Without permanent housing, interim shelter does not solve houselessness and is used to justify criminalization
Shelter and interim housing can have great value in getting people off the streets and into safer situations. However, shelter and interim housing do not meet the standards for housing spelled out by international human rights law. As Los Angeles lacks an adequate stock of permanent housing, people can remain in these deficient living situations for extended periods of time, or they leave and return to houselessness.
City officials use the existence of shelter and interim housing to justify, both legally and morally, implementation of criminalization policies—they can say that they offered “housing” before destroying an encampment and scattering its residents. They can move a certain number of people indoors, while the vast majority remain on the streets facing increasing enforcement of laws that punish their existence in public.
According to international human rights law, permanent housing means a place to live that is not temporary or time limited and that meets standards of habitability, affordability, accessibility, and security of tenure. The services agency and city officials have very little permanent housing to offer; instead, they offer various forms of shelter, including hotel rooms, primarily through the Project Roomkey (PRK) and Inside Safe programs, congregate shelters, A Bridge Home (ABH) shelters, Tiny Home Villages, and Safe Camping, which provide space in gated lots for people to set up tents. Despite this variety of options, there is not nearly enough shelter for everyone living on the streets. PRK, for example, peaked in August 2020, sheltering just over 4,472 people; one year later the program only served 1,392 people and continued to decline.
While these shelter situations allow some people to get off the streets and many who stay in them are grateful, they are temporary solutions, at best. Living conditions range from comfortable to uninhabitable. Many people refuse to enter congregate and other shelters due to lack of privacy, safety concerns, and unsanitary conditions. All the shelter options have degrading and even draconian rules that may include curfews, searches upon return to one’s room, prohibitions on guests, pets, and even partners or spouses, limits on keeping property, and other restrictions. Many unhoused people compare the conditions to being incarcerated.
The shelters have not led consistently to placements in permanent housing. City and county officials tasked with optimizing a system to rehouse people calculate that a successful system must have five permanent units for every one interim or shelter bed. This ratio allows a steady flow of people from the streets to shelter to housing. Los Angeles has far fewer permanent units than needed, and so the system stalls. Without that flow, people either stagnate in the shelters or they leave. When people leave, returning to the streets, new shelter beds are available, but these extremely expensive programs have not made a dent in the unhoused population.
The shelter or interim housing system has facilitated criminalization. The ABH shelters are surrounded by Special Enforcement and Cleaning Zones (SECZ) in which city policy empowers and housed neighbors expect police to enforce laws against unhoused people and where, more prominently, LASAN conducts repeated destructive sweeps. Human Rights Watch analysis of LAHSA data shows evidence supporting claims that in advance of high-profile encampment sweeps, city officials held hotel rooms empty so that they could show the public that they were placing people from those encampments into rooms rather than simply scattering them to other unsheltered situations. In doing so, they underutilized the rooms and left others, from less visible locations, unsheltered.
Officials often justify the cruelty of encampment destruction by claiming they have successfully “housed” people, when at most they have moved people into shelter options, often taking rooms from more vulnerable people who need to be indoors. Sweeps of lower profile encampments typically do not even result in shelter placements, especially as shelter beds are also scarce.
Despite the grave need to develop more permanent housing to effectively move people out of houselessness, policymakers in Los Angeles have trended towards prioritizing interim shelter over permanent housing, directing scarce resources away from the long-term solution.
Inside Safe and the Bass Administration Approach to Houselessness
The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, has publicly made houselessness her administration’s top priority and has promised a new approach that will solve the problem. She has issued orders declaring a “state of emergency,” and required city agencies to speed up the process of approving affordable housing developments.
Housing developments funded through Proposition HHH, passed by voters in 2016, should become ready for occupancy and allow for more permanent placements, though they are a finite resource. Measure ULA, a voter-approved tax on property sales over $5 million earmarked for permanent housing development and tenant protections, will give the mayor additional funds. She has promised to access federal and state resources.
However, despite her public pronouncements Bass has been prioritizing interim housing and shelter over permanent housing and has allowed criminalization to continue unabated. She has allocated $250 million to her signature program, Inside Safe, which mobilizes LASAN and police to destroy encampments permanently, while moving their residents to hotel rooms on a temporary basis. As with PRK, many people are grateful to get indoors, while others resent being forced into rooms that often have severe habitability problems. Officials have required people to surrender much of their property for destruction as a condition of accepting the hotel rooms. People who have declined to move into hotel rooms face destruction of their property and banishment from locations where they had been living. While touted as a pathway to housing, very few people have left the hotels for permanent situations—more have returned to houselessness.
As of September 2023, there were only about 1,100 Inside Safe rooms available, requiring choices about who would be placed in them. The Bass administration selection process has prioritized publicly visible encampments as opposed to setting aside rooms for people with the most need. This prioritization appears to be driven by City Council office preferences and complaints from housed neighbors, rather than helping the most vulnerable.
Housing Solves Houselessness
Housing people solves houselessness. Helping people retain their homes prevents inflows to houselessness. Developing and preserving affordable housing allows more people to stay housed and reduces housing precarity that leads to houselessness. Upholding and increasing tenants’ rights empowers them to maintain their housed status. Housing is different from temporary shelter or even “interim housing.”
Most unhoused people simply need a permanent, affordable, habitable place to live. Some people with disabilities need housing with a spectrum of support services attached, often called “permanent supportive housing” or PSH. Ample experience shows that providing PSH to “chronically” unhoused people—those with disabilities who have been on the streets for over a year—is extremely effective, with one-year retention rates around 90 percent. The Housing First model, in which people are housed voluntarily and without requirements of sobriety or treatment compliance, has been successful in a wide variety of jurisdictions in allowing people to stabilize and remain housed.
There are a variety of approaches to housing, each with relative benefits and drawbacks. Prominently, the federal government provides vouchers under the Section 8 program that allows tenants to pay 30 percent of their income in rent while the government pays the rest. There are not nearly enough vouchers for all who qualify for them; people with vouchers often cannot find places to stay due to discrimination and bureaucratic barriers; vouchers do not increase the overall number of affordable units. But, for those who do find housing with them, vouchers have greatly improved their lives.
Non-profit housing developers produce and manage permanent housing and PSH, despite a highly inefficient financing system and an overall shortage of funds. Advocates are calling for Los Angeles officials to convert hotels and unused commercial buildings to affordable housing, and to create land trusts that remove properties from the speculative market so that they can provide permanently affordable housing. While public housing, permanently affordable and financed entirely by government, has been demonized and starved of funding in the US, it can be an effective approach to delivering the right to housing.
Compared to criminalization and prioritization of temporary shelter, which do not solve houselessness, providing permanent housing is cost effective over the long-term, including through savings from reduced reliance on emergency services, lower court and jail costs, and reduced direct expenditures for sanitation, temporary shelter, and police interventions. The intangible human benefits of replacing policies grounded in cruelty with policies of care make housing production and preservation an obvious choice.
Human Rights Watch has documented numerous cases of people who were housed successfully after periods of houselessness. The positive change in the life circumstances of each of these people points to a way forward that will benefit unhoused people as well as housed people and will increase the value of communities in Los Angeles.
Relevant International Human Rights Law
International human rights law recognizes the right to adequate housing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) articulates and international treaties including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) enshrine this right. The US has signed, but not ratified these treaties, creating an obligation not to undermine their purpose and object. Implementing criminalization while neglecting to guarantee housing for all undermines the right.
The right to adequate housing, as defined by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, is not simply the right to shelter, but to housing that, at minimum: 1) has legal security of tenure; 2) has facilities, like water, sanitation, and site drainage, essential for health, security, comfort, and nutrition; 3) is affordable, without compromising other basic needs; 4) is habitable; 5) is accessible, accounting for disabilities and reasonable accommodation; 6) is located in a place accessible to employment, education, health care, and other social facilities; 7) is culturally appropriate.
The US has signed and ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), obligating it to uphold the right to housing in the context of combating racial and ethnic inequity. The long history and current policies of racial discrimination that have led to the prevalence of Black houselessness call for remedial and reparative actions.
Criminalization in all its forms violates the right to life, liberty, and security of person and prohibitions against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” found in International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) also prohibits cruel and degrading treatment. The US has signed and ratified both treaties, obligating it to comply with them. The UN Human Rights Committee has interpreted policies that punish life sustaining activities, like sleeping, as potentially cruel and degrading treatment. The ICCPR protects against arbitrary arrests, including arrests for the status of being unhoused.
As criminalization exposes Black and Brown people disproportionately to arbitrary arrest and cruel treatment, it may violate the ICERD’s mandate to end discriminatory policies and to mitigate racial harms, regardless of discriminatory intent.
Key Recommendations
As housing is the only proven solution to houselessness, Human Rights Watch calls on Los Angeles city and county governments, the state of California and the US federal government to affirm a right to adequate housing as defined under international human rights law and invest sufficient funds to progressively realize this right. To achieve this right, we recommend developing and preserving sufficient housing that is permanently affordable to low-income people, such as through use of creative approaches like community land trusts and converting unused government and commercial properties to housing. Most immediately, to help slow the spread of houselessness, the city and state should find ways to protect existing tenancies and prevent evictions, while also protecting others' rights.
Because houselessness has increased as government has diminished social safety nets, including the county’s General Relief payments, a basic income program for extremely poor residents, and the federal government’s scaling back of welfare programs, Human Rights Watch recommends restoring and enhancing social protection for all, including through universal social security and systems that ensure access to quality affordable health care for all. The state of California and city and county of Los Angeles should provide voluntary, community-based mental health care for all people, while avoiding systems of involuntary care and detention.
This report details how present and historical racial discrimination, often legally mandated or allowed, has led to highly disproportionate houselessness among BIPOC and especially Black communities. Human Rights Watch urges local, state, and federal governments to reverse laws and policies that have disproportionate negative racial impacts, to direct resources into low-income BIPOC communities that have traditionally been neglected, and to make reparations for past harms.
Given the historical emphasis on arresting and citing unhoused people for existing in public spaces, as detailed in this report, the City of Los Angeles should repeal laws that specifically criminalize unhoused people and discontinue targeted enforcement of other laws specifically against them. The state of California should pass a law forbidding local jurisdictions from enforcing laws punishing people for living in public spaces. Ending this direct form of criminalization will mitigate its cruel impacts while freeing up resources and directing political will to focus on effective solutions based on the right to housing.
To mitigate the health hazards of unhoused encampments and to alleviate suffering in the short-term, the City of Los Angeles should provide services, including sanitation, consistent and non-abusive trash removal, toilets and hygiene stations, medical care, and other assistance, to unhoused people living on the streets. LASAN cleanings should not be destructive and should respect people’s property. Further, the city should prioritize scarce shelter beds for those with the greatest health needs who wish to accept those beds.
Methodology
This report is based on research conducted from April 2021 through March 2024. Findings are based on interviews with 148 people, including multiple interviews with many of them. It is based on analysis of data obtained from various agencies within the City and County of Los Angeles as well as databases from other sources. It is based on review of other research studies, news articles, and historical records. All documents cited in this report are publicly available or are on file with Human Rights Watch and available on request.
An integral part of the research involved Human Rights Watch researchers witnessing and documenting actions by city officials and private actors towards unhoused people in Los Angeles. Researchers were present at numerous sweeps and enforcement actions.
Of the people interviewed, 101 gained their expertise on houselessness through the direct experience of living on the streets of Los Angeles. Of those people, 76 were living unsheltered on the streets at the time of the interview; 14 were in temporary shelter, primarily hotel rooms made available through “Project Roomkey” or “Inside Safe;” 10 were in permanent housing after having been unhoused.
Of those 101 people with direct lived experience of houselessness, 55 were male, 44 were female and two were non-binary or did not identify a gender. We did not ask people to identify their race or ethnicity, but about half appeared to be Black and most were people of color.
We did not ask people to state their age, though many did. We attempted to estimate approximate ages to gain a general understanding of interviewee demographics. While accurately estimating ages of people living on the streets is difficult, our best estimate is that 9 of the 100 people we interviewed who had experienced houselessness were between 18 and 29, 48 were between 30 and 54, and 41 appeared or identified themselves as over 55. The oldest who stated their age was 74. The ages of the remaining three were too difficult to estimate.
Disability is prevalent among unhoused people. Some of the 101 interviewees who had experienced houselessness openly stated that they had some physical disability or mental health condition that amounted to a disability. Others showed obvious signs, like walking with a cane or using a wheelchair. Others indicated that they received disability payments. Using these indications, we counted 40 interviewees who had disabilities, 21 of whom were over the age of 50. This number likely underestimates the prevalence of disabilities among the people interviewed.
We found people to interview by meeting them on the streets in Skid Row, Venice, Van Nuys, Downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, and other locations throughout the city. Community organizers, service providers, and mutual aid workers introduced us to many of them. Most interviews were conducted in person, though some were over the phone or through video conference.
This report uses pseudonyms for nearly all the people interviewed who had personal experience with houselessness unless they specifically asked that their real names be used. We have used pseudonyms to protect people’s privacy, especially given the highly personal and traumatic experiences shared, and to protect people from retaliation by government officials or private individuals.
We interviewed 47 others whose primary expertise was not gained by living on the streets. They included several elected officials and members of other elected officials’ staff; academics whose research involved houselessness and housing policy; lawyers who work directly on issues involving houselessness; people working in government agencies responsible for formulating and implementing policies related to houselessness; service providers outside of government; housing policy experts; nonprofit housing developers; LAHSA outreach workers; housed people living in neighborhoods with unhoused encampments; and community organizers, advocates, and mutual aid workers.
Human Rights Watch reached out multiple times to officials in then-Mayor Eric Garcetti’s administration, but no one would agree to speak to us. The people we contacted included the deputy mayor for Homelessness, the chief of the Office of Homelessness Initiatives, the person responsible for community engagement on Skid Row; the chief housing officer, the director of Interim Housing Strategies. Following Karen Bass’ election as mayor of Los Angeles city in November 2022, her chief of Housing and Homelessness Solutions agreed to a brief interview. Human Rights Watch submitted follow-up questions to the mayor’s staff members responsible for houselessness policy, but has not received responses at time of writing, despite multiple requests. Mayor Bass herself spoke to Human Rights Watch.
We reached out several times to Los Angeles City elected officials as well. Two councilmembers, Mike Bonin and Nithya Raman, spoke to us directly. Councilmembers Joe Buscaino and Katy Yaroslavsky had staff responsible for houselessness speak to us. Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell refused to meet. His staff requested written questions. Human Rights Watch submitted written questions but had received no response at time of writing, and O’Farrell was voted out of office in 2022. Councilmember Kevin De Leon’s staff responded with apparent agreement to arrange an interview, but then did not follow through despite repeated requests.
We reached out numerous times to representatives from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The senior lead officers on Skid Row referred us to LAPD’s public information officer (PIO), as did the LAPD homeless coordinator. The PIO took no action despite repeated requests from us, and no officers were willing to speak without the PIO’s approval. Human Rights Watch submitted written questions to the PIO based on our findings but received only a very limited response. We asked the PIO for LAPD’s response to key points of our data analysis. The PIO said that they could not answer without seeing our data. We sent them our data but have not received any response. Human Rights Watch did speak informally to officers at the site of encampment sweeps.
We spoke to current and former LAHSA outreach workers under condition of anonymity. Some of those we spoke to asked that their interviews, or some portion of them, be kept off the record or “on background.”
We disclosed to everyone interviewed the purpose of the interview and the intention of using their information in a report on the criminalization of houselessness.
Data
This report includes extensive quantitative analysis of data gained through the California Public Records Act (PRA). We requested a broad variety of data from various government agencies including the LAPD, City Attorney, LASAN, Mayor’s Office, Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), and LAHSA, a joint city and county agency. The agencies complied with the requests to varying degrees. When several agencies did not comply adequately, we sued the city, eventually receiving records substantially responsive to our request through settlement negotiations.
The data analysis in this report centers on presenting the activities of each agency through descriptive statistics. All processing and analytical code, as well as raw data and our original PRA requests, are available on Human Rights Watch’s GitHub page.[2]
Key Definitions
Language choices inform policy choices. The words used to describe the societal situations related to houselessness often determine and are determined by how the public understands these situations. That understanding helps determine what policies government and private sectors implement.
Homeless/unhoused or houseless
Over the years, people have used a variety of degrading terms to label people living on the streets, including “transient,” used by LAPD officers.[3] The word “homeless” came into widespread use beginning in the 1980s.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines a person as “homeless” if 1) they are “living in a place not meant for human habitation, in emergency shelter, in transitional housing, or are exiting an institution where they temporarily resided [for up to 90 days];” 2) they “are losing their primary nighttime residence, which may include a motel or hotel or a doubled up situation within 14 days and lack resources or support networks to remain in housing.”[4] LAHSA uses this same definition, but adds people fleeing domestic violence without resources to obtain permanent housing.[5] These definitions do not fully account for the many people who lack permanent housing while living doubled-up in over-crowded temporary conditions.
Calling a person “homeless” can serve to deny their place in the community. It feeds into policies that would remove people from communities where they live, since they are considered “homeless” and the community is not their home.[6]
Many advocates use the term “unhoused.” This term responds to the fallacy that people living on the streets do not have a home: they do, it is where they live, even if that is a temporary structure or shelter. What they lack is housing. The term emphasizes that people need housing and not simply temporary shelter.
For purposes of this report, Human Rights Watch will use the term “unhoused” or “houseless” to refer to people who do not have housing that meets the criteria set forth by the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR) in General Comment No. 4: The Right to Adequate Housing (art. 11(1) of the covenant).[7] This includes people living on the streets, in makeshift structures, in temporary or interim housing or shelters, in overcrowded conditions, and in sub-standard housing. This expansive definition reflects the massive scope of houselessness and the fluidity of housing situations—someone living in sub-standard or overcrowded housing one day may be living on the streets the next; someone living in a tent one day may be in a shelter or hotel room the next.
Because policies of criminalization tend to focus on visibly unhoused people, generally with the intention of removing them from sight, this report emphasizes the experience of unhoused people living on the streets.
Shelter or Housing
The CESCR describes adequate housing as meeting the following criteria: legal security of tenure; availability of services, materials, facilities, and infrastructure, like water, energy, and sanitation; affordability; habitability; accessibility; location accessible to employment, schools, health care and other social facilities; and cultural adequacy.[8]
In drafting the comment, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights said:”[T]he right to housing should not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with, for example, the shelter provided by merely having a roof over one’s head or views shelter exclusively as a commodity. Rather it should be seen as the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity.”[9]
Policymakers in Los Angeles often falsely say “housing” when they are referring to shelters, tiny homes, “safe camping” zones, hotel rooms with insecure tenure, and other temporary living situations.[10]
In this report, we use “housing” (sometimes “permanent housing”) to refer to a home that meets the definition of adequate housing in CESCR General Comment 4. Interim or otherwise temporary housing, shelter, and other living situations are identified specifically by what they are.
Encampments
While many unhoused people live on their own scattered throughout the city, a large percentage of them come together to form communities of differing sizes.
City officials and advocates usually call these communities “encampments.” Police enforce laws against “camping” in public spaces.[11]
This terminology is misleading and can feed into the public perception that people are unhoused because of their own choices. Camping is associated with a recreational activity--choosing to spend time outdoors. Unhoused people rarely chose to live outdoors. Rather than camping, they are existing or surviving outdoors. While it might feel more appropriate to restrict a person’s ability to “camp,” it is unfair and cruel to restrict their ability to exist.[12]
This report will use the terms “unhoused communities” and “encampments,” but with the understanding that people are living in these communities and not “camping” as a recreational choice. Encampments are communities built by unhoused people themselves on public land without authorization.
Criminalization
The term criminalization in the context of unhoused people refers to laws that in practice punish unhoused people for simply existing in public spaces.[13] While the laws do not explicitly make being unhoused illegal, by targeting unavoidable and natural human actions, they do so in fact. These laws may include bans on sitting or sleeping in public, keeping property in public, being in a park after certain hours, or living in one’s car.[14] They may also include targeted and systematic enforcement against unhoused people of laws that appear less obviously targeted at unhoused people, like trespassing, asking for money, loitering, drinking in public, urinating in public, jaywalking, smoking bans.[15]
Criminalization, as used in this report, also includes orders backed by threat of arrest to move someone from a location (“move-alongs”) or destruction and confiscation of their property and living structures, including through sanitation department clean-ups or “sweeps.”[16] It can also include coercing people into restrictive shelters or “safe camping” zones under threat of enforcement action, and coercing people into mental health treatment or drug rehabilitation facilities.[17]
Sweeps/Cleanups
LASAN has a vital role in maintaining the cleanliness of public space throughout the city. Its function is essential to the health and well-being of all residents.
LASAN has been mobilized to address the unhoused population in both positive and negative ways. To the extent LASAN performs clean-ups at encampments designed to remove waste and hazardous materials, without confiscating people’s property, without destroying the structures they depend on for shelter, and without instilling fear and abuse, their service is extremely valuable. Unhoused people generally welcome such cleanups, when conducted with predictable regularity and notice.
However, a substantial portion of LASAN cleanups amount to wholesale destruction of encampments, confiscation of property, and destruction of property, including clothing, bedding, tents, medications, personal papers, family mementos, and other personal items. As will be discussed in detail, these cleanups, called “sweeps” by unhoused people and advocates, inflict tremendous harm on people and often do not provide effective sanitation. Sweeps may also amount to encampment “clearances” when they result in permanently removing unhoused communities from a particular location.
Los Angeles City/County
The City of Los Angeles is an independent local municipality, with distinct borders, governed by a Mayor and a City Council consisting of 15 council members, each representing their own district within the city. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has jurisdiction throughout the city, as does the Los Angeles City Attorney. LASAN provides sanitation services throughout the city.
The County of Los Angeles includes the city, but also covers a much larger area and 87 other cities within its borders, along with unincorporated areas. LAHSA is a joint city and county agency.
This report focuses on houselessness and government responses within the City of Los Angeles. However, houselessness does not fit neatly within arbitrary borders. Nor does policy related to houselessness. Los Angeles County initiatives related to housing and services have direct impacts on houselessness in the city.
Because of the frequent intersection of these two distinct jurisdictions, it is not possible to strictly discuss one without reference to the other. While primarily focusing on the city, this report discusses relevant facts related to the county. In some instances, there may be inconsistencies in data due to the inability to distinguish between county and city. This report strives to be clear when discussing data and other facts about which pertain to the county and which to the city.
Interim Housing and Shelter Programs
In recent years, the city and county of Los Angeles and the state of California have initiated a variety of temporary housing or shelter programs designed to address houselessness. This report discusses many of them in detail, including their living conditions and rules, their success in moving people out of houselessness, and, to some extent their cost. This report discusses the relationship of these programs to the larger policy of criminalization.
These programs include:
1. A Bridge Home shelters (ABH): ABH are shelters that house people temporarily in congregate settings but offer everyone their own area, providing some privacy with room dividers.
2. Congregate shelters: These shelters offer large dorm-like settings in which people can stay indoors. Often, they provide cots or mats on which to sleep in open rooms with little to no privacy.
3. Project Roomkey (PRK): PRK was a state and local program in which unhoused people were provided temporary hotel rooms, meals, and some services designed to move them to permanent housing.
4. Tiny Home Villages (THV): THV are gated lots with eight-foot by eight-foot sheds designed to house two people each, with all residents sharing bathroom, shower, and laundry facilities.
5. Safe Camping: Safe Camping set aside gated lots in which people could live in tents with shared bathroom facilities.
6. Safe Parking: Safe Parking facilities are parking lots in which some vehicle-dwelling unhoused people can stay in their cars or vans overnight. Generally, people must remove their vehicles during the day.
7. Inside Safe: Inside Safe, like PRK, offers temporary hotel rooms for unhoused people whom city officials have moved out of encampments. The program promises services and assistance in obtaining permanent housing.
I. Criminalization in Practice: A Case Study
Criminalization, in all its forms, occurs throughout Los Angeles, often in hidden corners of the city with little oversight or attention. The sweep at Naomi Avenue in August 2021 was devastating to the residents of that community and typical of the implementation of such sweeps.
Naomi Avenue: A Little Known Encampment
At 7 a.m. on August 18, 2021, LAPD officers awoke Arturo T. as he slept in the makeshift house he had built under the freeway on Naomi Avenue between 16th and 17th Streets, just south of downtown Los Angeles. They told him that he had 15 minutes to get out of the way before LASAN workers took down the entire encampment.[18]
Arturo had been living at this location on the west side of the street for over a year, along with about 11 other people. Many of them had lived there longer than he had. A similar number of people lived on the east sidewalk across the street. Using scavenged scrap lumber and plastic tarps, they had built structures that provided shelter from the elements, including extreme heat, wind, sun, and cold. They had gathered abandoned couches, chairs, and mattresses to provide comfort and keep their bodies off the concrete sidewalk. They had formed a community of neighbors who provided each other with security and companionship.[19] They cooked meals together and watched out for each other. The area surrounding the encampment is generally light industrial, with few if any residences or retail businesses.[20] Arturo did not waste time. He gathered as many of his possessions as he could and moved out of the way.[21]
The previous week LASAN employees said that they were coming to clean the area soon, but they did not post signs giving official notice or a specific date and time.[22] Over the previous year, LASAN had conducted at least 25 cleanings in the immediate vicinity of the encampment.[23]
Arturo was able to pack some essential possessions before police officers ordered him to stand outside the perimeter that they had marked off with yellow tape. Officers stood next to patrol cars parked at both ends of the block, preventing Arturo and other encampment residents from entering the area to retrieve more of their possessions.[24]
LASAN trucks arrived, including a large flat-bed with a Kubota loader, a trash compactor truck, and a trailer with a portable toilet attached for their workers to use.[25] The city once had put a portable toilet near this encampment for a short period of time, but then removed it, leaving the residents to urinate and defecate in bottles and bags.[26] Because the encampment had no trash cans or dumpsters, a substantial amount of garbage had accumulated around it and its surrounding area. People unconnected to the encampment frequently dumped garbage near where the encampment residents lived, making the situation worse.[27] Months earlier, city officials identified the need for toilets and handwashing facilities to serve unhoused people in this area, but they provided none.[28]
Using the loader and shovels, LASAN workers first demolished the makeshift homes on the east side of Naomi Avenue, then on the west side where they destroyed Arturo’s home and all his remaining property.[29] They heaped his possessions, including bicycles, a television, a bed, a sofa, his clothes and shoes, into the dump truck and crushed them, “like it was worthless.”[30]
They destroyed a brand-new air-mattress, battery packs, food and cookware, as well as paperwork and identification that Lisa G., who lived in the encampment just around the corner on 16th Street, had been storing in a friend’s home in the Naomi Avenue encampment.[31] They only allowed her to remove a backpack and her dog. Another man had his bike, clothing, wife’s clothing, and a small generator taken and destroyed. Another man at the encampment had his work tools, clothing, and his birth certificate destroyed. LASAN took all of an older man’s possessions, including his medications. Others also had their medications destroyed.[32]
The demolition on this day was part of the city’s Comprehensive Cleaning and Rapid Engagement (“CARE+”) program, described as a “full comprehensive cleaning.”[33] General Dogon, an organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), arrived on the scene with Human Rights Watch as it was happening. He questioned the police officers guarding the north end of the block as to why LASAN was destroying this encampment.
Initially, the responding officer said it was because of a law forbidding encampments under the freeway.[34] Later the officer said it was to ensure that the sidewalk was passable in compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements.[35] However, a few days after LASAN finished demolishing and disposing of everyone’s possessions, structures, and the garbage, they set up a fence on the east side of Naomi Street where 10 to 15 people had lived, and another on the west side, where Torres lived.[36] These fences, which almost entirely blocked both sidewalks, remained in place for about a year and were as much a barrier to people with disabilities as the encampment had been.[37]
According to LASAN records, the “Solids Team” removed around 40 tons of material, about 600 pounds of which they identified as hazardous waste.[38] Much of it was indisputably garbage, but much of it included people’s possessions as described above, their built-up shelters, and furniture essential to create some comfort in a harsh living environment.[39] Sanitation workers are required by protocol to place personal property they have not defined as “hazardous” into bags that are then tagged and transported to a storage facility where they can be reclaimed within 90 days.[40] That day at Naomi Avenue, LASAN did not collect a single property bag, instead destroying everything.
Police officers at the scene told Human Rights Watch that outreach workers had been at this encampment offering shelter placements and services and that some of its residents left with the LAHSA workers.[41] Residents of the encampment denied that any outreach workers had taken people to housing or shelter from this encampment.[42] LAHSA records obtained by Human Rights Watch show that on the day of the demolition, LAHSA contacted one person at the demolished Naomi Avenue encampments, gave that person some food, water, a hygiene kit, and protective masks (PPE), but did not provide or even make a referral for housing or shelter.[43]
LAHSA workers contacted three other people at the immediately adjoining encampment on 16th Street.[44] They obtained “Bridge Housing” for one person that day. This person had been referred to “Bridge Housing” five months earlier, though it is unclear if their placement that day was related to the previous referral.[45] Outreach workers gave one person a tent, then obtained “crisis housing” for that person the following day.[46] Several Naomi Street residents simply moved around the corner onto 16th Street, integrating themselves into an already existing encampment.[47]
LAHSA records from the preceding two weeks further contradict the police officers' claim that they had been assisting people from this encampment with housing. From August 5, 2021 through the day of the demolition on August 18, 2021, outreach workers contacted 5 people from encampments at or within 250 meters of the Naomi Avenue encampment, providing them with food, water, PPE, hygiene materials and other services, but did not refer any to shelter or housing.[48] During the 40-month period from January 1, 2019 until April 22, 2022, LAHSA provided similar services to 53 individuals at these encampments, referred 19 of them to some form of interim housing or shelter, and obtained interim housing or shelter for a total of 3 of them.[49]
Over the next few months, LASAN, with support from the police, demolished the adjoining encampments on 16th Street and set up fences that blocked the sidewalks as they did on Naomi Street, compelling residents to scatter to other places without offers of shelter or housing.[50]
Arturo T., Lisa G., and the others had to absorb the destruction of their homes and property, then move on and start over at some other location.
II. Overview of Houselessness in Los Angeles
According to 2023 estimates, 46,260 people are unhoused in Los Angeles, over 7 percent of the unhoused population of the entire US, and 73 percent of those are unsheltered, living on the streets and sidewalks, in parks or in vehicles.
Black people make up less than 8 percent of the population of Los Angeles, but nearly one-third of unhoused people; a Black person is six times more likely to be unhoused than a white person in Los Angeles.
57 percent of Los Angeles renter households pay over 30 percent of their income for housing, while 270,000 renter households are considered overcrowded, meaning that huge numbers of people are at imminent risk of houselessness.
Older people are increasingly among the unhoused. The 2022 population estimates found 4,323 unhoused people in the city aged over 62 years.
Around the corner from the destruction of the settlement on Naomi Avenue, a row of tents and plywood and tarp structures lined the 16th Street sidewalk alongside the freeway off-ramp. Alice J., a Black woman who appeared to be in her 60s, sat on a tattered couch next to her structure. Chained to the leg of the couch was her dog, who stood up and growled if anyone approached until Alice assured the dog she was safe.[51]
Alice had been living on the streets for three years. She and her husband, a military veteran and a musician, owned their house until he took a loan against it for a business venture that failed, and they lost everything. He died two years later, leaving her on her own. Earlier in 2021, LASAN officials, with police in support, had destroyed her makeshift home. They took her computer, her bicycles, some kitchen equipment she had bought in hopes that she might find an apartment, shoes she had intended to sell to add to her SSI income, and mementos from her late husband. They told her she could get her possessions from the storage facility, but when she tried, they were not there.[52]
Alice watched the Naomi Avenue operation silently anticipating that her home would be next. She had many of her possessions packed up and stacked onto a cart, ready to move if the dump trucks appeared on her street.[53]
Alice is just one of tens of thousands of people living on the streets of Los Angeles. The Greater Los Angeles Point in Time (“PIT”) Homeless Count (“PIT” Count), put out by LAHSA annually, is an estimate of the number of unhoused people, sheltered and unsheltered, living in Los Angeles.[54] Despite significant limitations with its methodology, and critiques that the PIT Count substantially underestimates the number of people without housing, it can provide a baseline understanding of demographics and show increases and decreases in populations.[55]
In 2023, the PIT Count estimated 46,260 unhoused people within the city limits and 75,518 in the county.[56] These numbers marked an approximately 10 percent increase from the 2022 estimates.[57] The city of Los Angeles makes up 1.1 percent of the total US population, but 7.1 percent of the US's unhoused population.[58]
Encampments and vehicle dwellings have become pervasive parts of the Los Angeles landscape. The 2023 PIT Count found 14,096 cars, vans and recreational vehicles, and 9,342 tents or makeshift structures like the one in which Alice lived, housing tens of thousands of people in the county.[59] The vast majority of unhoused people in Los Angeles are “unsheltered,” while across the US most unhoused people are sheltered.[60] The 2023 PIT Count estimated that 27 percent of unhoused people lived in shelters or transitional housing and 73 percent lived on the streets in the city.[61] Almost all of the growth in Los Angeles’ unhoused numbers is due to an increase in the unsheltered population. The 32,680 people estimated living on the streets in 2023 marks a 15 percent increase in unsheltered houselessness in the city from the year before and more than double the number (107 percent increase) from 2009.[62]
While shelters and transitional housing come with their own problems that can make them unacceptable options to many people, living unsheltered on the streets can mean exposure to the elements—especially extreme heat, sun, wind, cold, occasional but brutal rains, and pollution—vulnerability to crime, and being subjected to law enforcement and other actions by city officials. Access to services is more difficult for unsheltered people.
Racial disparities in the unhoused population continues to be extreme, with Black and Native American people vastly overrepresented among the unhoused in relation to their overall population. [63] The proportion of the city’s unhoused population that is Black is over four times higher (33 percent) than that of the general population (8 percent).[64]
Just as Human Rights Watch was completing this report, LAHSA announced the results of the 2024 PIT Count, which showed a .27 percent reduction in the overall unhoused population for Los Angeles County and a 2.2 percent reduction for the city, the first decreases in many years.[65] The number of sheltered unhoused people increased, while the unsheltered population decreased.[66] These results are encouraging and may reflect a heightened attention to houselessness by city and county officials. Human Rights Watch has not had the opportunity to conduct a thorough analysis of LAHSA’s data; nor are we aware of other such analysis produced before completion of this report. The reduction in makeshift shelters, tents, and vehicles used as shelter was over 9 percent, considerably more than the reduction in actual people counted.[67] This difference could suggest that efforts to remove the most visible signs of unhoused communities have made individuals harder to locate and count. |
A. Gaps in the PIT Count
One obvious PIT Count limitation is that the estimates are based on one day or, as in 2023, just a few consecutive days in the year, and are not necessarily an accurate estimate of houselessness throughout the year. In Los Angeles, those days are generally in the winter when unhoused people are more likely to use what resources they have to get indoors, even if only very temporarily.[68]
The PIT counts rely on administrative shelter data and a sample of sight-counts of unsheltered people, tents, vehicles and structures.[69] Many unhoused people make great effort to hide themselves in order to avoid law enforcement, vigilantes, or just being exposed to public view, increasing the likelihood those sight-counts will miss them.[70] Law enforcement and sanitation departments may clear encampments ahead of the counts, making people difficult or impossible to find.[71] Incarcerated or hospitalized unhoused people may not be counted.[72] Perhaps most significantly, the count does not include people who are “couch surfing” or squeezing temporarily into overcrowded units who may flow in and out of unsheltered houselessness.[73]
Leaving people who do not have stable housing and are on the verge of being on the streets out of the count means a substantial underestimation of the problem. US Education Department data on unhoused children, counting those living in motels or doubled-up in other people’s homes, indicate a vastly larger number of unhoused people than the PIT counts estimate.[74]
This undercount means that many unhoused people are left out of consideration and that the scale of the problem is minimized; the methodology of counting visibly unhoused people, whether intentional or not, favors policies of criminalization that drive unhoused people out of public view.[75] A jurisdiction that criminalizes aggressively is likely to lower its count because unhoused people will be harder to find.
B. Who is Unhoused in Los Angeles?
Each person counted in these estimates is a human being with individual circumstances and experiences that led them to be unhoused. Each feels pain and joy, love and fear. Every one of them has hopes and desires. Every one of them has essential needs—a stable, secure, comfortable home; food and water; basic hygiene; social interactions; dignity and privacy and more. Every one of them has a human right to an adequate standard of living that meets these needs.
Bobby M., a 70-year-old Black man who has worked as a truck driver, a roofer, and a forklift operator, has been unhoused in the Skid Row neighborhood for many years.[76] More and more older people like Bobby are unhoused in Los Angeles. The 2023 City of Los Angeles PIT Count estimated 12,031 unhoused people over the age of 55, compared to 9,978 in 2020.[77] Over one-quarter of the unhoused residents of Los Angeles are over 55 years old.[78]
Serena C. lives in a tent with her husband and her young adult son in an encampment in Van Nuys near the ABH shelter. She has moved to various encampments and lived in shelters, but she found that their rules separated her from her family. Both she and her husband have physical conditions that prevent them from working. Her son has seizures often triggered by stress.[79] The 2022 City of Los Angeles PIT Count estimated there were 2,306 unhoused family units (having at least one child under age 18), over 90 percent of them sheltered.[80] Families with children make up almost 30 percent of the US unhoused population, according to a 2021 study.[81] Historically, most unhoused families in the US are headed by female single parents.[82]
Carter L.’s landlord evicted him from his Skid Row apartment just before the pandemic lockdown started in March 2020.[83] People stole from him and assaulted him while he was living on the streets near his former home. He went to the Veterans’ Administration in Westwood, since he had been a US Army medic in the 1990s, but they were unable to get him into housing. He moved into a large encampment along San Vicente Boulevard just outside the fence in front of the massive VA campus, along with dozens of other unhoused veterans, while he waited for a housing voucher. The 2022 PIT Count estimated 1,895 unhoused military veterans like Carter in the City of Los Angeles, nearly 80 percent of them unsheltered.[84]
Sandra C. had to leave her home following a dispute with her ex-partner, forcing her to live on the streets. The residents of an encampment south of Downtown Los Angeles welcomed her and she had lived there for about a year when we spoke with her. She fixes bicycles and sells them. She buys food for her neighbors in the encampment when she has money.[85] The 2022 City of Los Angeles PIT Count estimated there were 13,817 unhoused women—about one third of the total population. An additional 534 people included in the count identified as gender non-binary or “questioning” and 703 identified solely as transgender.[86]
Sage Johnson had to leave her home at age 17 to escape an abusive situation. She avoided living on the streets by staying with friends and relatives on their couches or wherever there was space available in the residence. Eventually she found transitional housing with the LGBT Center and permanent housing in West Hollywood.[87] The 2022 City PIT Count estimates 1,681 unhoused “transition aged youth” (TAY)—those between the age of 18 and 24.[88]The 2023 County PIT Count estimated 3,718 TAY among the unhoused population, 932 more than in 2022, including a doubling of the number of unsheltered TAY.[89]
Sally F. came to Los Angeles to escape her abusive husband in 2021. She has seizures that started after he hit her on the head; she has post-traumatic stress, bi-polar disorder, and anxiety. She stays on Skid Row and has survived assault and rape while on the streets.[90] A 2022 study of unhoused women in Los Angeles County found high rates of victimization for harms, including theft (73.8 percent), domestic violence (48.1 percent), and coerced sexual activity (about one-third) throughout their lifetimes.[91] Over 20 percent of women said intimate partner violence caused them to become unhoused.[92] Women and especially trans and non-binary people reported high rates of victimization while living on the streets.[93] Nearly one-third of unhoused men report having experienced intimate partner or sexual violence during their lifetimes.[94]
Edgar S. lives in a tent on 7th Street in Skid Row. After his mother died, his family split apart leaving him with no support. He has bi-polar disorder and anxiety. He has a heart condition. He had a substance use disorder and went to prison for a drug-related offense, losing his Social Security Disability benefits. He now survives on General Relief (GR) payments of $221 per month and Food Stamps.[95] The 2022 PIT Count estimated that 25 percent of unhoused people in the city have a mental health condition with high support requirements, 28 percent have harmful substance use, 12 percent have a developmental disability, and 22 percent have a physical disability.[96] Many, like Edgar, have some combination of these conditions.
C. Black Houselessness
Connie W. is a Black woman in her mid-50s who has been living in Skid Row for the past four years. She stays on the sidewalk near 6th Street, under a tree. For the first two years she lived in Skid Row, she slept on a piece of cardboard, until someone gave her a tent. She appreciates the protection from the sun and rain that the tent gives her, calling it “half-way decent.” She is part of a small community of people who live side by side and look out for each other.[97]
Connie uses a wheeled walker and describes having “crippling rheumatory arthritis.” She is extremely thin and looks frail, appearing to weigh less than 90 pounds, though she says she weighed 174 pounds when she got to Skid Row. She takes marijuana and drinks alcohol to address the constant pain in her bones. She takes medications for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and for voices she hears and feels these medications help her. She found some milk crates and put a mattress on top of them inside her tent, so she does not have to sleep directly on the concrete.[98]
Connie has been on her own since she was 16. She has some schooling and she worked for 25 years in various jobs, including as a janitor, a cement mason, and a cosmetologist. She styles hair for other unhoused women by her tent on Gladys Avenue.[99]
She had her own apartment, with government subsidized rent, for nine years.[100] Connie allowed her niece, who worked for a cable company and was living in her car, to stay with her. The landlord found out and evicted them both, leaving Connie out on the streets. Some of her family members have apartments or houses, but they are already too crowded for her to move in with them.[101]
Connie stayed in shelters, but she found them unbearable. Though she got priority because of her physical conditions, administrators would place her in the day room where she had to sleep on a mattress on a floor full of people as close as two feet away from her. “A person could be snoring or farting right in your face.”[102] She would have to leave the shelter right after breakfast and only could return later in the day.
She got a Section 8 Voucher after becoming unhoused but was unable to find a landlord who would accept her as a tenant within the time limits. She survives on food stamps and $221 a month from General Relief payments.[103]
The Sanitation Department periodically comes by her sidewalk home and makes her pack up her tent and property so they can clean. After they finish, she usually cleans again with soap and bleach. She keeps a broom and dustpan in her tent and tries to keep her area tidy.[104]
Houselessness in Los Angeles is a result of decades of racial discrimination and systemic policies and practices designed to advantage white people and disadvantage Black people like Connie.[105] Black houselessness in Los Angeles is extreme. The 2023 PIT Count estimates that, while Black people make up about 7.6 percent of the overall population in Los Angeles County, they are 31.7 percent of the unhoused.[106] Almost half of unhoused families are Black.[107] Nearly 40 percent of unhoused unaccompanied children and youth aged 18 to 24 are Black.[108] Unhoused older people are disproportionately Black.[109]
Los Angeles has over 15,400 unhoused Black people out of a population of nearly 300,000, nearly 9,000 non-Hispanic white people out of a city population of over 1.06 million and nearly 19,000 unhoused Latinx people out of a population of over 1.82 million.[110] The odds of being unhoused are 1 in 19 for a Black person in Los Angeles, 1 in 97 for a Latinx person, and 1 in 121 for a non-Hispanic white person. Black people in the city of Los Angeles are over six times more likely to be unhoused than white people.
The rates of county houselessness for white, Latinx, and Asian people are all below their share of the overall population, though Latinx houselessness has risen considerably in recent years.[111] Native American and Alaska Native people make up 1 percent of unhoused people in Los Angeles County but only 0.2 percent of the overall population; Native Hawaiian and Pacific Island people are 0.5 percent of those unhoused and 0.2 percent of the overall population.[112]
The Skid Row neighborhood, which has Los Angeles’ most concentrated poverty and houselessness, is primarily a Black community. Black people comprise 56 percent of unhoused people there.[113] Skid Row’s history as a place of containment of unhoused people, and its history of aggressive policing, are significant to understanding the racial dynamics of city officials’ response to houselessness.[114]
D. Precariously Housed People
While the Los Angeles homeless services system has become more efficient at helping people regain housing in recent years, LAHSA reports that every day, on average, 227 more people become unhoused, while only 207 retain housing.[115] People who lose their homes usually do not go directly to the streets: they may move in with a series of friends or family, sometimes called “couch surfing;” they may then move into a vehicle or temporary shelter or a motel before ending up outdoors.[116]
Sage Johnson couch-surfed until she was able to get into a shelter; Connie W. snuck her niece into her apartment until they were both evicted to the streets and shelters.[117] Harvey Franco lost his job due to an illness and could no longer afford his rent. He moved in with relatives until their landlord raised the rent beyond their means and he went out on the streets.[118]
Californian cities, including Los Angeles, have seen the highest growth in home prices in the nation over the past 24 years. Since 2000, the price of a typical home in Los Angeles has more than tripled.[119] Home values in Los Angeles have grown at a 60 percent faster rate than the average for the 50 largest US cities.
Los Angeles currently has the fourth most expensive house market in the US, behind only three other Californian cities. The “typical” home in Los Angeles is currently valued at nearly $1 million, though estimated values differ per neighborhood, ranging from $563,000 in the Watts neighborhood to nearly $4 million in the Bel Air neighborhood.[120]
Rents have also skyrocketed, having increased by 50 percent in the city between 2015 and 2024.[121] Median rent prices were $2,240 for a 1-bedroom and $3,200 for a 2-bedroom in February 2024.[122]
The City of Los Angeles has the highest rate of housing cost burden and overcrowding in the US.[123] A household that pays over 30 percent of its income for housing costs, including rent and utilities, is considered “cost burdened;” over 50 percent is considered “severely cost burdened.” Almost two-thirds of Los Angeles households rent their homes.[124] In 2022, 57 percent of those Los Angeles renter households were cost burdened, which includes 31 percent that were severely cost burdened.[125] An additional 38 percent of people in owner-occupied units were also cost burdened.[126] With a median household size of 2.58 people, that means approximately 1.86 million people were living in cost burdened households including over a million severely cost burdened.[127] Almost all low-income renter households pay more for housing than they can afford.[128]
In much of west Los Angeles and the northern San Fernando valley, a minority of households rent their homes. The proportion of households that rent is especially high around downtown including the areas east and south of it. Cost burdened households are distributed throughout the city with especially high percentages in the San Fernando Valley (see maps).
In 2020, the city had the second lowest rental vacancy rate in the US and the lowest among major metropolitan areas, reflecting a shortage of homes at the lower priced end of the spectrum.[129] Only about one-half of vacant units are actually for rent or sale, while a growing percentage is held off the market for various reasons, especially an increasing number of short-term rentals.[130] Newer, more expensive units have higher vacancy rates, but are out of reach for low-income renters.[131] Speculative investors, especially in gentrifying areas of the city, often hold housing units vacant to realize increased returns when monetary values rise.[132]
The lack of available affordable homes and the high cost of housing relative to income contribute to severe overcrowding.[133] Families and individuals force themselves into units that are too small for the number of people living in them. About 270,000 households in Los Angeles, almost 14 percent, are considered over-crowded and 80,000 renter households are considered severely overcrowded.[134] No other major city in the US has this level of overcrowding, which places large numbers of people at high risk of falling into houselessness. [135]
E. Death on the Streets
Once a person is living on the streets, the consequences are often dire. After couch surfing, then living in her car, in friends’ garages, occasional hotel rooms, and shelters for over two years, Tanya L. finally obtained a subsidized apartment for herself and her children. She tried to move her mother into the apartment, but the apartment manager said her mother’s status as a parolee was a lease violation. The manager let Tanya remain, but evicted her mother, who had cancer and could not get help from the medical system. She died on the streets.[136]
Houselessness is deadly. Five unsheltered people died each day on average in Los Angeles County in 2020, a 56 percent increase from 2019, following a steady increase from 1.7 per day on average in 2014.[137] The first full year of the Covid-19 pandemic saw that number increase to 5.5 daily deaths on average.[138] In 2021, deaths averaged just over six per day.[139]
Leading causes of death for people living on the streets of Los Angeles County are drug overdoses, especially related to methamphetamine and fentanyl, coronary heart disease, traffic injury, homicide, suicide, and, after March 2020, Covid-19.[140] The average age of death for unhoused people in Los Angeles County is 48 for women and 51 for men. [141]
People who remain unhoused are 80 percent more likely to die than those who regain housing; those who become unhoused after the age of 50 have higher death rates than those who become unhoused at a younger age.[142]
Stressful life situations, lack of access to health care, and exposure to the elements all age people rapidly.[143] Substance use, often to numb the pain of existence on the streets or to help people stay awake to protect themselves, increases the risk of death and contributes to deteriorating health. Death by homicide for unhoused people has increased dramatically in recent years, accounting for 21 percent of all homicides in Los Angeles County in 2021 despite unhoused people making up only about 1 percent of the overall population.[144] Death on the streets is often preventable and almost always brutal.
In September 2021, a woman died in her tent on the sidewalk of 6th Street south of Gladys Avenue. Her neighbors said that she had been suffering through a painful illness for many months. They heard her moaning in her tent, but they were unable to get her medical care.[145] A few days after she died, the Sanitation Department came out and loaded her tent and belongings into their trash compactor truck.[146]
III. Drivers of Houselessness
The government’s failure to dedicate maximum available resources towards realizing the right to housing and its failure to appropriately regulate the profit-driven housing system has led to dramatic shortage of affordable housing causing mass scale houselessness. Other factors like health conditions, discrimination, family violence, and job loss may explain why a particular individual is houseless.
Over half a million low-income renter households lack affordable housing in Los Angeles, while housing development is concentrated in the high end of the market.
Since 2000, renter income in California has gone up by 8 percent, while rents have increased 37 percent; the median two-bedroom unit in Los Angeles was $2,650, about 50 percent of the median income.
Government at all levels has substantially decreased social protection for people living in poverty; Los Angeles County General Relief payments are capped at $221 per month, less than the $312 paid in 1989; the federal government has discontinued direct spending on affordable housing development, while making Section 8 rental assistance available to only about one-quarter of eligible people.
Government policies, including red-lining, zoning, freeway construction, “urban renewal,” and mass incarceration, along with private discrimination and de-industrialization, have enforced racial segregation and contributed to Black poverty and houselessness.
A. Economic structure
The cause of houselessness is, in one sense, extremely simple: the housing system in Los Angeles and throughout the US, does not create or maintain enough affordable, quality housing for all residents.[147] For this reason, a certain number of people necessarily will be unhoused, primarily those who are disadvantaged by the economic system due to discrimination, disability, lack of family or government support, or some other circumstance.[148]
Individuals lose their homes for a broad variety of specific reasons:
Ida J. had to stop working to care for her ailing mother. When her mother died, Ida inherited her debt and could not pay the mortgage. She lost the house and lived on the streets in Skid Row before getting temporary shelter in a motel room. She is in her mid-60s and has sciatica which requires her to use a walker.[149]
Ramon T. worked as a roofer. He, his wife, and two very young children had an apartment that was infested with roaches and barely habitable, and still they could not afford the $1,200 per month rent. The landlord evicted them. His family moved into his wife’s mother’s already crowded apartment, while Ramon set up his tent in MacArthur Park.[150]
Kate W. fled her abusive husband with her children. The domestic violence shelters would not let her stay because her children were too old, so she moved into a large encampment in a riverbed in Ventura County. She got a job and an apartment in Los Angeles, but the pay was not enough for her to cover rent. After her eviction, she continued to work while living in an encampment in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles.[151]
Carla P. was going to school, but after five years of sobriety she relapsed into drug addiction, leading her to lose her housing.[152]
Sean O. had a temporary job at an Amazon warehouse with no benefits and low pay. After the Christmas season they laid him off. He was arrested for possessing drug paraphernalia and placed on probation. After losing his job, he could not pay fees associated with his probation or his share of the family’s rent. His mother and sister kicked him out of their house, and he ended up living in his truck in Venice.[153]
Many precipitating factors can lead any one person into houselessness, including losing a job, experiencing an eviction, having a mental health condition, family violence, an injury, illness or other medical condition, or a rent increase, for example. People facing these circumstances do not necessarily lose their homes, but the likelihood increases given the overall shortage of affordable housing. For example, 1 in 85 adults with disabilities is unhoused, compared to 1 in 344 adults without disabilities.[154] A substantial share of unhoused people have disabilities, but as these statistics indicate, most people with disabilities do not become houseless. Similarly, most people losing their jobs or facing a health emergency or with substance use disorder do not become houseless, but a certain number do.[155] Most people report that their entry to houselessness began with being removed from their home through an eviction.[156]
Individual factors may explain which individuals become unhoused, but structural features inherent to the market-based approach to housing and enabled by government policies explain the prevalence of houselessness.[157] In the US and especially in Los Angeles, housing is largely treated as a commodity. While people experience their housing as “home,” it also functions, primarily for many people, to build wealth.[158] Homeownership is often as much an investment as it is a place to live; landlords buy properties as a source of income. A market system that treats housing as a commodity does not enable the creation of enough affordable housing for all people without massive government intervention.[159]
Large private equity firms, whose obligation is to their investors, have increasingly bought up housing stock across the US and in Los Angeles.[160] These companies have bought distressed and foreclosed properties, taking advantage of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s to expand their holdings and dominate housing markets.[161] While the industry sometimes claims to be saving affordable housing, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing Leilani Farha has pointed out that they tend to purchase existing housing and make it more expensive.[162] Specifically, she noted, companies seek out properties that they consider “undervalued” because the rents are not as high as the market will bear.[163] Then they raise rents and cut back maintenance, often driving the existing tenants out, in their efforts to squeeze as much profit as possible from their investments.[164] Private equity firms have bought about 13 percent of homes in the US.[165] In Los Angeles, housing grabs by private corporate landlords have disproportionately impacted Black neighborhoods.[166]
More fundamentally, under a market system in which the goal of real estate development is to build wealth, it is not economically rational for developers large and small to build housing that is affordable to people with low incomes, absent government intervention.[167] Helmi Hisserich, former deputy mayor for housing and homelessness under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former member of Mayor Richard Riordan’s business team, said that profit-driven developers build high-end housing due, in part, to costs of construction and land.[168]
Building and land costs are especially high in a coastal city like Los Angeles because, among other reasons, land is limited due to geography, suburbanization, and single-family home zoning.[169] Developers are driven to make profit rather than to provide for unhoused or precariously housed people, and the profit margins on high-end homes incentivize developers to build expensive ones.[170] The demand for such homes consumes much of that limited land. Heidi Marston, former executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Agency, explained that non-profit affordable housing developers simply cannot compete for available land on the open market.[171]
The 2023 Los Angeles County Housing Needs Assessment Report found that over half a million low-income renter households do not have access to affordable housing and the average monthly rent requires a person to make almost three times the minimum wage to avoid being rent-burdened.[172] A 2021 study found that Los Angeles had only 20 available affordable rental units for every 100 extremely low-income households.[173] With the bulk of housing production concentrated at the high end of the market, the amount of affordable housing remains well below the needs of the population.[174]
The City of Los Angeles Draft Housing Element 2021-2029 Housing Needs Assessment (2021 LA City Housing Needs Assessment), a study generated every 10 years by the city planning and housing departments, evaluated housing needs and production from 2014 through 2021.[175] To meet estimated needs, the goal for that time period had been 82,002 total units, including 35,412 above moderate income, 13,728 moderate income, and 32,862 low and very low-income units. The total number given permits for development was 103,973—a seeming success. However, 92,407 of those units were for those with above moderate income, 2.6 times greater than the need at that level. Housing development to serve low-income people fell vastly short of the goals.[176]
Projecting forward to the next 10 years, the 2021 LA City Housing Needs Assessment anticipates a massive increase in the need for housing, including 184,721 units for people with low, very low, and extremely low incomes, and another 75,091 for people with moderate incomes.[177] They anticipate new construction will not remotely meet these needs, while overproducing for above moderate-income people by more than 50,000 units.[178] To meet the needs, construction of affordable units will need to increase 2,291 percent by 2029.[179] Such an increase is highly unlikely without substantial government investment.
A 2023 study of housing development across the US found that “multifamily production was extraordinarily strong,” but it mostly targeted the high end of the market.[180] From 2015 through 2022, the share of new units with monthly rents over $2,050 doubled to 36 percent of the market, while the share of units with rent below $1,050 dropped from 22 to 5 percent.[181]
High levels of construction of higher cost housing have not driven costs down and made housing more affordable.[182] Developers leave units empty rather than lower rents or rent them out short-term to individual or corporate tenants.[183]
The area surrounding the encampment near City Hall where Sonja Verdugo first lived is filled with recently built market rate housing with vacancies. The land on which these buildings sit used to be parking lots.
The Downtown section of Los Angeles has relatively high vacancy rates, but also has the highest concentration of people living on its sidewalks.[184] For-profit developers and property owners have built luxury apartments and converted low-income units into above-market rate housing.[185]
Houselessness tracks gentrification.[186] With rising housing costs, relatively middle-income people seek out lower-cost housing in neighborhoods where lower-income people, often Black and Brown people, live. Their ability to pay more pressures the price of that housing upward and reduces the stock available to people who cannot afford as much.[187] Speculative housing developers invest in these neighborhoods with rising home prices to convert previously affordable units into higher-end market rate housing.
Developers have targeted the areas surrounding and even within the neighborhood of Skid Row for creation of upscale, expensive housing, as more wealthy people choose to live in the city core. The Echo Park neighborhood, a traditionally working-class Latino area, has changed drastically over the past two decades, driving up housing costs and displacing longtime residents. David Busch, an unhoused person and advocate who had been living in an encampment there, told of a Latina woman, a grandmother, who had lived in Echo Park her entire life.[188] Unable to afford rent, she lost her house. Not wanting to leave her home and community, she set up a tent in a large encampment by Echo Park Lake. She stayed there until police destroyed that encampment in March 2021 and dispersed its residents.[189]
Gentrification has been ongoing for decades in the Venice neighborhood, as has houselessness. In the mid-2000s, a US Housing and Urban Development subsidized building on the boardwalk that provided affordable homes to dozens of people living on social security disability payments, was converted to a market rate hotel. Units now rent for between $269 and $359 per night.[190] Several of the people displaced by the conversion moved to nearby encampments on the boardwalk or on 3rd Street and some of them have died while living outdoors.[191] Many other residents of these encampments were part of a multi-generational community of working class Black and Latinx people in Venice who had been priced out of their housing.[192] When Google and other technology companies moved to Venice in the early 2010s even more high-income people came to the area, driving housing prices up and accelerating gentrification.[193]
In Los Angeles, the lack of affordable housing and prevalence of poverty create widespread housing instability and houselessness. The 2021 LA City Housing Needs Assessment found the median household income in Los Angeles to be $62,000 per year, well below the cut-off to be considered low-income for a family, and that the most available jobs in the city paid under $30,000 per year.[194] About 22 percent of Los Angeles households live on less than $25,000 per year.[195] People with such low incomes have little flexibility if their rent increases, work hours diminish, or they have an unplanned expense like a health emergency or a traffic accident. Such precarity leaves people on the brink of losing their homes.
Wages in Los Angeles and throughout California have not kept up with housing costs. Since 2000, renter income in California has gone up 8 percent, while rents have increased 37 percent.[196] Los Angeles has among the highest rents of any city in the US. In 2021, the median two-bedroom unit cost $2,650 per month, about 50 percent of the median household income.[197]
Income inequality combines with the sheer numbers of people living in poverty or at its edges to drive houselessness.[198] Los Angeles is home to many very wealthy people and massive numbers of people with little or no wealth. Wages for Californians in the bottom half and bottom tenth of earners have remained stagnant for at least the past 40 years, while wages for the top 5 and 10 percent of earners have risen substantially.[199]
This inequality means some people can afford very expensive housing, thus incentivizing profit-driven developers to build for them and driving the housing market up, while the vast majority of people compete over the insufficient affordable housing stock.[200] With rising housing costs, middle- and even upper-income people seek out less expensive options, making it even more difficult for lower-income people to find homes.[201] A report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that California ranked 49th among US states for housing units per capita and that 50 percent of households could not afford their housing costs.[202] Los Angeles has among the nation’s most severe housing shortages for low-income people.[203] Half a million renter households in Los Angeles cannot afford their homes.[204]
B. Property Values, Housing, and Houselessness
While the commodification of housing--combined with governmental failure to invest in affordable housing--contributes to creating the conditions that lead to houselessness in the US, concern with monetary property values dominates public policy towards housing and unhoused people. “Free market” ideology resists regulations on speculative, profit-driven development of housing and developers and property owners exert their influence over government to promote laws and policies that help them build wealth.[205]
Some scholars observe that the emphasis on home ownership as wealth-building vehicle, promoted by government subsidies and guarantees, along with profit-maximization in the housing rental market, insure that property values, seen strictly in financial terms, guide policy related to houselessness.[206]
Many policymakers and much of the public perceive social or public housing as a “give-away” to undeserving people and as crime-ridden slums.[207] These perceptions are deeply connected to racism.[208] They become self-fulfilling when that perception leads to disinvestment and subsequent deterioration of neighborhoods where poor people live. Many in the public blame those who have “lost the competition” for housing for their own circumstances, viewing them as disposable and subject to banishment from sight.[209]
Government actions—from disinvesting in social supports that meet human needs to removing regulations that would restrain abusive profit-maximizing practices to subsidizing the commodification of the housing stock—have created the conditions in which widespread houselessness exists throughout the US and prominently in Los Angeles.[210] Over the past several decades, the federal government—including under both Republican and Democratic administrations—has drastically cut social protection programs, at the same time that well-paying working class jobs disappeared when the US economy restructured and lost much of its industrial base.[211]
At the local level, for example, state law requires all counties to provide a monthly payment for basic survival to qualified people with no other source of income.[212] These General Relief payments in Los Angeles County were $312 per month in 1989, equivalent to $770 in 2024 dollars.[213] In 2024, the payments were $221 per month, as they have been since 1992 when the California legislature amended the law to allow counties to cap the amount they pay at 62 percent of the 1991 official federal poverty line.[214] In addition to gutting this program by failing to keep up with rising costs of living, the agencies that administer it enforce rules designed to remove people from their rolls to save money.[215] Cutting this and other social protection programs means more people risk falling into houselessness and fewer can escape it.
In place of social supports for people living in poverty and otherwise marginalized people, and instead of making the long-term investments in affordable, non-market housing needed to address the crisis, government policies frequently default to criminalization and removing unhoused people from public view, limiting their perceived potential negative impact monetary property values.
C. Federal housing policy
In response to massive houselessness during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the federal government created the Federal Housing Administration and began funding and building public housing to provide permanently affordable homes for low-income people on a grand scale.[216] Under the public housing model, the federal government paid the full costs of building and maintaining the housing.
In Los Angeles, the Housing Authority (HACLA), which administers public housing, had 8,627 units in 1959, but had only added 305 more units by 1995.[217] Its total stock has steadily dropped since then, leaving HACLA with only 6,488 units of public housing in 2021.[218] There is only one unit of public housing for every 100 people in the city of Los Angeles living in a household with an income below the federal poverty line.[219]
Most of these units were built in the 1950s and have maintenance costs associated with buildings of that age. Public housing funding in Los Angeles, which comes nearly exclusively through federal Public Housing Agency (PHA) grants from HUD, has more than doubled since 2007, without adding new units.[220] Presumably much of this money is spent on maintenance costs for aging buildings. Even with the increase, the federal government still has not adequately funded these costs.[221]
In the 1960s and early 1970s, federal policy shifted away from building and maintaining permanently affordable public housing to subsidizing building by private developers.[222] About 50 percent of the US federally assisted affordable housing stock is owned by for-profit entities.[223]
Programs created by the 1961 National Housing Act and the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act, referred to as the Section 236 and 221(d)(3) programs, for example, offered private developers extremely low interest rates on mortgages, and guaranteed return on their investment, in exchange for them keeping the units they developed affordable for a set time period—usually 40 years.[224] They also gave developers the right to pay off their mortgages after 20 years. Once the developer paid off the mortgage, either after 40 years or as early as 20 years, they could charge market rates for rents.[225] Hundreds of thousands of units of housing built under these and other programs across the US have been or soon may be removed from the stock of affordable housing.[226] As the federal government has long ago discontinued these programs, they are not replacing the lost housing stock.
In Los Angeles, affordability restrictions for 9,412 units of housing financed with federal and state subsidies are scheduled to expire by 2031 and an additional 47,286 will end after that date.[227] Private owners in expensive housing markets like Los Angeles have great incentive to shed affordability restrictions.[228]
In the historically Black and working class, but now heavily gentrified, Oakwood neighborhood in Venice, for example, 190 units in 10 buildings of the Holiday Venice development have subsidies and affordability restrictions expiring in 2029.[229] These buildings were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Black community members using Section 236 subsidies, but they have since fallen into private ownership. They are home to many of the last remaining Black and Latinx families in Venice, who have organized effectively over the years to maintain the affordability restrictions on these buildings.[230] |
In the 1970s, housing policy shifted further away from new construction towards programs subsidizing rents. The “Section 8” programs allow low-income tenants to pay only 30 percent of their income as rent, with a subsidy going directly to a private landlord who charges an approved “market” rent.[231] Two basic categories of Section 8 subsidies continue to exist today.[232]
Project-based Section 8 is a subsidy attached to a building that allows the landlord/developer to pay operating costs through rents covered by the subsidy.[233] Project-based Section 8 subsidies are used to help finance housing developed by housing authorities and private developers.[234] Like other government subsidies to private housing developers, project-based Section 8 is time limited, allowing these developers to “opt-out” of their contracts and obligations to rent to lower-income people after a certain time-period.[235]
The second type of Section 8 program provides a qualified person with a voucher that they can take to a private landlord guaranteeing that they will pay 30 percent of their income for rent and the housing authority will cover the difference between that 30 percent and a determined “market rate.” While vouchers help reduce the amount people have to pay for rent, the money goes to the property owner, and the program does not expand the stock of housing.[236] Section 8 vouchers give people more choice about where to live, so long as landlords will accept them.[237] Voucher availability is limited by lack of funding and millions of eligible people across the US cannot get them.[238]
By the 1980s, the federal government had almost entirely cut off direct funding for new housing development, instead focusing on Section 8 subsidies and further privatizing affordable housing production.[239] As part of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, it created the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program (LIHTC).[240] Under LIHTC, which remains the primary federal funding source for affordable housing today, the government gives investors tax credits to incentivize development of low-income housing.[241]
LIHTC housing now accounts for almost half of all federally assisted affordable units.[242] However, without additional Section 8 subsidies, LIHTC housing is not necessarily affordable for the lowest income people most at-risk of homelessness.[243] Affordability requirements generally last 30 years; investors may be able to opt-out of them after 15.[244] This expiration can cause instability for tenants in tight housing markets like Los Angeles.[245] By 2029, affordability requirements for several hundred thousand units of housing funded by LIHTC across the US are scheduled to expire.[246] California gave developers incentives to accept longer affordability restrictions, and, in 1996, California required future LIHTC projects to remain affordable for a minimum of 55 years.[247]
In addition to moving away from directly funding and building affordable housing, the federal government has drastically reduced its overall spending on housing.[248] Reduced funding has hampered efforts to maintain existing housing, leading to deterioration of the affordable housing stock, which may impact availability across the country and funding for new units.[249] Further, the system by which non-profit housing developers finance affordable housing developments using tax credits and multiple other sources of funding, including from private sources and from different levels of government, has become highly complicated, expensive, and inefficient, contributing greatly to the failure to meet the need.[250]
Since the 1980s, the federal government has passed various housing initiatives, but never funded them adequately.[251] The 1990 National Affordable Housing Act purported to help preserve housing with expiring subsidies primarily through block grants to local jurisdictions.[252] This program has not been funded to meet the need and has seen major cuts in recent years.[253] Also in the 1990s, the HOPE VI program led to the demolition of tens of thousands of “severely distressed” public housing units, only some of which were replaced by affordable units for low-income people, causing further displacement.[254] The National Housing Trust Fund (NHTF), part of the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act, aimed to develop 1.5 million units of affordable housing.[255] However, Congress did not begin funding the program until 2016.[256] It paid for development of 739 units that year and the preservation of several hundred others.[257] There are currently bills proposed in Congress to fund housing development and preservation.[258] US President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation proposed large sums of money for affordable housing, but Congress did not pass it.[259]
Beginning in the 1980s, federal homelessness policy emphasized sheltering unhoused people instead of creating the housing they needed.[260] The 1987 McKinney Homeless Assistance Act created and funded programs to provide shelter, transitional housing, and services for unhoused people, but very little permanent housing.[261] Similarly, the “Continuum of Care” model, developed by HUD in the 1980s, emphasized programming ahead of housing.[262]
In the early 2000s, the federal government adopted a nominal “Housing First” policy to address houselessness.[263] Housing First means placing people in stable, secure housing first, then taking steps to address other needs, such as voluntary mental health services, or treatment for problematic substance use.[264] State and local governments, including California and Los Angeles, claim to adhere to the Housing First model. However, few jurisdictions have dedicated sufficient resources to implement a true version of Housing First.[265]
The 2009 federal Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act (HEARTH) program continued the pattern of funding shelter, transitional housing, and services without putting enough resources into permanent housing.[266] Former US President Donald Trump’s administration explicitly rejected the Housing First approach, instead focusing on removing regulatory barriers to private housing development and supporting law enforcement responses.[267]
Meanwhile, even as the federal government has dramatically reduced funding for affordable housing that would help people living in poverty over the years, it has supported those who could afford to buy a home by allowing them to deduct mortgage interest payments from their taxable income. This tax deduction amounts to a $70 billion yearly subsidy to middle- and upper-income people.[268]
D. State and Local Policies in California and Los Angeles
At the state and local level, investment in affordable housing and in prevention of houselessness has been sporadic, though recent years have seen renewed emphasis in Los Angeles and California. Los Angeles voters, for example, passed Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond to finance affordable housing, in 2016, and Measure ULA, a tax on high-end real estate transaction to pay for affordable housing and eviction prevention, in 2023.[269] The state of California has been investing in a variety of programs to develop more housing.[270] However, structural and philosophical barriers remain.
The laws that govern the landlord-tenant relationship generally allow landlords to do what they want with the property. Los Angeles’ Rent Stabilization Ordinance (LARSO), which regulates some rentals in the city, provides limited eviction controls but landlords can get around them by doing some remodeling of their units or taking the units off the rental market.[271] In January 2023, the City Council passed tenant protections that also apply to rental units not covered by LARSO, including a requirement that landlords have “just cause” for evictions and prohibiting eviction for non-payment of rent unless the amount owed exceeds one month’s fair market rent.[272] Other tenant protections, like guaranteed representation in eviction proceedings, are not available.
According to media reports, many for-profit developers and major landlords have made significant efforts to influence Los Angeles City Council members.[273] They have invested huge sums of money into lobbying efforts.[274] They have contributed to city council campaigns and organized to defeat council members who have favored renters’ rights.[275] Several city council members and their staff have been indicted and convicted in recent years for corruption involving alleged payments from real estate developers.[276]
In 2018, changes in state law allowed the city to enforce long-dormant “inclusionary zoning” laws that require new developments in some areas to include affordable units, but they have not been in effect long enough to have major impact.[277]
The Ellis Act, a state law which allows landlords to evict tenants in rent controlled or rent stabilized units and convert those units to high-priced housing, has led to the removal of nearly 30,000 homes with tenant protections from the Los Angeles rental market since 2001.[278]
While not investing sufficiently in measures that will reduce houselessness and promoting market-based laws and policies that encourage the commodification of housing, federal, state, and especially local governments continue to invest heavily in criminalization.
E. Houselessness in Los Angeles is a Manifestation of White Supremacy
The high rate of houselessness among Black residents of Los Angeles is the result of decades of laws, policies, and practices that discriminate against Black people and other people of color.[279] It is the result of a commodified housing market that devalues Black lives. It is the result of systemic racism that pervades policing, education, health care, employment, and other systems and disadvantages Black people in the competition for scarce housing resources. Much of the houselessness in Los Angeles, and much of the rest of the country, is a manifestation of white supremacy.[280]
Racist policies and practices leading to modern houselessness date back centuries.[281] The land on which Los Angeles now sits is home to the Tongva people, but it was taken from them by Spanish colonial settlers and Catholic priests who enslaved and forcibly converted some, killed most, and banished others.[282] In 1850, California passed a law punishing “Indians” found to be loitering by forcing them to perform unpaid labor.[283] In practice, white Californians used this law to press Native Americans into forced labor.[284] In downtown Los Angeles, where the federal courthouse now sits and across the street from the county criminal court and City Hall, there was a slave market for the sale of Native American people.[285]
Black people began migrating to Los Angeles during the late 1840’s California Gold Rush, seeking economic opportunity.[286] By the time it became a state, California already had laws and policies upholding white supremacy and restricting citizenship based on race, including segregating schools, prohibiting inter-racial marriage, and banning non-white people from voting.[287]
Around the turn of the 20th century, Black people arrived in Los Angeles in larger numbers from the US south, especially Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia, fleeing racial violence and discrimination under the emerging Jim Crow regime.[288] They mostly settled just south of downtown, found plentiful work, and created communities.[289]
By the 1920s, as Los Angeles was experiencing extremely rapid growth and expansion, the real estate industry began to impose aggressive measures to enforce racial segregation.[290] Homeowners’ associations, driven by an ideological belief that racially “pure” white communities had higher economic value, demanded restrictive covenants that forbade Black people, other people of color, and non-Christians from living in their neighborhoods.[291]
Government policies of that era deliberately promoted racial segregation. The Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC), created by the federal government during the 1930s to promote lending for homeownership and to help people fight off foreclosures, generated maps to guide lending institutions that graded neighborhoods higher for being all white and discouraged lending in low-income and non-white neighborhoods, most severely in Black neighborhoods.[292] This “redlining,” named because the maps colored disfavored neighborhoods in red, led to disinvestment in Black communities, deterioration of housing stock, and the encouragement of restrictive covenants and other methods of racial segregation.[293]
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created to promote homeownership by offering insurance and 80 percent loans on long-term mortgages, explicitly required racial segregation by refusing to make loans in mixed race neighborhoods that were considered less economically “stable” than all-white neighborhoods.[294] FHA underwrote entire suburban developments throughout the US, including Los Angeles, with explicit conditions that Black people be excluded.[295] These restrictions on homeownership deprived Black people of the opportunity to build wealth as compared to their white counterparts and forced them to crowd into smaller parts of the growing city with deteriorating housing stocks.[296]
Restrictive covenants, private contracts that excluded Black people and other minorities from living in a particular area, became prominent in Los Angeles in the early part of the 20th century.[297] These covenants were promoted by the real estate industry and by the 1920s had made most of the housing in Los Angeles unavailable to Black and Asian residents.[298] These practices, enforced by government and courts, were widespread throughout the US.
Similarly widespread was the practice of zoning sections of the city into white and Black only neighborhoods.[299] Though this practice was found unconstitutional in 1919, some jurisdictions continued it.[300] Others simply shifted to facially race-neutral zoning policies that allowed only single-family homes to be built in certain areas.[301] These policies effectively excluded non-white and particularly Black people from living there, while multi-unit developments that were financially attainable to Black and other people of color were relegated to limited zones.[302] This zoning, which explicitly segregated by economic class, functions to exclude by race because of longstanding discriminatory policies that have systematically prevented wealth accumulation by Black people.[303]
Many cities, including Los Angeles, zoned areas around where Black people lived as “industrial,” allowing toxic, polluting industries to exist near their residences.[304] These zoning policies, which continue today, have limited the development of safe, affordable, multi-family housing throughout the country and in Los Angeles. They have forced Black and Latinx people to crowd into neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, bad air quality, and poorer schools.[305]
Areas zoned for single-family housing in Los Angeles have higher white populations and lower Black and Latinx populations.[306] By stifling wealth accumulation and economic opportunity for non-white people and restricting their housing options, these zoning policies have contributed to the prevalence of Black houselessness.
Los Angeles experienced another wave of growth in the 1940s, including a large influx of Black people attracted to plentiful industrial jobs during and immediately after World War II.[307] The real estate industry continued to shape a segregated city through informal practices such as refusing to show homes in white neighborhoods to Black buyers and promoting laws to entrench racial divisions even after the US Supreme Court held restrictive covenants unlawful in 1948.[308] The continuation of redlining, discriminatory housing practices, and racist zoning prevented Black people from benefitting from the post-war housing boom, while increasing housing insecurity as the Black population of Los Angeles grew tenfold from 1940 to 1970.[309]
Freeway construction and “urban renewal” projects destroyed Black and poor communities throughout the US in the 1950s and 1960s, displacing people from their homes and creating physical barriers between white and Black residents.[310] The federal Urban Renewal Act of 1949 authorized local governments to clear land considered blighted and sell it to private developers. The majority of urban renewal areas were inhabited by Black residents, in part a direct result of decades of disinvestment leading to the decay of those neighborhoods.[311] Building codes, enforced as part of “anti-blight” campaigns in the 1950s, especially in Black neighborhoods, further cut the stock of affordable, low-income housing.[312] Destruction of these neighborhoods, which had affordable, if low-quality, housing, resulted in further ghettoization for Black people and greater housing instability leading to houselessness.[313]
In the 1970s the suburbs of Los Angeles, made up of vast tracts of mostly single-family homes, grew in population and area.[314] This suburbanization reinforced the trend of segregated living.[315] In 1978, California voters passed and enacted Proposition 13, limiting property taxes for homeowners.[316] This change helped entrench the wealth derived from homeownership, enabled in part by discriminatory zoning, land use, and financing policies, while reducing revenues needed for basic services to help low-income people.[317] The 2020 rate of homeownership in Los Angeles was 33 percent for Black people and 57 percent for white people.[318]
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, deindustrialization resulted in the loss of high paying manufacturing jobs throughout the US and especially in Los Angeles.[319] It hit Black workers especially hard, putting homeownership out of reach for more people, raising unemployment and increasing housing instability.[320] Unemployment, under-employment, and low-wage employment have been consistently higher for Black people in Los Angeles than for white people, contributing to higher rates of housing instability and houselessness.[321]
Concurrently, federal government investment in public housing and other forms of subsidized housing, which had evolved to primarily provide homes in Black communities, declined dramatically.[322] In the 1980s, during the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the federal government began destroying the social safety net and gutting social programs that helped Black and poor people maintain their housing.[323] In the 1990s, US President Bill Clinton’s administration continued that destruction, dismantling the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and directing funds to policing, prosecutions, and prisons.[324]
During this period, federal and local governments embarked on “wars” on drugs and crime, while neglecting root causes related to poverty. US state and federal prison populations increased from 218,000 in 1974 to 1,404,032 in 2001, and overall rates of imprisonment rose from 92 to 472 per 100,000 people.[325] Prison populations have decreased slightly since then to roughly 1,230,000 people in 2022 and a rate of 355 per 100,000 people.[326] Perhaps more significant to the understanding of houselessness, the number of people who had ever been to prison increased from 1,819,000 to 5,618,000 between 1974 and 2001.[327] As of 2018, one in every two adults (approximately 113 million people) has had an immediate family member incarcerated for at least one night in jail or prison and one in seven adults has had an immediate family member incarcerated for at least one year.[328]
This carceral response to crime and poverty—including funding the penal system at the expense of social supports, imposing overly harsh punishments, and prosecuting crimes related to survival and coping with poverty—focused largely on Black communities, who have continued to experience incarceration rates in vast disproportion to their share of the population. In 2022, the latest year for which data is available, Black people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons at nearly five times the rate of white people.[329] As of 2018, Black adults were 50 percent more likely than white adults to have an immediate family member incarcerated.[330] Contact with the police and criminal legal system increases the likelihood a person will become or remain unhoused.[331]
These numbers do not include those who were incarcerated in local jails, youth and immigration detention centers, or were supervised on probation and parole. By 2020, there were 1.9 million people across the US incarcerated in jails or prisons, nearly 3.7 million on probation or parole, and at least 79 million with a criminal record.[332] While comprising about 13 percent of the US population, Black people make up about 38 percent of the incarcerated population.[333]
Local, state and federal governments began decommissioning large and often abusive mental hospitals in the 1950s, but failed to invest in community mental health care to replace them.[334] Without this community-based care, many people with mental health conditions with high support requirements ended up living on the streets.[335] Similarly, a shortage of evidence-based treatment or other supports for people with substance use disorder impacts houselessness.[336] A 2019 report by the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health noted that mental health and substance use services for people of color are “disproportionately limited compared to services for the white population.”[337]
These factors contributed to an explosion of houselessness in Los Angeles in the 1980s, especially among Black people.[338] By that time, Skid Row had become a majority Black neighborhood.[339] In the mid-1970s, city leaders had planned to demolish Skid Row to pave the way for an expanded business district.[340] Local advocates and Skid Row residents objected and forced a compromise.[341] City officials withdrew demolition plans and instead turned Skid Row into what they called a “containment zone” in which to keep unhoused people from spreading throughout the city. Skid Row would be the location of affordable Single Room Occupancy (SRO) housing, shelters, and drug rehabilitation facilities.[342] Officials and service providers encouraged and directed unhoused people from all over the region, people returning from prison on parole, and people discharged from mental health facilities to go to Skid Row to access services and shelter and to keep them contained in one place.[343] Police enforced the isolation and concentration of Black poverty in Skid Row through selective enforcement at the perimeter of the neighborhood to deter movement into other areas.[344] One primary result of the “containment zone” was to make houselessness and poverty less visible to the rest of Los Angeles.[345]
By the early 2000s, city and state lawmakers passed legislation that encouraged luxury development in and around Skid Row, resulting in the loss of much low-cost SRO housing and the dramatic increase in luxury housing development.[346] This transformation further reduced the number of housing options in this majority Black neighborhood. The police presence increased even further, focused on Skid Row’s largely Black population.
In the late 2000s, the US economy experienced the “Great Recession”—unemployment rates doubled to over 10 percent, home prices fell about 30 percent, stock values dropped drastically and production nationally declined by 4.3 percent.[347] Predatory lending practices by banks and other financial institutions that had made mortgages easier to get through subprime loans, had few standards in place to ensure borrowers could repay them and complex payment plans that increased risk.[348] The resulting massive numbers of foreclosures were a major cause of the crisis.[349]
This crisis had a particularly dramatic impact on Black and Latinx communities, contributing to houselessness and housing instability. Because of the long history of lending discrimination and residential segregation and fueled by aggressive marketing by the industry, Black and Latinx people had taken out subprime loans in vast and disproportionate numbers.[350] The increase in Black homeownership through the 1990s depended largely on such loans.[351] Thus, when the market crashed Black and Latinx neighborhoods suffered the worst losses.[352] Since 2010, Black homeownership in Los Angeles has declined by 11 percent.[353] The foreclosure crisis drove up demand for rentals, causing their price to increase. It also enabled investors to buy foreclosed and distressed properties in marginalized communities, allowing for expanded corporate ownership of Los Angeles’ housing stock.[354]
This long history of racial discrimination and racist economic and social structures has led to extreme gaps in available affordable housing for Black people in Los Angeles, higher rates of housing instability, and the prevalence of Black people living on the streets.[355] Policies and practices that criminalize unhoused people and deny their basic human rights compound this racial oppression.
IV. Criminalization: Arrest, Citation, and Coercion of Unhoused People by Police
Over the past seven years, nearly 40 percent of all arrests and citations combined by LAPD have been against unhoused people, including 99 percent of all citations for infraction violations.
Los Angeles police enforce laws explicitly targeting unhoused people for simply existing in public spaces, including laws against sitting and sleeping and laws against having personal property, which leave them exposed to arrest, citation and destruction of property in large segments of the city.
While the overall number of arrests by LAPD of all people, including unhoused people, has decreased substantially in recent years, the number of incidents of use of force against unhoused people has remained steady. Further, unhoused people account for about one-third of all LAPD force incidents despite being less than 1 percent of the population.
Mario V., 59, and his wife lost their home and car six years ago after a back injury made him unable to work his construction job. They lived in MacArthur Park and on the streets of Skid Row and Santa Monica before setting up a tent in a community of unhoused people at Spring Street and Arcadia Street within view of City Hall, the Criminal Court Building, and the Federal Courthouse.[356]
Police have arrested Mario and his wife numerous times since they began living on the streets, mostly for sitting on the sidewalk or sleeping in the park.[357] Police have also arrested him for not taking down his tent during the day, though it is the only place he has had to store his possessions and it protects him from the sun, rain, and wind.[358]
Sometimes, to avoid drawing attention to himself, he would stay on the sidewalk with no tent. But police would still cite and arrest him and throw away his belongings, including his medications and papers. On some occasions, police have arrested his wife as well and thrown away her medications.[359]
Every time Mario was arrested, he would spend between two and six days in jail, either at the Twin Towers County Jail facility or at the lock-up in the downtown LAPD station, known as the “Glass House.”[360] Upon release, he and his wife would have to replace their medications, their clothing, their toiletries, and their tent. Upon release from jail, they still had no place to stay but on the streets.[361]
Mario’s experience is not unusual. For decades, the most prominent response to visible houselessness in Los Angeles has been the enforcement of minor code violations, like sitting on sidewalks or sleeping in parks.[362] This enforcement approach has its roots in Depression-era “anti-Okie” laws which criminalized poor people migrating to California from other states, vagrancy laws which criminalized lodging in public or private places without explicit permission, and racist “sundown towns” which criminalized Black people being present after dark.[363] It has echoes from pre-statehood laws allowing courts to deem Native Californians accused of loitering to be “vagrants” and force them to work for private businesses or ranches owned by white people.[364]
While its proponents adhere to the rhetoric of public safety, often invoking the largely discredited “broken windows” approach to policing, this style of enforcement has little impact on violent crime or public safety.[365] Unlike some systemic or ramped up enforcement of minor violations of law that generate funds for the local jurisdiction, enforcement in this context is not a money-maker—unhoused people can rarely afford to pay fines.[366]
Criminalization is punitive; its primary effect is banishment—to remove unhoused people from view, making it appear as though there is no problem.[367] Some city officials refer to criminalization as a “tool in our toolbox.”[368] Dennis Gleason, staff person responsible for homelessness policy for former LA City Council Member Joe Buscaino, described enforcement of these laws as providing people with “deadlines.”[369] Unfortunately, with inadequate available housing, the only way to meet the “deadline” for most unhoused people is to simply move to another location and make themselves invisible.
Criminalization is grounded in an ideological belief that individual “pathologies” or perceived moral failings as opposed to large-scale economic conditions, cause houselessness. The belief that people live on the streets because they are lazy, criminal, or drug-addicted, fuels support for policies that treat them as criminals.[370] Many proponents of criminalization believe that enforcing laws against existing on the streets will incentivize unhoused people to come indoors.[371]
The Trump Administration Council of Economic Advisors stated this belief explicitly: “Increasing the tolerability of living on the streets shifts the demand for homes inward, and so the number of people living on the streets increases…. One potential factor [explaining higher levels of homelessness in some cities] is differences in city ordinances and policing practices, as these policies would directly affect the tolerability of living on the streets and predict the aggregate number of unsheltered homeless people.”[372]
While Democratic elected officials, particularly in local jurisdictions like Los Angeles, are less likely to use the same terms as Trump’s advisors, they often implement essentially the same policies.[373]
Criminalization does not address the lack of sufficient housing.[374] Without adequate housing, people have no place to go and must simply experience the punitive consequences of criminalization or move out of sight of law enforcement and members of the housed community who call police, often retreating to secluded and remote places where survival is much more difficult.[375]
Arresting unhoused people for existing in public can cause considerable harm to those individuals. Arrests rob them of their liberty and expose them to often brutal and, at minimum, dehumanizing conditions in custody. Even if prosecutors do not pursue criminal charges, a person can remain in jail for days.[376] That person’s property, essential for survival, is either taken from them by police and sanitation officials or left exposed to theft or other destruction.
There are three levels of adult crimes in California—felonies, misdemeanors, and infractions.[377] A felony arrest invariably means a person is taken into custody and conviction can lead to incarceration in prison. A misdemeanor arrest can result in release with a citation or being taken into custody. Punishment for a misdemeanor can include imprisonment in a county jail, probation, unpaid labor, and/or a fine. Arrest for an infraction is followed by release with a citation.
Treating violations of these laws as infractions rather than misdemeanors still has harmful consequences.[378] Infraction enforcement initially involves a citation and potential punishment by a monetary fine. For a person living on the streets with little income or financial resources, paying a fine is either highly debilitating or simply impossible. With “penalty assessments” added to base fines, a typical ticket for sleeping on the sidewalk can cost as much as $300—substantially more than Los Angeles County’s monthly General Relief payment.[379]
Unhoused people face challenges with transportation and property storage just to go to court to handle their tickets. Inability to get to court or to pay fines results in courts issuing arrest warrants.[380] People with warrants then live in fear of imminent arrest, subject to the discretion of police officers who frequently stop them.
Convictions for crimes make it more difficult to find housing, as landlords may refuse to rent to a person with a criminal record. Obtaining Section 8 subsidies or public housing is more difficult with a criminal record.[381] Public benefits may be paused or terminated when a person goes to jail.[382] Unhoused people lose jobs, miss opportunities for obtaining shelter or housing, and become disconnected from health care and other services, when arrested and jailed.[383] Warrants and unpaid fines can lead to damaged credit ratings and loss of drivers’ licenses.[384]
Enforcement of laws against unhoused people for existing in public is prevalent and rising throughout the US.[385] These include laws against sitting or sleeping, asking for money, staying in cars, and storing property in public.[386] Law enforcement also disproportionately uses other laws, even if they do not explicitly target unhoused people, against them, such as trespassing, urinating in public, drinking or possessing alcohol in public, being under the influence of alcohol or narcotics in public, and possessing narcotics.
A. Laws in Los Angeles Specifically Targeting Unhoused People
Los Angeles has several municipal ordinances that directly target unhoused people for existing in public spaces throughout the city. Each of these laws has evolved over the years, often in response to community political pressure and litigation by unhoused people, advocates, and public interest lawyers. Enforcement varies as policy priorities and public opinion shift. Enforcement also varies from location to location, often responsive to pressure from housed people and business owners in each area.
1) LAMC section 41.18
Los Angeles Municipal Code (LAMC) section 41.18 is an example of a “sit/lie” law.[387] It makes sitting, lying down, and, by implication, setting up a tent, sleeping bag, or other living structure, in public spaces illegal. A 2019 study found that over half of 187 cities surveyed across the country had some version of a “sit/lie” law, a 75 percent increase since 2006.[388]
Proponents of sit/lie laws often couch them as being about removing obstructions on sidewalks and roads. Sometimes they promote access for people with disabilities.[389] However, often they are written broadly to empower enforcement beyond these narrow goals, criminalizing the act of simply existing in public space.[390]
The Los Angeles City Council passed the original version of LAMC section 41.18 in the early 1960s.[391] They amended subsection (d) in 1968 to say: “No person shall sit, lie or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk or other public way.”[392] Police have used this extremely broad formulation to cite and arrest unhoused people. The punishment for a violation of section 41.18, as a misdemeanor, was a fine of up to $1,000 and imprisonment in the county jail for up to six months.[393]
In 2003, a group of unhoused people living on Skid Row filed a lawsuit, Jones v. City of Los Angeles, challenging the constitutionality of LAMC section 41.18(d). Attorney Carol Sobel and lawyers from the ACLU argued that given the lack of sufficient shelter, the plaintiffs had no choice but to break the law and therefore enforcement violated their due process and equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution and their right against “cruel and unusual punishment” under the 8th Amendment.[394] In 2006, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that, while the law is broadly constitutional, enforcement of 41.18(d) without any time and place limitations against involuntarily unhoused people who cannot obtain shelter violates the 8th Amendment.[395] The result of the Jones litigation was a settlement agreement in 2007 that precluded enforcement from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., with exceptions for obstructing certain rights of way, until the city provided an additional 1,250 permanent supportive housing units for chronically unhoused people.[396]
The Jones settlement mitigated some of the impact of section 41.18(d), but it did not stop police from enforcing it. Police would regularly pull up to unhoused people and communities at 6 a.m. and demand that they pack up their tents, often ticketing those who failed to comply, even those who were ill, had a disability, or had no place to go.[397]
Luther W. described being jailed frequently for not taking his tent down while he was living on Skid Row. Because he was on parole, they labeled it a violation.[398]
Julia S. has been arrested and cited dozens of times for staying on the sidewalk on Skid Row. She has contested misdemeanor charges for violations of section 41.18(d) in court. One time, after she lost at trial, a judge sentenced her to six months in jail. She says that she has no housing options and that offers of “housing” from the city have been vague and insufficient.[399]
Ida J., in her 60s and living with a debilitating back injury, has received numerous tickets for not taking her tent down. Since she was unable to pay the tickets, they became arrest warrants. She has gone to jail twice because of them.[400]
Arthur M. was arrested for sitting on a chair on the sidewalk in front of his tent and property on Skid Row. Officers put him up against the wall and searched him before taking him to the station lock-up. He spent a day in jail. When he got back to his spot, his property was gone—taken either by police and sanitation workers or by thieves.
Cecilia R. got three tickets in two weeks from the same LAPD officers. The officers came to her unhoused community near City Hall at 6 a.m. and demanded she take down her tent. They ticketed her when she had not packed her stuff quickly enough. The tent provides her with protection from the elements. Cecilia went to court to contest her tickets and the officers did not show up, resulting in dismissal.
Betsy C. keeps an orderly tent site on a side street on Skid Row. One night, she had her tent set up before 9 p.m. An officer told her to “collapse [her] tent.” When she did not, he ticketed her. She went to court, but the ticket was not filed. The court clerk told her she needed to monitor the court website to find out if it does get filed. Failure to appear if it is filed will result in a warrant for her arrest.[401]
Sharon C. was sitting on a chair by her tent on Skid Row. Police arrested her. The prosecutor declined to file charges, but she still spent the night in jail.[402]
In 2019, the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit issued a ruling in the case Martin v. Boise finding, in line with the reasoning of the Jones case, that cities and counties were violating the 8th Amendment by enforcing laws against sitting or sleeping in public places at all times and places if there was not “adequate shelter” available to them.[403] However, the court did not clearly define what constitutes adequate shelter.[404]
In 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed called for the US Supreme Court to reverse the holding of Martin v. Boise, the subsequent holding in Johnson v. City of Grants Pass, and a district court ruling in San Francisco following those holdings, claiming that the requirement that a municipality offer adequate shelter as a precondition to punishing a person for existing on the streets hampered their ability to "solve" the problem of houselessness.[405] In the Grants Pass case, a divided Ninth Circuit panel forbade enforcement of the city’s law that allowed unhoused people to sleep in public places, but punished them for using blankets or any other bedding.[406] Newsom filed an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case urging the US Supreme Court to reverse its holding and to limit the scope of Martin in ways that would give cities broad latitude to clear encampments even if there was not enough shelter for everyone.[407] The US Department of Justice, in their brief, stated that criminalization was unconstitutional, but argued that courts must make determinations for each individual as to whether they had alternatives to sleeping in public.[408] To make such a determination, the individual unhoused person must already have been arrested and brought to court, thus suffering much of the harmful consequences of criminalization. The Los Angeles city attorney also filed a brief asking to reverse Grants Pass and limit the reach of Martin to ensure that cities can enforce these laws against unhoused people even if there are not enough shelter beds for all unhoused people, similarly arguing for individualized determinations.[409] A ruling in line with Newsom, the Department of Justice and the city attorney’s positions would render Martin’s modest protections from criminalization meaningless. Conservative justices on the Ninth Circuit authored a series of strongly worded dissents in the Grants Pass case, calling for reversal of Martin’s holding.[410] Law enforcement, municipalities, and neighborhood associations filed briefs calling for reversal.[411] On January 12, 2024, the US Supreme Court granted the petition to review the Grants Pass case.[412] On June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court reversed Grants Pass and invalidated the holding in Martin, removing the requirement that cities and counties across the US provide unhoused people with shelter or some lawful place to stay before enforcing laws punishing them for being in public space.[413] The Court’s holding rejected limitations on punishing people for their status, including that of being unhoused. Led by Councilmember Traci Park, the Los Angeles city council immediately initiated legislation to consider changes to their criminalization laws in light of the Court’s ruling.[414] This ruling may increase dramatically the use of arrests and citations to drive unhoused people out of visible public spaces. |
In response to these court decisions and to the rise of visible unhoused communities throughout Los Angeles, the City Council passed a revised version of section 41.18, which became effective on Sept. 3, 2021.[415] The new version appears narrower in scope than the original section 41.18(d), and is designed to allow enforcement against people on the streets while avoiding the limits on that enforcement imposed by the Martin decision.[416] The new section 41.18 creates categories of places where people may not sit, lie, sleep, or store property. These include near driveways and loading docks, building entrances, fire hydrants, on roadways open to vehicles, including bicycle paths and other public rights-of-way. It also prohibits people from sitting, lying, sleeping, or storing property in ways that interfere with access for people with disabilities or with any city-permitted activity.[417]
The law further allows the City Council to pass resolutions to designate additional zones (“resolution zones”) where people are not allowed to sit, lie, sleep or store property.[418] These zones can include “sensitive use” designations within 500 feet of a public park or public library.[419] They can include any street or sidewalk within 500 feet of an overpass, freeway ramp, tunnel, bridge, pedestrian bridge, subway, wash, spreading ground, or active railway if the City Council determines that people staying there is “unhealthy, unsafe, or incompatible with safe passage.”[420] They can include any street or sidewalk within 1,000 feet of a facility providing shelter, services or “safe camping” for unhoused people.[421] They may include any location if the City Council determines, based on “specific documentation,” that continued sitting, lying, or sleeping there “poses a particular and ongoing threat to public health or safety.”[422] In September 2022, the City Council amended section 41.18 to add a prohibition on sitting, lying, or sleeping within 500 feet of a school or day care facility.[423]
The law allows prosecution as a misdemeanor of anyone who “willfully resists, delays, or obstructs” enforcement of the section or “willfully refuses to comply” with orders from a city official to move from a prohibited location.[424] A municipal code misdemeanor is punishable by up to six months in the county jail and up to $1,000 fine.[425]
Under the new law, vast swaths of the city have become zones where unhoused people may not exist.[426] As of February 2023, there were approximately 2,000 designated zones.[427] As a result, people are left with considerable confusion about where they can and cannot be.
Individual City Council members drive the creation of resolution zones within their district: some have chosen to file a high number of resolutions; others have refused to do any.[428] Often they are guided by political pressure from housed residents and business owners. Council members generally vote to approve each other’s resolutions.
Council Member Mike Bonin, representing Council District 11, which includes the gentrifying Venice community, Westchester, and parts of West Los Angeles, spoke about the ineffectiveness and cruelty of section 41.18 enforcement.[429] He refused to seek any resolution zones. However, he did not run for re-election in 2022.[430] Traci Park, campaigning on promises of more aggressive enforcement against unhoused people, as well as opposition to development of affordable housing in Venice, won the seat and immediately proposed nine resolution zones in her district.[431]
To enforce the resolution zones the City Council set up a process that requires LAHSA’s Homeless Engagement Teams (HETs) to assess the needs for services of unhoused residents in the zone, identify available housing and resources, and place signs notifying the public of the zone prior to enforcement.[432] The process then allows LASAN to clear any unhoused communities in the zone and fence off specific areas if the council member recommends it.
The process does not require the city to provide, or even offer, shelter, much less housing, and does not establish locations where people can go.[433] Media reports indicate that outreach is inconsistent, with outreach workers offering unhoused people little other than some food and water, taking down names and other information, and then not returning with offers of help in finding more permanent housing.[434]
In the hearing to pass her resolutions, Councilmember Park said: “We will not do enforcement until every individual has been offered the opportunity to come inside.”[435] She referenced a legal and moral obligation to offer housing. She did not define what that housing would be, how it would be provided, or the terms of any “offer.”[436]
Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, explaining her opposition to Park’s and others’ 41.18 resolutions in February 2023, raised concerns about the inadequacy of outreach: “It is not clear that we are making credible offers of housing and services as we apply it across our 15 districts…. 41.18 has been used in a dozen cases in my district. It just blows up encampments and spreads people around. Homelessness has gotten worse in my district.… [We are] engaging in an elaborate shell game.”[437] The City Council subsequently passed Yaroslavsky’s motion ordering a report on implementation and outreach related to section 41.18.[438]
Yaroslavsky’s motion, passed on April 12, 2023, required a report back from the Chief Legislative Analyst, with coordination from LAHSA, LAPD, LASAN and other city agencies, within 60 days.[439] As of February 2024 the chief legislative analyst had not produced the report, but someone leaked to the press LAHSA’s submission generated in compliance with this city council order.[440] Several city council members had not seen LAHSA’s study before it was leaked, though it was produced November 28, 2023.[441] LAHSA’s findings exposed the failure of enforcement of LAMC section 41.18 to live up to its supporters’ promise that it would facilitate housing people and clearing encampments.[442] It said that outreach efforts associated with enforcement were “generally ineffective in permanently housing individuals,” and that most encampments saw some repopulation within a year of being cleared.[443] It reported that encampment clearances could disrupt efforts to provide services by causing people to lose contact with outreach workers or to lose trust.[444] In the nearly two-year implementation period LAHSA analyzed, only two people attained permanent housing, while only 16.9 percent of LAHSA clients were placed in “interim housing” or shelter before LASAN and LAPD cleared their encampments.[445] Those placed in “interim housing” stayed a median of 53 days, most presumably returning to the streets.[446] The LAHSA report noted that 93.5 percent of encampment residents actively engaged with outreach workers to find housing before section 41.18 went into effect.[447] City Council President Paul Krekorian, a strong supporter of LAMC section 41.18, called the LAHSA report “clearly faulty and incomplete at best, and perhaps even deliberately misleading.”[448] LAHSA officials countered that they had offered “impartial analysis.”[449] Krekorian did not provide documentation to support his claims.[450] On May 31, 2024, the chief legislative analyst publicly produced the full report.[451] It did not dispute the LAHSA data on the lack of results housing people, but pointed out that LAHSA is not required to house people during LAMC section 41.18 enforcement actions and that “41.18 is an anti-encampment law,” not a housing program.[452] It disputed LAHSA’s claims that 81 percent of encampments were repopulated, arguing that only 39 percent were repopulated by a person who had been in the encampment before it had been cleared.[453] The chief legislative analyst’s own investigation found that most of the previously cleared encampments had people living in them, even if they were not from the population that had lived there before the clearance.[454] The full report included some data from LAPD, including that section 41.18 arrests had increased from 555 in 2021 to 1,846 in 2023, though those in 2023 were primarily infraction citations, while those in 2021 and 2022 were more commonly written as misdemeanors.[455] Without providing any underlying data, the report repeated LAPD claims that violent crime against unhouse people dropped 3.9 percent from 2021 to 2022 and 6.9 percent from 2022 to 2023, and that property crime fell 4.6 percent and 27.5 percent in those years.[456] LAO said that they could not determine if the reduction was attributable to 41.18 enforcement or some other causes.[457] Without access to the data supporting these claims, they are impossible to assess. The report failed to meaningfully assess the costs of section 41.18 enforcement as required by the city council motion. Neither LAPD nor LASAN gave dollar amounts that accurately reflected their costs, saying that they were unable to disaggregate those costs from the rest of their operations.[458] The report said that the city spent $1.83 million on posting signs announcing prohibited zones.[459] |
LAPD has trained its officers to instruct unhoused people on the requirements of section 41.18, give them an undefined “reasonable” amount of time to move away from the prohibited area, and cite them for an infraction if they do not move.[460] If the officer can articulate that the failure to move is willful, the officer may arrest for a misdemeanor violation.
Data Human Rights Watch received from the LAPD tracks the use of section 41.18 against unhoused people. LAPD also provided us a dataset of arrests and citations of people it identified as “homeless.”[461] The data covers the period from January 1, 2016, through August 30, 2022. Prior to September 3, 2021, police enforced section 41.18(d), the blanket prohibition on sitting or lying in public space, as limited by the Jones settlement and then the Martin ruling; after that date, they enforced the revised section 41.18.
During that time, police made 13,046 arrests for misdemeanor violations of section 41.18 and issued 4,326 citations for infraction violations.[462] Human Rights Watch compared the dataset of arrests of unhoused people with publicly available LAPD data on arrests and citations. We found that all those arrests and citations for violations of section 41.18 were of unhoused people.[463]
In 2016, LAPD officers made 191 arrests or citations for LAMC section 41.18 per 1,000 unhoused people.[464] That rate dropped dramatically between 2017 and 2019.[465] This reduction partially coincided with the issuance of the Martin decision in April 2019, but the sharpest drop occurred before the court ruling. The annual rate in 2020 was 8 per 1,000 unhoused people.[466] LAPD says that they “made a concerted effort to conduct enforcement … only as a last resort,” and that the policy was to seek “voluntary compliance” with section 41.18.[467] Voluntary compliance means unhoused people obey orders from police to move away from a particular location, with the threat of arrest for those who “refused to correct the violation.”[468] Since September 2021, with implementation of the new law, enforcement through ticketing and arrests has increased. It continued to be low relative to 2016 levels, but data released by the City Controller in October 2023 revealed that arrests for Section 41.18 had almost doubled since 2022 with officers making more infraction-level arrests in June and July 2023 than in any other months since 2018.[469]
Arrests over the past 10 years have been heavily concentrated in the downtown LA/Skid Row, Hollywood, and Venice areas, according to LAPD 41.18 arrest data analyzed by the City Comptroller.[470] A disproportionately high 42.5 percent of those arrests have been of Black people, compared to 33.9 percent of white people and 20.5 percent of Latinx people.[471]
Arrest and fear of arrest cause many people to leave established communities.[472] This dispersal removes people from protected situations and may leave them alone and vulnerable to violence, drug overdose, and deterioration of mental health.[473] It interferes with outreach for services and housing.[474]
Councilmember Nithya Raman stated her opposition to section 41.18 enforcement given the extreme lack of housing resources: “I don’t have any intention of resolving homelessness by moving people up and down the sidewalk.”[475]
2) LAMC Section 56.11
Enforcement of section 41.18 is directly tied to enforcement of Los Angeles Municipal Code section 56.11.[476] While one regulates a person’s ability to exist in public spaces, the other regulates their keeping of possessions in public spaces. Both serve to remove people from public spaces.
The LAPD uses Section 56.11 in parts of the city where section 41.18 does not apply. LAPD training materials on enforcement against unhoused people specifically say: “[LAMC section 56.11(10)(a)] should be used to cite individuals who willfully resist, delay or obstruct an authorized City employee from moving, removing or discarding personal property that violates provisions of Section 56.11 that do NOT occur on property governed by LAMC Section 41.18.”[477] The same training maps all the zones covered by section 41.18, which has its own provisions banning people from keeping personal property in its enforcement areas.[478] While section 41.18 by itself may not contravene the Martin ruling, because it applies only in limited locations, in combination with section 56.11 it leaves unhoused people no place to go in the absence of “adequate shelter,” unless they have no possessions.
Prior to 2016, section 56.11 banned people from “leav[ing] or permit[ing] to remain any merchandise, baggage, or any article of personal property upon any parkway or sidewalk.”[479] Police and Sanitation workers employed this broad prohibition to confiscate and destroy property and sometimes to cite or arrest people.
In 2011, unhoused residents of Skid Row filed a lawsuit challenging enforcement of section 56.11.[480] The plaintiffs in Lavan v. City of Los Angeles each had stored valuable personal property, including identification documents, medications, toiletries, family memorabilia, cell phones, and sleeping bags, on public sidewalks while they left to use bathrooms and showers or to go to court. City officials took their unabandoned property and destroyed it. They took some property even while the owner was present claiming possession.[481] Organizers with the Los Angeles Community Action Network (“LA CAN”) documented the destruction to show the court.[482] LA CAN is a grassroots community organization made up of poor and unhoused people living on Skid Row that advocates for human rights.
The federal district court found the summary destruction of property to violate Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment protections against unreasonable government seizures and issued an injunction against “1. Seizing property in Skid Row absent an objectively reasonable belief that it is abandoned, presents an immediate threat to public health or safety, or is evidence of a crime, or contraband; and 2. Absent an immediate threat to public health or safety, destruction of said seized property without maintaining it in a secure location for a period of no less than 90 days.”[483] The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this decision.[484]
Instead of ending the seizure of property, city officials changed their justifications and began deeming unhoused people’s property a threat to public health.[485]
In 2016, another group of unhoused Skid Row residents, LA CAN, and the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, a volunteer service organization that helps unhoused people, filed another lawsuit alleging unlawful taking and destruction of property. The plaintiffs in Mitchell v. City of Los Angeles presented evidence that LAPD officers were arresting people on minor charges and then destroying their property, and supervising “clean-ups” without notifying people so they could move their property.[486] Ruling on the lawsuit, the court issued a further injunction that forbade destruction of property during a cleanup or following arrest absent a reasonable belief it is abandoned, evidence of a crime, contraband, or an immediate threat to public safety. The court also ordered the city to store seized property in an easily accessible location, and to provide 24-hour notice before conducting large scale cleanups.[487]
To account for the limitations imposed by the Lavan and Mitchell injunctions, the City Council passed a modified version of section 56.11 later in 2016.[488] While the previous version was general in scope, the new ordinance very specifically targets unhoused people by prohibiting keeping unattended property and “excess” property, even if attended, in public spaces.[489] City officials may discard “bulky items,” even if attended, though with some exceptions. City officials may remove property that they deem a health hazard or that obstructs access without notice. People must remove their tents from public property between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.; city officials may take tents without notice, even if attended. Personal property is supposed to be taken to storage and held for 90 days before destruction or returned to its owner on proof of ownership.[490]
While simply having property in violation of section 56.11 is not a crime under the new law, resistance to officials taking property or refusal to take down tents is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail.[491]
On July 19, 2019, Human Rights Watch observed a team of police officers stop an older Black man on the Venice Boardwalk during the regular Friday sanitation sweeps. The man had a very clean wheeled laundry cart filled with personal items. The officers told him that he could not have this amount of property and handed him a clear plastic 60-gallon bag. They told him to put what he wanted to keep into that bag and that they would take the rest. The man complained that he had just bought the cart and that he needed to keep his property. He begged them not to destroy his property. The officers surrounded him and threatened him with arrest. He obeyed, filling the plastic bag. The officers took the cart and the rest of his possessions and turned them over to LASAN workers who loaded them into the trash compactor.[492]
In October 2019, police came to Arthur M.’s tent and took his generator from him. They told him they took it to storage. They gave him a citation.[493] Sharon C. lives on Skid Row. Three times, police arrested her in her tent and LASAN workers discarded her property. She has seen them arrest others for having their tents up and not moving them quickly enough.[494]
Unhoused people who had their property taken and summarily destroyed under the “bulky item” provision of section 56.11 sued the City and won an injunction in 2020 against enforcement of that provision in the case Garcia v. City of Los Angeles.[495] LAPD training on the Garcia decision says it prohibits destroying personal property “based solely on the size of the item,” leaving open property seizure and destruction based on the criteria set forth in Lavan: “abandoned, immediate threat to public health and safety or is evidence of a crime or contraband.”[496] They can also claim larger property violates ADA and other public access regulations as a reason to take and destroy it.
In the course of the Garcia litigation, the court determined that the LASAN officials had altered their documentation to change their stated justifications for seizing items from unhoused people from “bulky items” to “ADA violation” and “contaminated.”[497] The judge found that these changes amount to “spoliation [of evidence] … during the course of the litigation…” and that changes were made by LASAN officials to match their litigation position, presumably to avoid liability or evade court orders limiting property destruction.[498] The court indicated an intention to impose sanctions. As of this writing, city officials have not held anyone at LASAN accountable. |
While, in recent years, LAPD has focused their section 56.11 enforcement powers on supporting LASAN in taking and destroying property and dismantling unhoused communities, they have also arrested people and issued citations. From January 1, 2016, through August 30, 2022, according to data on arrests of unhoused people provided by LAPD, police made 3,972 arrests and citations for violation of this section.[499] Every arrest made by LAPD under this code section during this period was of an unhoused person.[500]
Enforcement through arrest and citation was relatively rare in 2016, then peaked in 2018 with 46 arrests per 1,000 unhoused people. By 2022 it had dwindled to just 1 arrest per 1,000 unhoused people, reflecting a de-emphasis on arrests as a means of enforcement.[501] As will be discussed in subsequent chapters, enforcement of section 56.11 by LASAN through taking and destroying property, always backed by the threat of arrest by LAPD, has been the city’s primary approach and has continued as actual arrests decreased.
Under the new version of section 56.11, police can arrest or cite a person for willful refusal to comply, which, according to LAPD training “may be demonstrated where officers have evidence that an individual has been directed and complied, and thereafter engaged in the SAME violation.”[502] Since compliance does not help a person get housed, repeated “violations” are all but inevitable, allowing officers wide discretion to threaten and make arrests.
While the number of arrests has decreased substantially from the 2018 peak, criminal enforcement remains critical to city policies towards unhoused people: the threat of arrest and long history of arrest continue to define the context in which all relevant city policies play out and shape how unhoused people navigate their daily lives and assess their options.
3) Other laws explicitly targeting unhoused people
Sections 41.18 and 56.11 are the most prominent city ordinances that explicitly target unhoused people. But there are other laws that give police power to cite and arrest people for existing in public.
LAMC section 63.44 regulates the use of parks and recreation areas within the city, including beaches.[503] It includes bans on “camping,” defined as “remaining for prolonged or repetitious periods” with personal possessions associated with sleeping and cooking, or actually sleeping, cooking, eating, or storing personal possessions.[504] It bans setting up a tent, possessing “bulky items,” and storing personal property in a park, and it authorizes removal and discarding of that property.[505] It forbids people to enter or remain in public parks during certain hours.[506]
Berto E. had been staying in MacArthur Park for a year prior to the September 2021 LAPD and LASAN action that removed all people living there and erected a fence around the park. He said he frequently observed police harassing unhoused people and giving them tickets for being in the park after hours. He himself avoided ticketing by quickly moving away when police arrived.[507]
Carolyn S. received nine tickets for sleeping on the beach in Venice or for trespassing when she set up her tent off the beach. She received two tickets in one day. A free legal clinic run by the Venice Justice Committee, an organization that advocates for unhoused people, is helping her to fight these tickets.[508]
Carl M. has lived on the streets since arriving in Los Angeles in 2015. He received multiple tickets for sleeping on the beach which have gone to warrant. He has avoided arrest, but he remains vulnerable to the discretion of police officers.[509]
Between 2016 and 2022, police in Los Angeles made 12,427 arrests for violations of park regulations under LAMC section 63.44, 100 percent of which were of unhoused people.[510] Most were for infractions, but almost one third were misdemeanors.[511] Arrests for park violations have trended downward from a high of 94 per 1,000 unhoused people in 2018 to 22 per 1,000 in 2022.[512]
LAMC section 85.02 forbids using cars, vans, or other vehicles for “dwelling,” defined as using a car as a place of residence or accommodation. In 2014, the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeal found this section unconstitutional.[513] The City Council revised the law in 2019 but built in a sunset provision. As of this writing, section 85.02 is not in effect.[514]
Other laws in Los Angeles that directly target unhoused people include LAMC section 41.59 which prohibits “aggressive” solicitation or panhandling.[515] This section defines “aggressive” to include a broad variety of behaviors that can be interpreted subjectively. It also forbids panhandling in certain locations.
B. Other Laws Used Against Unhoused People
Unsheltered houselessness increases the likelihood that people will be arrested and prosecuted for crimes that bear some relationship to their poverty and unhoused status, like trespassing, public intoxication, or petty theft.[516] This likelihood further increases for unsheltered people with mental health conditions.[517]
Arrests in general in Los Angeles are highly concentrated among the unhoused population. From 2011 to 2016, the percentage of LAPD arrests of unhoused people compared to total arrests rose from 7 to 12 percent, according to a UCLA study.[518] This increase occurred as overall numbers of arrests in the city decreased.[519] This study showed that by 2016, LAPD arrested unhoused people at a rate 17 times greater than they did the overall population and that the number of custodial arrests of unhoused people that year equaled 50 percent of the unhoused population.[520]
A later study found that, from 2017 to 2020, 24 percent of all arrests in the city were of unhoused people.[521]
1) LAPD data shows police enforcement has focused on unhoused people
Unhoused people make up about 1 percent of the over 3.8 million people in Los Angeles, yet accounted for 38 percent of everyone LAPD cited or arrested between 2016 and 2022.[522] Unhoused people made up 17 percent of everyone booked into jail upon arrest. They accounted for 20 percent of all felony arrests; 42.6 percent of all misdemeanor arrests; and over 99 percent of infraction arrests.[523] Infraction arrests have been almost exclusively of unhoused people over the entire period.[524]Publicly available LAPD data and that provided to Human Rights Watch does not include individual identifiers, so people with multiple arrests or citations cannot be accounted for. However, as a rate per population, there were more arrests and citations of unhoused people than total unhoused people living in the city (1,102 per 1,000 people). An unhoused person in Los Angeles was 79 times more likely than a housed person to receive a citation or arrest and 27 times more likely to be booked into jail.[525]
Citations and Arrests by Housing Status (2016-2022) | |||||
Category | Housing status | Number | Rate per 1,000 people | Odds | Difference |
Total citations and arrests | Unhoused | 233,320 | 1,102 | 1 per 0.9 people | 79 x |
Housed | 382,253 | 14 | 1 per 71 people | - | |
Arrests ending with a jail booking | Unhoused | 80,091 | 378 | 1 per 2.6 people | 27x |
Housed | 382,166 | 14 | 1 per 71 people | - | |
Felony arrests | Unhoused | 46,856 | 221 | 1 per 4.5 people | 33x |
Housed | 187,092 | 7 | 1 per 143 people | - | |
Misdemeanor arrests | Unhoused | 135,581 | 640 | 1 per 1.5 people | 96x |
Housed | 182,881 | 7 | 1 per 143 people | - | |
Julius M. had been unhoused and staying on Skid Row for many years. Police used to ticket him for having a shopping cart to carry his possession or for jaywalking. Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, he said, they are making fewer arrests.[526]
Police cited Sebastian C. for trespassing and for not removing his property when they ordered it removed. He says that they are ticketing infrequently now, but some officers are more aggressive than others. He has gone to jail after his tickets have gone to warrant.[527]
Ronald C. stayed in a tent on the Venice Boardwalk before city officials cleared it of unhoused people. While living there, he observed unhoused and housed people using drugs and stealing. Police ticketed him twice for having his tent up during the day and once for having an open alcohol container. He said that police frequently ticket for these violations, but they are selective about who they cite.[528]
Police held Calvin A. in jail for over 16 hours for a shopping cart violation before releasing him with a citation. While he was detained LASAN threw away his property, including his backpack, shoes, ID, General Relief paperwork, and cash.[529]
Officers arrested Andre N. for selling cigarettes, a common survival tactic of people living on the streets. He says when he argued with them, they charged him with criminal threats resulting in him going to prison.[530]
While the overall number of arrests of unhoused people has dropped since 2016 from a monthly average of just over 4,000 to just under 2,000 by the end of 2022, the rate of arrest of unhoused people remains extremely high relative to the rate of arrest of housed people: in 2016 there were 1,612 arrests and citations for every 1,000 unhoused people and 18 arrests for every 1,000 housed people, with the unhoused 89 times more likely to be arrested; in 2023 those numbers were 519 per 1,000 unhoused people and 10 per 1,000 housed people, with the unhoused 50 times more likely to be arrested.[531] Numbers of arrests of housed and unhoused people correlate nearly perfectly over time suggesting that arrest numbers are more reflective of policing practices than of actual criminal behavior.[532] In other words, because trends in the numbers and rates of arrest of unhoused people mirror the trends of overall arrests, any changes in unhoused arrest statistics are likely more associated with changes in policing policy and practices rather than changes in the unhoused population numbers or activity.
Arrest totals for felonies and infractions have remained consistent over that period; monthly arrests for misdemeanors, however, have dropped from just under 3,000 to about 1,000.[533] The bulk of that reduction (78 percent) is attributable to major decreases in arrests for open container/drinking in public, LAMC section 41.18, LAMC section 63.44, and shopping cart possession.[534]
This change suggests a move away from traditional criminalization through arrests, but also may reflect changes due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Annual arrests for different types of charges followed different patterns over time. Arrests for drug use and possession increased rapidly in 2018 and 2019 but have since returned to earlier levels. Arrests for property crimes, such as shoplifting or burglary, have stayed flat over the period with roughly 2,700 arrests per year. Yearly arrests for “violent/potentially violent” crimes such as aggravated assault, domestic violence, robbery or battery, have increased from about 2,200 arrests in 2016 to nearly 3,000 in each of the past several years.[535] However, because the unhoused population has grown considerably, the rate of arrests relative to that population for all crimes has decreased. The arrest rate for “violent/potentially violent” crimes was 8 percent lower in 2022 than it was in 2016. Further, the recent changes in the annual number of arrests may be a result, in part, of greater awareness by LAPD of the unhoused status of people they arrest.[536]
Police arrest unhoused people for certain specific charges. While violations of LAMC sections 41.18 and 56.11 account for 7.4 and 1.7 percent of all arrests of unhoused people, respectively, police use other offenses that are not explicitly tied to houselessness to criminalize.[537]
Drinking in public or open container violations account for 21.4 percent of all arrests of unhoused people.[538] According to LAPD data, every single one of the 50,182 arrests LAPD made for drinking in public or open container violations during the time period studied was of an unhoused person, indicating that the LAPD is enforcing these laws strictly against people who do not have a private place to drink alcohol.[539] Enforcement of open container and drinking in public laws, however, has dropped from a rate of 500 per 1,000 unhoused people in 2016 to 85 per 1,000 in 2022.[540]
As is the case for LAMC Sections 41.18, 56.11 and 63.44, LAPD has directed 100 percent of its enforcement of city cannabis regulations, laws against hiring unlicensed vehicles, and laws against soliciting/vending at unhoused people.[541] Ninety-nine percent of citations for violations of littering laws have been against unhoused people.[542]
Arrests for violations of liquor laws, gambling, and obstructing sidewalks are all almost entirely of unhoused people.[543] Loitering, drug paraphernalia, marijuana possession in public, trespassing, sex work, and other offenses lead to arrests of unhoused people in vast disproportion to their share of the population.[544]
Given the prevalence with which police apply these laws to unhoused people, often related to exposure in open and public space, frequent contact with police, and engagement in survival activities, like sex work and shoplifting, their enforcement against unhoused people serves to criminalize the status of being unhoused.
Arrests for violent crimes, including homicide, domestic violence, kidnapping, aggravated assault, robbery, and others, are also disproportionately high for unhoused people, though not nearly at the levels of the other violations.[545]
LAPD officers jail nearly every person arrested for a felony and about two-thirds of those arrested for misdemeanors. Nearly every person arrested for a misdemeanor who was not booked into jail from 2016 through 2022 was unhoused, according to LAPD data.[546] This fact underscores how few alleged violations by unhoused people police consider an immediate threat to public safety.
Enforcement disproportionately impacts Black and Latino people. Black people make up 28 percent of arrests of unhoused people in the city, compared to an approximately 8 percent share of the total population. However, that number is less than their 37 percent share of the unhoused population over the seven-year period.[547] Unhoused Latinx people account for 43 percent of arrests, but only 32 percent of the unhoused population.[548]
Race data 2016-2022
Race | Percentage of Los Angeles Population | Percentage of Unhoused Population | Percentage of Unhoused Arrests |
Black | 8% | 37% | 28% |
White | 28% | 22% | 23% |
Latinx | 48% | 32% | 43% |
All others | 15% | 9% | 6% |
C. Unhoused People as Victims/Survivors of Crime
According to LAPD data covering the 2016-2021 period, there were 26,500 crimes reported in which unhoused people in Los Angeles were identified as the victims, a rate of 126 per 1,000 people.[549] This rate is 2.3 times higher than that of the general population.[550] The victimization rate peaked in 2019 when there were over 160 reported crimes per 1,000 unhoused people.
A surface look at increased crime victimization of unhoused people appears to show it corresponds to decreased arrests of unhoused people for minor crimes, which could support an argument that more enforcement protects unhoused people. However, a closer examination shows there is no such correlation. Victimization of unhoused people increased most profoundly in 2018, when arrest rates of unhoused people also increased; victimization decreased steadily from 2019 through 2021, as arrests dropped dramatically.[551]
Unhoused people are disproportionately more likely to be victims of violent crime. Between 2016 and the end of 2022, there were nearly 300 homicide victims identified as unhoused, accounting for 15 percent of all homicide victims in the city. Unhoused people are the victims of homicide at over 17 times the rate of the total population. They are the victims of reported rapes at nearly 11 times the rate of the total population and account for 10 percent of all reported rape victims. They are the victims of assault with a deadly weapon at nearly 12 times the rate of the total population. Many of these crimes are marked as having occurred in streets, sidewalks, alleys, and parking lots.[552]
For many types of offenses, the LAPD makes arrests at a lower rate when crime victims are unhoused. For example, in rape cases, police make arrests at more than twice the rate when the victim is from the general population (49.8 percent) than when the victim is unhoused (22.8 percent). Similar rate ratios apply for simple assaults and sexual battery.[553] The lack of police response to crimes against unhoused people signals they are not protected and may embolden people who seek to harm them.
Murders of unhoused people have increased steadily from less than 5 in 2010 to 85 in 2021, making up an increasingly larger share of total murders in the city.[554] Only 27 percent of the 2021 murders of unhoused people involved unhoused suspects and only 22 percent involved a suspect who knew the victim.[555] These numbers may indicate vigilantism or other targeting of unhoused people based on their status or unique vulnerabilities.[556]
The high rates of unhoused people victimized by crime demonstrates the vulnerability of people living on the streets, which permanent housing could alleviate. Studies show that evicting people from encampments and their communities heightens their risk of exposure to violent crime by forcing them into more isolated areas where they have less community to support and protect them.[557] When victimized, unhoused people are also less likely to seek help from law enforcement for fear of punishment under laws criminalizing their presence in public spaces.[558]
D. Move Along Orders and Other Harassment
Edgar S. is in his late 50s.[559] He lives on the streets of Skid Row. He says that people break into his tent and steal things and that he fears being robbed. He is trying to get on a waiting list for housing, but he understands that there is little available. He survives on Los Angeles County General Relief Fund (GR) payments of $221 per month and on food stamps. He is on probation.
“Police work at their own discretion,” Edgar said. They frequently approach him, order him to put his hands up against the wall or fence, then search him. Sometimes they take him to jail for warrants from tickets he has received in the past but was unable to pay. When arrested, his possessions are left out to be stolen or destroyed. He said, “They got me by the balls.”[560]
Police encounters with people that do not result in arrest or citation can still be coercive, demeaning, and abusive. Stops and searches are prevalent among unhoused people, even if they are not necessarily reflected in police data.
UCLA Law Professor Gary Blasi, an expert on Los Angeles policy on houselessness, said that police enforcement against unhoused people is less about reducing crime or punishment and more about “banishment,” making unhoused people disappear from sight.[561] According to one LAHSA employee, enforcement of section 41.18 is used to move people from one council district to the next.[562]
Police use the threat of arrest for crimes related to a person’s unhoused status as leverage to order them to move from a particular location.[563] Often the location is one about which housed neighbors and local business owners have complained or politicians have targeted.[564] A study in San Francisco found that the vast majority of citizen complaints resulted in move-along orders rather than arrest or citations.[565]
While simply displacing people may seem less harmful to them than arrest or citation, the cumulative effects of being uprooted and constantly moving takes a substantial toll and serves in itself as a form of punishment.[566] UCLA Assistant Professor of Sociology Chris Herring, who has conducted studies of police interactions with unhoused people, said that because “move-along” orders are informal, they do not generate a record like arrests and citations do, making it impossible to quantify how often they occur and making it extremely difficult to hold officers and police departments accountable for abuses.[567]
Move-along orders serve to break up encampment communities, often leaving people isolated and cut off from others who can help and protect them.[568] Scattering people can lead to confrontations because it destabilizes existing unhoused communities, forcing people together who do not know each other and do not know the rules of the community.[569] Often, police respond to complaints from housed neighbors about unhoused people who are not violating the law by threatening arrest and ordering them to move.[570]
To avoid the trauma of being uprooted constantly by police move-along orders, many unhoused people simply avoid staying in one place. Cathy G. deliberately keeps only a few possessions and moves quickly when police tell her to go.[571] Carlton Y. keeps all his possessions in two bags and a blanket roll. He never stays in the same location.[572] Anthony S. keeps his possessions in a cart and stays mobile; he hides from the police.[573] Sean O. does not stay in a tent so that he can move quickly when police tell him to move. He finds it hard to live exposed to the elements and to potential violence.[574]
On September 17, 2021, LAPD officers approached Serena C. at her family’s tent by the Van Nuys Metro station. They told her neighboring business owners had complained and she had to leave. She said she knew this claim was false. She had a good relationship with all the business owners and employees on the street. One let her use their electrical outlet and several would ask her to watch their places after working hours. She kept her tent area clean and fully contained. Serena refused to move.[575]
Steven A. had been living in Skid Row for about 18 months. Police and private security officers frequently told him to move and threatened him with arrest. When he did not move, police would arrest him. To avoid these confrontations, he does not set up a tent and stays wherever he can find a spot.[576]
E. Police Violence
Though unhoused people only make up a little over 1 percent of the City of Los Angeles’ population, in 2022 35 percent of all people subjected to force by the LAPD were identified as unhoused, according to the LAPD’s own data.[577] From 2018 through 2022, police engaged in at least 11,962 distinct documented incidents in which they used physical force, 4,030 or 34 percent of which were against unhoused people.[578] The percentages of force incidents involving unhoused people have remained consistent each year over this timespan.[579]
The total numbers of incidents of police violence against unhoused people each year, ranging from a low of 714 in 2018 to a high of 850 in 2021, also have remained fairly consistent over this time period.[580] This consistency, despite the substantial decline in actual arrests of unhoused people over these years indicate that police continue to have coercive interactions with unhoused people that result in violence, even as they are pursuing arrests less systematically. The rate at which force incidents occur per arrest or citation of unhoused people nearly quadrupled from 15 per 1,000 in 2016 to 56 per 1,000 in 2020.[581]
The data on the 2016-2020 period show that police used force against unhoused Black people at much higher rates than they did against white and Latinx people, a disparity that similarly applies to housed people.[582]
LAPD data reveals that a large percentage of force incidents involve people with mental health conditions.[583] Of the 11,746 distinct “non-categorical uses of force” from 2018 through 2022, 3,643—or 31 percent—were against people perceived to have a mental health condition or as experiencing “a mental health crisis.”[584] Similarly, of the 115 shootings over that time period in which officers hit someone, 42 were identified as having a mental health condition.[585] As discussed previously, a substantial portion of unhoused people have mental health conditions, in part because of the effects of houselessness.
F. The Evolution of Police Actions Towards Unhoused People
A 1967 study of policing on Skid Row by sociologist Egon Bittner found that officers spent time getting to know the residents to contain their presence in that area and away from the rest of the city.[586] Officers used their discretion to make or not make arrests for minor violations of law for the purpose of maintaining order, as opposed to enforcing laws.[587] They might make an arrest simply to resolve a problem by removing one of the parties from the situation, without regard to whether anyone committed a crime.[588] Officers rationalized this lack of concern for individual rights and for assigning guilt for wrongdoing by claiming arrests were for people’s own protection and for protection of the community.[589] Officers told the author of this study that they believed arrests essentially had no negative impact on the people arrested.[590]
As policing of unhoused people has evolved in Los Angeles, it has maintained many elements of this “order maintenance” approach, even with the recent de-emphasis on arrests and citations.
1) Safer Cities Initiative (SCI)
An important variation of “order maintenance” policing was the “Safer Cities Initiative” (SCI) introduced in 2006 by then Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and then LAPD Chief William Bratton.[591] Deployed on Skid Row, SCI was based on “broken windows,” a policing doctrine that studies have shown to be abusive, racially discriminatory, and ultimately ineffective.[592]
“Broken windows” policing, first described in a 1982 magazine article by political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling, hypothesizes, using anecdotal evidence, that a neighborhood with signs of disorder—a broken window, a panhandler, a publicly intoxicated person—will inevitably breed crime, and that enforcement against those appearing to create disorder will stop crime.[593] Under their plan, police would use charges like vagrancy and public drunkenness as “legal tools to remove undesirable persons from a neighborhood…”[594] They argued that police should enforce community norms of order and remove “undesirable persons,” even if that meant acting outside of the law.[595] The authors did not explain who defines those norms. They acknowledged that there was no way to ensure police do not become agents of neighborhood bigotry, but believed training and supervision would limit officers’ discretionary authority.[596]
Putting “broken windows” into operation, SCI concentrated large numbers of officers into a small area and tasked them with citing people for “quality of life” violations, like sitting on the sidewalk, littering, jaywalking, and other pedestrian violations.[597] They also brought in additional plainclothes officers to engage in undercover stings to arrest people they believed were selling or using drugs or involved in sex work.[598] The purpose of SCI was “to reduce the density of homeless encampments using fines and citations.”[599]
Nine months after SCI began, Chief Bratton touted it as a great success.[600] He announced, at a time when Skid Row’s population ranged between 8,000 and 11,000, that uniformed SCI officers had made 1,800 felony and 1,300 misdemeanor arrests, conducted 8,000 warrant checks and issued 8,000 citations.[601] Narcotics buy teams, which primarily target people suspected of low-level street sales and personal use of drugs, made an additional 2,000 arrests in that period. A study by UCLA professor Gary Blasi found even more extreme levels of enforcement: 9,000 arrests and 12,000 citations, primarily for pedestrian violations, in the first year of the program.[602]
2) SCI impacts
While overall crime decreased during the first two years of SCI, according to Blasi’s study, it decreased by similar amounts in surrounding areas that were not policed with nearly the same intensity or in the same style.[603] The study found a more substantial reduction only for robberies on Skid Row, but noted that the cost for each reduced robbery was high and questioned whether city funds spent in other ways would have achieved better results.[604]
An LA CAN survey of Skid Row residents about the impacts of SCI conducted in 2010 found that most of the citations were for jaywalking, though other common violations included drinking in public, sitting on the sidewalk, possessing an open container, loitering, and littering.[605] The survey also found that SCI officers handcuffed and searched most of the people they were citing and that nearly half of those people reported being abused verbally or physically in the process.[606] Over 82 percent of unhoused Skid Row residents and over 50 percent of all residents surveyed had been cited or arrested by police in the year preceding the survey.[607]
Even people who were not cited or arrested reported high rates of being handcuffed, searched, and subjected to further abusive treatment.[608] Nearly 90 percent of unhoused people and two-thirds of all residents reported being detained by police.[609]
Then-LAPD Chief Charlie Beck disputed LA CAN’s findings and challenged LA CAN’s methodology, but he did not provide evidence disputing the high frequency of citations, arrests, detentions, and abusive encounters.”[610]
In defending SCI, Beck described horrific conditions on Skid Row, including “urine, feces, drugs and disease which coated the sidewalks.”[611] However, in conjunction with SCI, city officials removed portable public toilets from the area ”[612] Police frequently cited people for littering when the area has very few public trashcans.[613] A federal court found LAPD violated constitutional rights of Skid Row residents by using minor infractions like jaywalking as an excuse to search people and take them to jail.[614]
Beck said to the Board of Police Commissioners that because of SCI, “the community has reclaimed their public spaces”[615] He did not define who he meant by “the community.” General Dogon, a long-time Skid Row resident and community organizer, described an atmosphere of terror during SCI among fellow Skid Row residents, including many housed people, who were afraid to leave their homes due to the risk of police harassment.[616]
3) SCI coercion and lack of supportive services
When the Mayor announced SCI, he said that policing was only one component and promised that the city would offer services, like drug treatment programs, housing, or mental health services, in conjunction with enforcement.[617]
This two-pronged approach to policing has been called “therapeutic policing.”[618] It involves an implicit and explicit ultimatum: enter treatment programs or face aggressive policing and jail.[619] However, the city never funded or provided the core services and treatment component of SCI that was proposed to benefit the unhoused population. [620] Primarily, the policy relied on private sector missions, which are non-profit agencies, often religiously affiliated, that provide large shelters and services for unhoused people.
Officers said that the goal of SCI was to make life on the streets so uncomfortable that people would “hit rock bottom” and go to the missions.[621] Some shelter administrations helped to shape this policy and legitimized this form of policing.[622] Reverend Andy Bales, president and CEO of the Union Rescue Mission, one of several large shelters on Skid Row, supported SCI. His teams would encourage people to come to the shelters and engage in programs, telling them that police were “right behind them” ready to take enforcement actions if they did not.[623] He also believed courts would order people into shelter and programming after citation or arrest by SCI officers.[624]
In his 2016 study of Skid Row under SCI, sociologist Forrest Stuart wrote: “Skid Row policing couples these programs [Streets or Services, HALO] with aggressive and constant enforcement of minor laws to restructure residents’ range of potential decisions, deincentivize behaviors deemed irresponsible, and compel the self-discipline that residents have supposedly shirked.”[625] He explained that those who did not choose to submit to the particular forms of treatment offered by the missions had to disappear from sight or face punitive consequences.[626] Stuart quotes an officer saying: “Our job is to help them to make the right choice. If they don’t want to make the right choices to get better, to move up and out of here, then we have to step in.”[627]
Stuart found that while people might enroll in a program, when it was available, to avoid jail, few participated.[628] One study found that in 2006 and 2007 only 34 of 7,428 people arrested by SCI officers completed “Streets or Services,” which was the main program to which they were referred.[629]
4) “RESET” replaces SCI
In 2016, the LAPD formally ended SCI and replaced it with the Resources Enhancement and Services Enforcement Team or “RESET,” also focused on Skid Row.[630] RESET is tasked with “crime suppression, LAMC ordinance violations, Penal Code violations, Health & Safety Code violations, California Vehicle code, Business & Professional Code, and crime deterrence through high visibility patrols.”[631] LAPD assigned 56 officers to RESET, nearly the same number assigned to SCI, to provide foot patrols, enforce code violations, and back up LASAN workers, especially during sweeps.[632]
LAPD says that RESET conducts “outreach,” but it is unclear what the purpose of that outreach is or whether it is connected to actual services. [633] In 2017, for example, their data report showed that RESET officer outreach resulted in 2,637 contacts with unhoused people, 482 “referrals” (to what is not clear), and 42 mental health detentions.[634] During the same time period, RESET officers issued 1,693 citations, made 1,121 misdemeanor arrests, 70 of which were based on warrants, and 759 felony arrests, 309 of which were based on warrants.[635] While these enforcement numbers are much lower than they were at the peak of SCI, they still indicate an investment in enforcement.
5) “HOPE” units
While RESET is limited to Skid Row, LAPD has created units called Homeless Outreach and Proactive Engagement (HOPE) that they deploy throughout the city.[636] Their stated goal is to connect people with services.[637] HOPE units are tasked with supporting LASAN workers while they tear down unhoused communities, enforcing LAMC section 56.11, and “homeless outreach in conjunction with LAHSA.”[638] HOPE units have a total of 38 officers and four sergeants, many fewer than RESET; they make far fewer arrests and give out fewer tickets.[639] They also make “referrals,” but again, it is unclear to what.[640]
In 2017, for example, HOPE units initiated 16,312 contacts with unhoused people, made 3,134 referrals, and arrested or cited 1,421 people.[641] The LAHSA workers affiliated with LAPD’s HOPE teams placed only 229 people into shelters city-wide in 2017 and 23 into permanent housing.[642]
While LAPD officials publicly speak of how HOPE and RESET de-emphasize enforcement in favor of connecting people to services, these programs, in fact, use the threat of arrest and other enforcement actions and the repeated destruction of unhoused communities to pressure people to go to shelters.[643]
G. Gentrification and Criminalization
Gentrification is a process in which a neighborhood of poor and working-class, often Black or BIPOC people, becomes attractive to wealthier, and often white, people who move in, invest in physical improvements that change the character of the neighborhood, and drive housing, property tax, and other costs up, forcing poor people to leave their home community. During the transition of the neighborhood, the newer, wealthier, and more politically connected residents often pressure police to take enforcement actions to remove unhoused people.
Downtown Los Angeles, of which Skid Row is a part, has been rapidly gentrifying. Developers have produced large numbers of luxury apartments and condominiums over the past several decades as these policies have evolved. Business and property owner organizations, like the Central City Association and Central City East Association, who sought to and did help to transform downtown Los Angeles into a place that serves business and real estate interests, have consistently advocated for aggressive policing, especially the SCI program.[644]
Removing people living on the streets of downtown Los Angeles from the homes and communities they have created facilitates this gentrification, increases monetary property values, serves the wealthy, and protects their investments.[645]
A driving force behind the aggressive enforcement approach are housed people who demand an immediate “solution” to the presence of unhoused people in their neighborhoods.[646] Housed neighbors often oppose efforts to make life on the streets more comfortable, including efforts to provide bathrooms and garbage facilities.[647] Complaints about unhoused people escalate in neighborhoods where more wealthy people are moving.[648]
H. Criminalization Offers No Solution
The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, a collaboration of 19 federal agencies whose mission is to create and implement a national strategic plan to end houselessness, issued a report in 2012 called “Searching for Solutions: Constructive Alternatives to the Criminalization of Homelessness.”[649] The report said: “Local and county governments frequently devote significant resources to deploying law enforcement to disperse people experiencing homelessness from public spaces; however, these interventions do little to stop the cycle of homelessness…. Police action to move or arrest people experiencing homelessness is rarely effective because those who sleep unsheltered on the streets are often chronically homeless with no access to housing and have underlying mental health issues and other disabilities. It is not a solution to force someone to move when they have nowhere else to go, but in many cities police do not have the tools they need to offer solutions, they can only disperse or arrest.”[650]
The report warned that criminalization is costly and ineffective; that criminalization is at best a temporary solution that undermines more lasting ones, like developing affordable housing; that criminalization, by jailing people and saddling them with criminal records, makes it more difficult for them to find work and housing.[651]
The ongoing policy of tasking law enforcement with addressing houselessness, through ticketing, arresting, detaining, searching, and using force, as well as under cover of offering services and shelter that are generally inadequate and unacceptable, has been as ineffective as it has been cruel.
Pete White of LA CAN summed up the evolution of policing against unhoused people on Skid Row and throughout Los Angeles: “Each iteration is the same. They do the same stuff. They always tie enforcement to the promise of more services, but they never deliver. They just enforce. In the end it is about land clearance and banishment.”[652]
V. Mental Health and Hopelessness:
Institutionalization as Criminalization
California policymakers are enacting changes to laws around mental health to set up court systems and legal procedures to order unhoused people into mandatory “treatment,” that may include severe loss of personal liberty, while proposing to spend billions to build involuntary care facilities.
California policymakers are taking funding away from already scarce voluntary mental health treatment programs to pay for involuntary care.
Mental health professionals disproportionately diagnose Black and Latinx people with conditions qualifying them more readily for involuntary treatment and loss of liberty.
With the limitations on arrests and citations imposed by the Martin v. Boise decision and some recognition by officials that arresting people for their unhoused status is unfair, cities like Los Angeles and states like California are expanding mechanisms for involuntary detention for mental health treatment which will have the effect of removing unhoused people from public spaces.[653]
The 2023 PIT Count found that 25 percent of unhoused people in Los Angeles reported experiencing a mental health condition with high support requirements.[654] The circumstances of living on the streets, including lack of sleep, constant danger and stress, poor nutrition, criminalization, and exposure to elements, easily can lead people into mental distress; people with mental health conditions, especially those who lack an external support network, may be less able to compete for scarce housing and thus end up unhoused.[655] But houselessness is not caused by people experiencing mental health conditions.[656]
Unfortunately, people who need care, especially those who live on the streets, face a severe shortage of voluntary treatment options.[657] When the state shut down large institutional mental hospitals in the 1950s through the 1970s, it promised to replace them with community-based treatment centers that would allow people with mental health conditions to access care while maintaining their autonomy and avoiding jail-like conditions.[658] In 1963, the federal government enacted the Community Mental Health Act to advance de-institutionalization and fund community-based treatment, but Congress failed to adequately fund it.[659]
In 2004, California voters passed the Mental Health Services Act (MHSA), which added a tax to high-income people intended to fund treatment programs for people with mental health conditions, in addition to money in existing county mental health budgets.[660] This tax had generated $29 billion by 2022, but for a variety of reasons, including chronic and systemic underfunding of other social and mental health programs and a severe shortage of mental health clinicians, it has not expanded voluntary treatment enough to meet the need.[661]
The MHSA helped pay for Full Service Partnership Programs (FSPPs), which provide voluntary mental health and substance use treatment, along with housing, employment, and education assistance. FSPPs have been effective in improving housing outcomes and reducing houselessness, decreasing criminal legal system involvement, reducing emergency room usage, and saving public money.[662] They are premised on intensive case management, a belief that people with mental health conditions with high support requirements can achieve housing stability with adequate support, and treatment tailored to the needs of the individual.[663] Despite their success, FSPPs have not been adequately funded or implemented.[664]
A. “CARE” Court
Rather than expanding FSPPs and other successful voluntary programs, especially early interventions, to meet the need, in 2022 California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed creating a new court system to order people into involuntary treatment.[665] There is no evidence that involuntary treatment is more effective than voluntary treatment, and some studies indicate it causes harm.[666] The experience of involuntary treatment also can be highly traumatizing.[667] People who enter treatment voluntarily, sometimes after extended outreach efforts, have better outcomes than those who are coerced into it.[668]
Known as the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Act, this new system authorizes police, outreach workers, medical personnel, mental health workers, family members and even roommates to file a petition for a person to be evaluated for court-ordered treatment if they are an adult “currently experiencing a severe mental illness” with a diagnosis “identified in the disorder class: schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders.”[669] It is unclear how that determination is made in each case, though the petition must document that a behavioral health professional has examined the person or has made unsuccessful attempts to do so.[670] This uncertainty leaves much to the discretion of officials implementing the system.
Once a petition is filed, there are a variety of steps, many requiring court appearances, in which the individual has an opportunity to agree to comply with a “CARE Plan” that can include mental health treatment, medications, and “housing.”[671] If the person does not agree to the plan, the court, after a hearing with fairly informal process, may order the person to comply with the plan.[672]
Once ordered to comply or after agreeing without the court’s formal order, the person must submit to regular monitoring by the court and may be ordered to continue involuntarily for a second year if the court is unsatisfied with progress after one year.[673] The court may also notify officials responsible for placing people under conservatorships of a person’s non-compliance with the ordered treatment.[674] Failure to comply with a CARE Plan will be used as evidence of the need for a conservatorship and will create a legal presumption that the person needs “additional intervention” beyond the CARE plan—presumably a conservatorship or other mandatory treatment.[675]
The CARE Act does not bring in new resources for mental health care or for housing, instead relying on existing funding sources, including the MHSA.[676] It does provide tens of millions of dollars of new funding for the courts.[677] People ordered to CARE Plans may be given priority for scarce treatment placements and housing over people who seek them voluntarily.[678]
Though the CARE Plans may include a housing requirement, they do not guarantee a “housing” placement. The legislation does not define what counts as “housing,” but it does list a variety of eligible programs that include interim shelters.[679] Counties will be allowed to decide what “housing” will suffice.[680]
Unhoused people and their advocates have great concern that CARE Plans will force people into substandard and restrictive shelters that will not lead to permanent housing. Opponents of the CARE Act object to its coercive approach to mental health—using police and courts, while denying people’s autonomy and control over their own health care.[681] Along with peer organizations and mental health care providers, unhoused people and advocates have called for more housing and more voluntary care.
The CARE Act process will allow police and outreach workers to petition a person into court if that person does not meet a subjective definition of “stabilized” or if that person has been detained or arrested multiple times.[682] While not increasing the resources an outreach worker has to offer, it increases the potential consequences for a person who does not want to enter a substandard shelter. Knowing that outreach workers may be documenting their interactions for a petition to the CARE Court, unhoused people may be hesitant to engage with them at all. Police may use the petitions to remove people from the streets that they find problematic or use the threat of petitions to displace people.[683] Fearing being petitioned into involuntary treatment, many unhoused may make themselves less visible, and thus less accessible for actual services and more vulnerable to harm. Giving police the power to petition, and especially to threaten to petition, people into coerced treatment—a consequence that can be more severe than an arrest—simply provides them another tool with which to can drive unhoused people into hiding or place them under control of the state.
The CARE Act passed with near unanimous support in the legislature.[684] Newsom’s administration announced CARE Act as a “new plan to get Californians in crisis off the streets and into housing, treatment and care.”[685] City governments across the state, chambers of commerce, tourism industry groups, and National Alliance on Mental Illness-CA supported the CARE Act; disability rights organizations, mental health peer organizations, civil and human rights groups, housing justice, racial justice, mental health providers, and many individuals who had experienced involuntary treatment opposed it.[686]
Los Angeles County voted to fast-track implementation of the CARE Act to begin in December 2023.[687]
B. Discriminatory Impact—CARE Court
The racial implications of the CARE Act and other efforts at involuntary treatment are likely to be profound. As it targets the unhoused population which is disproportionately Black and Latino in Los Angeles, more Black and Latino people will lose autonomy over their care.
Further, mental health professionals diagnose Black and Latinx people with qualifying conditions at much higher rates than they do white people, despite no evidence that these conditions are more prevalent in these populations.[688] One meta-analysis of over 50 separate studies in the US found that Black people are diagnosed with schizophrenia at a rate nearly 2.5 times greater than white people.[689] A 2014 review of empirical literature on the subject found that Black people were diagnosed with psychotic disorders three to four times more frequently than white people.[690] This review found large disparities for Latino people as well. The disparities may be a result of racial and ethnic bias and lack of cultural competence by clinicians, and biased assessment norms.[691] As a result, there is a real risk that CARE Court will place a disproportionate number of Black and Latino people under involuntary court control.
C. CARE Act and SB 43 Expand State Power to Control Lives Through Conservatorships
As referral to conservatorship can be the consequence for non-compliance with a CARE Plan; at Newsom’s urging, the legislature passed a law to expand eligibility for conservatorships that will make it easier to place people under strict control.[692] The law, SB 43, enacted in 2023, amends existing California law. It expands the definition of “gravely disabled,” a condition required to be placed under a conservatorship, from a person “unable to care for basic personal needs for food, clothing, shelter,” by adding “unable to care for… personal safety or necessary medical care.”[693] This expansion has potential to expose crime survivors and people who assert their own wishes about their health care to placement under conservatorship.[694] The bill also adds “severe substance use disorder” to the definition of gravely disabled.[695] This change greatly expands the reach of conservatorship laws, in a way that is particularly threatening to unhoused people, who are continually being policed and are likely to be a major target of CARE Act enforcement.
Conservatorship is an extreme limitation on a person’s liberty. A conservatorship allows the court to authorize mental health treatment, including psychotropic drugs, against the will of the conserved person.[696] It allows the conservator to place the conserved person anywhere, including in a locked facility.[697] The conservator takes over all financial decisions for the conserved person.[698]
In September 2023, the legislature passed AB 531, which asks state voters to approve a bond measure to allocate over $6.3 billion to build psychiatric facilities.[699] Days before the vote in the legislature, the bill’s authors removed all language requiring the facilities be voluntary and unlocked and replaced it with language allowing locked facilities for involuntary holds.[700]
The overall impact of this move towards forced treatment will not reduce houselessness, except to the extent it increases detention. Fear of placement in locked facilities, forced medication, unacceptable interim shelter, and loss of rights and self-determination will drive unhoused people away from needed services. Without permanent housing, forced treatment will not remove the underlying instability of houselessness.[701]
VI. Sanitation Sweeps as Criminalization
Los Angeles Sanitation Department enforces laws against unhoused people existing in public space by systematically taking and destroying their property, including tents, bedding, clothing, medication, paperwork and personal effects.
From 2020 through 2022, LASAN has conducted nearly 25,000 cleanups or “sweeps” of unhoused communities and disposed of 1.3 million pounds of material, on average, per month, much of it valued possessions of unhoused people, while only collecting 72 bags per month for storage, despite court orders against destroying property.
A. Hampton Drive, Venice—Case study of LASAN destruction
On Hampton Drive in Venice, about three blocks from the beach, unhoused people had established a long-standing community between Sunset and Rose Avenues. This two-block stretch has no residential buildings and borders the back of a restaurant, parking lots, a gym, and a Google facility.[702] Many of its unhoused residents were originally from Venice, including some who had to leave a subsidized affordable apartment building that the owners converted to a luxury hotel.[703]
Michael C. had been making this community his home for about five years when he returned from an errand on the morning of September 16, 2021 to find that the LASAN CARE+ crew, which conducts “comprehensive” cleanups that include the destructive sweeps, had arrived and given everyone a short time to clear out their belongings.[704] LASAN protocols say that they should allow people living in unhoused communities 15 minutes to clear out before “clean-ups” begin.[705]
Michael, who supported himself by recycling and had been looking for a job, had just a few minutes to gather his stuff. In the stress and confusion and with so little time, he was unable to salvage much. He begged for just five more minutes, but the LASAN lead refused and ordered him outside the yellow tape. He stepped aside with just a small backpack with some clothing and his bicycle.[706]
He watched as the LASAN workers took his tent and threw it into the trash compactor truck. Along with his tent, they destroyed his cell phone, his clothes, his bedding, his letters, paperwork, ID, and photos. They trashed his medication for his mental health condition. They trashed his medication for diabetes and the machine that checks his blood sugar levels.[707] He turned to the LAPD officers who were standing by at the scene, but they gave no help.[708] Their presence was a reminder of the threat of arrest for interfering with LASAN’s operations.[709]
Five days later, Peggy Kennedy of the Venice Justice Committee found him on the sidewalk where his tent once stood, looking afraid and hopeless.[710] LAHSA outreach workers had been out at the sweep, but they had not offered him any place to go or replacement for his lost property. He said of them, “It’s more for show.”[711] He had been on lists for housing over the past five years, but nothing had ever come of them. He had heard that LAHSA offered motel vouchers to people staying a block away on Third Street, but not on Hampton.[712] He felt that his blood sugar levels were high and rising. He was afraid he might have to go to the emergency room.[713]
Kennedy called Dr. Coley King from the Venice Family Clinic.[714] King specializes in street medicine, meeting with people at the various unhoused communities in the area and helping with their health needs.[715] King was on vacation, but he answered her call and arranged for prescription refills at the nearby clinic. About an hour later, Michael rode by on his bicycle to thank Kennedy and tell her he had gotten his medication.[716]
Michael was not the only person to lose important property during the sweep of Hampton Drive that day. Lester C., 67 years old at the time, had gone to a nearby McDonald's to get a cup of coffee and to use the bathroom. When he returned, his tent was in the street and much of his property was in bags, including his clothes, paperwork, guitar and sleeping bag. LASAN workers would not let him retrieve anything. They put his tent in the garbage. Later, someone gave him another one just like it.[717] LASAN refused to give him his bagged property, instead loading it into a truck and taking it away.[718]
A woman named Dorothea, who was also staying on Hampton Drive, said that there was no prior notice of the sweep and that LASAN and LAPD came early in the morning and told them that they had two minutes to pack up and could take two bags.[719] She disputed the claim by a representative from Council District 11 that there had been notice. Dorothea said she lost everything except the clothes she was wearing.[720]
The LASAN “Confirmation Sheets” for the CARE+ cleaning did not indicate a cleaning for Hampton Drive that day and noted the area at 3rd Street and Rose Avenue, just a block away, was set for “spot clean only” due to being a “COVID Hotspot.”[721] Spot cleaning, as opposed to a full clean-up, usually means that they take away trash from the area, but do not destroy tents and property. After the September 16 clean-up, the area remained dirty.[722]
Cathy G. was staying on Hampton Drive when the city agencies arrived on September 16. Someone from LAHSA told her that she had to move because LASAN was coming to clean and take everybody’s stuff. They gave her a bag to fill with her property. Because she deliberately keeps very little stuff with her, Cathy was able to pack everything up and avoid any loss. But doing so is inconvenient as she stores most of her clothes and other things with friends, and she wastes time travelling to retrieve them when needed.[723] Cathy had been on lists for housing for a year with no apparent progress.[724]
1) The LASAN operation on Hampton Drive
Hampton Drive is within the Special Enforcement and Cleaning Zone (SECZ), around the A Bridge Home (ABH) shelter on Main Street and Sunset Avenue a few blocks away.[725] There are permanent signs up indicating cleaning every Thursday, which would include the day of this sweep.[726] While this serves as notice in a technical sense, the area indicated on the signs is several square blocks large. Unhoused people do not know on a given Thursday whether their particular area will be cleaned or, if so, whether it will be a “comprehensive cleaning,” in which everything can be thrown away, or a “spot cleaning,” that will work around tents and structures.[727] It is labor and time intensive to pack up a sidewalk home, in addition to being emotionally traumatic and physically difficult, especially for the many people with disabilities in unhoused communities.[728] The lack of specific notice means LASAN frequently catches people unprepared.
LASAN documents indicate that Councilmember Mike Bonin’s staff requested the September 16 comprehensive clean-up at Hampton Drive.[729] Bonin had been one of the few councilmembers who publicly opposed criminalization of unhoused people and typically resisted calls to simply remove unhoused people from the neighborhood. A vocal group of housed people in Venice criticized Bonin for this stance, including attempting a recall campaign.[730]
LASAN documents explained that they were enforcing LAMC 56.11 and removing barriers to access to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as removing “feces, urine, sharps, and other potential health hazards.”[731] People staying on Hampton Drive tried to keep their area clean, but they had no toilets or dumpsters.[732]
LASAN documented the destruction of seven “encampments,” referring to individual tent sites, on Hampton Drive that day, though two of them had two adjacent tents.[733] They removed 3 tons of what they called “solid waste/trash;” 1,750 pounds of “hazardous waste;” 75 pounds of feces and urine; and 85 pounds of aerosols, paint, and oil.[734] They sent seven bags to storage at the Skid Row “Bin” facility across town.[735]
While some of the tent sites that LASAN demolished on Hampton that day were disorderly and surrounded by what could have been garbage, others were clean and self-contained.[736] LASAN noted there was “bird feces” on Lester C.’s tent, condemned it as contaminated, and threw it away.[737] They determined that the tent, bike trailer, and other property at a second site were also contaminated and disposed of them.[738] Another tent had syringes, food, and a jug containing urine, which is a common type of makeshift toilet in places where no regular toilet exists.[739] LASAN destroyed everything at this site.
The September 16, 2021, clearance was not the first such operation on those two blocks on Hampton Drive; nor the first to destroy people’s property.[740] Just four weeks earlier, unhoused Hampton Drive resident Juan R. returned from taking a shower one block east on 3rd Street, to find the area where he had been living was closed off with yellow tape. Juan had seen no notice of a sweep, other than the unspecific permanent signs. He was completely unprepared.[741]
He asked the police officers if he could go inside the tape to get his diabetes medications. They told him to ask the LASAN officials. Those officials refused him. They threw away his identification, bicycles and parts, tent, clothing, sheets, blanket, and medications. He was able to refill his medications at the nearby Venice Family Clinic, and a local mutual aid activist got him a replacement tent later that day. Otherwise, Juan had to start over again gathering possessions necessary for his survival.[742]
2) Sweeps on Hampton Drive over the years
The September 16, 2021, operation was just one of many that LASAN undertook between October 2019 and January 2023 at this location. LASAN records show 141 “comprehensive” and “spot” cleanings during that period, in which LASAN cumulatively disposed of over 215,000 pounds of material.[743] While some of it was likely garbage, much of it was the personal possessions and shelters of the people living there. During this period, LASAN also took 72 bags of property to the downtown storage facility.[744] Despite this investment in resources in the destruction of people’s property, the encampment remained in place until January 2023, when newly elected Mayor Bass completely dismantled it through her Inside Safe program.[745]
LAHSA outreach workers were also present during the September 16, 2021 Hampton Drive sweep.[746] Their records show they provided services to three people, primarily distributing food, water, hygiene items, and Covid-19 protection equipment. They gave referrals for housing or shelter to two people, but their records do not indicate if they provided either with an actual place to go.[747] One of the two is marked as having “attained” ABH shelter two months later, on November 15, 2021.
Between March 2020 and April 2022, LAHSA records show they encountered 475 individuals in the area around the Hampton Drive unhoused community. Only about half of those people were given a “housing referral” by the agency. Fifty-two people attained LAHSA-referred housing or shelter at some point during this two-year period, about 11 percent of the people LAHSA encountered in the area.[748]
B. Sweeps Throughout the City
In response to public records requests, LASAN provided Human Rights Watch with data from all the cleanings and sweeps of unhoused encampments in the city from April 1, 2020, through October 31, 2022. This includes spot and comprehensive cleanings. During this time, LASAN carried out nearly 25,000 total cleanings in the city, during which crews threw away at least 100 pounds of solid material. LASAN disposed of an average of 1.3 million pounds each month. In 2020, the average sweep disposed of 1,617 pounds; in 2022, that average had increased to 2,600 pounds.[749]
Despite a legal requirement to take and store property that was not considered hazardous, LASAN workers did so infrequently, collecting only 72 bags on average per month throughout 2021 and 2022.[750]
Much of the material that LASAN collects during these sweeps, estimated as high as 80 percent by LASAN Chief Enrique Zaldivar, comes not from unhoused people but from businesses that dump illegally.[751] The City of Los Angeles controller reported that “illegal dumpers” frequently seek out unhoused encampments as locations to leave garbage.[752]
C. Police Enforcement and the Sanitation Sweeps
The encampment on Hampton Drive has been the sight of police enforcement against unhoused people as well. From 2016 through 2018, LAPD data shows they cited 583 people for infractions and made 139 misdemeanor arrests, 73 percent of which were for violations of LAMC section 41.18.[753]
In recent years, city policy has shifted away from arrests and citation and instead emphasized sanitation sweeps.[754] This approach to enforcement has become the primary tool for making unhoused people disappear from public view.[755] Unlike citations that require a court process, sweeps punish people immediately, on the spot.[756]
Police play a decisive role in sweeps. They accompany LASAN crews, or they are in radio communication and easily summoned if unhoused people object or refuse to cooperate with the confiscation and destruction of their property.[757]
LASAN has taken and destroyed Martin S.’s tents, clothing, and medication multiple times while police stand by and prevent him from retrieving his things.[758]
During a sweep of a community of eight unhoused people in Koreatown, eight police officers stood by, hands on their guns, while LASAN workers threw away their property.[759]
LASAN has taken Ida J.’s tent three separate times. Along with her tent, they have thrown away her Bible, her mother’s funeral notice, blood pressure medications, phone, ID, and Social Security Card. During one sweep police officers held her arms to prevent her from getting her property.[760]
Susan G. was having chest pains during a sweep of her community in Hollywood. She asked advocates from StreetWatch to help her move her stuff, but police on the scene would not allow them to help.[761] She left in an ambulance and lost her property.[762]
Iris P. was packing up her belongings as LASAN workers were conducting a sweep in Van Nuys in December 2021. A police officer came up to her and said, “You’ve had your time. You need to leave or get arrested.” She argued, asking for more time. When she tried to pick up one last item, the officer grabbed her arms and shook her until she dropped it. The officer cuffed her and placed her in the patrol car where she sat watching her possessions, especially her collection of family photos, thrown in the trash compactor truck.[763]
D. The Legal Evolution of Sanitation Sweeps
Prior to 2011, LASAN had a practice of taking the property of unhoused people on public streets and sidewalks and destroying it without limitation.[764] That year, as part of the Lavan lawsuit, which challenged this taking and destroying of property, a federal district court issued an injunction limiting what property they could take and destroy.[765] The injunction said city officials could not seize property unless they reasonably believed it to be “abandoned, … an immediate threat to public health or safety... evidence of a crime, or contraband,” and, unless it was a threat to public health or safety, they had to store it for 90 days before destruction.[766] The judge required city officials to leave a notice at the location where the property was taken advising where it would be stored.[767]
That same year, while the District Court injunction was in effect, the City of Los Angeles requested that the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (DPH) assess public health issues in Skid Row.[768] Echoing the language of the Lavan injunction in many respects, DPH found human waste constituting an “immediate threat to public health;” improperly disposed hypodermic needles, described as “safety hazards;” active rodent infestations; improperly disposed solid waste; living conditions, including crowding, inadequate water, sanitation and access to health care, that increased the risk of communicable disease transmission; and other public health deficits related to people “living on the streets, in homeless, desperate situations.”[769] DPH gave directives to the city to mitigate these hazards.
Many of these conditions on Skid Row were a direct result of the city not providing trash cans, dumpsters, or toilets in the area, despite the community requesting them for years.[770] Similarly, failure to provide adequate housing contributed immensely to the hazardous public health situation. Rather than invest in these solutions, LASAN implemented a program called “Operation Healthy Streets” (OHS), which it called “a robust homeless community outreach program.”[771] Its stated objective was to “reduce the impacts of encampments in the Skid Row area (as identified in the Los Angeles County Public Health Report) on public health, fire hazard, hazardous materials, and safety.”[772]
LASAN continued to take and discard property throughout the city following the Lavan injunction, but they adjusted their justifications to meet the injunction’s exceptions.[773] “Biohazards” and “contamination,” like the bird feces on Lester Carson’s tent, became the justification to throw out property.[774]
Environmental Compliance Officers or Inspectors (ECIs), who lead the LASAN teams conducting sweeps, decide what is contaminated, based on an expansive and somewhat vague list of possible hazards.[775] The list of hazardous materials includes toxic and flammable substances and human waste, but it also includes “materials potentially-infested with lice, fleas, bedbugs, bacteria, or viruses,” “materials potentially in contact with vectors such as rodents and birds,” “materials or substances which may potentially harbor infectious agents,” and “materials which may have come in contact with a hazardous substance, Health Hazard or infectious agent.”[776]
One ECI told reporters: “Pretty much when something is in contact with the ground and it’s near urine and feces, it’s a health hazard, so it’s trash.”[777] Without toilets available to unhoused communities on Skid Row and throughout the city, this standard makes most property vulnerable to destruction.[778] A LAHSA outreach worker, who has been present at dozens of LASAN clean-up operations, said that LASAN workers will claim that condensation on a tent is evidence of contamination and use it as an excuse to dispose of the tent and everything inside it.[779]
At the time of the Lavan injunction, LAMC section 56.11 said: “No person shall leave or permit to remain any merchandise, baggage or any article of personal property upon any parkway or sidewalk.”[780] While the language of the ordinance sounded neutral, it was applied selectively, against unhoused people.[781]
In 2016, the City Council rewrote section 56.11 to conform it to the restrictions in the Lavan and Mitchell injunctions, and in a way that more specifically applies to unhoused people.[782] It now defines how much and what types of property unhoused people are allowed to possess, and where they may keep that property. Some provisions address issues of accessibility, including forbidding keeping property close to property entrances or fire hydrants or in ways that violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. It codifies the right to take and destroy without notice any property that “poses an immediate threat to the health and safety of the public.”[783] It does not define how such a threat is determined, effectively leaving it to the broadly interpreted discretion of LASAN officials and workers.[784]
The revised section of 56.11 specifically limits the erection of tents, and allows the city to impound any tent set up in violation. It authorizes officials to impound and store any unattended personal property and to take “excess personal property,” defined as anything not fitting into a 60-gallon container.[785] LASAN officials frequently pass out 60-gallon bags to unhoused people and take any property they cannot fit into it.[786] Unattended property means the owner is not immediately there, thus allowing disposal of property, even if it is only unattended temporarily or if it is guarded by another person on behalf of the owner.
The ECI leads the LASAN teams and makes the final decisions about what is done—including what gets destroyed, what gets taken to storage, what people are allowed to keep, and how much time to give people to pack up their belongings.[787] Some ECIs allow people more time, while others do not.[788] Once the ECI designates something as a health hazard, LASAN crews take it and dispose of it.[789]
The stated goal of the sweeps is cleaning, but their tangible impact is the destruction of encampments, and thus removal of unhoused people, from the locations.[790] The job description for LASAN’s ECIs says their role includes “prevent[ing] misappropriation of public areas for personal use…,” “respond[ing] to neighborhood issues and concerns as called for in… LAMC 56.11, and developing strategies for dealing with situations that may arise among unsheltered [unhoused] individuals….”[791]
E. 31st and Main: An Unhoused Community
On October 19, 2021, LASAN destroyed an unhoused community at 31st and Main Street, a mostly industrial area with few residences or retail businesses, just south of Downtown Los Angeles. They tore down shelter structures and threw away people’s possessions.[792] Records indicate 6,000 pounds of material were trashed and no property was taken to storage.[793] They left in place a huge pile of trash on the corner.[794] They also left in place a wooden structure and fencing that a business owner on that block had erected that completely blocked the sidewalk.[795]
This unhoused community was in an SECZ with permanent signs saying that cleanings in the zone can occur any Tuesday.[796] The zone encompasses seven large square blocks, any of which—or none—may be cleared on a given Tuesday. LASAN considers these permanent signs to meet the notice requirements of the Mitchell injunction. Usually, someone from LASAN lets the people staying in this close-knit community know about a major cleaning so that they have a chance to move their belongings.[797]
On this date, the people living on 31st Street received no specific notice until the early morning, when police arrived with LASAN and told them they had 20 minutes to move.[798] After what people there said was only 10 minutes, the officials told them to stop and step away from the area.[799]
Roberto F. had built a structure out of wood that protected him from the elements. He was able to get some papers and some clothing packed before they stopped him. LASAN destroyed his other papers and clothing, his bed, a sofa, a small refrigerator, and a fan. They destroyed his home structure and those of 10 other people living on that block.[800]
Sandra C. lost photos of her son and other personal items with sentimental value.[801] Two people who were sleeping when police and LASAN came were unable to salvage anything before being rushed out of the area.[802] LASAN destroyed mattresses, couches, chairs, shades, and other furnishings and structures that allowed people to create some comfort and protection from the elements and to feel like they had a home.[803]
After the destruction, the residents of this community stayed exposed on the sidewalk until they were able to rebuild.[804] LAHSA staff have come to this community and given out food, but they have very rarely offered housing.[805] On the day of the October sweep, LAHSA did not offer services to any resident, nor did they offer services to anyone in the month following the sweep. Over the 2 years before and after this sweep, LAHSA staff encountered 19 different people in the vicinity, offering housing referrals to 11, with 4 people attaining housing or shelter.[806]
The residents of this community try to keep the area clean themselves.[807] They had a dumpster on the block, but city officials removed it. The city had provided porta-potties, but removed one and did not maintain the others.[808] The residents rely on a local laundromat for a bathroom.[809]
Between the periodic destructive sweeps at 31st and Main Street, LASAN also conducts occasional “spot cleanings” which involve trash removal and sometimes power-washing, but not the wholesale elimination of people’s property.[810]
The residents of unhoused communities generally appreciate the “spot cleaning.”[811] Often they spend time cleaning their areas themselves, but need additional support given the lack of trash cans, dumpsters or working toilets.[812] Sometimes LASAN will conduct cleanings in an area but leave trash cans overflowing with garbage.[813] The Services Not Sweeps Coalition, made up of community organizations that represent unhoused people and that provide mutual aid to assist unhoused people’s survival, has called for regular non-destructive sanitation services, including handwashing stations, dumpsters, toilets, and regularly scheduled trash removal.[814]
F. CARE and CARE+
LASAN currently implements two different types of “cleanings” of unhoused communities, using two different kinds of teams: Cleaning And Rapid Engagement (CARE) teams, which conduct “spot cleanings,” and Comprehensive Cleaning And Rapid Engagement (CARE+) teams, which conduct “spot cleanings” and fully destructive sweeps.[815] In 2021, CARE and CARE+ teams scheduled cleanings on approximately 250 days.[816]
CARE teams include two ECIs, one maintenance laborer, one garbage truck operator, and two Homeless Engagement Team (HET) members who work for LAHSA.[817] CARE operations are intended to provide regular trash collection to improve public health conditions at encampments.[818] CARE staff trainings stress working directly with people living in those settlements to provide voluntary trash removal.[819] The inclusion of LAHSA workers on the CARE teams is supposed to facilitate connection to services and housing, along with the trash removal.[820]
CARE+ teams are larger, and their operations are often much more invasive.[821] They include two additional laborers and two additional truck operators, as well as traffic control officers, since CARE+ operations frequently involve closing off entire streets.[822] Police are more likely to be on-site or within immediate reach when CARE+ teams are involved. LASAN trainings claim CARE+ is about connecting unhoused people with resources, but the reality is that the program prioritizes clearing encampments and destroying the property of unhoused people.[823] CARE+ teams maintain data on what they collect, store, and discard, not on services provided or people connected to shelter or housing.[824]
Notices for the CARE+ “comprehensive cleanings” tell people that LASAN will clean the area, including power washing, and that people must remove all personal property. Anything left behind will be collected and taken to storage for 90 days before destruction. Anything considered to be “an immediate threat to public health or safety, trash, [or] evidence of a crime may be discarded immediately.”[825] CARE+ teams are supposed to give people “up to 30 minutes” to move their belongings out of the cleaning area, though other protocols say only 15 minutes.[826] People frequently report that the ECIs give them much less than that amount of time, though some ECIs give more time.[827]
CARE and CARE+ are integrally connected to former Mayor Garcetti’s A Bridge Home (ABH) shelter plan. Under Garcetti’s plan, the city built and operates a shelter in each council district. Surrounding each shelter are “Special Enforcement and Cleaning Zones” (SECZs), like the one that includes the Hampton Avenue unhoused community, in which city officials promised to enforce laws criminalizing use of public space by unhoused people, and established cleaning operations under these two programs. The SECZs have CARE spot-cleaning four days a week and a CARE+ comprehensive cleaning one day a week.[828] Though CARE and CARE+ are implemented throughout the city, they are especially intense in the SECZs.
In March 2020, city officials suspended some enforcement of LAMC section 56.11 and comprehensive CARE+ cleaning due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A few months later, they reversed and reauthorized implementation of CARE+ within the SECZs.[829] In June 2021, the City Council voted to resume CARE+ encampment clearances throughout the entire city.[830]
Advocates and unhoused people, led by LA CAN and the Services Not Sweeps coalition, called for regular cleanups of unhoused communities and had reason to be hopeful when the city initiated the CARE program, despite ongoing concerns about police involvement.[831] However, within a few months of starting the program, LASAN shifted to the more aggressive sweeps, under pressure from members of the City Council to “fully enforce” LAMC section 56.11.[832]
G. Notice of Cleanings
On November 4, 2021, LAPD officers and a LASAN CARE+ team arrived at Ceres Street, between 6th and 7th, on Skid Row early in the morning. There are permanent signs stating that this block is within a much larger zone that may be cleaned every Thursday between 7:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. Generally, LASAN only cleans a segment of the zone each week. The sign is not specific about which parts of the zone will be cleaned. The cleanings occur inconsistently, and residents do not know when LASAN will clean their block.[833] Frequently people move their possessions, but then there is no clean-up.[834]
Angela P. was living in the unhoused community on that block. She was using a wheelchair and, following a recent surgery, she had tubes running out of her abdomen emptying into a plastic bag.[835] A LASAN official came up to her that morning and told her that she and the others would not have to move, indicating that they intended to do a “spot,” rather than “comprehensive,” cleaning. Angela said usually there are specific signs indicating a comprehensive cleanup or sweep, in addition to the permanent signs, but that day there had been no additional notice.[836]
A short time later, a different LASAN official came and told her and others on the block that they would have to move their tents and their belongings, or everything would be taken and destroyed. Several people had already left the location to go to jobs or other appointments, relying on the earlier assurance that their possessions were safe.[837]
People on the block started furiously packing their property and tents.[838] Aaron W. had been living on this block for over a year and had his possessions taken by LASAN twice before. In his 50s, he has an injured back and, despite having little money, he hires others to help him move when the sweeps occur. The people who usually helped him were gone by the time he got notice of the need to move.[839]
Robert J. had lived on the block for five years and has had his property taken eight times. He has lost jewelry, shoes, clothes, family pictures, and his identification. “If you come back while they are ‘cleaning,’ they don’t let you get your stuff. They don’t care. They call it ‘I’m just doing my job.’”[840] A LASAN worker came up to him and told him they would return at 1 p.m. and throw everything away that had not been moved.[841]
After LASAN workers left the Ceres Street community, the unhoused residents moved all that they could out of the cleaning zone.[842] LASAN workers did return that afternoon and took 18,000 lbs. of material.[843]
Unnoticed and misleadingly noticed sweeps, like what happened on Ceres Street, are common.[844] An activist with the organization StreetWatch, which helps unhoused people replace essential property lost in sweeps and documents the destruction, described witnessing incidents where LASAN officials said they were just “spot cleaning” but then threw away everything people left in place.[845] He described other incidents in which officials told people they would be comprehensively cleaning an entire area, leading those people to move their tents and property, only to have LASAN leave without cleaning.[846]
Susan G. asked the LASAN team what their plan was when they arrived at her encampment in Hollywood. The officials told her it was just a spot cleaning. With this understanding, several residents left, some going to medical appointments. Then, LASAN switched and conducted a “comprehensive clean-up,” throwing away all property left at the site. StreetWatch replaced people’s essential belongings.[847]
The Naomi Street sweep came after previous verbal notices of sweeps had been false alerts.[848] Similarly, city officials gave no specific notice of the sweep of the encampment on 31st and Main Street described previously.[849] People who are not present during the sweeps, either because they did not receive notice, because the notice they received had been a false alert in the past, or because they had some other place where they had to go, frequently lose all of their property.[850] LASAN also often does not allow people to remove property that belongs to a neighbor or friend, even if the owner has asked them to look after that property.[851]
Some people living on the streets avoid the trauma of losing their property in the sweeps by avoiding any accumulation of property.
Gary C. keeps all his things in a small backpack. He said: “You got to keep it simple, be ready to shake the spot. You can’t get comfortable.”[852]
Andre N. does not use a tent. He keeps all his property in one bag and a small cart.[853] While packing light allows him to be mobile, he said he had not slept in days at the time of his interview with Human Rights Watch.[854]
After having his property taken and destroyed seven or eight times, Julius M. reduced his belongings down to a bicycle and all he could fit into a basket.[855] Rather than live in a tent, he sleeps on a piece of cardboard or directly on the concrete. He admitted to not getting much rest, suffering back pain, and being exposed to the elements.[856]
Carlton Y. does not stay in one place, to avoid police and sanitation sweeps. He lives “cowboy style,” keeping everything in just two bags, rolling out a blanket on the ground for a bed. He said, “God provides.”[857]
H. Storage
LASAN workers refused to give Lester C. his property back when he returned to his Hampton Avenue tent site to find they had bagged it up and put it on a truck. Instead, they posted a notice on the fence above where his property had been, telling him he could retrieve it at “the Bin,” a storage facility in Skid Row, over 17 miles away.[858] When Lester went there the next day, they told him to fill out a form and that they would call him. As of the time of his interview with Human Rights Watch, five days after the sweep, no one had called. “They didn’t give me shit,” he said.[859]
Lester’s story is familiar:
Alice J. had thousands of dollars’ worth of kitchen equipment she had been saving in the hopes of finding a home where she could use it. During a sweep of her unhoused community near Naomi Street, LASAN took it, loaded it on a truck and told her it was going to the storage facility. When she went to retrieve it, the employee at the storage facility told her it was not there.[860]
Sharon C. had to wait outside the Skid Row storage facility in the blazing sun for two hours before they let her in to claim property taken during a sweep. The employee told her he could not give her property back if she did not have paperwork.[861]
It is extremely difficult for people to retrieve their property from the storage facility.[862] Sometimes LASAN does not put the property there; sometimes people get property but some of it has been lost.[863] Unhoused people have to travel great distances on foot, by bicycle, or using public transit to get to the storage facility, and then, if they are able to retrieve it, they have to carry their property back to where they are staying.[864] Human Rights Watch calculated the public transit travel time to the Bin from every location where LASAN took a bag of property.[865] The median travel time to the Bin was over 65 minutes. For hundreds of people, they would need to travel over 90 minutes on public transit to reach the Bin.[866]
The storage facility often creates bureaucratic hurdles, including requiring paperwork or sometimes identification, which not everyone has, before they will release property.[867] Many times the property is simply not there.[868]
LASAN workers took a crate full of tools belonging to Joseph H. during one sweep. He took the notice they left, drove his truck to the Skid Row storage facility from where he was staying in Van Nuys, and successfully retrieved his property.[869] A LAHSA worker who spoke to Human Rights Watch described frequently going to the storage facility on behalf of clients and navigating bureaucratic hurdles to get their property. This worker is unsure what would happen to his clients if they went alone.[870]
Even as the storage process is extremely burdensome and often futile for unhoused people, LASAN infrequently collects property for storage—electing to dispose of it instead. They took fewer than 4,000 property bags to storage from nearly 25,000 cleanings during 2021 and 2022.[871] LASAN did not collect and store a single property bag at 96 percent of the nearly 25,000 cleanings it carried out between April 2020 and October 2022.[872] Even after excluding spot cleanings and public right-of-enforcement calls, LASAN only collected property at 6 percent of cleanings. During 2021 and 2022, LASAN only collected one bag of property, on average, per every eight cleanings.[873]
Those who do manage to retrieve their property from storage are still exposed to future confiscations, as the abusive process does not help anyone find housing.
I. Sanitation as Justification for Banishment
Despite knowledge of the harms of property destruction and breaking up unhoused communities, and despite the lack of housing options for people, Los Angeles city officials have spent millions of dollars on these abusive policies.
While often advertised as necessary to maintain public health and sanitation, the sweeps are conducted in ways not tailored to meet this goal. Instead of providing regular, consistent, and complete garbage removal; installing and maintaining dumpsters, toilets, and washing stations; and providing supportive sanitation services the city pursues a policy of taking and destroying property.[874]Instead of providing regular, consistent, and complete garbage removal; installing and maintaining dumpsters, toilets, and washing stations; and providing supportive sanitation services the city pursues a policy of taking and destroying property.[875]
The wholesale destruction of property, like tents, chairs, and bedding, makes living in already harsh conditions even harsher. The taking of essential items, like court papers, identification, hygiene materials, clothing, medications, and personal items, like family photographs, is cruel. It harms the mental and physical health of those losing property. It makes it more difficult for unhoused people to find solutions to their situations. Repeatedly starting over—finding new clothes, building a new structure to shelter from the elements, restocking medications, or obtaining replacement identification—is difficult, demoralizing, and traumatizing.
The sweeps, like traditional criminalization through ticketing and arrests, implicitly and wholly blame unhoused people for their circumstances by moving them away from where they are and out of sight of the housed public.[876] Sweeps remove the visible signs of poverty and houselessness.[877] They primarily serve the interests of those concerned about monetary property values, including homeowners, landlords, developers, financial institutions, and others generating wealth from such values, and the politicians who benefit from supporting such interests.[878]
A Comprehensive “Cleaning” in HollywoodOn March 1, 2022, Human Rights Watch observed a CARE+ sweep of an encampment in Hollywood, at Selma Avenue and Shrader Boulevard. About a dozen LAPD officers were present. They taped the area off to prevent entry on both ends of the block. A large crew of LASAN workers were present, with a loader and a garbage disposal truck. Representatives from LAHSA and Council District 13, along with workers from Urban Alchemy, a private organization contracted by the city to perform some cleaning and other tasks related to unhoused people, were present.[879] Department of Transportation officers were controlling traffic around the location.[880] The LAPD sergeant told Human Rights Watch that this operation was a “regularly scheduled clean-up.”[881] The unhoused settlement was in an SECZ, as it was within a couple of blocks of an ABH shelter. There were paper notices posted advising of the sweep that day. The sergeant said outreach workers had offered everyone hotel rooms through PRK, but only about 10 of the 100 residents had accepted.[882] According to LAHSA data, LAHSA staff conducted outreach in the vicinity on four occasions in the month prior to this cleaning, speaking with five individuals. During that outreach two people were given housing referrals, but neither attained housing at the time. On the day of the sweep, LAHSA representatives spoke with one individual, offering only food. StreetWatch activists were able to convince the LASAN ECI to allow a trans woman who had just returned to the encampment from an appointment to go inside the taped-off area to retrieve a cart full of her belongings before LASAN threw it in the trash compactor truck.[883] Previously, police had denied her permission. A Black man in his mid-fifties who walked with a cane asked police officers if he could go inside the area to retrieve his property from his tent.[884] He said he needed to get his identification, his shoes, his medicine, and other things. The officers did not respond. The StreetWatch activists attempted to get the attention of the ECI on this man’s behalf, but the ECI ignored them. The man said some outreach workers came to this encampment a few days earlier offering food and put people on lists for hotel rooms, but they never actually offered rooms. The man’s partner separately described the same experience.[885] Before the LASAN workers could destroy the man’s tent, the StreetWatch activists lifted the yellow tape and walked into the sweep area with him. Police intercepted them and a verbal confrontation ensued. However, police did not stop the man from going to his tent and removing a bag full of his possessions. He struggled to get out of his tent, as police, LASAN, and Urban Alchemy workers stood by watching without offering any help. When asked what the city had to offer them, the man’s partner said: “A badge, a gun, and dumptrucks.” |
VII. Services and Criminalization
LAHSA data indicates they provided services for nearly 80,000 individuals but helped “attain” housing for only a very small percentage—10,255 people from January 1, 2019, through April 22, 2022, according to their own dataset.
LAHSA outreach workers’ participation in the LASAN encampment sweeps, in violation of their “guiding principles” that condemn “encampment clearings” and other policies of displacement, undermines their ability to build trust with and provide services for unhoused people.
LAHSA provided shelter or housing referrals to any person at only 10 percent of LASAN sweeps, and attained housing or shelter for any person at only 3 percent of LASAN sweeps.
LAHSA often prioritizes people for scarce shelter and housing resources based on political pressure to clear publicly visible encampments, rather than based strictly on individuals’ need to be indoors.
LAHSA plays a complex role in Los Angeles city and county policy towards unhoused people. They are responsible for providing services, including helping to find shelter and housing. They operate through their own outreach teams and resources, and through non-profit agencies with which they contract and supervise. Despite their underlying mission to help unhoused people, and their success in doing so, LAHSA also participates in criminalization and the sweeps. Their presence, for example, on the CARE+ teams lends a perception of legitimacy to the destruction and allows city leaders to claim that the sweeps are not abusive because they offer "housing” and services. However, with housing and shelter resources available to help only a small fraction of unhoused people subject to sweeps and to other criminalization, LAHSA’s participation can be harmful.
A. The MacArthur Park Closure
Berto E. had been staying in a tent in the section of MacArthur Park north of Wilshire Boulevard for about a year, along with dozens of other unhoused people, when we spoke to him. Before moving to the park, he had lived with his family in East Los Angeles. When his mother died, they lost their house and he ended up living on the streets.[886]
During his stay in MacArthur Park, representatives from LAHSA would come to his tent periodically. Each time they came, they would take down his name and information, promising they would get him housing. Berto was eager to get indoors. He told them he would accept any kind of housing they offered. He gave them his phone number and email address, but the LAHSA representatives never followed up with him. Berto even went to their office to try to move the process forward, with no results.[887]
In September 2021, LAHSA representatives started coming to MacArthur Park more frequently.[888]
In late September 2021, city officials announced that they would be renovating MacArthur Park.[889] The officials gave unhoused people a strict deadline of October 15 to vacate the park.[890] The unhoused community in the park had grown dramatically during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.[891]
By the first week of October, city officials had begun erecting a fence around the southern section of the park.[892] Sanitation crews began dismantling encampments and throwing away tents and other possessions of unhoused residents in that section.[893] Some police were present, supporting LASAN with the looming threat of arrest for anyone who resisted the destruction.[894]
LAHSA outreach workers were at the park during the destruction of the encampments, going from tent to tent with clipboards.[895] One LAHSA worker said they were moving people to hotel rooms through PRK. One man, whose tent LASAN had destroyed, brought a couple of bags with him as he entered an SUV with LAHSA markings, which later drove away. Before he left, he said he did not know if they were taking him to a hotel room or not.[896]
Ramon T., who had been staying in the southern portion of MacArthur Park, came back from work on October 4, 2021, to find that LASAN had taken his tent and all his possessions and thrown them away.[897] He had nothing left but the clothing he was wearing. The next day, LAHSA representatives approached him for the first time ever and told him they would get him into a Project Roomkey hotel room. Ramon was eager to get out of MacArthur Park, and felt he had little choice, given the destruction of his tent and other property. However, they did not have a room for him that day.[898] Ramon was aware of other people from this section of the park who had gone to hotel rooms. Some had left those rooms and returned to the park.[899]
Kelvin G., who also stayed in the park, said LAHSA outreach workers had approached him in the weeks leading up to the park closing and removal of unhoused residents. They had talked to him about housing, but they had not told him that they had housing available for him.[900]
According to then-City Council Member Gil Cedillo, LAHSA and People Assisting the Homeless (PATH), the contracted service provider, moved 126 people from MacArthur Park into hotel rooms and shelters in the 18 days between the announcement of the park plan and the closure on October 15, 2021.[901] Those who did not get into rooms or shelter moved to other locations but remained unhoused.[902]
The records LAHSA provided to Human Rights Watch do not corroborate the information released by Cedillo. These records show that during September and October 2021, LAHSA personnel and contractors contacted 232 individuals in MacArthur Park, including multiple contacts with a few.[903] They made referrals for interim housing to nearly all of them. However, only 49 people encountered by LAHSA in MacArthur Park during that period were marked as having “attained” hotel rooms or shelter beds.[904]
During September and October 2021, LASAN teams went to MacArthur Park 27 times, throwing away a cumulative 37,465 pounds of material and failing to collect a single bag of property for storage.[905] LAPD made 83 arrests of unhoused people in the park, booking 10 of them into jail. The arrests included 19 for drinking in public or open containers, 14 for possession of a controlled substance, 13 for loitering, and 10 for trespassing. Over half, 52 percent, of those arrested were Latinx, 24 percent were Black, and 19 percent were white.[906]
B. LAHSA’s Important but Controversial Role
LAHSA is a joint Los Angeles County and City agency that is responsible for coordinating services for unhoused people throughout the county. Among its primary roles is re-housing—moving unhoused people back into interim and permanent housing.[907] It oversees and contracts with a network of service providers who, among other things, administer the PRK and, now under Mayor Bass, the Inside Safe hotel sites; help unhoused people navigate the complexities of the housing system; and run shelters and other forms of interim housing.[908]
According to LAHSA, its rehousing system placed 65,829 people in Los Angeles County into housing between 2020 and 2022, including 21,213 in 2021 alone.[909] Rehousing includes rapid rehousing assistance to quickly move recently unhoused people back into housing, permanent supportive housing for people with disabilities, and other forms of affordable housing.[910] LAHSA estimates that while the system helps rehouse 207 people each day on average, an additional 227 people become unhoused each day.[911]
LAHSA did not provide Human Rights Watch with the raw data underlying the totals stated on their “dashboards,” so we were unable to confirm their claims or audit what kind of housing people obtained.[912] These numbers are substantially higher than what was included within the services data LAHSA provided to Human Rights Watch. According to that data, LAHSA outreach workers provided 12,696 housing and shelter referrals in 2021 as part of their outreach, only 4,431 of which indicated the individual “attained” housing. From January 1, 2019, through April 22, 2022, LAHSA’s data shows that they housed 10,255 people.[913]
In 2021, LAHSA reported sheltering 27,701 people.[914] It is not clear from the data provided how many of those sheltered were subsequently placed into permanent housing, how long they stayed in shelter or interim housing, what types of shelter or interim housing they obtained, or how many left their shelter or interim housing and returned to the streets.[915] It is also unclear if some of those counted had repeated short stays in shelter.[916] LAHSA’ analysis of its own data, in response to city council request for a report on section 41.18 enforcement, stated it found interim housing for 17 percent of outreach clients in 2021 and 2022, and the median stay in interim housing for those placed in advance of 41.18 sweeps was 53 days.[917]
LAHSA’s ability to serve people depends in part on its funding. Voters in Los Angeles County approved Measure H in 2017, assessing a quarter cent sales tax to fund homeless services.[918] Measure H has generated about $355 million annually and will last a total of 10 years.[919] Much of that money goes to LAHSA to conduct outreach and to implement a system to prioritize services and housing.[920] It has allowed for a substantial increase in services for unhoused people.[921] Some of the money is directed to housing, but not enough to slow the increase in the unhoused population.[922] In November 2024, Los Angeles County voters will decide to approve, or not, a ballot measure that would replace Measure H on a more permanent basis with a similar sales tax to fund services, housing, and houselessness prevention.[923]
LAHSA operates the Coordinated Entry System (CES), which conducts assessments and creates a prioritized list of unhoused people to “ensure that people are connected to housing and services appropriate to their needs and eligibility, and to match those with the greatest needs to limited resources.”[924]
Studies suggest that the VI-SPDAT assessment tool, which the Los Angeles CES and many other jurisdictions use to make assessments, tends to assign higher needs acuity scores to white unhoused people than to Black unhoused people nationally, but also specifically in Los Angeles.[925] This results in white people being prioritized for permanent supportive housing at higher rates than Black people.[926] LAHSA responded to the studies by saying they were working on a new assessment tool and denying that the disparities were reflected in actual housing placements.[927]
In addition to conducting these assessments and putting people on lists for housing, LAHSA’s Homeless Engagement Teams (HETs) distribute bottled water, food, hygiene kits, and brochures related to other services. They sometimes help people obtain documents, provide transportation, and help replace tents, medication, and other destroyed property. Sometimes they succeed in helping people access shelter and housing.
The LAHSA data provided to Human Rights Watch contained anonymized identification numbers so services provided to individual people could be tracked over time and geography. Of the 79,429 individual people to whom LAHSA provided some form of services in the time frame, 62 percent, or about 49,000 people, were only encountered once. LAHSA provided services to the other 38 percent on at least 2 or more dates. Eight percent of people were encountered 5 or more times and 2 percent on 10 or more occasions. There were 53 people to whom LAHSA provided services on 50 or more dates and 17 people whom LAHSA contacted on 100 or more separate occasions.
1) LAHSA’s participation in sweeps violates their Guiding Principles
In February 2019, LAHSA issued its “Guiding Principles and Practices for Local Response to Unsheltered Homelessness.”[928] These principles established a framework for effective and humane responses to houselessness, as well as a realistic assessment of current conditions. They acknowledged that: “until there is enough safe, decent, affordable, and accessible housing for everyone, people will continue to live in public spaces.”[929]
They said: “We need to end our neighbors’ homelessness, not sweep it out of sight.”[930] They condemned citations, “encampment clearings,” and other policies that displace people as making it harder for unhoused people to rise out of houselessness.[931]
LAHSA’s principles stressed the need to build trust through multiple contacts and patient consultation with the people they seek to serve, and condemned criminalization of life-sustaining activities like sitting, sleeping, and eating in public.[932]
Unfortunately, LAHSA continues to engage alongside LASAN and LAPD, during CARE and CARE+ sweeps and in other ways, in contradiction of these principles.
In September 2019, LAHSA leadership instructed its teams that CARE and CARE+ were designed to be a collaboration between them, LASAN, and LAPD, they would move away from strict enforcement of LAMC section 56.11, and they were to “focus on offering services rather than achieving compliance.”[933]
A few months later, LASAN Director Enrique Zaldivar, in response to pressure from the City Council, especially newly installed Council President Nury Martinez, decreed a different vision for these programs and the role of outreach: “Every CARE and CARE+ team will fully enforce LAMC 56.11 at every location they visit.”[934]
The director said LAHSA was to be “held accountable for implementing adjustments to the CARE program and enforcing the law, as well as carrying out Mayor and Council priorities.”[935] This policy change made explicit the expectation that LAHSA’s outreach teams’ primary function in the CARE and CARE+ operations was not to provide services and connect people with housing, but to facilitate the sweeps.
LAHSA leaders complied, despite this function directly contradicting their stated principles, possibly due to city council members’ influence over their funding.[936] LAHSA workers were told they were to do what the LASAN leads told them to do during the sweeps.[937]
LAHSA outreach supervisor Kristy Lovich posted on Twitter, on June 29, 2020: “LAHSA Outreach workers may not be cops but their work within sweeps programs is a tool for strict enforcement measures used by law enforcement and electeds, their presence playing the role of ‘political insurance’ so critiques can be deflected by claiming ‘services were offered.’”[938]
On July 4, 2020, she posted: “I supervised CARE (sweeps) teams for @LAHomeless. Services offered consist of education about how to comply with LAMC 56.11 and notification that @LACitySAN will be conducting a clean up and clients have 15 minutes to prepare.”[939]
Lovich and others called for an end to LAHSA’s engagement with law enforcement, including its participation in CARE and CARE+ sweeps.[940] In response, LAHSA issued a statement on July 28, 2020, that read, in part: “Currently, LAHSA deploys outreach teams in advance of encampment clean-ups to offer services and help prepare those living encampment (sic) prepare for the clean-up, and, when appropriate, advocate on the unsheltered residents’ behalf.”[941]
LAHSA’s teams provide “immediate services and education around expectations to encampment residents in preparation for sanitation operations,” which generally means advising people they need to pack up quickly and sometimes helping them pack before the loaders put their property in the trash compactor.[942]
2) LAHSA participation in sweeps undermines proactive outreach
LAHSA conducts “proactive” and “reactive” outreach. The distinction is important to understanding their relationship to criminalization.
“Proactive” outreach teams seek out unhoused people most in need of services, especially shelter and housing, and engage in multiple contacts with them to build trust, so that, over time, they are better able to find resources to help them. Those with the greatest need may be older and more vulnerable, be in poor health, have mental health conditions with high support requirements, be targeted for violence because of their identity, or have any number of other specific social risks heightened by the fact of living on the streets. They also may be less visible than others. Effective prioritization requires “proactive” outreach.[943] LAHSA’s “Guiding Principles,” while not using the term explicitly, center on a proactive approach, including patient relationship-building and respect for personal autonomy.[944]
In theory, “reactive” outreach addresses emerging health and safety risks, like wildfire evacuations or Covid-19 outbreaks.[945] It can provide new connections to the prioritization system.[946] However, in practice, the main forms of reactive outreach are generated by the teams engaged in the CARE and CARE+ sanitation sweeps and the “Roadmap” teams.[947] Roadmap outreach teams function under the direction of City Council offices and target specific encampments that those offices prioritize.[948]
As of 2021, LAHSA had 30 HET teams that worked with CARE and CARE+ and 15 assigned with Roadmap, nearly half of all teams countywide.[949] Even LAHSA’s “generalist” HETs, unrelated to CARE, CARE+, and Roadmap, and presumably dedicated to proactive outreach, often get directed to do reactive outreach at the City Council offices' request.[950] Within the City of Los Angeles, less than one-third of the HET units are assigned to provide any traditional proactive outreach, while the rest operate on schedules dictated by LASAN or the Council offices.[951]
Molly Rysman, chief programs officer for LAHSA, wrote in a May 2021 report on Los Angeles’ coordinated outreach system:
When encampments are prioritized based on visibility, public complaints regarding encampment activity, or when services are a precursor to enforcement, resulting outreach efforts can interrupt existing connections, resulting in confusion for clients and additional barriers to engagement and housing placement efforts. Importantly, proactive outreach results in longer-term outcomes for clients by focusing on housing needs and pathways out of homelessness.[952]
For example, a LAHSA outreach worker described working with an older female client living in a large and highly visible settlement. The woman had recently suffered a stroke and desperately needed to get indoors.[953] LASAN, authorized by the Council District, swept the encampment where she lived and put a fence up around the area, forcing her and the other residents to move someplace else. The outreach worker had the woman on a short-list for a room, but he was unable to find her when the room became available.[954]
This outreach worker had a similar experience trying to get a group of three trans women into PRK rooms.[955] When LASAN conducted a sweep and fenced off the area where they were staying, the residents had to scatter. The outreach worker could not find the three women before their rooms were no longer available.[956]
A former LAHSA outreach worker said that sometimes the council offices treat LAHSA as their “own personal outreach teams,” often bypassing LAHSA priorities and best practices to meet the council members’ political needs.[957] For example, this worker said they were assigned to a particular site one day but a city council member diverted them to a different site, where there were two people and two tents that LA Department of Transportation officers had cordoned off. LAPD was also present. The LAHSA worker’s team was simply tasked with helping the pair of unhoused people move their possessions in advance of an LASAN clean-up. They did not have any services or housing to offer. The following day, the council member held a press conference at the location.[958]
Even successful reactive outreach can be problematic. When council members direct LAHSA to clear specific unhoused settlements, requiring them to direct limited resources, including interim housing beds, to people from those settlements, they do so at the expense of other unhoused people who may have greater need.[959]
This prioritization generally responds to pressure from certain housed constituents who complain about seeing unhoused people and about “problematic encampments.”[960] Those unhoused people who live quietly and out of sight do not get the same attention.[961] This approach prioritizes location over need.[962] It also encourages a policy of driving unhoused people out of view.
3) LAHSA does not provide services at many sweeps
Most of the over 24,000 LASAN cleanings in the data provided to Human Rights Watch were categorized as either a homeless encampment cleaning (43 percent of cleanings) or a right-of-way enforcement (54 percent).[963] The remainder were Operation Healthy Streets cleanings in Skid Row or Venice, or other spot cleanings.
Human Rights Watch identified all instances in which LAHSA provided services near cleanings, using a radius of 250 meters, carried out in the city between July 2020 and April 2022. In total, LAHSA provided services at just under 30 percent of the LASAN cleanings.[964] Some unknown proportion of cleanings may not have required LAHSA’s presence, but for those marked as unhoused encampment cleanings, LAHSA only provided services at 31 percent.[965] Even at the nearly 400 cleanings in which LASAN took one or more bags of property from unhoused people for storage, LAHSA only provided services at 43 percent;[966] at the other 57 percent, there was no indication in the data that LAHSA provided any services.
At only 10 percent of cleanings did LAHSA staff provide a shelter or housing referral and at fewer than 3 percent did they identify someone attaining shelter or housing.[967]
The proportion of LASAN cleanings where LAHSA provided services peaked in spring and summer of 2021.[968]
C. Council-District-Directed Outreach and Encampment Clearance
LAHSA participates in encampment clearances ordered by city officials. These clearances are accomplished by sanitation sweeps, often including action such as fencing off the swept area, enforcement and threat of enforcement by police of laws like LAMC sections 41.18 and 56.11, and, in more visible locations, prioritizing unhoused residents for available shelter and housing over others with equal or greater need.
While clearances occur throughout the city with little scrutiny and relatively few resources devoted to them, there have been several major clearances of high-profile locations in recent years, with greater public attention and investment of resources. Main Street, Echo Park Lake, and the Venice Boardwalk have been the sites of some of these actions.
1) Main Street between 5th and 7th
On one side of Main Street, between 5th and 7th Street, sit government buildings, a burgeoning entertainment zone, and luxury apartments—on the other, Skid Row. Advocates call the line that separates the two areas “The Dirty Divide,” to reflect differences in how people are treated depending on their relation to Main Street.[969] A community of unhoused people had set up about 35 tents and structures to live on these 2 blocks of Main Street.[970] The residents of this unhoused community generally got along with each other and did their best to keep the area clean.[971]
In October 2021, however, prompted by multiple complaints from housed neighbors and businesses, Council District 14 had this encampment cleared.[972] In the days leading up to the sweep, LAHSA outreach workers went to Main Street and told residents they would be removed and the sidewalks fenced.[973] They told the residents they would have to leave, but also took people’s information for housing lists and offered hotel rooms to some. They had posted notices of the sweep dated for October 11, though some residents said LAHSA representatives had told them the sweep would not occur until a few days later.[974] Some of the residents had been offered and had accepted hotel rooms through PRK, while others, including some who had previous experience with the rooms they were offering, refused.[975]
Frederico S., who had been living on Main Street for about a year with his wife and previously stayed in a PRK room, expressed great dissatisfaction with that shelter
program.[976] He said: “They offer ‘housing,’ but not as tenants. They search you coming in, both your body and your bags. They supervise you in the hallway. You don’t do to tenants like this. A lot of us don’t want to go cause of that.” Frederico added, referring to the streets, “We don’t want to be here.” He was eager for a housing situation, but not one with demeaning conditions.[977]
On October 12, 2021, LASAN teams, several LAPD officers, and LAHSA outreach teams carried out the sweep.[978] Representatives from City Council member Kevin DeLeon’s office, in whose district this encampment was located, were present.[979] Outreach workers made vague promises to the unhoused residents that the hotels would be pathways to permanent housing.[980] People moving to the hotel rooms had to give up most of their possessions.[981]
After a lengthy argument with a council district representative about the lack of adequate notice, Frederico and his wife stepped away from their tent and watched as sanitation workers destroyed all the property he could not fit into smaller bags.[982]
Josh F., a white man and military veteran in his 40s, had been living on Main Street after becoming unhoused in 2019 due to conflict with his family. He has a variety of job skills, including being a licensed boat operator, but he has severe medical issues. Doctors have told him he needs spinal surgery and dialysis treatments. They have refused to perform the surgery until he has permanent housing in which to recover. LAHSA had previously placed Josh in a PRK hotel room, but the security guards kicked him out for violating rules when he stayed out too long because of his job. He had been there for five months with no progress towards permanent housing. He returned to Main Street.[983]
On October 11, 2021, after over two years on housing lists, LAHSA placed Josh in a room where they promised he could live for up to two years while they attempted to get him a permanent Section 8 subsidy. Josh appreciated having his own keys and the privacy of his own place, but said the room was very small and they would not let his girlfriend move in with him. He has mental health conditions and was concerned about becoming isolated. Still, Josh was hopeful.[984]
By contrast, Sonya V., who was also staying on Main Street, received no offer of housing or a hotel room. She has cancer and feared being exposed to Covid-19 in a congregate shelter.[985] On the day of the sweep, she was sitting on the sidewalk wrapped in a blanket with her two bags next to her.[986] LASAN had taken and destroyed her property on a previous occasion, and she feared they would take the rest on this day.[987] Sonya hoped to get into a hotel room.[988]
On October 12, LASAN crews threw away 7,000 pounds of materials and collected 2 property bags to send to storage. In the month prior, they had already been to the area 5 times, throwing away a cumulative 10,800 pounds.[989] LAHSA staff provided services to six people, giving shelter or housing referrals to each. Two of those people are marked as having attained housing on that day.[990]
Human Rights Watch searched LAHSA service records for services provided in the area in the three weeks prior to, and the week following, the sweep. Over that period, LAHSA encountered 26 individuals in the area and gave housing referrals to 24 of them.[991] Only one “attained” shelter or housing on the day of the referral. Of the 24 who received referrals, 7 were marked by LAHSA as having “attained” housing or shelter.[992]
After completing the removal of the residents and the destruction of their property, LASAN set up a fence that blocked off the sidewalk. Some of the residents got into vans headed for hotel rooms, while others simply moved on to another location.[993] A few blocks away, on Skid Row, thousands of people, many with a higher need to get indoors than those moved as part of this operation, remained on the streets.
Nearly two years later, in August 2023, the fencing remained in place, obstructing the sidewalks on these blocks.[994]
2) Echo Park Lake clearance
In March 2021, city officials, spearheaded by then City Council Member Mitch O’Farrell, working with the Mayor’s Office deployed LAPD, LASAN, LAHSA, and other service providers to clear the large unhoused community that had established itself in the park at Echo Park Lake.[995] The park is located in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles.[996] Prior to its removal, the unhoused community was fairly organized, held regular meetings among its residents, built community showers, tended to a shared garden, and provided mutual aid harm reduction services, all with support from local advocacy groups.[997] While the Echo Park Lake unhoused settlement had its troubles, including some drug use and occasional fighting, it was a place where many people found shelter, safety, and community. [998]
The operation began in early 2021, as outreach workers, mostly from LAHSA and Urban Alchemy systematically took people’s names and information at Echo Park Lake for the purpose of moving them to some form of shelter.[999] Many residents received offers to go to hotels rooms and other shelters.[1000]
LAHSA fast-tracked people from Echo Park Lake into PRK housing, skipping the normal triage process, allowing them to jump ahead of people with higher need in other locations.[1001] To enter the hotel rooms, people had to surrender most of their property for destruction.[1002] Unhoused people at Echo Park Lake often understood the offers of hotel rooms included the implied promise of a pathway to permanent housing.[1003] Some offers of hotel rooms were false and people went instead to congregate shelters or other, less tolerable, living situations instead.[1004] Other times city officials rescinded the offers of hotel rooms nearby and placed people in rooms far away from their community.[1005]
On March 24, after several weeks of outreach and moving people to hotels and shelters, LAPD and LASAN, without providing notice, descended on the unhoused community at Echo Park Lake in massive numbers, forcing the remaining people out and destroying what was left of the community and their structures.[1006] Over the course of 2 days, police deployed 750 officers, at a cost of over $2 million, to take over the Echo Park Lake community, arresting dozens of activists who turned out to defend it.[1007] City officials put a fence around large portions of the park, preventing residents from returning and closing it to the public. They arrested two people for remaining at the location and not accepting offers of “housing.”[1008]
In October 2021, O’Farrell posted a message on Twitter calling the clearance of Echo Park Lake “one of the most successful housing operations in the history of the City.”[1009] In an interview later that month he said: “You have got to stand up for housing solutions along with reclaiming our public space.”[1010] Deputy Mayor Jose “Che” Ramirez, responsible for homelessness policy in the Garcetti administration and then for “city homelessness initiatives” under Mayor Bass, called the Echo Park Lake clearance a model for housing and services.[1011] Mayor Garcetti considered it a “successful housing operation unprecedented in scale.”[1012]
The Echo Park Lake Collective, which includes many unhoused and formerly unhoused people, and the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy published in 2022 a comprehensive report on the Echo Park Lake settlement, its destruction by the city, and the impact on its residents.[1013] The report revealed that, nearly a year later, of the 168 people from the encampment placed in some form of interim housing, 82 had simply disappeared from LAHSA’s system to unknown situations, likely returning to houselessness; 15 were known to have returned to houselessness; 17 were placed in some sort of housing, though not necessarily permanent or stable; and 48 were still in the PRK rooms or some similar temporary shelter waiting to be placed.[1014]
Betsy C., a Black woman in her early 40s, found a community in Echo Park Lake. She got blankets, hygiene supplies, and food there. Outreach workers from Urban Alchemy talked to her about PRK and told her she could go to the LA Grand hotel nearby. She packed up and was ready to go, but they then told her that she had to go someplace else. Uncertain of what they were offering, she took her possessions and moved back to Skid Row, where she remained living on the streets.[1015]
3) Venice Boardwalk clearance
The Venice settlement, unlike Echo Park Lake, was not organized, but made up of smaller, more separated communal groups that existed within it. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic the number of people setting up tents and other living structures on the Venice Boardwalk swelled.[1016] Housed residents in the area complained and called for eviction of the over 200 unhoused residents, many of whom had been previously forced to move from other unhoused communities in Venice and West LA.[1017]
In April 2021, shortly after the Echo Park Lake evictions, city officials, led by Councilmember Mike Bonin, began planning to remove unhoused people and their property from the Boardwalk.[1018] Bonin insisted no one be arrested and “housing” be offered to everyone.[1019] He secured $5 million for outreach and hotel rooms.[1020] Outreach workers began intensive action on the Boardwalk in June 2021.
As this outreach operation was beginning, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva visited the Boardwalk himself and sent large numbers of deputies there, including his Homeless Outreach Services Team (HOST).[1021] Villanueva was running for re-election, and promoted his actions on social media.[1022] As representatives from LAHSA and St. Joseph’s Center, the primary homeless services agency in Venice, gathered information from unhoused residents and assessed them for interim housing, armed, uniformed sheriff’s deputies went from tent to tent with clipboards taking information from many of the same people and making vague offers of housing. When Human Rights Watch questioned sheriff’s deputies at the scene about what kind of housing they were offering, they had no answer.[1023] At the same time, Villanueva was making threats of mass arrests if people did not leave.[1024]
Some people in Los Angeles accused Villanueva of using the Venice Boardwalk, which the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) normally does not patrol, and the unhoused community there as a publicity event in the lead up to his ultimately failed re-election bid.[1025]
By early July, city officials cleared the tents and living structures from the Boardwalk. Primarily, they moved people to motels—some local and others far away.[1026] The unhoused people were allowed to keep small amounts of property and LASAN destroyed the rest.[1027] After the initial clearance, LAPD and LASAN more strictly enforced the camping ban on the Boardwalk, which is a city park covered by LAMC section 63.44, including evicting people and destroying their property in the middle of the night.[1028]
St. Joseph Center reported in October 2021 that they and LAHSA had moved 213 people from the Boardwalk: 167 to some form of temporary housing, mostly hotel rooms, and 46 to permanent housing.[1029]
Ronald C. was one of the first people moved to a hotel when they cleared the Boardwalk. They initially took him to one in neighboring Culver City, then moved him to another one in Inglewood, where he stayed for a few months. People stole his property while he was staying there. Eventually, he was moved to a place in South LA that he shares with seven other people. He was unsure if this place will be permanent or transitional.[1030]
Christian P. had been unhoused in Los Angeles for about a year. He would ride buses all night and sleep on the beach during the day. Eventually, he got a tent and set up on the Boardwalk by Dudley Avenue, where he found a small community of people he trusted and who felt like family to him. LASAN took everything he could not carry—including his blanket, tent, and sleeping bag—when they swept his Boardwalk site in July 2021. They moved him into the Cadillac Hotel close to where he had been staying, with a four-month voucher. Then they moved him to a place in South LA that he describes as “an old frat house.” He has a one-year lease, though it is still considered “transitional.” It is far from his health-care provider in Venice, but he is now optimistic about his situation.[1031]
Carolyn S. had been living on the Boardwalk since a fire in 2019 destroyed the home she shared with her son. Homeless service providers moved her to the Venice ABH shelter and then to the nearby Cadillac Hotel. She found the rules, including curfews and frequent searches, oppressive and intimidating. She said that many of the people moved from the Boardwalk either remained in hotels or were back on the streets.[1032] Carolyn eventually moved into a new affordable housing development on Rose Avenue built by Venice Community Housing.
Some city officials saw the Boardwalk clearance as a success, particularly when compared to the Echo Park Lake clearance, given that many people were placed in hotel rooms and reportedly 46 people eventually went into permanent housing.[1033] Council District 11 budgeted $2.34 million for hotel rooms for 200 people for 90 days at $130 per night.[1034] Another $1.3 million went to case management personnel.[1035] Unlike the Echo Park Lake clearance, there has been no similarly detailed independent evaluation of the Boardwalk clearance. But LAHSA data given to Human Rights Watch does not match the claims.
During June and July 2021, LASAN swept the Boardwalk area over 60 times, throwing away a cumulative 110,440 pounds of material and taking 94 bags of property to storage.[1036] According to their own data, LAHSA staff provided services at about 64 percent of these sweeps. During that period, LAHSA contacted at least 251 individual people at or near the Boardwalk, including two or more contacts for about one-third of those. LAHSA staff gave housing referrals to 143 of those individuals: obtaining shelter or housing for approximately 27 percent of those, according to LAHSA records.[1037]
Over the 3 months following these summer sweeps, LAHSA returned to the area multiple times, providing services to 115 people–73 percent of whom they had not previously encountered during the June and July Boardwalk clearance.[1038] Even with the clearance of the visible encampments, unhoused people continued to be in the area.
Although the Boardwalk clearance resulted in moving people into hotels, and some into more permanent living situations, a great benefit for those individuals, it also paved the way for criminalization and banishment of people from that location.[1039] People who did not go indoors simply moved to another place.
Those who went indoors benefited from a limited resource, but the operation “sidestepped” the CES prioritization system—every room filled by someone from the Boardwalk was a room unavailable to another unhoused person in Los Angeles, perhaps one with a greater need to be indoors.[1040]
D. Outreach, Sweeps, and “Service Resistance”
A common justification for connecting outreach to police and sanitation enforcement is the false idea that people are “service resistant” and, without some pressure, they prefer to remain on the streets.[1041] If a person refuses to enter the “housing” offered, then, proponents say, there should be enforcement.
A 2019 New York study found that while it may take multiple outreach contacts to build trust, very few unhoused people ultimately refuse real offers of shelter or housing. The study did find that people were familiar with unkept promises of help and bureaucratic barriers were the primary reason people did not accept offers to get into housing or shelter situations.[1042] It found hesitancy to enter shelters was nearly always rationally based on unsafe and unsanitary conditions and disappointing past experiences.[1043] “Service resistance” is largely a myth.[1044]
A Rand Corporation study in Los Angeles, published in 2022, drew similar conclusions.[1045] It found that 90 percent of unhoused people surveyed wanted housing or shelter, over 40 percent had been offered “housing” of some type since they had been unhoused, and about one-third were currently on waiting lists.[1046] However, the most common reason people cited for not going to housing (43 percent of respondents) was that they had not been contacted for move-in.[1047] In other words, many “offers” of housing were not valid offers.
Large majorities of people surveyed expressed willingness to go into various types of interim housing, including hotels and shelters with private rooms; fewer approved shared apartments and group shelters, but still substantial numbers would accept them.[1048] Lack of privacy or safety, rules, and curfews were also leading causes of people not entering shelters.[1049]
LAHSA Policy Director Molly Rysman said: “Service acceptance is often contingent on a client’s level of trust with outreach staff and the availability of services that clients are seeking.”[1050] If outreach staff come to people with police and sanitation workers, if they are prioritizing enforcement of LAMC section 56.11 over finding people places to live, or if they repeatedly take down personal information without progress towards housing, they will struggle to build trust effectively.
Service and housing offers, when made, are often unacceptable: the living conditions are incompatible with a person’s needs, the room is in an unsafe place for the individual, accepting the offer will disconnect them from services and community, the shelter is highly temporary and requires surrendering property for destruction, or it is not even a real offer, but an offer of a waiting list or of inaccessible services, like a sometimes hard-to-use Section 8 voucher.[1051]
Shelters and many housing options often require people to surrender their personal autonomy in ways that are degrading, including obeying rules about visitors, curfews, searches, separation from friends and family, and deprivation of privacy.[1052] One man on Skid Row explained many people refuse the “housing” situations they are offered because the rules treat them “like a kid again.”[1053]
Shawn Pleasants, a formerly unhoused man, said, “People aren’t objects to be warehoused.”[1054] Once people find a safe, relatively comfortable place to stay, even if it is on the streets, they will be hesitant to move unless they have some certainty about the safety and permanence of their new location.[1055] He described becoming hopeless after filing out the “invasive” CES questionnaire multiple times, and after LAHSA and other services providers repeatedly failed to follow-up on promises of housing and services. “You can only be resilient for so long.”[1056]
Human Rights Watch spoke to many people who said they preferred living on the streets to shelters, or that they had refused some offer of “housing.”[1057] In most instances, they had specific objections to what they had been offered or what they had experienced, and expressed, or implied, that they would go indoors under the right circumstances.[1058]
David Busch said, “People are not shelter resistant, but they are shelter aware.” They understand the waitlists and the conditions and many feel that the offers of “housing” are not real and a waste of time.[1059] Advocates who work directly with unhoused people agree that what some call “service resistance” really is refusal to accept offers of shelter or sub-standard housing situations.[1060] Paul Boden of Western Regional Advocacy Center points out that the shelters are generally full and the lists for housing are long; there is no housing for people to reject.[1061] A LAHSA outreach worker said there were huge lists of people waiting for the PRK hotel rooms.[1062]
Reverend Andy Bales, former director of the Union Rescue Mission, described using the specter of police enforcement during the Safer Cities Initiative (SCI) to encourage people to enter recovery programs at his shelter.[1063] He said we should not criminalize people unless they have an immediate place to go, but after using compassion and persistence, it is appropriate to use a “legal stick.”
Some city officials see repeated destruction of unhoused people’s tents and other property as the “catalyst they need to accept the help they’re offered.”[1064] LAPD Sergeant Jerald Case, lead of the Valley HOPE Unit, a team that combined LAHSA, LASAN, and police to address unhoused settlements, and was the precursor to the CARE and CARE+ teams, told a news reporter: “Sometimes you know they’re upset in the first clean up and then after a couple times they think that maybe there is something to the services that you’re offering.”[1065]
Criminalization, through sanitation sweeps or arrests and citations, these officials argue, is intended not to be cruel, but to encourage reluctant people to get off the streets. However, given the shortage of acceptable alternatives, the result is cruelty, regardless of stated intention.
E. Lack of Housing Resources Undermines Outreach Efforts
The lack of available housing, including interim housing and shelter, but especially permanent housing, undermines the stated purpose of homeless services outreach, and compounds the harm of their participation in the sweeps.
The outreach workers are caught in an extremely difficult situation. Many of them are formerly unhoused and have precarious housing situations themselves. Their pay is very low.[1066] The job exposes them to people in high stress situations, especially during the sweeps, when people’s belongings are being destroyed. Outreach work itself is highly stressful, trying to help people, including people who are attempting to manage mental and physical disabilities that have high support requirements, without the necessary tools and resources to do so. Many outreach workers are conflicted about their role facilitating the sweeps.[1067]
Outreach workers often have little to offer the people they are tasked with helping.[1068] UCLA Professor Gary Blasi described them as “salespeople with no product to sell.”[1069] Molly Rysman acknowledged a “dramatic disparity between resources and needs.”[1070] Without housing options, the system fails.[1071]
VIII. Housing, Interim Shelter, and Criminalization
Project Roomkey (PRK) peaked in August 2020, providing rooms for 4,472 unhoused people, but quickly reduced capacity, serving 1,392 a year later and dropping to just 63 people by March 2023; through the duration of the program, 1,920 people exited PRK directly to permanent housing, the rest stayed in hotel rooms or other shelters for long terms or returned to the streets.
The largest PRK hotel, the LA Grand Hotel, fell to less than one-third capacity in February 2021, then rapidly refilled as authorities removed people from the Echo Park Lake encampment, raising questions of whether administrators deliberately emptied it to accommodate a high-profile encampment clearance.
Less than one in five people admitted to the A Bridge Home (ABH) shelters exit to permanent housing, while nearly 30 percent return to the streets. The rest stay in the facilities long-term or transfer to some other shelter.
Despite the benefits of getting indoors, many unhoused people resist entering shelter, including PRK rooms, or leave them once admitted, because of oppressive and demeaning rules, lack of privacy, unhealthy living conditions, and uncertain pathways to permanent housing.
Without a sufficient stock of permanent housing to which people can move, interim housing and shelter are ineffective for moving large numbers of people out of houselessness, though many Los Angeles policymakers continue to emphasize shelter over permanent housing.
Shelter and interim housing can have value in getting people off the streets and into safer situations. However, they do not meet the standards for housing spelled out by international human rights law.[1072] In addition to their impermanence, the shelter and interim housing options in Los Angeles often offer deficient living conditions, lack privacy, and, especially, have demeaning rules that resemble aspects of incarceration. As Los Angeles lacks an adequate stock of permanent housing, people remain in these deficient living situations for extended periods of time or they leave and return to houselessness.
City officials use the existence of shelter and interim housing to justify, both legally and morally, implementation of criminalization policies—they can say they offered “housing” before destroying an encampment and scattering its residents. They can move a certain number of people indoors, while the vast majority remain on the streets facing enforcement of laws that punish their existence in public.
A. Project Roomkey (PRK)
With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, the sudden demise of the tourist industry, and the dangers of congregate shelters for unhoused people, the state of California and local governments enacted a program to repurpose empty hotel rooms for temporary shelter for unhoused people. PRK’s initial goal was to reduce transmission of Covid-19 among unhoused people.[1073] Its further goal was to move people from the streets into hotels and provide case management to help them transition to permanent housing.[1074]
Originally, Los Angeles city and county officials intended for PRK to have a capacity of 15,000 units.[1075] Within a few months, PRK was serving 4,000 people, and at its peak in August 2020, PRK in Los Angeles County housed 4,472 people.[1076] After that month, the number steadily declined, as many hotels were removed from the program and other hotels housed less than their maximum capacity.[1077] One year after its August 2020 peak, PRK housed 1,392 people. By early March 2023, there were only 63 people housed by the program. However, beginning in mid-March, rooms again began to be utilized and by April, and continuing through the end of the dataset in mid-June, approximately 400 people were staying in PRK rooms.[1078]
Black people made up 32 percent of all PRK participants, slightly lower than their share of the unhoused population; white people were slightly over-represented compared to their share of the unhoused population.[1079] The median age was 52.
PRK rooms were a finite and scarce resource. Even at its greatest capacity, PRK did not come close to sheltering all the unhoused people who needed to come indoors and did not come close to the housing and shelter goals announced at its inception.
From March 2020 through June 2023, there were 11,400 distinct stays in PRK rooms, though many individuals may have experienced multiple stays.[1080] Almost half of those stays lasted 1 to 6 months, while 26 percent of people moved out in less than a month and 11 percent lasted less than a week. Nearly a quarter of all stays were greater than six months.[1081]
In November 2022, LAHSA announced in a statement on its website that, since the program began, PRK led to more than 4,800 permanent housing placements.[1082] However, data LAHSA gave to Human Rights Watch indicates that only 1,920 people exited PRK directly to permanent housing.[1083] The data from LAHSA did not indicate how many people were placed into a different interim shelter or how many left PRK and went back to the streets. LAHSA officials told Human Rights Watch that 4,800 people who had participated in PRK eventually found permanent housing. They said they made 3,574 placements from PRK into other interim housing, though those include multiple placements for the same individual, while 1,049 people left PRK directly to the streets, 2,883 to unknown locations (which could also mean the streets), and 1,509 to some “other” undefined location.[1084]
1) PRK is another form of shelter, not housing
While PRK has had some success serving as a conduit from the streets to permanent housing, its residents have conflicting views of its suitability as a temporary shelter. Many reported being grateful to be indoors and to have a bed, shower, and a roof; many also found the conditions harsh and the rules degrading.[1085]
PRK aimed to get people rapidly indoors, where they could quarantine and limit transmission of Covid-19.[1086] At first, it targeted people with the highest risk, though that prioritization appears to have changed over time. A 2021 study of the same program in San Francisco found it had some success in limiting the harm of the virus.[1087]
Felicia M. received a PRK room in June 2020, after having a mental health crisis while living on the streets and avoiding the congregate shelters because of fears of Covid-19. It was a hot day when she came indoors. “I cried. I was over the moon.” She had a shower, a clean bed, food, protection from the elements, and safety. She stayed in that hotel for six months before moving into an apartment with a “time limited subsidy.”[1088]
Though he did not like the conditions in his hotel, Todd G. appreciated that PRK “got [him] off the streets for a while,” and allowed him to save some money.[1089] Raquel L. called it a “blessing.”[1090]
The organization United Tenants Against Carceral Housing (UTACH), strong critics of the way PRK has been administered, recognized the value of sheltering people indoors and pushed for the program to be extended for all participants until they could be moved into permanent housing.[1091] They also called for improved conditions within the hotels, more effective case management, and program transparency.[1092]
PRK residents have lodged profound complaints about the living conditions. The service providers running the hotels often imposed rules that resembled incarceration and denied basic rights; the physical conditions of the rooms were often substandard and unhealthy; the instability of tenure and constant threat of eviction caused severe anxiety and insecurity.
Angela P. said the rules made her feel like she was in prison.[1093] LAHSA’s Project Roomkey Participant Agreement set forth some of those rules.[1094] They included “entrance and exit hours,” which essentially serve as curfews. Personal belongings were limited to the contents of two 60-gallon garbage bags, and people could not store additional items in the rooms. Alcohol and weapons were not allowed in the rooms.[1095] “Loitering and congregate activities” were not allowed, nor were visitors.[1096] People could not receive mail at their rooms. Service provider staff retained the right to search a person’s room and bags at will. Refusing to allow a search would result in “immediate exit.”[1097] Additionally, staff could enter and inspect the rooms at will and without notice.
Failure to submit to any of these rules could result in termination from the program and eviction back to the streets.[1098] Angela P. said she was evicted when she was hospitalized and had to be away from her room for a few days.[1099] The rules made it very clear that people living in PRK rooms were not tenants and did not retain any of the rights that come with a tenancy, making those rules more readily enforceable and contributing to the residents’ insecurity.
Todd G. had to abandon many of his possessions, including tools he needed for work, to enter a PRK room. He lost a job offer because the curfew prevented him from working the hours available.[1100]
Walt A., who entered PRK when his community on the streets was cleared and destroyed, was searched every time he entered the building. If he was out past curfew, he had to remain outside overnight.[1101]
Raquel L. said security staff, who had keys to their rooms, would come in and steal things from her.[1102]
Iris P. could not collect recyclables, her main source of income, in the cooler evening because of the curfew.[1103]
All PRK residents were adults and would not be subjected to any of these rules if they had not been unhoused.
People who stayed in the rooms said the limitations on visitors and socializing in PRK rooms, even with others in the same hotel, were among the most burdensome of the rules.[1104] Some people who had lived in the hotels blamed this isolation, a substantial change from life from the unhoused communities on the streets, for contributing to drug overdoses and other deaths.[1105] The rules that caused isolation of people in their rooms were initially part of efforts to quarantine against the spread of Covid-19, though that goal eventually became less relevant as the pandemic subsided.[1106] Deaths inside the PRK rooms must also be understood in the context of the high number of deaths that occur on the streets, and the generally poor health conditions of unhoused people.[1107]
Sally F. found conditions at the hotel so isolating that she left after just two days and moved to a sidewalk on Skid Row.[1108] She said she needed “community.”
Many unhoused people placed in PRK rooms said disrespectful and sometimes abusive staff and security treated them “like children,” provoked conflict, invaded their privacy, or changed rules with no notice, enforcing them strictly.[1109] Others found the physical conditions inhospitable: describing their rooms as “filthy,” infested with bed bugs, and “chaotic.”[1110] The constant threat of eviction—either for violating a rule or because the facilities were closing, added to a continual feeling of instability.[1111] Ruth G. spent a year and a half in the program and was moved to three different hotels; she now lives in her car.[1112] Others had similar experiences being moved from place to place.[1113]
Evictions were common.[1114] Equally common were “self-exits;” people simply left and returned to the streets.[1115] Some were pressured out; some simply could not tolerate the restrictive and degrading rules.[1116] Some left when they realized PRK was not leading them to permanent housing.[1117]
The result of evictions and “self-exits” was that rooms re-opened, which allowed for a churn of residents. A steady flow out of PRK hotels, even if a large percentage of people are returning to the streets, meant there was space to place people who were being evicted from encampments.
PRK was another form of shelter.[1118] It was valuable for getting people immediate relief and most people were eager to take rooms. However, it was not sustainable for long-term living; the insecurity, restrictions, and lack of basic rights and dignity made it less viable than staying on the streets for many people. Its role in facilitating and justifying criminalization of those who remained on the streets substantially diminished the benefits of the program.
2) PRK capacity and encampment sweeps and clearances
Evidence indicates the hotels may not have been used to their maximum capacity. For each hotel, Human Rights Watch located the date of its highest level of usage and assigned that number of residents as its maximum capacity.[1119] Adding up the maximum capacities of all the hotels in service at a given time generates an overall program capacity. Throughout the summer and fall of 2020, available PRK rooms in Los Angeles County were filled at an 85-93 percent rate. However, throughout 2021 that usage dropped to an average of 80 percent, meaning rooms went unused, despite people with urgent need to get indoors still living on the streets.[1120]
According to city government sources who wished to remain anonymous, Garcetti administration officials directed PRK administrators to set aside rooms for people who were in encampments deemed a priority for clearance by City Council offices.[1121] These sources indicated that PRK administrators used minor rule violations as justifications to remove people, making room for new people from those prioritized locations in advance of major sweeps.[1122] Human Rights Watch reached out to the specific officials alleged to be responsible: they did not agree to speak.[1123] Reserving shelter beds to allow for encampment clearance reportedly occurs in other cities.[1124]
Human Rights Watch could not corroborate the anonymous sources noted above or assign responsibility to any individual or entity in the mayor’s office or other public official, however, the data is suggestive. At the end of November 2020, the Grand Hotel, the largest of PRK sites, with a capacity of 550 people, was 85 percent full. Over the next two-and-a-half months, leading up to the clearance of the Echo Park Lake community, those numbers steadily dwindled. By February 17, 2021, only 210 rooms were occupied.[1125] Over the next few weeks, as intensive outreach was conducted to remove people from the Echo Park Lake community, the Grand steadily re-filled, reaching 94 percent of capacity by March 25 when the police closed the park.[1126]
There was a similar pattern before the clearance of unhoused people from MacArthur Park in late September and early October 2021 and the clearance of Main Street in downtown Los Angeles between 5th and 7th Street in early October. People from these locations were placed primarily in the Grand and Mayfair Hotels, both of which had noticeably reduced occupancy in the two months leading up to those sweeps.[1127]
Human Rights Watch asked LAHSA officials for an explanation for why the reductions in occupancy at those hotels occurred when they did. LAHSA’s communications director responded by saying:
There were several periods in which, at the city’s request, LAHSA began demobilizing the Grand and the Mayfair in preparation for the end of the lease. During the demobilization process, the City extended the leases to use the hotels to shelter people experiencing homelessness during encampment resolution efforts. In addition, COVID outbreaks could have limited new intakes and people exiting PRK due to contracting COVID could have also been factors in the population change.[1128]
Human Rights Watch asked for clarification of this response and, at time of writing, is waiting for an answer.
An anonymous former LAHSA official denied rooms were cleared or held open for people from major encampment sweeps.[1129] They did say LAHSA sometimes attempted to move entire encampments into hotels together so they could remain together as a community.
The California Department of Social Services issued recommendations for implementation of PRK, including guidance on “eligibility and prioritization,” which stressed that the rooms were an “extremely scarce resource” and should be held for people with Covid-19 and people at “high-risk,” including older people and those with underlying health conditions.[1130] Prioritizing location in particular encampments would counter that recommendation.
LAHSA officials have subsequently reported in another context that “Council Districts do often make requests to reserve interim housing beds in their district, upon availability, for those within a 41.18 encampment resolution initiative….”[1131] This statement acknowledges that council members seek to use scarce shelter beds to facilitate sweeps.
B. Other Shelter and Interim Housing
Outside of PRK, there are other interim “housing” options, including congregate shelters, “A Bridge Home” (ABH) shelters, Tiny Home Villages, and “safe camping” sites. Cheri Todoroff, Director of LA County Homeless Initiative, said in March 2022 that Los Angeles County had almost 25,000 interim beds, many added by the infusion of Measure H funds.[1132]
Without sufficient permanent housing, however, people can be stuck for months and years in interim situations like shelter beds or hotel rooms, without knowing when they will be able to move to a more stable and livable situation, if they do not leave or get evicted. The longer stays in interim housing compound the shortage of beds.[1133]
1) Congregate Shelters
Congregate shelters allow temporary stays in large open-setting rooms that multiple people share—sleeping on bunks, cots, or even mats on the floor.[1134] These facilities typically mirror temporary emergency shelters or even prison dormitories.[1135]
The McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 addressed houselessness not by restoring federal affordable housing funding, but by directing money towards institutionalizing these congregate shelters.[1136] Initiatives under the administrations of US Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in the 1990s, similarly emphasized shelter over permanent housing.[1137] Historically, large congregate shelters, like the Union Rescue Mission, Midnight Mission, and others, mostly centered on Skid Row, have served as the primary option for unhoused people seeking to sleep indoors.[1138] The expansion of the shelter system in the 1980s coincided with the emergence of laws criminalizing existing on the streets.[1139]
For some, these shelters can provide protection from the elements, especially during cold and wet weather, and access to services and rehabilitation.[1140] Felicia M. went to the Union Rescue Mission after being physically threatened while she was living on the streets. She was able to avoid sleeping outside by accessing that shelter until fear of exposure to Covid-19 drove her out again.[1141] Some enter the missions simply to avoid police and penal consequences.[1142]
The shelters themselves have rules and restrictions that deny people their personal autonomy and freedom, displaying some of the characteristics of a jail or other institutional setting.[1143] They narrowly limit what belongings people may bring with them, they forbid pets or separate people from partners or family, some require sobriety or religious practice, and they generally lack privacy.[1144] Many require people to leave in the morning and wait in line to enter in the evening. These rules and lack of independence discourage many people from voluntarily entering shelters and cause others to leave.[1145] In addition to the rules, many people cite degrading treatment by staff as reason to avoid the shelters.[1146]
While proponents of shelters argue they are safer and healthier than living on the streets, a fair trade-off for people submitting to restrictive rules and frequently degrading treatment, many unhoused people and advocates believe the shelters themselves are dangerous or have experienced such dangers.[1147] There have been reports of sexual and physical abuse in congregate shelters, and many, especially women, avoid them due to safety concerns.[1148] Fear of disease, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, in congregate shelters keep people away.[1149] Some people with mental health conditions simply cannot function in a congregate setting.[1150]
Despite the drawbacks of congregate shelters, enough people want to access them but there are not enough beds to meet the need.[1151]
There is growing recognition that large congregate shelters are not suitable for most unhoused people.[1152] This change of thinking has led to shelter options, like ABH, that do afford more privacy, but still fail to meet the standards of adequate housing.[1153]
2) A Bridge Home Shelters
In 2018, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a plan to build a system of emergency shelters, opening at least 1 in each of the 15 city council districts, called A Bridge Home (ABH).[1154] These shelters were designed to offer more privacy than the missions or other dorm-style congregate shelters, however, they still keep people in open settings in cubicles with a mattress and storage cubbies.[1155] The stated intention was that they would be a “bridge” to permanent housing.
Temporary residence in ABH shelters can allow people in acute mental health distress to become calm and more able to transition to permanent housing.[1156] Dr. Coley King, who practices street medicine in Venice, described several of his patients who benefited from entering the ABH shelter. One man with alcohol use disorder was able to get sober once inside the shelter. King described one woman found in a busy area in Venice, in obvious mental health distress and at risk of harm. Once inside the ABH shelter, a support team gained her trust, got her treatment for her mental health conditions, and helped her transition to permanent supportive housing with in-home services.[1157] Despite these and other success stories, Dr. King said that ABH shelter is not the end goal—shelter is not a home.[1158]
Serena C. stayed for two weeks at one San Fernando Valley ABH shelter and then for six weeks at another one. She said: “I’d rather go to jail.” She described them as “filthy” and restrictive. They would not let her clean. She had to keep her chihuahua in a crate. There was nothing to do, except sit and wait. They did not disclose the rules to her before she entered the shelters, and sometimes they would change the rules. Serena went into the shelters with her husband, but they were not allowed to stay together. Instead, they had to stay in separate cubicles.[1159]
Susan G. stayed in two different ABH shelters and found them “unhygienic.”[1160]
Many cite the lack of privacy in ABH shelters as a major problem.[1161] Carolyn S. left the ABH shelter in Venice after one week because she could not bear the lack of privacy.[1162] Residents also have criticized other ABH shelters for restrictive rules, including intrusive searches, curfews, and limitations on interactions with people living outside of the shelter.[1163]
Still, people often stay a long time in these shelters, hoping for a better situation.[1164] Throughout the city, there are 1,570 total ABH beds, with an average stay of about 5 months. A slight majority of people go into some other form of interim housing or shelter from ABH, and 19 percent find permanent housing. Just under 30 percent returned directly to the streets.[1165] From November 2018 to April 2022, 872 people moved from ABH shelter to permanent housing.[1166]
There appear to be inconsistent levels of success moving people from ABH shelters into permanent housing. For exampl