A federal judge overseeing an extensive homeless lawsuit in Los Angeles on Tuesday ordered the city and county to provide some form of shelter or housing to the entire homeless population by October.
Judge David O. Carter last week granted a preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiffs in the case and now tells the city and province that they must provide a place to sleep to single women and unaccompanied children within 90 days, and families within 120 days and finally, by October 18, every homeless person offers shelter.
It is unclear whether the city and province will challenge the order, which also calls for the city to put $ 1 billion into a bail account – an idea that has caused concern among city officials.
The ruling argues that the city and county in LA erroneously focused on permanent housing at the expense of more temporary shelter, “knowing that major delays in development were likely while people died in the streets.” This element of the order underscores the judge’s skepticism about a core part of LA’s current strategy to tackle homelessness.
“Los Angeles has lost its parks, beaches, schools, sidewalks and highway systems due to the lack of unemployment of city and county officials that left our homeless citizens nowhere else to go,” Carter said in a 110-page discussion. with quotes from Abraham Lincoln and an extensive history of how skid row was first created.
“All the rhetoric, promises, plans and budget cannot disguise the shameful reality of this crisis. Year after year there are more homeless Angelenos, and year after year more homeless Angelenos die on the streets.” Last year, more than 1,300 homeless people died in Los Angeles County.
In the last homeless census in January 2020, it was found that more than 4,600 homeless people drive on disk – about 2,500 in large shelters and 2,093 on the street. They make up just over 10% of the city’s total homeless population, and it’s not clear what Carter’s order could mean for other parts of the city.
The judge wrote that he, “after offering adequate shelter, would allow the city to enforce laws that keep streets and sidewalks away from tents, as long as it complies with previous legal rulings that have restricted the application of such rules. only applies to disk free.
He also ordered the country to ‘offer support services to all homeless residents who accept the offer of housing’, including placements in ‘appropriate emergency, interim or permanent housing and treatment services’. The cost will be shared by the city and province, he said.
Rob Wilcox, a city attorney’s spokesman, said Tuesday that city attorneys are reviewing the order. He declined to comment further.
Skip Miller, a partner at the Miller Barondess law firm, who is outside the county’s attorney in the case, said the county is now considering our options, including the possibility of an appeal. ‘
Previously, the province had asked to be removed from the case, arguing that it was about the city and that the country was reacting aggressively to homelessness without any court guidelines. It cited efforts that included spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on benchmark H and developing innovative strategies such as Project Roomkey in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Project Roomkey is a state program that provides temporary funding to cities and provinces to rent hotel rooms to homeless people during the pandemic.
The push for an ‘order’ is an attempt by property owners and businesses to free their homes from homeless people, ‘Miller said.
“There is no legal basis for an order because the country spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on proven strategies,” he added.
Matthew Umhofer, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, the LA Alliance for Human Rights, said he and his clients are in ecstasy. Carter’s call to action was what they were looking for when they filed the case, and why they were looking for Carter, who has overseen similar cases in Orange County in recent years, to be the chairman.
“This is exactly the kind of aggressive emergency action we think is needed in the case of homelessness in Los Angeles,” Umhofer said.
The Alliance is a coalition of business owners and downtown residents who filed the case in March 2020, accusing the city and county of reducing their duty to a nuisance, reducing property value without compensation, public wasted funds and violated the state’s environmental law and state. and federal acts that protect people with disabilities.
Carter’s order comes on the day Mayor Eric Garcetti announced his budget for the next financial year, which spends nearly $ 1 billion on homelessness. The longtime federal judge also ordered “that $ 1 billion, as represented by Mayor Garcetti, be immediately bailed out.”
Of the $ 1 billion in homeless spending planned by Garcetti, more than a third would come from Proposition HHH, the 2016 mortgage measure to build permanent housing for homeless residents. Garcetti assistants said they expect the city to build or develop 89 HHH projects over the next financial year, for a total of 5,651 residential units.
Whether Carter’s order will disrupt the activities is unclear. In his order, the judge said he wanted a report within 90 days from every developer who received funds from HHH, as well as new regulations to limit the possibility of funds being wasted.
At a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Garcetti declined to say whether the city would appeal the order and said he wanted to read it first. But he suggested that Carter’s order could delay the construction of HHH projects.
“Roadblocks put forward as progress are the last things we need,” he said.
As the $ 1 billion for homelessness does not yet exist – some of it does not come from Washington and none of it has been approved by the city council for the coming year – Garcetti said he also fears the city would rather be asked to ‘ another source of money in the surety account.
Carter also asked for a number of reports from city and county officials on how money is being spent to combat homelessness. He also ordered that the city and province stop any sales or transfers of property in the city or province before providing such reports.
The lengthy ruling also toppled corruption scandals involving housing projects, “excessive delays and the booming costs” under the HHH mortgage measure, and LA’s failure to seek federal compensation for Project Roomkey rooms.
Councilor Kevin de León, whose skid row includes, welcomed the judge’s ruling. Although LA needs more clarity on the $ 1 billion preservation, he said the short time frame to provide shelter or housing to residents ignites a fire under the city to act with a real sense of urgency and to saving the rhetoric with real results matches lives. ”
“It’s a strong shot over the bow – and he expects action,” de León said. “Not continuing negotiations or studying everything dead.”
Pete White, executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, who is an intermediary in the case, said his organization “became concerned that politicians were using this lawsuit to justify investing in emergency shelters instead of housing.”
“We all know that shelters will not solve our housing crisis, and they will certainly not pay attention to the structural racism that has brought us here.”
Skiing activist and resident Jeff Page echoes White, saying that the tight window to relocate people means that they are not moving to permanent housing, but rather ‘having a residence style in itself is problematic.’ According to him, there is more permanent housing in the area that needs to be built as soon as possible.
‘We need more housing here. We need more services, ”he said.
In his order, Carter outlined historical forms of discrimination that deprived black people of housing opportunities, including the delineation of, segregated aid systems during the Great Depression, highway construction that displaced black families, and criminalization that affected black communities unequally.
Racial inequality still colored the government’s handling of the crisis, Carter concluded, believing that current urban and provincial policies’ exacerbate and perpetuate structural racism, and threaten the integrity of black families in Los Angeles and a excessive number of black families forced to become shameless. ”
The judge earlier compared the situation to the aftermath of the civil rights case against Brown against the Board of Education, saying that there are times when the federal judiciary may have to act ‘after a long period of nullity by local officials’. government’.
Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School, calls the 110-page order a “deep dive into the problems of homelessness in Los Angeles and a manifestation of Carter’s frustration at how the city and province have responded to this crisis. . ” She noted that judges in the South during the 1950s and 1960s used similarly extensive orders to make desegregation a reality and in other cases to carry out the prison reform.
She was not sure how a higher court would render a verdict if an appeal were lodged, but said it was ‘definitely a decisive decision’.
“It is an open question whether the appellate court will intervene,” she said. ‘As Judge Carter acknowledges, there is usually a trial before such an order. However, he loaded his decision with facts that he said hindered the need for a trial. The judge took a bold step. ‘
The news of the mission did not flow to the streets of skid row on Tuesday, but people responded favorably when notified. Hasan Saleem, 58, who was sitting outside his tent in 6th Street, said he would take housing ‘immediately’ if it was offered, even if it lasted 180 days. Yet he remained skeptical.
“I would not mind waiting if that was true,” he said. “I do not know if this is true or not.”
“It’s better than they did before they just took your stuff and put you in jail,” said Peaceful Bolden, who stood with a small group across from the Los Angeles mission. “At least they’re trying.”
But Bolden said she does not think housing alone would be enough.
“Some of these people are just refugees from whatever life they have had,” she said. “They need mental health. Some of them need hospices. Many of them do not want to leave because they do not want to be under anyone’s rules. ”
Andy Bales, president and CEO of the Union Rescue Mission, heard the news and praised it as the ‘wall of reality’ that the city and country end up with.
“This is what I came to Union Rescue Mission to accomplish,” Bales said. ‘I have always wanted to decentralize ski resorts and regionalize services throughout the province. My hope is it will do it. ”
Times authors David Zahniser and Dakota Smith contributed to this report.