The Brief

In 2019, Orange County settled a years-long legal battle that marked a turning point in the way the county addresses homelessness. In the years since, there has been significant progress on the number of shelter beds and standards of care at those shelters. But those signs of progress are accompanied by more troubling indicators.

The shift started in 2017 when county officials sought to clear out a large homeless encampment that had become a health hazard and an embarrassment for public officials. Advocates for people experiencing homelessness sued, arguing that because of a dearth of shelter beds — and appropriate beds for people with disabilities — there was no place that people experiencing homelessness could sleep without violating the law.

The result: What's come to be known as the Catholic Worker settlement (Orange County Catholic Worker was one of the plaintiffs), which is actually a group of similar settlements involving more than a dozen O.C. cities.

Four years later:

• People sleeping on public property have to be assessed by outreach workers and offered appropriate shelter before law enforcement can enforce anti-camping rules. 
• There are more emergency shelter beds. But often with more restrictions on who can use them. 
• Shelters have to adhere to standards of care and there's an appeal process when disputes arise. 
• There's more permanent supportive housing. But not nearly enough to meet demand. 
• Federal emergency housing vouchers have helped fill the need for affordable housing. They expire in 2030. 
• There are no longer massive encampments in places like the Santa Ana riverbed. But there are still more than 3,000 people without shelter on any given night, many of them in encampments that are more hidden and, advocates say, likely more dangerous. 
• The number of unhoused people dying annually in Orange County has more than doubled in the last five years — to some 500 people last year.

The pre-pandemic lawsuits that led to many of these changes are similar to ones currently playing out in Los Angeles. LAist talked to officials, lawyers, homeless service providers, and people experiencing homelessness in Orange County about what's unfolded over the past several years.

From riverbed encampment to permanent housing: One woman's long journey

Kathy Schuler was living in a tent next to the Santa Ana River channel in central Orange County when I met her in early 2017. Eventually, an estimated 800 to 1,500 people ended up in the sprawling encampment, including Schuler's adult son and daughter.

It stretched for about two miles behind Angel Stadium and the Honda Center. Advocates sued each time county officials tried to clear the encampment.

[Read: The Court Case That Forced OC To Stop Ignoring Its Homeless]

During a survey of the encampment in April 2017 with Judge David Carter — the same federal judge who oversees several big cases on homelessness in L.A. — Schuler showed off the homey details of her tent, including a framed photograph of her with her kids and their bevy of dogs. The area in front of Schuler's tent was neatly swept and decorated with potted plants.

Kathy Schuler in front of her tent next to the Santa Ana riverbed in central Orange County in 2017.

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The following year, in February 2018, Schuler and everyone else in the encampment were told they had to leave. The county promised motel vouchers and help finding permanent housing as part of a deal between advocates and county officials brokered under Judge Carter's watch.

A line of people experiencing homelessness at the Santa Ana riverbed.

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On a sunny February morning, Schuler and her encampment neighbors packed up their things and waited for buses to take them to their assigned bed.

Six years later … 

I visited Schuler, now 66, and her dog Freeway this spring in their one-bedroom apartment in Tustin, where they've lived since 2021. The apartment is in a breezy, well-kept complex.

Schuler's walls are covered with jigsaw puzzles she's finished and mounted. Her patio is filled with plants, including a few she's been caring for since her time at the riverbed encampment.

Kathy Schuler and her dog, Freeway, in their patio in Tustin.

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What she likes most about her apartment: "Mine," she giggled, a smile spreading across her face. "Mine."

But it took Schuler more than three years of shuffling through motels and shelters to get her apartment, and only with a lot of help from advocates.

"How long is it gonna take?" Schuler remembers thinking on many occasions. "I'm glad I had people helping me out that know what's going on, you know," she said. "Because I had no clue."

Schuler's adult son and daughter still don't have permanent housing. Her daughter lives in a motel that's been converted into interim housing, part of Project Homekey. Her son and his girlfriend live in their vehicle, Schuler said.

Carol Sobel, a lawyer who's been involved in many of O.C. and L.A.'s most consequential cases on homelessness, said Schuler's too-long road to housing is "not a success."

"How many years to get them stability?" she asked of Schuler and other plaintiffs in the riverbed eviction case. "It is a constant battle."

What the data shows

There is some evidence of positive changes around homelessness in Orange County. There are also much more somber signs.

Point-in-time

The latest point-in-time count, from 2022, found nearly 17% fewer people experiencing homelessness on a given night compared to the previous count in 2019. Still, there are more than 3,000 people who sleep outside or in their vehicles with no shelter.

The 2022 count also revealed stark disparities: The share of the unhoused population identifying as Black or Native American was much higher than their percentage of O.C.'s total population.

Additionally, the percentage of the unhoused population considered chronically homeless (for more than a year) rose from 19% in 2017 to 42% in 2022.

Housing inventory

The county's inventory of short- and long-term housing available for people experiencing homelessness has increased substantially since 2017, according to annual data submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Orange County "Housing Inventory Count" for people experiencing homelessness, 2016-2023.

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The county has added close to 1,000 emergency and transitional shelter beds to its inventory since 2017.

Available rapid rehousing, which provides short-term rental assistance, and permanent housing have both doubled since 2017, according to county data. Much of this increase is thanks to emergency housing vouchers provided by the federal government as part of the pandemic-induced American Rescue Plan.

Funding for those extra vouchers runs out in 2030.

People living off of Beach Boulevard in Garden Grove regroup during a break in the rain and after a raid on the encampment that periodically sprouts up here.

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Despite these gains, a recent county report shows the county has failed, year after year, to build enough permanent supportive housing for chronically unhoused individuals, despite pledges to do so in Carter's courtroom. And there's no improvement in sight, by the county's own estimates, given the steep rise in construction costs in recent years.

In 2018, the county projected this type of housing with built-in social services would cost $344,444 per unit. The report notes that the real, average cost per unit of developments funded between 2018 and 2022 was nearly 45% more — $497,570.

"If current development cost trends continue, it is projected that the average per unit cost for supportive/affordable housing in Orange County will be approximately $550,000," the report reads. Nearly 60% of that total is construction costs.

In the absence of permanent housing, homeless service providers told LAist that people are staying in emergency shelters much longer than intended. Data show the average length of stay in shelters here is more than five months. The data also show that more people return to homelessness after a shelter stay than move on to permanent housing.

Deaths of people 'without fixed abode'

Perhaps the starkest contrast to O.C.'s improvements in addressing homelessness comes from a committee convened by the sheriff's department to review deaths of unhoused people. The committee's report, released earlier this year, found that deaths doubled between 2017 and 2021. They've only increased since then — to some 500 people last year.

COVID-19 seemed to claim a relatively small number of the deceased — 17 people in 2021, according to the report. The main causes of death were drug overdoses — especially fentanyl — heart disease, and getting hit by a vehicle.

[Read: The Explosion In Unhoused People Dying From Fentanyl And Meth Is A Wake-Up Call For LA, Service Workers Say]

In defense of the Catholic Worker settlement 

Brooke Weitzman is a lawyer with the Elder Law and Disability Rights Center, one of the groups that initially sued the county. She worked closely with Sobel on the case and has a more optimistic view of its success.

For one thing, she said, people living on the streets are getting assessed for and offered, when possible, shelter and treatment options before they're ticketed for sleeping or loitering in public spaces.

"In the areas that are a part of the settlements, we aren't seeing anti-camping enforcement anymore," Weitzman said. "Certainly law enforcement is still enforcing other non-poverty related crimes like substance use or theft. But … being unhoused, sleeping in the park, those we're really not seeing tickets for the way we did before the litigation."

Weitzman said suing officials over homelessness was never going to solve the housing crisis, but forcing cities to build more temporary shelters has also made them realize just how hard it is to move people into permanent housing.

"Coming out of the cases, no city in Orange County can honestly tell you they don't have a problem with access to housing," she said.

Doug Becht, who oversees homeless services for the county, said he's proud of the progress since the lawsuits, especially of the standards of care to which all county-funded shelters now have to adhere.

"So regardless of what shelter either an individual or a family go in, they are assured that their service and the atmosphere and the environment and the care that they receive will be high," he said.

The county's legal settlement also establishes a grievance and appeal process — for example, if a shelter or treatment program wants to kick out a participant — and the right to appeal disputes all the way up to Judge Carter.

A volunteer with Wound Walk OC takes the vital signs of a man sleeping in an underpass in central Orange County.

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But Becht said a lack of housing options remains a major challenge, along with limited capacity to act quickly.

“When someone’s ready, and interested in help and is interested in working towards ending their homelessness, we gotta be there and ready to receive that," he said. "And in a lot more cases than ever, we are. But we’re still not able to do it for everyone at every point and that’s where we want to be.”

What critics say

David Gillanders, executive director of the homeless services organization Pathways of Hope in Orange County, questions how much positive change came out of the riverbed lawsuits.

"It has not resulted, I don't think, in enough people getting housed," he said. "But what I do hope it's done is stimulate some conversation around what homelessness is, how homelessness actually works, why people go homeless."

Without a right to housing, which doesn't exist in the U.S. or California constitutions, Gillanders is skeptical about how much progress on homelessness can be accomplished through the courts.

"The ultimate lawsuit is one that makes housing a human right literally," he said, "not just as a slogan that we sometimes say, but actually makes it an entitlement. Short of that, there's nothing that will solve homelessness."

Sobel, after more than two decades of suing elected officials to force them to open shelters, told LAist she no longer believes it's an effective strategy.

"I think we've fallen into this trap about this being a solution when all the evidence around is it hasn't worked and it doesn't work because at the end of the line, there's no housing," Sobel said.

The O.C. Catholic Worker case has served as a template for a federal lawsuit filed by a business group against the city and county of Los Angeles over the lack of shelter and mental health treatment for people experiencing homelessness. The city of Los Angeles settled their part of the case last year.

L.A. County is currently appealing a ruling by Judge Carter rejecting its settlement. The judge said he wanted to see more beds and more court oversight in the settlement.

Despite Sobel's doubt about fighting homelessness through the courts, she doesn't plan to stop.

"I think about how much worse it would be if we weren't doing this," she said. "You just have to keep fighting and you have to hope that one day, somebody's going to say, 'Look, this is not making sense.'"

Topline:

Street flooding: Roadway flooding was reported this morning on the westbound 134 Freeway at the 5, near Glendale and Griffith Park.

Coastal Flooding: All weekend, forecasters have warned of dangerous rip currents and an elevated risk of coastal flooding.

Flooding was reported yesterday in Seal Beach and Long Beach.

"We have quite a few reports already of waves up to 10 feet on some beaches — Zuma Beach especially, where we've gotten reports [of] strong rip currents," said Todd Hall, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Advisories and closures:

• An ocean water quality rain advisory has been issued for all L.A. County beaches until Wednesday, Sept. 9 at 2 p.m. That means to avoid ocean water contact for at least 72 hours after the rain.
• A coastal flood advisory and a high surf advisory for L.A. and Ventura county beaches remain in effect until Tuesday, Sept. 8 at 11 p.m.
• The City of Seal Beach is closing two beach parking lots due to flooding concerns.

What's next: Hall said to expect more showers across L.A. County throughout Sunday. On Monday, he said isolated rain is expected, mostly in the mountains.

A sign on the front door says “Beekeeper owned,” and inside the Hive & Hanger store in Burbank, the layout is a mix of vintage clothes, antique jewelry and something rather unexpected: a pop-up Bee Museum.

The owner is Carrie Diazzz, a vintage maven turned urban apiarist. She admits with a smile  two extra Zs at the end of her real last name are a homage to her beloved bees.

When the store opened in 2020, it was originally all-vintage. “I was not looking to change careers,” she said, but after taking a two-hour beekeeping experience course, she was hooked.

Hive & Hangar in Burbank doubles as a bee museum.

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“I don’t like dirt, and I don't like bugs. I'm a heels and lipstick, nails, kind of person,” she said. “There's just something magical about the honeybee. The more you know, the more you want to know.”

That prompted her to pursue a bee master certification at UC Davis. She collaborated with Elina Niño at the university’s Bee Lab to curate information and research to bring her pop-up Bee Museum to life almost a year ago.

A crash course in bees

The Burbank Bee Museum.

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There’s a Bee 101 explainer by the front door, which shows the differences between bees and wasps, and fun touches like pop songs containing the word “Honey,” and a list of Noteworthy Beekeepers including Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, Leo Tolstoy, Emily Dickinson, Angelina Jolie and Sherlock Holmes.

One long-standing myth is that honeybees are stingers. “People always ask me how often I get stung, but I don’t wear gloves, and I don’t use smoke, and it very rarely happens. And honeybees die after they sting, as opposed to wasps, who can sting repeatedly,” she said.

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Most arresting is a floor-to-ceiling collage series of framed model fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries, all of which the honeybee has a role in pollinating. Beside that is an exhibit on pesticides, one of the insect's biggest threats. Pieces of dried honeycomb are everywhere.

Diazzz has also been hosting school trips for the Boys & Girls Clubs. “I might be the only beekeeper they will ever meet,” she noted. The point is to give bees the respect they deserve. “Did you know that it takes 12 honeybees their entire lives to make one teaspoon of honey?”

Rescuing hives across Southern California

The Bee Museum serves up not just honey, but bee knowledge.

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There are no live bees in the store, but Diazzz has her own hives in Burbank.

“They are from rescues: I cut the hive out from a wall,” she explained. She takes care of hives from San Diego to Bel Air, with many in the San Fernando Valley, and a couple with a view of the Hollywood Sign. Her caretaking quests have taken her on skyscraper roofs, at apartment buildings and in parking lots.

Almost a year ago, she began her studies as a honey sommelier at the American Honey Tasting Society in Connecticut, where she learned about the science and experience of honey. Her future includes going off to Bologna, Italy, the world honey hub, for the final round of studies and tests at the Albo Nazionale degli Esperti in Analisi Sensoriale del Miele or the National Register of Experts in Sensory Analysis of Honey.

Carrie Diazzz, owner of the store and the museum, sells small jars of honey sourced locally and from her own hives.

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“Nectar and honey are not the same thing,” she explained. “Nectar is the liquid sticky substance that bees collect from flowering plants and take back to the hive. They transform it into honey by dehydrating the moisture out of the nectar, and capping it over with wax.”

Diazzz recently held her first informal tasting experience at The Bee Museum, and has small batches of various local honeys for sale: cactus, sage, and honey from her own hives. “I usually leave the honey alone, and only take any extra they have made to sell,” she said, because bees use the honey as sustenance. Her favorite? “A toss-up between dandelion and sunflower. Orange blossom is delicious too, but very sweet.”

Maybe you, like me, are a daily puzzle player. Maybe you like a Wordle, or a crossword, or one of the other entries from the New York Times puzzle empire.

But maybe you're looking for something else.

So, with a tip of the hat to the people on Bluesky who helped me discover a bunch of games I love in the last month or two, I'm sharing a few games that I'm particularly enjoying these days — ones that are not NYT word games. (No disrespect to my original love, Spelling Bee.)

There are more, of course: the spelling bee game Beeswax, the word game Smush, the vexing Anthropeum, the movie games Framed and Cinematrix. Truthfully, I have more games in the "daily games" folder on my phone than I could ever actually play daily. But given a choice between puzzling and doomscrolling, I'll take the puzzles every time.

MapTap

Any idea where Regina is? Do your best in MapTap's daily geography game.

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MapTap is a very simple game. You are shown a 3D globe that you can rotate with your finger, but there are no lines dividing countries or territories. So you are just looking at the unmarked terrain of the world, and you are challenged to tap as close as you can to a particular named location. Maybe "London, England, U.K." You tap. It shows you the distance between where you tapped and where the place really is. You get more points the closer you are. There are five questions in each daily round.

This game can be genuinely humbling, because without those familiar borders showing, it can be difficult to even locate places you are very familiar with. (Without state and national boundaries, it always takes me a minute to precisely find even a place I myself have lived.) But what I love about MapTap is that as I do it, over and over, I actually get better at world geography, which is worthwhile and enriching.

TimeGuessr

Look carefully: What's your best guess for where and when this photo was taken? TimeGuessr makes you a detective.

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In the same family as MapTap is TimeGuessr, where each day's challenge is made up of five puzzles that each start with a photo. Your task is to choose, on a timeline, what year the photo was taken, and to choose, on a map of the world, where it was taken. Sometimes, the photos are of historically meaningful events, like the aftermath of a battle or a natural disaster. Sometimes, they are photographs of ordinary people going about their lives.

The trick with TimeGuessr is detective work. Some hints are straightforward: a sign in the window of a store that might tip off the location (if you can figure out what language it's written in), a license plate, something along those lines. But sometimes, the clues are more subtle. What are the people in the photo wearing? What do the cars look like? How is everybody wearing their hair? It's a fascinating exercise in putting together clues, and again, you can actually increase your knowledge of the world while you play.

The Loop

Everything is connected (somehow) in The Loop, which is a perfect first-thing-when-you-wake-up game.

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The Loop is my favorite early-morning game, perfect for when I'm only partially awake. It offers you 12 simple illustrations that you have to arrange in a circle so that each illustration connects in some way to the ones on either side of it.

So, for instance, in one round I played, a square-root symbol connected on one side to a carpenter's square (because square/square), which then connected to a picture of a toolbox (because a carpenter's square is a tool). On the other side, the square-root symbol connected to a carrot (because it's a root vegetable), and then the carrot to an icicle (because they're the same shape). It can be fun to crack all the different ways that the images connect to each other, but the game design also offers so many chances to get it right that there's a huge amount of grace for making mistakes. That, of course, is why it's perfect for being half-awake.

Clues by Sam

It's up to you to figure out who's innocent and who's guilty in Clues by Sam.

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Clues by Sam is a logic puzzle. It presents you with a grid — four across and five down — of people, each represented by a name, an emoji and an occupation. Your job is to figure out which of those people are innocent and which are criminals. (There is no set number; there could be lots of criminals or only a couple.) Your opening clue might say, "Michael is one of three criminals in row 2." Then you click on Michael and mark him as a criminal, and when you're right, that gets you another clue, and so on.

Like most of these games, this one is enjoyable largely because it's simple, but its diabolical twist is that you can't guess. If you try to label Jane innocent, for instance, and she eventually will be, but the game hasn't given you enough information yet to actually know that, then that answer is wrong and is rejected. You are only allowed to deduce from the clues you have, because it is genuinely the journey and not the destination. Note that Clues by Sam gets harder each day from Monday through Sunday, so if you're a beginner, give it a whirl early in the week to get the hang of it.

Catfishing

Catfishing asks you to figure out the title of a Wikipedia page from its categories — which is harder than it sounds.

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Without a doubt, the hardest game I play regularly. In this game, you get a list of at least some of the categories that a particular Wikipedia page belongs to, and you have to try to figure out what page it is. There are ten questions; my average score is about four, and the highest I've ever gotten is eight.

For example, if you know a page is filed under "20th century musicians," and "21st century musicians," and "American folk musicians," and "people born in Minnesota," you might start to zero in on Bob Dylan. But be warned: Many of the answers are far more obscure than that, and it's very common for me to give up and reveal the answer, only to learn that I never stood a chance, because I've never heard of the person (or event, or phenomenon) at all. It doesn't matter how many ways you classify certain medieval rulers or political conflicts of 19th century Iowa; I may never get there.

This piece also appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what's making us happy.

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