For several decades, a homeless encampment has existed near and under the H Street bridge on the north end of Lompoc. Until the last five years or so, the homeless largely stayed to themselves and didn’t bother anyone.
Now they are everywhere, including the shopping center that occupies the northeast intersection of Central Avenue and H Street. And, in the last couple of years, the once docile homeless population has become emboldened, and they have become a menace to shoppers and business owners in the shopping center.
Not only have they harassed customers, damaged shop owners’ properties, shoplifted, and generally trashed the alleyway behind the center, they also damaged the crops of a farmer who had leased some property from the city across from the airport.
Perhaps it is because of actions by federal courts to allow “camping” in public places and state law changes that encourage people to steal $900 worth of merchandise any time they feel like it. Or is it because of their altered state caused by prolonged drug/alcohol use?
Several shop owners have complained to the City Council, and the farmer stopped leasing the property; something had to be done!
So, the staff and council, unlike the current administration in Washington, D.C., decided that they needed to build a fence to “protect city property.” The theory was that it would allow the farmer to start farming again and hinder the homeless from easy access to the shopping center. No one knows how much the fence cost.
One issue they had to deal with first was the eviction of the homeless. In California an “inhabited dwelling house” can be anything including the makeshift shelters used by the homeless. Originally this definition was applied to burglaries in recreational campgrounds; however, it now includes search warrants and other legal definitions, including evictions of the homeless even though the people occupying the camps don’t pay rent and don’t have ownership rights.
I am told that one of these camps even had a concrete floor, solar power, and potable water storage. This camp was constructed of a good grade of materials, and whoever built it had good construction skills.
The police used up to five officers for several days between Aug. 4 and Sept. 6 to contact and evict 14 homeless people from the riverbed. According to police, most waited until the last possible minute to leave, then they and their belongings were all “relocated” to the homeless camp on Sweeny Road. City solid waste crews and a vegetation clearance contractor spent several days removing tons of trash and vegetation.
The fencing contractor worked for more than a week installing the fence, but it didn’t take long for some upset river camp inhabitants to react to the attempt to exclude them from their river-view homesteads.
Before the fence was complete, someone cut down several of the support poles; just when the damage was done and who did it remain a mystery, but the damage was substantial. And later, others cut holes in the fence to allow them access to the path leading to their campsites. Other “campers” simply moved across H Street to the west, and within a couple of days some started reestablishing their camps where the old ones were once located.
And did the farmer renew his lease to farm the area? Well, no, because the city left large piles of cleanup residue within the fenced area, thus preventing the use of the property for agriculture. And the homeless somehow figured out how to deposit more trash on the property, which is clearly visible from H Street as motorists enter and leave the city. Meanwhile the Fire Department is still responding to numerous encampment fires in the same area.
So, while a fence with sophisticated electronic surveillance systems and several hundred border patrol officers might be effective at the southern border, a simple fence to keep a few homeless misfits out of a farmer’s field and a commercial shopping center in Lompoc isn’t working at all.
Oh well, keep trying. Eventually through trial and error, you’ll come up with a more effective solution.
Ron Fink writes to the Sun from Lompoc. Send a letter for publication to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 15-22, 2022.