LA City's Homelessness Quagmire
How Fights over Encampments are Distracting us from Making Progress
Homelessness was in the news this week in LA, as the City Council passed a motion to expand restrictions on homeless encampments throughout LA. Specifically, the new law made it illegal to camp within 500 feet of a school or day-care center. Alberto Carvalho, the new head of LAUSD, was concerned that young students would be at risk as schools start in a couple of weeks. He explicitly asked for this measure. However, the activist community very vocally opposed the measure; the scene at city hall got so contentious that security had to clear the room of activists, who were calling to shut the meeting down before the final vote.
Since the issue made some headlines and hugely impacts politics and policy in our city, I thought it was worth putting out some thoughts. Homelessness has arguably become the most contentious and heated issue in LA politics, and I felt it essential to try to add some nuance to avoid the pitfalls of activism on both sides to the best of my ability:
Crackdowns won’t Reduce Homelessness
The current homeless problem in LA has a deep history and cannot be fixed by enforcing stricter rules about where folks can camp on the street. There are not enough options for people living on the street to find shelter or housing, and the city has yet to create a plan to address this issue. Look no further than April, when LA admitted defeat in a pretty damning lawsuit: the city did not have the resources to get all its homeless residents into housing or shelter and had no clear plan to get there. LA County is in the same boat: for 60,000 plus homeless individuals, only 24,616 shelter beds exist in the county. Many shelters have open spots but the homeless won't use them because the conditions at those shelters are so terrible so that they are uninhabitable. While the city has invested more in housing, HHH, the premier policy to address housing for homeless residents, has been woefully slow and inadequate at addressing the issue. LA’s city leaders (and, to a large extent, all of California’s elected leaders) have not had the political will to change this underlying reality. As Project Roomkey, which places many homeless individuals in hotels, expires very soon, the situation will likely worsen as people lose their place to stay.
At best, these measures will almost certainly push encampments to other areas of the city, not get people off the streets. When 41.18 was initially passed last year, it was supposed to be followed by a strategy that would address the issue with more street outreach and options for those in encampments. Unfortunately, that broader strategy has never materialized. Instead, the law has been ineffective at helping people and has actively harmed some by making it harder to find stability. My friend James recently sent me a picture of a notice that he saw which informed homeless residents that within 36 hours they had to pack up all their belongings while the area was cleaned:
Giving people 36 hours' notice that an encampment will be cleaned is a very disruptive move and lends legitimacy to the idea that the city’s plan is merely to keep pushing the problem farther and farther from sight. With the latest measure, close to 20% of land in LA is closed off to homeless encampments:
One can see a dysfunctional environment emerging where LA's different city council districts' primary homelessness policy is to get folks to pick up and move to a neighboring community or city. While data shows most homeless individuals are long-time residents (80% of homeless are 5+ year residents of LA County, and 68% are 10+ year residents), there is a longstanding history of some cities dealing with the homeless by forcing people to move out of town. This policy is incredibly destructive as more resources go into trying to move people around, and fewer resources go into actually trying to help people address their substantive issues.
Widespread Encampments near Schools are Bad
Councilman Mike Bonin argued vigorously against the measure, saying it would “simply push the problem down the street.” I think an appropriate response to Bonin and his allies is to argue that in this limited case, moving encampments away from schools is a reasonable policy goal for the city, even if it does not solve the broader issue. Yes, sweeping encampments is horrible and traumatizing to its residents, and the original implementation of 41.18 had many problems. But I am worried about the activist response, which seems to be defensively reacting to bad laws by arguing for a kind of protected “right to camp” by homeless residents.
It is essential to be honest that encampments near schools pose some real risk to kids and generally make family life harder. We can debate how dangerous, but it is not insignificant. Without going into too many details, people close to me have been assaulted by mentally unstable homeless individuals to the degree that they could have pressed criminal charges. In addition, I have heard countless stories of people (almost always women or girls) who have experienced troubling and scary things in and around encampments. While I do not believe that most Angelinos living on the streets have ill intent, discounting these experiences does not serve this conversation.
My sense, having talked to many normal Angelinos who are not very political or plugged into this debate, is that they believe two things at the same time:
We can and should martial resources to show compassion towards those who are living on the streets.
That compassion should mean that unlimited rights to camp on the street do not come at the expense of my kid being safe.
Whether you agree with that stance or not, one must admit it has a persuasive internal logic. Everyone recognizes that the current situation where tens of thousands of people live on the street is destructive and unsustainable for them and for the public. Activists need to wrestle with that before they try to tell voters that they need to suppress their desire for public safety. While I believe that the current ordinance as passed was probably hastily drafted and will have unintended consequences, it is hard to pick more of a losing political battle than to argue with parents about their kids' safety. The failure of activists to take this seriously and their refusal to compromise did not help their cause.
I suspect this tension is especially true on the Eastside, where I have seen more visible frustration bubble to the surface about homeless encampments during the pandemic. I think the reasons for this are pretty straightforward: during the pandemic, wealthy people had a lot of options for safe recreation: they often lived in single-family homes with backyards. They might even have second houses or at least the ability to vacation in an Airbnb outside the city for some time. On the flip side, if you were working class and living in an overcrowded apartment, one of the few places of respite you could go was a public park. But in my neighborhood, Lincoln Park became too dangerous due to criminal activity around encampments and RVs, taking away residents’ safe outdoor space during the pandemic.
I often say that I hope LA could gradually borrow from the model of Tokyo, a growing city ten times our size that has managed to maintain housing affordability. It has done this in various ways; the biggest is allowing more decentralized land-use decision-making, facilitated by a standard national zoning code that gives individual property owners freedom. Another part of Tokyo’s secret sauce is that they do not have a self-imposed scarcity of nice places to walk in urban areas without competing with cars. But a third key to Tokyo’s success is that all residents of all genders feel empowered to traverse the city, both on foot and on transit, without feeling unsafe. Even small children can do this without parents watching them like a hawk; recently, a Japanese reality show “Old Enough” that featured toddlers performing errands on their own became a viral sensation in the US:
Yes, the show has cute kids, which always is a plus. But I think the show was appealing because it tapped into this vision for urban life that seems both outlandish and attractive to Americans. Giving kids freedom is good for kids and their development, but it's also good for parents who need to relax about their kids now and then. But we are a long way from this vision, and one of the biggest reasons is that LA has very serious public safety issues. Parents’ fears are rational. Just like Metro’s ridership has plummeted as the city has allowed trains to become a de facto sanctuary for homeless individuals, codifying a right to sleep on the street is absolutely not compatible with a long-term vision of urbanism.
Homelessness in LA is Bigger than Encampments
When you look at homelessness data for any given year, you see a massive turnover in the homeless population. For example, the LAHSA writeup of the 2020 homelessness count found that 82,955 people became homeless in LA County over 2019, while 75,458 exited homelessness (30% of whom were placed by the county, 70% were estimated to find housing via other means). Of the vast majority of people flowing in and out of homelessness, most are not chronically living on the street; homelessness for them is just a short-term phenomenon. In some ways, this is encouraging because it shows it is possible to get people off the streets and keep them there, but in some ways, it is discouraging because it illustrates how many people are at risk at any given time.
Of the 66,436 homeless individuals in LA County in 2019, about 28% were in a shelter, while another 28% lived in a vehicle. Many others likely went uncounted as they lived in hotels, temporary housing, or on a friend or family’s couch. People who sleep on the street in an encampment tend to be a fraction of the overall population of homeless folks, and they tend to be those with the most severe problems. Living on the street is also a negative feedback loop: the longer someone who is chronically homeless lives on the street, the harder it becomes for them to re-integrate into society.
Encampments are a serious issue for LA, but that does not mean it’s wise for people working on the issue to spend all their time and political capital debating encampments. After all, the majority of Angelinos who lack stable housing will never live in an encampment. Arguably this is an indictment of both sides of the encampment debate: they are wasting valuable time on a relatively narrow and controversial question that won’t fix the issue rather than focusing on finding solutions to sustainably getting people off the street.
A better debate would be about implementing a right-to-shelter ordinance, which would make the localities obligated to build enough shelters to house all 66,000 people living on the street. New York City has a right-to-shelter ordinance (mainly because you would die of exposure sleeping on the street in New York in the winter), so the city has built enough shelter to house its 55,000 homeless residents. On the other hand, LA does not have a right to shelter, even though it’s largely seen as a good idea by voters and preferable to alternative policies. The problem is that activists and neighborhood groups oppose a right to shelter. People who approve of shelters in theory vigorously oppose them in their neighborhood (I have seen this personally). On the other hand, many activists argue that housing is a better long-term solution than shelter, and we need to invest in longer-term solutions by codifying housing as a human right.
I am sympathetic to these concerns, but I think they are both misguided. On the one hand, I understand residents’ concerns about shelters in their neighborhood. On the other hand, however, I would ask them, quite simply: which is more of a community safety issue: a shelter, or encampments in your local park? It seems clear to me that shelter is preferable.
I am also sympathetic to the idea that we need more housing, and codifying a right to housing could be a helpful way to do that legally. But we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and we are unlikely to see a meaningful change with LA building enough affordable housing anytime soon. Many affordable housing projects are pushing an average cost of $1 Million per unit and are happening in a painstakingly slow time frame. Of course, there will always be the desire to “do more” for those who need housing, but when time is of the essence, sometimes we need to be content to start by doing enough. Homeless activists, in particular, have a terrible track record on this. In New York, the government tried to incentivize the conversion of hotels into affordable housing to help get people out of shelter:
A state program established last year sought to seize on a unique opportunity presented by the pandemic to convert struggling hotels into housing — particularly for the tens of thousands of people sleeping in shelters and on streets and subways.
But nearly six months later, New York’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal has received just one application to actually use the $100 million set aside for the effort, and that sum has yet to be spent. Experts say costly and burdensome regulations are to blame for the plan’s failures.
Why did the program fail? It didn’t pay attention to the same issues that block housing in all big expensive American cities:
Developers, housing advocates, and other experts interviewed by POLITICO say the measure establishing the program did not address zoning and building code issues that continue to pose a logistical and financial obstacle to successful conversions.
But also, the program got opposition from activists who thought the potential housing would not be good enough:
Some advocates who pushed the creation of the program say those provisions were necessary to ensure it didn’t generate substandard housing.
“We didn’t want a program that cut corners to make it more palatable to developers,” said Joseph Loonam, housing campaign coordinator for the progressive advocacy group VOCAL-NY. “We wanted a program that centered on the needs of homeless New Yorkers, which is true high quality affordable housing where they can have full autonomy and dignity.”
This approach is counterproductive; full stop. Looking at the most cost-effective, fastest ways to get people off the street is important. Other cities have had relative success building tiny homes for affordable prices, though LA has had a mixed track record at doing this, mostly because our city struggles with cost overruns for everything we build. Worse yet, the city seems inclined to refuse to let others experiment with innovative ways to tackle the issue: one musician in LA built some tiny houses for $1200 a piece, only to have the city confiscate them because he did not respect various rules:
These are the types of solutions we need: something in between a traditional communal shelter and a permanent house that can be built quickly. We should be investing our time and energy in making these a reality, not fighting over encampments.
We Need to Talk about Housing
My most important observation on this issue is this: to make progress on homelessness, you have to move the conversation towards two fundamental questions:
Why does our city lack enough affordable housing so that people are becoming homeless faster than we can rehouse them?
Why has our city had difficulty moving people into housing faster than they become homeless?
In the 2020 homelessness count survey, 59% of those who had become homeless in 2020 attributed it at least in part to economic hardship, while 39% to a weakened social network:
It is not hard to understand why this has gotten so bad in Los Angeles: as housing prices have spiraled out of control, people live on thinner and thinner margins. So any disruption is more likely to send them onto the street and make it harder to get them back into housing. This is why California has such a disproportionately high homeless population compared to other cities with much higher poverty rates:
Much of this stems from our city’s longstanding indifference to the need to keep our housing stock affordable. Because LA has not built more housing at all income levels, working people with thin margins have very few places to live. Housing in LA has gotten so expensive that people balk at the idea that new construction can serve the homeless; this is not true. Subsidized affordable housing is constantly being built through government funding, but even most market-rate construction in LA includes some modest set-aside of subsidized units and almost always many more affordable units than existed in the previous property. More importantly, new construction creates more options for middle-class residents, who otherwise would be competing and displacing existing tenants from naturally existing affordable housing. Building housing is a homelessness prevention measure.
Houston, America’s 4th largest city, which has grown quite fast in the last 20 years, has dramatically reduced its homeless population, moving 25,000 people out of homelessness and cutting the overall homeless population by 63%. It has done that through many admirable strategies, including prioritizing getting people into housing. However, another reason it has been successful is that many more homes in Houston are affordable for very low-income people. For example, the median price of a condo in Houston in 2022 was $202,000 compared to $798,000 in LA:
Simply put, getting people into housing is much easier when options are abundant, especially on the low-end of the cost spectrum!
Its also true that there were times in American history when it was common to build new construction that served very low-income renters without any government subsidy. Single-Room Occupancy buildings (known as SROs) were zoned and banned from existence in the middle of the 20th century, mostly because it was said that they didn’t afford enough dignity and space to people. More than 100,000 SRO units in New York City went offline between 1960 and 1978. Matt Yglesias points out that New York City now requires all new apartments to include at least 680 square feet, which means that to afford the units, a low-income person now needs a subsidy. In the name of dignity people are given no other option but to sleep on the street.
The modern market for SROs would look more like micro-units and would bring more dignity to people than their current conditions. As Nolan Gray points out, policymakers could make this change tomorrow, but it is not on our agenda. We cannot take the homeless problem seriously until we take the housing problem seriously.
Irwin - I wanted to leave a comment on your Jubilee piece but the comment box would not pop up. I am a long time georgist, Administrator for the International Union for Land Value Taxation and also for the Baltimore Thrive LVT team, and a long time UN Ngo representative for the IU. As you I am greatly interested in the Jubilee ideas as relevant to today. I have put together a small group to move this forward, and am putting together a resource list to send to religious leaders and seminaries. Would like to communicate with you, call me if you like I am in PA at 717-357-7617.