The right to sleep on the streets is still alive in Los Angeles as the city council postponed a vote on banning homeless encampments.
Los Angeles has one of the worst homelessness problems in the country — and for many reasons.
First, consider the weather. The weather in Los Angeles is a nice bonus for anyone, but if you’re going to live on the streets, then a dry, temperate climate can be a matter of life and death. If you were homeless, wouldn’t you pick the city’s weather?
Then, there’s the lack of housing. Los Angeles is the least affordable city in the United States by some measures. Huge swaths of the city are zoned for only single-family housing, with minimum lot sizes of 5,000 square feet. That means it’s illegal to build more housing in much of the city.
What’s perfectly legal is living in the streets. The city has laws that restrict homelessness, but in effect, the official policy is that law enforcement can’t stop people from living on the streets.
A federal court ruled it is unconstitutional to prosecute homeless people for sleeping on the street unless you also provide them housing — and that doesn’t include religious-based homeless shelters. So, even if shelters have open beds, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2018, a city can’t enforce homelessness bans.
One result is 66,000 homeless people in the city, up nearly 50% in five years. The city tries to address this by making evictions harder and rarer and subsidizing housing. The numbers keep growing every year, and neighbors see the homeless encampments as harming their quality of life. Thus, there’s some momentum behind a push to crack down on the camps.
The proposed measure would ban “sitting, lying, sleeping, or placing personal property” in public places. Homeless advocates fiercely oppose the measure, and the City Council in its October meeting decided to cool its heels for a month. They’ll vote right around Thanksgiving.
