Irene Basdakis

Andrew spent most of his life keeping to himself and getting the job done. A Navy veteran and longtime tow truck operator, he built his days around discipline long before he ever needed a program to teach it to him. But discipline doesn't protect you from everything. When his landlord canceled his lease with a month's notice, Andrew found himself packing his life into his car and parking it on the beach in Dana Point.

In conversations about unhoused populations, mental health and substance use are often talked about as if they're two separate problems, two boxes on an intake form, two referrals to two different specialists. In practice, they rarely show up separately. They experience one life, one set of days, in which both are present at once, often feeding each other in ways that are hard to untangle from the outside and and even harder to untangle from the inside.

Recently, the City of Orange arrested 69 people while clearing homeless camps near Hart Park. It's part of a much larger pattern across Orange County: since the Supreme Court's Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling cleared the way for cities to enforce anti-camping laws, jurisdictions from Anaheim to Santa Ana have leaned hard into sweeps, citations, and jail bookings. Transient bookings into county jails are up more than 40% since 2022.