06/10/2026
In late April, the Pomona City Council passed Ordinance 4369, making it a crime to exist in public without a home.
City officials claim they aren’t criminalizing the status of being homeless, but they are criminalizing the actions required to stay alive. When survival requires a blanket, a tent, and somewhere to sleep, banning those things is criminalizing homelessness. Renaming a shelter a “safety violation” doesn’t change what you’re doing to the person inside it.
The City Attorney openly admitted that this ordinance was meticulously rewritten to make it easier to cite poor people in public spaces. No new shelter beds. No housing investment. No mental health infrastructure. Just a cleaner legal mechanism to move unhoused people from the sidewalk to the citation, from the citation to the fine, from the fine to the criminal record. They didn’t solve a problem. They optimized a pipeline.
This is not a safety policy. It is a disappearance policy — written by lawyers, submitted by the police chief, and passed by a council that decided it was cheaper to punish poverty than to address it.
Pomona has a choice: invest in housing, or invest in prosecution. They chose prosecution. We’re here to change that.
