A federal judge overseeing a sweeping lawsuit about homelessness in Los Angeles ordered the city and county to find shelter for all unhoused residents of Skid Row within 180 days.
In a fiery 110-page order, Judge David O Carter on Tuesday condemned Los Angeles officials’ inability to address the rise in homelessness in the region.
“All of the rhetoric, promises, plans, and budgeting cannot obscure the shameful reality of this crisis – that year after year, there are more homeless Angelenos, and year after year, more homeless Angelenos die on the streets,” Carter wrote in granting a preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiffs last week.
Carter ordered the city and county to find shelter for all women and children on Skid Row within 90 days, and every homeless person in the downtown area must have a place to stay by mid-October.
In addition, Carter mandated the city auditor examine all public money spent in recent years to combat homelessness, including funds from a 2016 bond measure approved by voters to create 10,000 housing units over a decade. That project has been slow to ramp up.
Carter’s filing was made a day after the Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, vowed to spend nearly $1bn in the coming year to get people off the streets. Carter on Tuesday ordered “that $1bn, as represented by Mayor Garcetti, will be placed in escrow” with a spending plan “accounted for and reported to the Court within seven days”.
As of January 2020, there were more than 66,400 homeless people in Los Angeles county, with 41,000 within LA city limits. While the homeless population was once largely confined to the Skid Row neighborhood in downtown, rows of tents, cardboard shelters, battered RVs and makeshift plywood structures are now familiar sights throughout the nation’s second-most populous city.
Skip Miller, an attorney representing LA county, said the judge’s order “goes well beyond” what the plaintiffs asked for in their preliminary injunction.
“We’re now evaluating our options, including the possibility of an appeal,” Miller said, adding that the county had spent millions on “proven strategies that have produced measurable results throughout the region, not just on Skid Row”.
Garcetti said he had been briefed on the lengthy ruling but had not yet read it. He told reporters at city hall that he and the judge shared a sense of urgency, but the mayor warned that the city could not tolerate delays in the proposed record investment in housing, services and treatment for the homeless.
While he declined to comment on the judge’s intentions, Garcetti said: “Putting a billion dollars in escrow that doesn’t exist doesn’t seem possible,” emphasizing that it was up to city council to review and enact his proposal.
The mayor also raised doubt about the judge’s timeline under which the city and county would be required to provide shelter to every person on Skid Row by October. “That would be an unprecedented pace not just for Los Angeles but any place that I’ve ever seen with homelessness in America, ” he said.
The lawsuit was filed last year by a group of business owners, residents and community leaders called the LA Alliance for Human Rights. It accuses the city and county of failing to comprehensively address the desperation that homeless people face – including hunger, crime, squalor and the coronavirus pandemic.
“This order is a vote of no-confidence in the mayor, the city council and county officials,” said Daniel Conway, policy adviser for the alliance.
Conway said he was struck by Carter’s grand prose in the court filing, which quoted Abraham Lincoln and traced the history of homelessness back from slavery through decades of redlining, containment, eminent domain, exclusionary zoning and gentrification.
“Carter is able to put together a history of racist and discriminatory policies and connect them to the policy failures of today. It shows the culpability of the city and county of LA for decades. Now they have to make it right,” Conway said Tuesday.
Gary Blasi, professor emeritus of law at University of California, Los Angeles, agreed that the judge’s order contained “a compelling description in all the ways that public policy has failed poor people and homeless people in particular”.
But Blasi said Carter’s order “is not well thought out” and invited confusion about what the judge meant by “shelter”. What was needed was long-term housing, not temporary shelters that “in many cases are inferior to encampments”, Blasi said.
“There’s no doubt that in the short run, this will reduce the number of encampments on Skid Row and increase property values,” Blasi said. “But in the long run I fear it could make things worse by serving as an excuse to turn to police to clear people off sidewalks.”
Some advocates for unhoused people said they wanted LA officials to focus on permanent housing options, not temporary shelters.
“We have grown concerned that politicians are using this litigation to justify investment in emergency shelters instead of housing,” the Legal Aid Foundation of LA and the Los Angeles Community Action Network said in a statement on the ruling. “We all know that shelters won’t solve our housing crisis … We need housing, not handcuffs – even if the handcuffs are preceded by an ‘offer’ of a shelter bed.”
The judge’s decision also comes after LA officials and the police department recently faced widespread backlash for evicting a major homeless encampment at the city’s popular Echo Park Lake.
