally prohibited local governmental entities from enforcing ordinances that ban public camping unless they first provide enough shelter beds to house every person experiencing homelessness within their jurisdiction. What is not well understood, however, is how nullification can happen on the ground through the negative application of street-level bureaucratic discretion without the involvement of state legislatures or the courts.

Scholars who work closely with policy delivery to unhoused people at the street level have identified how negative application of discretion has the potential to undermine cases like Martin (Alden 2015). According to Rankin, undermining Martin could deny individuals of the fundamental constitutional rights the decision sought to protect (Rankin 2021). This study analyzes these aspects of the power of street-level bureaucratic discretion, an issue that has remained relatively unexplored but is especially relevant in a post-Trump political environment. This environment has emboldened pressure from antihomelessness activists who display a strongly negative social response and resistance to unwanted development and services, and as I will show, it affects discretionary actions by street-level bureaucrats which result in the circumvention of official government policy by nonenforcement and creates an impediment to the delivery of intended services.

Social Response and Resistance to Unwanted Development

For decades, scholars have named and described different social responses and resistance to unwanted development. It is unclear where some of these terms come from, but they have been used by planners and scholars dating back to the 1980s, when—according to some accounts, such as William Safire's article in the Christian Science Monitor—pronuclear activist Walton Rodger coined the term “not in my back yard,” now better recognized by its acronym NIMBY (Safire 2008). In this same vein, others like urban planner Frank Popper (1981) coined the term “locally unwanted land use,” also known as LULU (Popper 1981). Many similar terms have entered the planning lexicon since, including “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone” (BANANA), “citizens against virtually everything” (CAVEs), “not in anybody's backyard” (NIABY), “not in my term of office” (NIMTOO), and “not on planet earth” (NOPE) (Schively 2007). More recently, the term “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) has also been introduced by prodevelopment activists (Lake 1993).

NIMBYism displays follow a familiar pattern. As Deirdre Oakley writes:

NIMBY tactics tend to exhibit certain regularities. During the initial stage, a vocal minority living within the vicinity of the proposed site expresses its concern about the project. Generally, they mask their true intentions of exclusion through a rhetoric of seemingly innocuous reasoning: inadequate level of public services to support another facility, preserving the neighborhood's historic character, and ensuring orderly development (Oakley 2002).

This study shows how these dynamics work on the ground in tandem with legal and policy frameworks of service delivery. It examines how, taken together, they affect the discretion of street-level bureaucrats and their delivery of services to unhoused people such that homelessness continues to be criminalized in a policy landscape where, theoretically, it should not.

Martin v. City of Boise

The issues addressed here became especially important when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision in Martin v. City of Boise (2019), leaving intact the Ninth Circuit's decision of September 4, 2018. As noted above, the Martin decision prohibited governmental entities from enforcing ordinances that ban and criminalize public camping unless they first provide enough shelter beds to house everyone experiencing homelessness within their jurisdiction. In the incident that catalyzed the case, local law enforcement cited Robert Martin for resting outside a shelter in Boise, Idaho; a court found him guilty at trial and fined him $150. Martin and other plaintiffs successfully argued the two city ordinances that banned sleeping and camping on public property violated their Eighth Amendment rights, “criminalizing them for carrying out basic bodily functions” (Harvard Law Review 2019). While Martin remains the law of the Ninth Circuit, whose jurisdiction includes California, the Martin framework prohibits making homelessness illegal when there are no housing alternatives and compels local governmental entities and their street-level bureaucrats to proceed accordingly as they shape and implement their governance of the unhoused.

The twenty amici briefs filed in support of the City of Boise argued in favor of discretion at the level of local government. Notably, the amici brief filed by the California State Association of Counties and thirty-three California cities argued in favor of the need for local governments to preserve flexibility and discretion as an important element of a multidimensional, “creative, and effective” response to the homelessness crisis. This includes the use of police powers and the criminalization of the unhoused for lacking shelter and often having no other option but to rest, sleep, or camp in a public space. Similarly, to make the case for discretion, the amici brief of the California Sheriffs’ Association, California Police Chiefs’ Association, and California Peace Officers’ Association offers an ominous portrait of the homeless with whom law enforcement has daily contact. Supporting local municipalities in their role of regulating health, safety, and welfare, these police associations view their professionals as the most directly impacted public sector servants since they have frequent contact with the unhoused. They consider the Martin decision an impediment to the exercise of core officer functions, including the ability to make on-the-scene decisions about citing individuals for basic health and safety law violations. They urge restoring their flexibility to make enforcement decisions without review or sanctions. The Martin decision's restrictions on law enforcement are designed to reduce the role of cops as the primary street-level bureaucrats engaging with the unhoused and to make more significant the role of other street-level bureaucrats, such as nonprofit workers, by compelling cities to provide shelters for all their unhoused residents. This move hopefully averts what Forrest Stuart has called “therapeutic policing” in his ethnography of the 50-square-block area adjacent to Los Angeles's downtown neighborhood, Skid Row. According to Stuart, therapeutic policing results in harassment and incarceration rather than rehabilitation (Stuart 2016).

As the U.S. housing market excludes more individuals, a growing segment of the population ends up in precarious housing arrangements. When local government becomes involved, street-level bureaucrats become the frontline. As scholars have noted, most studies on homelessness focus directly on federal neoliberal policy and its effects on a larger scale. Consequentially, these accounts fail to show the effects on and of local policy. As Stacey Murphy has stated, “the neoliberal devolution of the responsibility of managing homelessness to the local level shifts the site of policy production to the sociopolitical context of the city” (Murphy 2009). This means that local governments have been simultaneously forced to reform their welfare and poverty assistance programs and take on the responsibility for alleviating it. Cities have responded by assembling “localized networks of social service, housing, and medical providers [that] comprise a critical, and understudied, site of local poverty management interventions, particularly because their policy and programmatic imperatives often diverge considerably from the primary tenets of neoliberalism” (Murphy 2009).

By focusing on the localized networks of social services, this article demonstrates that enforcement and criminalization of the unhoused in Orange County, California, are highly influenced by local political dynamics and ideology, both of which shape the discretionary decision-making processes of frontline actors. This argument resonates with that of Rahim Kurwa, who noted in his study of Section 8 recipients in California's Antelope Valley that “the criminalization of poverty […] can […] be enforced by local residents, a privatized version of the street-level bureaucrats who hold so much control and decision-making power” (Kurwa 2018). In the case presented here, a highly vocal antihomeless coalition of “concerned citizens” in Beach City has a disproportionate impact on homelessness policy and service delivery. These concerned citizens mobilize police, whose role was intended to be reduced through Martin, and restore their high enforcement roles through increased reporting of “criminal activity” (sometimes legitimate and sometimes questionable), along with the intimidation of nonprofit workers and other members of their local community who may not agree with them but do not wish to become the target of their discreditation efforts. As suggested by a local police officer I interviewed, “…there is a population [local residents] that calls just out of an unjustified and unnecessary fear” (interview with the author).

In a context where nonprofits have become key street-level bureaucrats of homeless policy service delivery, local resistance stands to interfere with their ability to assist unhoused residents. In fact, as Christopher Herring has recently found, in San Francisco, in large part due to Martin, criminalization has increased when the city has opened shelters in an area because they also increase policing near these services in order to satisfy local elected officials and the surrounding communities (Herring 2021). In Beach City, because of local political dynamics and municipal pressure, there is excessive enforcement of minor infractions such as jaywalking, violating parking laws, having property in parks, being on train platforms without a ticket, smoking cigarettes on the beach, and littering. In this way, the city has continued to criminalize the homeless without having to abide by the ruling in Martin and provide adequate alternatives.

Local Elected Officials

Pressure on Traditional Street-Level Bureaucrats. Local politics and, more specifically, local politicians play a significant role in the way that local bureaucrats choose to do their jobs. Both traditional and new street-level bureaucrats experience pressure from the antihomeless coalition. For example, local law enforcement receives a high volume of calls for service concerning homeless individuals who are not engaged in any obvious criminal activity but rather are being reported based on their status. This has been going on for a long time and even prompted the Chief of Police Services to state at a City Council meeting back in 2017 that “homelessness is not a crime” yet “unfortunately some people can’t accept that, but it's just a state of where some people are at” (Presentation at City Council Meeting, February 21, 2017). The unhoused population in Beach City is generally well-versed in local politics. While the average resident of a generic city in the county might be unsure who represents them on their local council, many unhoused residents in Beach City know every member of the city council and can tell you their position on the issue of homelessness. For example, Winston, an African-American man in his thirties who has been homeless in the area for about five years, points out just how much energy the council puts into criminalizing the unhoused. In an interview, Winston noted that “…every single week they [the council] spent at least half of the agenda of the city council meeting talking about homelessness…and were making laws every, every two weeks […] and…[…] making new laws to affect less than 1% of […] the population” (interview with the author). A review of City Council meetings shows that Winston is not wrong in his assertion. Of the fifty-seven meetings reviewed, at least forty-one included official discussions of homelessness issues, whether it was in the form of a “homelessness update,” a report from the contracted outreach nonprofit, or a discussion of the homelessness taskforce. The item was always present. The other sixteen meetings included a call to the audience for comments about homelessness, even though the subject was not an official item on the agenda.

Jimmy, a man who lives in his car in an alley and sells items he finds online, told me about the time one of the local sheriff's deputies impounded his car for being past due on his registration. Jimmy described that he knew his registration was coming due and had even spoken with the deputy about his plan to get the money to pay for it through his recycling collection. Jimmy was $70 short on the day he needed to renew, and he even showed it to the officer. The officer decided to impound the vehicle anyway, causing Jimmy to have to come up with $800 almost overnight to get his vehicle and his home out of the impound. Jimmy explained that he believed that “she [deputy] was purposely working for the city council and she thought she was getting brownie points for kissing ass…to the city council and trying to get rid of one more homeless person, one more eyesore or high homeless person” (interview with the author). This perception came from the fact that Jimmy was very aware of what the deputies heard from the council, if not directly, at least through their comments to the local newspaper and through statements at local meetings. Jimmy has attended city council meetings and, along with Winston, has even addressed them directly during call to the audience. They were not the only ones who saw the council as involved in creating the conditions for their despair. In fact, according to some unhoused residents, the members of the council were directly involved in harassment that extended beyond passing ordinances to drive them out. For example, Teresa, a local unhoused woman, described that, “there's the guy that got into city council… he comes around and yells and calls us names and everything else” (interview with the author).

Pressure on New Street-Level Bureaucrats. The unhoused population is not the only one who sees the actions of the council as direct attacks. Local nonprofit sector workers, or what I have been terming new street-level bureaucrats, recognize these actions as well. The pressure they experience is twofold. On the one hand, they have to worry about their organizations losing contracts that the council can vote on directly. This influence is something that is apparent even to the local unhoused population. In some instances, these actions have direct effects on the services provided by these workers to community members even without ordinances mandating the change. For instance, as seen in the anticamping ordinance passed by the council in 2018, fire risk is often cited as a reason to banish the unhoused from being outside. This became an issue when a local nonprofit food pantry was forced to stop providing the homeless with perishables such as uncooked meat. Mike, a veteran who works as a case manager for the nonprofit told me that the mandate was issued so as “to reduce the amount of trash, especially [because of] the fires in the canyons” (interview with the author). The reasoning was that because the unhoused do not have access to refrigerators or kitchens, they would dispose of the perishable food that they cannot cook. While trash certainly exacerbates wildfires and wildfires are a risk throughout California, there were no documented fires that prompted this change; the city council simply stated it as a reason for attempting to limit the amount of perishable food given to the unhoused.

Mike and his group are not the only ones changing their assistance to the homeless because of the actions of the council. While Mike's group changed their services willingly, Bonny's group did not have a similar experience. Bonny is a retired resident of Beach City. Since retiring she has been working with her church in their homeless ministry. Her church is a registered nonprofit and receives small amounts of funding from the city for several of its programs. Bonny shared that a while back, they “were doing full meals in the park for anyone that showed up. And we'd get 30 people, and we'd provide […] hygiene kits and […] clothing and all kinds of supplies were readily available, and we would take orders and fundraise to meet them.” Bonny continued that, “the city council after several years at that, shut us down […] they threatened […] a lawsuit and […] to send police” (interview with the author). Whether there was a legal basis behind the threats did not matter because it had the intended effect of scaring them into stopping their actions. Similarly, Jeremy, who runs a bible study group at the beach for his nonprofit, explained that he and the unhoused participants of the bible study have been “kicked out” of almost every public space in town by the council. Regarding an exchange he had with a sheriff's deputy, Jeremy shared with me, “I was told by one of the officers…, ‘you're making my job harder, they’re [city council] telling me to get you out of here…so you got to find someplace else and it's not legal for you here” (interview with the author). Jeremy asked the officer where it was legal to stay: “He [the officer] was telling me that every place I went, he was told to remove me. They put signs up on the train platform not because of the homeless people sleeping there, mostly […] to get us out of there doing bible study” (interview with the author). These interactions show how local elected officials work to banish the homeless regardless of what they are doing, and as these conversations show, local street-level bureaucrats are highly influenced by such efforts and become complicit in the agenda of banishment regardless of whether they have the actual authority to do so. They threaten both nonprofit volunteers and employees and the unhoused, which has the consequence of excluding them from essential and all other spaces.

However, local street-level bureaucrats are also influenced by the second group of significant actors: the concerned citizens. It is noteworthy that there is some crossover within these groups and that, in the last two elections, the concerned citizen coalition has put forth successful candidates for council. One of these candidates, who is now in his second term on the council and has taken a strong antihomeless position, caused a minor controversy within activist circles when he stated in an email that his “primary concern is the protection of those who pay taxes in this city. With that goes the need to start reducing and ultimately eliminating the presence of those who are living on our streets and in our canyons” (emphasis added by the author; email with the author). In late 2019, after the city closed an encampment on a city lot, the then mayor was questioned by the local newspaper about how the city would stop additional encampments from forming. The mayor's response was that two ordinances passed by the council on the same day as they voted to close the camp would stop this from happening. One of the ordinances designated the train platforms at the train stations as “ticket-required areas” while the other mandated the use of two-sided tents that provide unobstructed views of the interior. It is curious that the mayor would choose to go on record with the newspaper with such a statement, considering that the council made it a point to claim that the intention of these ordinances was not to target the homeless, presumably for legal purposes related to Martin, but that rather they applied to every resident in the city.

Concerned Citizens. While elected officials are writing and passing ordinances that directly influence how street-level bureaucrats perform their duties, the second set of actors affect the unhoused more indirectly. This group has a powerful effect on the actions of local politicians and influences how those at the street level choose to enforce policy on the ground. The unhoused individuals I interviewed often spoke about the “concerned citizens” that terrorize and harass them. Jonathan, a young millennial who grew up in Beach City and whose parents and sisters often drive by his hangout to check on him, told me about the “people [who] drive by […] slow […] scoping it out like you’re being watched kinda thing, you know slowly, or they’ll throw rocks at cars” (interview with the author). Jonathan explained that they threw rocks at cars doubling as shelter, which can be recognized because they are bursting at the seams with the possessions of unhoused people who pack their whole lives into their cars. Similarly, Nathanial, a Navy veteran, described a similar situation to a local television news crew that was set up at the Beach, stating that concerned citizens have “burned a hole in my umbrella and my tent, they’ve driven by, throwing things at us from eggs to great big washers.” ⁵

These concerned citizens are very active at the local levels of government and, as noted above, have been successful in helping elect several city council members in the last few years. They are highly organized and attend city council meetings often and are regular commenters during call to the audience. In addition, they are known to use the interactions they have with the unhoused as reasons to push the council for punitive ordinances. This group of individuals is known for taking pictures of and harassing Beach City's unhoused population. For example, Danielle, who has lived in Beach City since she was 13 years old, after her mother left town without her during one of her stints in juvenile hall. Danielle told me about an altercation she had with a city council member and his friend. The council member “was down here talking his shit and I grabbed his shirt…he had the camera, like, in my face, and I got arrested for assault and battery” (interview with the author). Danielle is still dealing with legal actions from this incident. In a highly publicized event in the city, a woman was attacked by an unhoused man after she approached his tent and began filming. This event appropriately resulted in community concern for the woman who was attacked. However, it did not spur an equally appropriate conversation about the right of unhoused folks to privacy and their right to refuse to be filmed.

Many of these incidents, the back-and-forth from community members, and organizing efforts can be seen on social media. One of the more controversial groups is a closed group that focuses on “crime and safety.” In order to join the group, one has to answer a series of questions and be approved by administrators. The questions include the following: “Do you live in Beach City? What are your thoughts on an emergency shelter? Permanent supportive housing? Who are your friends in this group? What do you wish to get out of this forum? And how will you be an active participant in addressing crime and safety?” (Facebook group post 2020). Taken together, these questions suggest that the group sees crime and safety as directly connected to emergency shelter and permanent supportive housing. Local activists and supporters of a shelter and permanent supportive housing also get harassed online. Brandon, a local volunteer and formerly homeless person, has experienced this firsthand. As a single father, Brandon has previously had his children accompany him as he attempts to help the local homeless residents of Beach City. This has resulted in concerned citizens recording him and posting the video on social media alleging that he was buying drugs. Eventually, someone called Child Protective Services on him based on this incident.

In a different incident, Felice, a well-known volunteer who is a professional social worker and has previously served as a street-level bureaucrat for a local nonprofit, has had her picture shared online and tagged as an “enabler” because of her work helping feed local unhoused residents. The treatment these volunteers receive also creates a chilling effect that prevents other community members from expressing their opinions on the issue. Even if they would be agreeable to supporting a shelter, they do not dare express that to their neighbors, who might be members of the concerned citizen coalition, for fear of social repercussions. Jenna, who is also a local nonprofit and church volunteer and who has only recently become involved after forging a relationship with Teresa, described an incident at a local city council meeting where she accompanied Felice to disseminate information:

…we wanted to give information to—to our county taskforce and we had our t-shirts, to distinguish us. And there were people there yelling, ‘Felice, go home.’ Are you freaking kidding me?…I mean, she wasn't even talking out loud, she was just there with flyers and… and stuff, and they're like, ‘Felice, go home. Felice, go home’ (interview with the author).

As with elected officials, it is not only the unhoused who are making these connections. Doug and his wife Karen, who have lived in Beach City for 13 years, are retired and run a daily meal program in the neighboring city that many unhoused residents of Beach City attend. The program has been controversial and demonized by several coastal cities. Doug and Karen told me that:

one of the head sheriffs spoke to our men's group [at] church. And he said, it takes two of my deputies off the street to drive all the way up to Santa Ana to house them couple hours up there, a couple of hours, you know, that kind of stuff. He said, ‘We just don’t have the manpower to do that,’ and when we spoke about the proposed shelter, he continued that, ‘It's the old NIMBY thing, you know, everybody wants the problem to go away, but they don’t want to do anything […] in their neighborhood. They want to ship them all out to the Inland Empire’ (interview with the author).

Historically, coalitions of local business and community leaders in Beach City have had success in getting their will passed through the council. A prominent example is the opposition to a proposed toll road extension that would have passed through several beach cities in South Orange County. There is a large crossover between the members of these groups and those who oppose solutions for the unhoused community in Beach City. The organizing infrastructure that the groups have built in their opposition to the toll road has been useful and successful in mobilizing for other efforts as well. For example, the same group has also mobilized to oppose a proposed shelter and the development of permanent supportive housing in the city. In addition, this dynamic has allowed for punitive ordinances to be put in place. Examples of this include highly restrictive parking rules that target areas where unhoused individuals are known to park their vehicles overnight and funding for antihomeless hostile architecture and landscaping in public areas. These dynamics have remained unchecked in the city for years. In 2018, a settlement in the Catholic Worker case, a lawsuit brought by Orange County Catholic Worker an unincorporated association against Orange County, limited many Orange County cities from enforcing anticamping and loitering laws until there were an appropriate number of shelter beds provided in the South SPA. However, mayors from South Orange County cities responded to this simply by asking to be able to transport their unhoused population to North and Central SPA shelters, citing empty beds in those areas (Gerda 2020). In June of 2019, Judge David O. Carter, who is tasked with overseeing the Catholic Worker case, was removed from overseeing the case for five South Orange County cities because he could be perceived to be biased based on statements he has made in the past. The case for these cities was reassigned to Judge Percy Anderson, who has since dismissed the lawsuit, stating that a single lawsuit could not encompass the five cities and that, therefore, individual lawsuits had to be filed for each.

So, even though under Martin, Beach City is prohibited from criminalizing homelessness and required to provide shelter before enforcing anticamping and loitering laws, under city pressure, sheriffs and code enforcement overenforce everything else, including the minor infractions listed above, e.g., smoking cigarettes on the beach or littering. While in the field, I learned of such overenforcement on an almost daily basis. Examples include when Jimmy's car and Teresa's RV were impounded for unpaid parking tickets, when Kiddo who is an unhoused youth who aged out of foster care was arrested after being searched five times in one day, and when Kevin a newcomer to Beach City was accosted by police for jaywalking. In light of this enforcement pattern, I argue that the city has continued to criminalize homelessness without having to abide by the ruling in Martin and provide adequate alternatives, thereby nullifying the ruling altogether. This has created a situation where the highly coordinated antihomeless concerned citizen coalition has continued to be successful in eliminating existing services for the homeless as well as stalling any development of a shelter or facility that would provide services to the homeless residents of Beach City. As a case in point, Beach City has refused to consider one local nonprofit organization's offer of land and $1,000,000 to assist in the building of a homeless shelter. The offer was made officially by an attorney representing the nonprofit at a Beach City council meeting. The council declined the offer and has moved to try to take the land from the organization through eminent domain, claiming that the land is needed for open space. This move is largely seen in the community by opponents and supporters of a shelter as a move to try to stop such development.

Interpretation

The dynamics observed in Beach City suggest that local middle-class and high-income residents have a major influence on local politics—specifically, on the issues of development and homelessness. Also, these residents are significantly influencing the discretion of street-level bureaucrats. The fieldwork conducted for this study suggests that a highly vocal antihomeless coalition of “concerned citizens” representing the business community and homeowners pressure local elected officials, some of whom are homeowners and local business elites themselves, and the elected officials directly and indirectly pressure street-level bureaucrats to perform their duties in a particularly punitive way. This pressure is multitiered, with some being overt, such as the local resident who shows up to council meetings with a machete, or online harassment of local officials after they vote in any way that can be interpreted as “prohomeless.” Some of this pressure is more covert and traditional political pressure: local businesses and residents donating money to hire the local political communications firm to run hit pieces during election years against those seen as soft on homelessness. The street-level bureaucrats also understand the local political dynamics so well that they take exceptionally informed, if potentially biased, actions that they believe to be consistent with the local political environment, out of fear of repercussions to themselves or their organization's contract with the city.

As I have discussed, the antihomeless concerned citizen coalition has been successful in halting any action concerning the development of a shelter or facility aimed at providing services to homeless residents. However, they have also been effective at eroding the services already provided to this population. Members of the coalition personally harass outreach workers and volunteers while also putting pressure on the council to defund programs they view as problematic. The harassment experienced by local volunteers is easily seen online. In some instances, members of the coalition have fabricated controversies to encourage the council to act in their favor. For instance, a purported rat infestation near the city's train tracks was found to have been fabricated to make it appear that the presence of the homeless was creating unsanitary conditions. The Orange County Mosquito and Vector Control District found that the rats were domesticated and, therefore, not the result of homeless people in the area. While no one was ever identified as having released the rats, local unhoused folks and advocates largely believe this to be the actions of members of the concerned citizen's coalition. This points to a trend found in the data regarding the social response and resistance to unwanted development and services related to homelessness (e.g., emergency homeless shelter, permanent supportive housing, and day center).

Limitations and Future Research

This study had several limitations that in future studies could be eliminated or at least mitigated. First, fieldwork for this study began in February 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic forced Orange County to shut down in March of that year. This forced me to reevaluate many of my methods. For example, instead of in-person interviews, most of my interviews were conducted over the phone. Also, many observations were conducted online; for example, city council and community meetings were held on Zoom and streamed on YouTube. The transition was not too challenging because I was already embedded within the housing justice movement in Orange County and knew many of the individuals that I would eventually interview. The shutdown forced me to not only rely on interviews and observations but also on government documents available online. Ultimately, this made the data richer and provided an illuminating context for the study.

The findings in this study show the effects of local political dynamics and ideology on the discretionary actions of street-level bureaucrats who respond to homelessness. I arrived at these findings by interviewing unhoused residents of Beach City and the street-level bureaucrats that interface with them. In the future, a study that focuses solely on the perceptions of street-level bureaucrats and how they see themselves and legitimize their actions would further inform the scholarly literature on the criminalization of homelessness in the United States.