As gentrification escalates in California, people wonder: Where can the homeless go?

The search party pulled out of a Mcdonald’s parking lot, a collection of homeless men and women and their advocates squeezed into VW station wagons and old SUVS. They sought a patch of land or a spare building, a place – any place – where dozens of people might live for a while.

The cars passed neighborhoods of twostory homes along a ridgeline with views of the Pacific Ocean surf and then wound through a business park. They stopped next to a field of knee-high grass that the guide warned was off-limits because of rattlesnakes.

No bus line runs here, and the nearest grocery is a hilly 2-mile walk. The only real virtue of the one-acre lot was that, while people work in the neighboring tech warehouses, no one actually lives anywhere near here.

“We need our own area without a lot of people around,” Jennifer Juarez, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has been homeless for years, said as she surveyed the field. “But this? I don’t know.”

That this remote lot is even a temporary housing option for some of Orange County’s 5,000 homeless people speaks to the growing compassion fatigue that California is confronting.

Frustrated with the slow pace of politics and demanding immediate, streetlevel action, residents in the wealthiest counties along California’s coast have been agitating for a solution – which increasingly involves pushing homeless people out of sight.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, D, recently called it “the greatest moral and humanitarian crisis of our time.”

In recent weeks, local governments from the northern city of San Francisco to here in Orange County have cleared out homeless camps, some of them years old and long considered public safety and health concerns. The regions have little in common politically but share a characteristic: extraordinarily expensive housing, which in March reached record highs in Orange County.

In the centers of many cities, tent encampments have become their own neighborhoods, often within areas that have been remade with public money and private investment.

Many of the state’s cities are thriving. But the gentrification that is taking place along the coast has made it far more difficult for local governments to afford housing options for those without homes. Hundreds of homeless people, now marooned in wealthy urban neighborhoods, Ashley Foster, 23, fixes her bike along the Santa Ana River Trail in Santa Ana. She lived in an encampment on the trail until officials shut it down early this year.

have tested the patience of new residents, who have spent small fortunes on the condos and townhouses in the city centers.

The community concern has been borne out by some recent events.

A fire last fall that threatened the Getty Museum and Bel-air started in a hillside homeless encampment, drawing calls from some of the richest Los Angeles neighborhoods for the government to do more to address the issue. Downtown businesses also burned as a result of cooking fires that got out of control in homeless enclaves.

A 51-year-old homeless man was arrested in April and charged with trespassing after breaking into the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento through a side window. Gov. Jerry Brown, D, was not at home, but his wife, Anne Gust Brown, was.

Days later, a homeless man walked into a steakhouse in Ventura, north of Los Angeles, and fatally stabbed a 35-year-old man as he ate dinner, his 5-year-old daughter sitting on his lap.

“Enough is enough. We are taking back our streets,” read a sign carried by one of dozens of marchers who made their way to Ventura City Hall a few days later.

San Francisco Mayor Mark Farrell began doing that during the last week in April. He ordered tents in the Mission District – ground zero for the city’s techmoney-driven gentrification, cleared of scores of homeless people. The city also has doubled the size of a city cleanup crew dedicated to disposing of hypodermic needles discarded on the streets.

In Orange County, the process has turned particularly bitter and has ended up in court. It has split the county’s crowded urban north, where the homeless population has been concentrated for years, and the richer suburban south, which has been ordered to bear more of the burden.

For a decade, as many as 1,400 people lived in tents along a mile-and-a-half stretch of the Santa Ana River, mostly a dry cement-lined channel running between highways within sight of Angel Stadium of Anaheim.

The camp scared off joggers, walkers and bikers, many of whom resented that a slice of sprawl set aside for them had been grabbed by others. More than 11,000 people signed a petition this year urging officials to clear it out.

In January, local officials began accelerating plans to clear the camp. But a homeless advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit against Orange County and several cities to block the move, which officials defended by citing anti-camping laws that they said prohibited the tent cities.

U.S. District Court Judge David Carter, a former Marine who served in Vietnam, said he understood the public safety risk the camp posed. But he took the unusual step of visiting the riverbed, seeing for himself the squalor and challenge. He declared that any eviction would have to be done “humanely and with dignity.”