American pavement dwellers
Recently I was in Mumbai (
Those who live in Dharavi have it better than some, Mumbai’s pavement dwellers, who live – eat, sleep, and cook – on rectangular plots of Mumbai’s wide pedestrian sidewalks.
Cooking under an awning on a Mumbai sidewalk
You might think pavement dwelling is a phenomenon to be experienced only in the Global South … but you’d be wrong, it happens in
Your government is here to help
As reported in this story from The New York Times:
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 10 — City officials agreed Wednesday not to enforce an ordinance used to bolster police sweeps of homeless people sleeping on sidewalks until 1,250 units of low-cost housing are built.
The police in recent years had used a 1968 law barring sleeping or lying in public spaces to arrest homeless people in and around Skid Row, a downtown district whose concentration of 10,000 to 12,000 homeless people is among the highest in the nation.
A year and a half ago, I wrote about the court case as being potentially a $7.5 billion ruling:
Last week the oft-overturned Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, via a 2-1 ruling, handed down a decision that is already sending shock waves through
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Los Angeles Police Department cannot arrest people for sitting, lying or sleeping on public sidewalks on skid row [just east of the historic core. — Ed.], saying such enforcement amounts to cruel and unusual punishment because there are not enough shelter beds for the city’s huge homeless population.
It seemed to me that once a city is prevented from enforcing vagrancy statutes, it has tacitly conferred a right to sleeping accommodations:
Homeless in
Dissenting judge Pamela A. Rymer clearly sees the consequences:
In other words, [the majority concludes that] the City cannot penalize the status of being homeless plus the condition of being homeless without shelter that exists by virtue of the City’s failure to provide sufficient housing on any given night. The ramifications of so holding are quite extraordinary. (Dissent, pages 1, 3)
Indeed so. Whatever one thinks of the matter, there seems little doubt the ruling is a major development:
“This will have a big impact not only on
Should the ruling stand, the issue will not be whether a city is precluded from rousting the homeless, but whether a city then has a financial duty to house them.
The arithmetic was easy:
There is, in other words, no way out of the dilemma. If you conclude that homelessness is an involuntary condition, then you have no escaping the conclusion it’s up to you to help them. And that math of a campaign to end homelessness is stunning:
50,000 more homeless people than beds in
x $150,000 per bed (author’s estimate, probably low)
= $7,500,000,000 to create enough homeless shelters in
It’s more money than I’ve got, anyhow
But a federal appeals court last year struck down convictions under the law, calling it one of the most restrictive in the country and cruel and unusual punishment, because of the area’s severe lack of housing for homeless people.
Even though there is no Eighth Amendment Constitutional requirement to house the homeless, the economic and moral imperatives are strong. So it has proved:
Under the settlement reached between the City Council and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which had sued the city in 2003 on behalf of six homeless people, the city will allow sleeping on sidewalks from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. People will not be able to bed down within 10 feet of the entrance of a building, parking lot or loading dock.
Even with the ten-foot exclusive, this is a lot of
Ad hoc structures in
The policy will remain in effect until
This is going to be very expensive.
The City Council president, Eric Garcetti, said he expected it would take at least three years to meet the target, at a cost of $125 million.
Only $100,000 apiece? I’ll bet much more, because of the supportive services, unless they’re planning very basic Single Room Occupancy (SRO) accommodation.
Mr. Garcetti said he expected the city to finance at least half of that, with nonprofit organizations and developers footing the rest of the bill.
“Footing the bill” is a complete misnomer that confuses capital with debt, equity or subsidy.
The city agreed to the settlement “because in doing so we can move the city forward toward our shared goal of ending homelessness,” Mr. Garcetti said. He said it would take effect immediately, though it would be nullified if the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected a joint motion to be filed soon by the city and lawyers for the homeless to end the case.
Mr. Garcetti said he doubted the city would allow the police to resume enforcing the law once the housing is built, though he suggested that by then the city would have adopted other laws intended to address the homeless problem.
Remarkable statement. It’s repealing the law without repealing it.
Why bother with banners when you can simply announce you will never enforce?
Ramona Ripston, executive director of the A.C.L.U., called the settlement important and “satisfying.”
“We don’t believe people should have to sleep on the streets; we would like there to be a house or a shelter bed for everyone,”
Yes, this is the goal.
“but until that happens people have to sleep somewhere,” Mr. Ripston said.
Letting the homeless sleep where they will is not in any sense solving the problem – it’s avoiding the problem. It says, in effect, that in consideration for the fact that you cannot house yourself, we will not enforce our normal laws.
Homelessness correlates with climate. We have only a few homeless in
“What this does is permit people to sleep throughout the city, not only on Skid Row but anywhere in the city without the police disturbing them.”
Has the city, I wonder, thought about the potential for political theater? Imagine fifty homeless people bedding down for the night on the sidewalks in front of the mayor’s house, or the city council president’s, or any other senior elected or appointed official.
This law is predicated on there being a finite number of homeless living in
Councilwoman Perry also points out a very plausible unintended consequence:
The 9th Circuit’s decision will only reinforce the view of law enforcement authorities and mental health officials from outside
In other words, if where the homeless sleep is where they must be housed, why not export them to
Anywhere but here
If you offer it, they will live here.
Pavement family, Mumbai
In
Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Homelessness and Hunger, an advocacy group, said the amount of housing provided in the settlement was too little, and he fretted that the police would resume cracking down on the homeless once the housing is completed.
The settlement leaves the City of
Will it be better to be legally established at this spot?
“It is incredibly disappointing that there would not be more vision on the part of the city to address our homeless crisis,” Mr. Erlenbusch said.
It has nothing to do with vision and everything to do with money.
That clinking clanking sound
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