A new contract awarded by the Orange County Board of Supervisors will help house 60 of the most vulnerable homeless displaced from the riverbed and Santa Ana Civic Center.
Paul Leon from the Illumination Foundation told the OC Register that his nonprofit will begin sheltering the homeless in recuperative-care centers or nonprofit motels while they undergo treatment.
“We have a whole team ready to go,” Leon said. “For us, it’s a pipeline – we have people moving into apartments, permanent housing. And as they go through, it opens more capacity for us to have new clients.”
Most of those homeless had been living in county shelters and motels in Santa Ana and Anaheim ever since the county cleared out the homeless camps in the riverbed and the Civic Center. Nearly 700 people were moved out of the riverbed in Anaheim and another 230 were removed from a camp in the Santa Ana Civic Center.
The nonprofit will help "prevent the return of homeless encampments at the Civic Center and Riverbed,” Supervisor Andrew Do said.
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