A federal judge overseeing a massive homelessness lawsuit in Los Angeles on Tuesday ordered the city and county to provide some form of shelter to Skid Row’s entire homeless population by October.
Judge David O. Carter filed for a preliminary injunction by the plaintiffs in the case last week and is now telling the city and county to find single women and unaccompanied children on skid row to stay within 90 days, followed by helping families within 120 days and finally, by October 18, providing shelter or shelter to every homeless person.
“Los Angeles has lost its parks, beaches, schools, sidewalks, and highway systems through the omission of city and county officials who have left our homeless citizens no other place,” Carter wrote in a 110-page letter filled with quotes from Abraham Lincoln and an extensive history of how skid row was first created.
“All the rhetoric, promises, plans and budgeting cannot obscure the shameful reality of this crisis – that year after year there are more homeless Angelenos, and year after year more homeless Angelenos die in the streets.”
Carter also wrote that “after adequate shelter has been provided,” he would allow the city to enforce laws keeping streets and sidewalks free of tents, as long as they are consistent with previous legal rulings enforcing such rules. have limited.
He also ordered the county to “provide support services to all homeless residents who accept housing offers,” including placements in “appropriate emergency, temporary or permanent housing and treatment services,” through the county mental health department and the health ministry. . The cost of this work would be split between the city and the county, he said.
Rob Wilcox, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, said on Tuesday that city attorneys are reviewing the warrant. He declined to comment further.
Skip Miller, a partner at Miller Barondess law firm, which is an outside counsel to the county in the lawsuit, said the county is “now evaluating our options, including the possibility of an appeal.”
Earlier, the county had asked to be removed from the case, arguing that it was about the city and that the county responded aggressively to homelessness without any instruction from the court. It cited efforts that include spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year through the Measure H sales tax and developing innovative strategies like Project Roomkey in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Project Roomkey is a state program that provides temporary funding to cities and counties to rent hotel rooms for homeless people during the pandemic.
This injunction “is an effort by property and business owners to rid their neighborhood of homeless people,” Miller said.
“There is no legal basis for a court order, as the county spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on proven strategies that have produced measurable results across the region, not just on skidding,” he added.
Matthew Umhofer, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the case, said he and his clients were ecstatic at Carter’s call to action. This was what they were looking for when they filed the case in March 2020, he said, and why they sought Carter, who had supervised similar cases in Orange County in recent years, to chair the case.
“This is exactly the kind of aggressive emergency action that we think is needed on the issue of homelessness in Los Angeles,” Umhofer said. “The city and county and all the forces of the status quo have had decades to try and fix it and have not done it. So the moment is crying out for extraordinary emergency response and this is just that. “
Carter’s order comes the day Mayor Eric Garcetti released his budget for the next fiscal year, which includes nearly $ 1 billion in homelessness. The old federal judge also ordered “that $ 1 billion, as represented by Mayor Garcetti, be immediately placed in custody, with the flows of funds accounted for and reported to the court within seven days.”
Of the $ 1 billion in homeless spending planned by Garcetti, more than a third would come from Proposition HHH, the 2016 bond measure to build permanent housing for homeless residents. Garcetti assistants said they expect the city to build or develop 89 HHH projects in the next fiscal year, for a total of 5,651 units. Whether Carter’s order will disrupt those operations is unclear. In his warrant, the judge said he wants a report within 90 days from any developer who receives money from HHH, as well as new regulations to “limit the possibility of money wastage.”
Many of these projects have been delayed and this was the year Garcetti assistants expected progress to be made. Last year, more than 1,300 homeless people died in Los Angeles County, and Carter said the city and county “had decided to focus on housing at the expense of shelter, even knowing that major development delays were likely while people were dying on the streets.”
Carter has also solicited a number of reports from city and county officials on how money has been and is being spent in the fight against homelessness. He wants these reports within 90 days and has ordered “a halt to the sale, lease or contract transfers, of the more than 14,000 town homes pending the Court’s report by Controller Ron Galperin, and any similar properties in court. are awaiting the county. the report of the district council. ”
The lengthy ruling also spurred corruption scandals involving housing projects, “excessive delays and skyrocketing costs” under the Proposition HHH bond measure, and LA’s failure to seek federal reimbursement for Project Roomkey rooms.
Councilor Mark Ridley-Thomas said city officials are still trying to understand the implications of the injunction, including how it would affect existing plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on homeless housing.
“There are a lot of questions we want to resolve,” Ridley-Thomas said Tuesday after the decision was released. “Every time the court appears, there is justifiable fear and trembling.” What is clear, he said, is that the court’s decision stems from the failure of the city and county to seriously address the crisis. “There’s no denying that,” he said.
In his order, Carter outlined historical forms of discrimination that had taken black people out of housing options, including redlining, segregated relief systems during the Great Depression, construction of highways that displaced black families, and criminalization that disproportionately affected black communities.
Racial inequality continues to color the way the government is handling the crisis, Carter added. For example, a report presented to county leaders found that Project Roomkey, a program to rent hotel rooms for the homeless, had been disproportionately provided to whites, “ increasing the risks to a black population already disproportionately damaging the effects of the city were enlarged. and the county’s failure to tackle homelessness, ”Carter wrote.
Carter concluded that current city and county policies “exacerbate and perpetuate structural racism, threaten the integrity of black families in Los Angeles, and force a disproportionate number of black families to go without housing.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
This is a story in development and will be updated.