Affordable Housing Institute : US

Now that Los Angeles has acquiesced in a judicial decision forbidding the city from rousting vagrants, will the city become a magnet for America’s homeless? 

 

Desperately seeking Los Angeles

 

As I posted nearly two years ago, Los Angeles is already America’s homeless capital.  Homelessness flourishes in temperate climates and is drawn to cities, whose excess wealth creates the raw materials from which the homeless can scavenge an existence.  What happens when you add to these natural advantages a judicial right of squatting, which a Federal Court of Appeals established in April, 2006:

 

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 Los Angeles politics.  As the Los Angeles Times reported it:

 

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’s hard to see this as anything other than the establishment of American pavement dwellers:

 

It seemed to me that once a city is prevented from enforcing vagrancy statutes, it has tacitly conferred a right to sleeping accommodations.

 

Even with the ten-foot exclusion, this is a lot of Los Angeles where the homeless now have a license to sleep.  Has the city realized what it hath wrought?

 

Ad hoc structures in Los Angeles

 

The policy will remain in effect until Los Angeles builds 1,250 units of low-cost housing with services for homeless people, with half of the units in and around the downtown area.

 

This is going to be very expensive. 

 

What will happen if, by the time the city has built the 1,250 apartments established by the edict, there are more homeless in Los Angeles?  If you were homeless, wouldn’t you make your way to a city that cannot evict you? 

 

Let’s head for LA

 

As I wrote a month back:

 

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 Angels barely a single step away from permitted pavement-dwelling.

 

Will it be better to be legally established at this spot?

 

The trickle is already starting, as reported in The New York Times:

 

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 30 — Not so long ago, Kenneth Johnson, 29, lived in a West Los Angeles condominium with his wife and three children and earned $4,000 a month as a forklift operator.

Now he is unemployed and divorced, and beds down each night on a grimy sidewalk in downtown’s 50-square-block Skid Row.

 

“It’s weird to be down here,” said Mr. Johnson, leaning against a wall as night fell. “It’s not a very easy feeling, but over a couple of weeks I got used to it.”

 

Kenneth Johnson, newly homeless, made his way to Skid Row because of the ease in finding food, shelter and services there.

 

Like thousands of others in this despairing city within a city, Mr. Johnson came to Skid Row because it is the easiest place in Los Angeles to find services, shelter and three square meals a day.

 

If you were homeless, wouldn’t you head for Los Angeles?

 

Under pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, Los Angeles agreed on Oct. 10 not to appeal a federal court order and will instead allow sleeping on the sidewalk, at least until the city provides 1,250 new beds in low-income housing.

 

The deal partly rolls back a zero-tolerance crackdown on petty offenses in the Skid Row area, including sleeping in public places, that was undertaken late last year by Police Chief William J. Bratton. The effort has reduced by about half the 8,000 homeless who frequented the area a year ago, according to police estimates.

 

Not just police estimates.  As shown at a fascinating Web site (you can see all the maps here), the city had made a striking change in its downtown homeless population:

 

November, 2006

 

January, 2007

 

April, 2007

 

June, 2007

 

Some advocates express concern that the flight from Skid Row has left people cut off from vital assistance. The police, however, maintain that the area is safer — for everyone, including the homeless — with fewer people living on the streets.

 

Probably both are true. 

 

As of Oct. 6, the police had made 10,742 arrests in and around Skid Row this year, 15% more than in the corresponding period of 2006.  At the same time, property crimes had dropped by 25% and violent crimes by a third, police statistics show.

 

Being homeless is miserable — especially in the United States, where our urban areas have extensive and well-funded support infrastructure.  Few are the American homeless who are the temporarily unlucky, like Mr. Johnson.  Many more have longstanding behavioral problems, substance abuse being by far the most common.

 

Much of Skid Row remains a place of wandering drunks and drug addicts, with homeless people lining urine-stained sidewalks in sleeping bags, cardboard shelters and tents.

 

Lee Ann Salazar, 63, said she had lived on the streets for six years. She tries to keep on the move, tending to 70 or so stray cats with a sack of Friskies. Ms. Salazar told of having recently been attacked by gang members who burned her shopping cart full of possessions.

 

Los Angeles already makes great efforts to help the homeless:

 

But while there are 17,000 shelter beds in Los Angeles County, most of them within the city, there are some 74,000 homeless across the county’s 4,060 square miles, officials say.  

 

For every shelter bed, there are already 4½ homeless individuals.

 

And despite the decline in their numbers on Skid Row, it remains an area with one of the nation’s largest concentrations of the homeless.  As a result, the shelters remain full every night, said Andy Bales, chief executive of the Union Rescue Mission, which operates one of them.

 

A worthy goal and a worthy effort

 

They will remain full, and over-full.  Now that Los Angeles has legalized pavement dwelling, more will come.  As I wrote when the decision came down:

 

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 Los Angeles that public drunks, drug users, homeless people and those suffering from mental illness belong not in their city, but in downtown L.A. 

 

In other words, if where the homeless sleep is where they must be housed, why not export them to Los Angeles City?

 

What is to stop other municipalities from solving their homeless population by simple voluntary transportation: hand them a one-way ticket labeled LA, shove them onto the bus, and bid the problem good-bye?

 

 

You may scowl, but there is precedent: transportation to Australia, which in the eighteenth century emerged as the enlightened solution to crime arising from urban overcrowding..

 

A one way ticket to Van Diemen’s Land

 

When there is a difference in pricing, the market will clear. 

 

List of convicts transported to New South Wales, 1787

 

Without knowing it, the City of Los Angeles has signed up to the impossible: committing to solve its homeless problem — and in doing so, it has also undertaken to solve all its neighbors’ homeless problems. 

This story has a long way to go.

 

And we don’t know how it ends

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