“One day I was walking into the downtown area and ran into a kid who had just gotten off the bus from New York,” Walters said. “He had no money and told me he left New York with just enough money to ride a bus to Santa Ana, where he had heard he could hang out. It [downtown] had just become a haven for transients.”
—Then Lieutenant, future SanTana city manager and Police Chief Paul Walters, in the Nov. 29, 1981 Los Angeles Times, talking about how even in the 1960s, OC’s county seat attracted homeless. All these years later, city and county officials still haven’t solved homelessness in the county and still insist it’s a modern-day phenomenon brought on by Proposition 47. The more things change…
