Los Angeles is regressing.
Every year, residents pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes dedicated to solving the problem of homelessness, and the city budget directs hundreds of millions of dollars to solving the problem of homelessness, and the problem of homelessness not only doesn’t get better, it becomes more politically powerful.
The City Council just voted to stop enforcing its already weak anti-camping law, municipal ordinance 41.18, in a dozen locations that now will be fully open to permanent public camping.
These include nine locations designated in a 2021 resolution authored by former City Council member Mitch O’Farrell, who was defeated in 2022 by Hugo Soto-Martínez as the representative for Council District 13, the area that includes Hollywood, East Hollywood, Silver Lake, Echo Park and part of Atwater Village.
It appears that the people who vote in those neighborhoods desire to have communities living under the 101 freeway at Silver Lake Blvd., Alvarado Blvd. and Vendome Street, on the overpasses above the 101 at Sunset Blvd. and Bronson Avenue, under the 101 at Silver Lake Blvd. and Sunset Blvd. and in the Verdugo Road underpass on the 2 freeway.
Soto-Martínez, one of the City Council’s card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America, has been under pressure from activists to halt the enforcement of 41.18 in the “discretionary” locations that council members may select. The law prohibits, in specified areas, sitting or sleeping on the public right-of-way, as well as or storing, using, maintaining or placing personal property there. Obstructing the public right-of-way in this manner, in selected areas, is illegal.
Activists call this “criminalizing poverty.”
Any longtime Los Angeles resident old enough to have a driver’s license can remember a time when it wasn’t normal, or legal, to set up a tent on a sidewalk, freeway embankment, flood channel, median strip, bike path, public park, overpass or underpass and assert a right to live there.
How did we get where we are?
In 2007, the city of Los Angeles settled a federal lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union over the city’s 41.18 ordinance, which at the time flatly prohibited sitting, lying or sleeping on the sidewalk unless waiting for a parade. Too broad, too vague, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. City officials could have rewritten the ordinance, or challenged the Ninth Circuit ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court. They didn’t. They settled.
In the settlement of the lawsuit known as Jones v. Los Angeles, the city agreed to stop enforcing the law against sleeping on the sidewalk everywhere in Los Angeles between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. until an additional 1,250 units of permanent supportive housing, specifically for the chronically homeless, were constructed, with half in the Skid Row area.
The housing was constructed, but the city never went back to court to seek permission to resume enforcement of 41.18.
The other part of the settlement was an agreement by the ACLU that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in the case would be vacated, so it couldn’t be cited as a precedent in future lawsuits.
That turned out to be meaningless, because the Ninth Circuit decided another case regarding a similar anti-camping law, this time in Idaho, and used all the same reasoning from the vacated Jones v. Los Angeles opinion. That decision, in Martin v. Boise, became a legal precedent in all the states in the Ninth Circuit. It said, in essence, that an anti-camping ordinance could not be enforced unless there were enough shelter beds for everyone.
The language of Martin v. Boise was vague enough that any jurisdiction trying to enforce an anti-camping law and compel people into shelter or housing risked being sued in federal court.
In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Martin v. Boise with its decision in Grants Pass, Oregon, v. Johnson. In that decision, the Supreme Court established that cities have the power to enforce a generally applicable anti-camping law.
Mayor Karen Bass immediately announced that she would do no such thing.
And here we are. Billions of dollars later, the homelessness count is far higher than it was before the tax increases began, and street camping is legal.
Los Angeles has chosen this.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley