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Meanwhile, market rate rent continues to spiral out of control. Waits for <br />mental health and substance use treatment are also long, and are rarely <br />available on demand. <br />Criminalizing poverty, houselessness and healthcare issues is morally <br />wrong, violent, harmful, and always ineffective. Experience and litigation <br />have demonstrated that municipalities cannot target, arrest and jail unhoused <br />people as a remedy or way out of the unmet housing and behavioral health <br />needs of Santa Ana residents. <br />Criminalizing houselessness has harmed and traumatized unsheltered <br />community members, who are routinely harassed, displaced, cited, and jailed <br />for being unhoused—but are rarely offered a safe, permanent, affordable home. <br />Criminalizing substance use —the "war on drugs" is a failed and retrograde <br />policy that is both immoral and ineffective. It has only served to expand our <br />bloated carceral system, wage war on poor people and communities of <br />color, and stigmatize substance use as a personal failure rather than what it is: <br />a healthcare issue. <br />An offer of "services" that rarely exist and have long wait lists is NOT an <br />excuse for criminalizing poverty, houselessness, and behavioral health <br />conditions. <br />We demand humane and effective policies —not police and <br />,jails. Unsheltered houselessness is an affordable housing crisis and a <br />humanitarian catastrophe. Decades of research have demonstrated what works: <br />the Housing First model, wherein safe, permanent affordable housing and <br />voluntary wrap -around services are provided as an immediate response to <br />people's needs. Housing is a form of healthcare, and research has shown that <br />mental and behavioral health services are much more effective when people <br />are removed from the stressors of the streets. <br />P) <br />