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windows of time, after which applicants wait years longer to receive <br />subsidized affordable housing. <br />• Meanwhile, market rate rent continues to spiral out of control. <br />• Waits for mental health and substance use treatment are also <br />long, and are rarely available on demand. <br />• Criminalizing poverty, houselessness and healthcare issues is <br />morally wrong, violent, harmful, and always ineffective. Experience <br />and litigation have demonstrated that municipalities cannot target, arrest <br />and jail unhoused people as a remedy or way out of the unmet housing <br />and behavioral health needs of Santa Ana residents. <br />• Criminalizing houselessness has harmed and traumatized <br />unsheltered community members, who are routinely harassed, <br />displaced, cited, and jailed for being unhoused but are rarely offered a <br />safe, permanent, affordable home. <br />• Criminalizing substance use —the "war on drugs" is <br />a failed and retrograde policy that is both immoral and ineffective. It <br />has only served to expand our bloated carceral system, wage war on <br />poor people and communities of color, and stigmatize substance use <br />as a personal failure rather than what it is: a healthcare issue. <br />• An offer of "services" that rarely exist and have long wait lists is <br />NOT an excuse for criminalizing poverty, houselessness, and <br />behavioral health 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. <br />• Decades of research have demonstrated what works: the <br />Housing First model, wherein safe, permanent affordable housing and <br />voluntary wrap -around services are provided as an immediate <br />response to people's needs. Housing is a form of healthcare, and <br />research has shown that mental and behavioral health services are <br />much more effective when people are removed from the stressors of <br />the streets. <br />• We demand a Santa Ana in which the basic needs of all are met <br />and the dignity of every resident, no matter who they are, where they <br />P) <br />