for living on the streets — penalties state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, D-Pasadena, said would only make it more difficult for people to lift themselves out of homelessness.

Her proposed legislation, Senate Bill 634, would prohibit a state agency or local jurisdiction from imposing civil or criminal penalties on homeless people for “any act immediately related to homelessness” or on anyone helping homeless people “with any act related to basic survival,” including handing out water or food or offering other services.

Pérez said people shouldn’t be criminalized for not being able to afford a roof over their heads.

“What we’re trying to get at here is prevent people from getting fined or being put in jail for being homeless,” said Pérez, adding that people shouldn’t be criminalized for the need to sleep.

“If you cannot afford to live anywhere — if you can’t afford housing, a hotel — you still need to sleep,” she said.

Pérez said fining or arresting someone for being homeless doesn’t work because if they can’t afford to pay the fine and they accrue additional fees as a result, the situation could quickly spin out of control, leaving them further in debt.

Additionally, she said, arresting people could result in them missing an appointment with a service provider to apply for housing or other services.

Fines and arrests are “not only not a solution,” but they exacerbate the homeless crisis, she said.

More than 300,000 people cycled through homelessness in California in 2024, yet the state only had 76,000 shelter beds and 79,000 units of permanent supportive housing, according to the bill.

Inner City Law Center, a legal services provider on L.A.’s Skid Row that serves homeless people, is a sponsor of the bill.

Representatives for the organization said Monday that when homeless people are fined, the unpaid fines can stay on their records, making it harder to apply for an apartment and perpetuating the cycle of poverty.

The focus, they said, should be on building affordable housing and providing more services to those in need, not creating additional challenges for poor people or those who help them. (Provisions in the bill protecting those who help homeless people were added, they said, in response to the Fremont City Council’s recent decision to make it a misdemeanor to “aid” and “abet” someone erecting a homeless encampment.)

“We’re here to fight poverty, not people who are poor,” Inner City Law Center fellow Ishvaku Vashishtha said.

But, he added, “after Grants Pass, we saw the flood gates open to allow municipalities to experiment with various ways of criminalizing poverty.”

When the Supreme Court rendered its decision on the Grants Pass case last summer and gave local jurisdictions permission to enforce anti-camping laws and ticket people for sleeping in public, it drew mixed reviews from officials in Southern California.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath, who chaired the Board of Supervisors at the time, condemned the decision, saying it criminalizes homelessness. Neither the city nor the county would punish people for camping in public, they said.

On the other hand, leaders from several Orange County cities praised the ruling.

Newport Beach officials recently called the Grants Pass decision “the single biggest game-changer for the city when it comes to dealing with the homeless.”

Two years ago, Mayor Joe Stapleton said Newport Beach had 94 homeless people. That number is down to 11.

“There’s no compassion for leaving these people on the streets,” Stapleton said, adding that the city is spending over $4 million a year for resources, tools, services, temporary housing and permanent housing solutions to get people off the streets.

There may have been resistance to Newport Beach’s anti-camping law at first, Stapleton said, but the city has since heard from people thanking it for forcing them to get the services they needed to get off the streets.

At the time of the Grants Pass ruling, the city of San Bernardino was still in litigation over allegedly throwing out homeless residents’ belongings during previous campsite clearings.

But in September, the city and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California agreed to a settlement requiring the city to adopt a policy to prevent the destruction of homeless people’s property during encampment sweeps and to provide reasonable accommodations for homeless residents with disabilities.

Almost immediately thereafter, San Bernardino began clearing campsites from its parks, starting with Perris Hill Park, to mixed results, according to former residents of those camps.

San Bernardino has also allocated another $1.4 million to house homeless residents, with more spending potentially on the way.

Pérez, who served on the Alhambra City Council before being elected to the state Legislature, said Alhambra doesn’t fine or arrest people for being homeless but offers shelter and services.

The issue is deeply personal to Pérez, whose cousin died while living on the streets in Nevada in 2019. Her aunt, who was also homeless and confined to a wheelchair toward the end of her life, died the following year. And Pérez has other family members still living on the streets.

“There are solutions that local municipalities can do that really center on services, on housing without having to go to these extreme measures” of fines and arrests, Pérez said.

Her bill is scheduled to be heard by the Senate Local Government Committee on April 23. Southern California legislators who sit on that committee include Sens. María Elena Durazo, D-Los Angeles, Steve Choi, R-Irvine, and Kelly Seyarto, R-Murrieta.