Encampments proliferate because Los Angeles refuses to provide shelter
By L.A. City Councilman Mike Bonin
Photo by Ted Soqui
In nearly every corner of Los Angeles, there are homeless encampments — collections of flimsy tents, usually within mere feet of a school, a park, a business, or someone’s home. Their presence invariably sparks a neighborhood debate, with loud voices proclaiming that “those people” are there by choice.
It’s not politically correct to admit it, but it’s true: Most people in Los Angeles are homeless by choice. Our choice, not theirs.
Many major cities have a large homeless population, but only in Los Angeles does such a large percentage sleep without any sort of roof, seeking refuge on cold, hard pavement. That may not be by design, but it’s also not accidental, or unforeseeable.
In 2006, a federal court told the City of Los Angeles it was “cruel and unusual punishment” to forbid people from sleeping on sidewalks unless the city offered sufficient housing and shelter as an alternative. For a decade, rather than provide housing or shelter, the city effectively said, “Let them eat asphalt,” and encampments proliferated nearly everywhere. By refusing to choose shelter, we chose sidewalks.
In the past two years, elected officials and the electorate said “enough.” We developed a comprehensive homelessness strategy, approved new dedicated funding, and started housing people at an impressive, record clip. Yet homelessness increased and encampments proliferated.
Part of the reason is that public officials, foundations and service providers are making the perfect the enemy of the good. We are so determined to build permanent supportive housing — which is expensive and can take years to bring online — that we fail to address the here and now. We desperately need thousands of units of permanent supportive housing (and I have proposed hundreds of units in my district), but that doesn’t help the people sleeping in a tent tonight.
Call it crisis housing, bridge housing, or interim housing. Call it shelter, if you want. We need places where people can sleep next week, next month, and even next year until enough housing is available. Not bare-bones, one-size-fits-all shelters that feel like prisons and become permanent warehouses for people. We need specialized, welcoming centers or shared housing for couples, for families with children, for teenage runaways, for veterans and others.
Our bureaucracies and our institutions have a hard time with that. They know how to approve development. They are accustomed to the slow, complex financing systems, and the arcane rules. They are not used to urgency. They operate at a traditional speed when we sorely need an emergency response. It has been two years since the City Council adopted a comprehensive homelessness strategy calling for an increase in and transformation of shelter — and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority still has no strategy to get thousands of people off the street any time soon. Bureaucratic inertia is at least as big a hurdle as neighborhood opposition to specific projects.
During recent fires, officials opened emergency shelters within hours of deploying first responders. Victims of natural disasters are not left to sleep on our streets, but refugees from economic hardship, gentrification, a housing shortage, domestic violence, sexual abuse, addiction and mental illness
are left to fend for themselves. That is unacceptable and intolerable.
We must insist on a range of immediate options for housing and shelter —
even if it means using every available city facility and every church or
temple in Los Angeles. If we don’t, encampments will proliferate, and
men, women and children will continue to live on our streets by choice — our choice.
As a retired Marine, I recently produced a music video to highlight the plight of veterans in our Nation’s Capital. I thought one of the veteran’s groups would have picked it up, but perhaps it’s too “unexplainable.” Homeless and veteran shouldn’t be in the same sentence–and there is an extra measure of irony in DC, where vets are homeless among the statues and monuments dedicated to them–please share. There but for the grace….
https://youtu.be/uFqRL3li7fs
How about you quit wasting money on road diets and help the homeless?
I am soooo freakin’ tired of being blamed for the ills of the world by a select few who deem it their mission in life to do so. I don’t know about you, but the vast majority of the homeless that I run across in the streets are mentally unstable. I had nothing to do with that. Many others seem to be on the streets because they just prefer to, and in LA, because of politicians like Bonin, that has led to an increase to the homeless numbers. I had nothing to do with that. And lastly, I am sorry to say that as taxpayers we have in fact done everything we are supposed to do – give to the charities and tax ourselves to death so that government agencies can take care of the problem. So how did this become my fault? LA is simply too expensive to live in and just because you want to live here doesn’t mean you get to live here, especially if you don’t have the means to do so. That, I presume, is a sub-group of those setting up shop on the sidewalks because they want to live in LA, for whatever the reason. It’s Bonin and the rest of the “saving the world” crowd down at City Hall who have focused on bizarre saving the planet issues, or on federally mandated issues (can we say the words illegal immigration) that they have ignored this very obvious problem that has been festering for years but they do nothing about. Or developing transit systems that virtually no one is using. This has been my choice? Give me a break.