Two weeks ago, a homeless encampment was forcibly relocated by the Los Angeles Police Department, in full riot gear, from Echo Park.
This night-time action prompted protests by homeless rights activists, the arrest of members of the press, calls for an investigation of the police action by two city council members, and, inevitably, vocal support for the eviction from local homeowners and a few local politicians.
That event reminds us that homelessness and housing insecurity are part of a decades-long and seemingly intractable social crisis eating at the roots of civic well-being in Los Angeles. Until these challenges are solved, they put LA, long a liberal bastion, last amongst major US cities to address social equity and end economic discrimination.
I wrote this opinion piece five years ago for the Architect’s Newspaper. I’ve lightly edited it. The statistics cited reflect the situation in 2016 when it was initially published. Per my previous post, circumstances for the homeless in LA have dramatically worsened since 2016, in part due to the COVID-19 crisis.
The photographs included here are by Monica Nouwens from her series, Food, Not Bombs.
Here, Pity only Lives when it is Dead.
”Qui vive la pietà quand' è ben morta”(Here pity only lives when it is dead)
Dante Alighieri Inferno, 20.28
Why is it that in a city prepared to spend up to $50 million vainly trying to capture the Olympic games (for the third time), over 25,000 people are sleeping on the streets on any given night?
Why is it in a place that will soon be home to a half-billion-dollar, 100,000-square-foot mega-mansion, there is not enough affordable housing?
Los Angeles now has the ignoble status of failing to house more dispossessed people than just about any other major city globally, coming in third after Manila (with more than 70,000 homeless) and New York City (with more than 60,000). More than 44,000 homeless people were counted in January 2015 across Los Angeles County, with nearly 26,000 in the City of Los Angeles alone.1
The numbers keep rising; the city’s homeless population has spiraled upwards for the better half of the last decade, while funding to combat homelessness has shrunk.
Astonishingly, LA has also become home to billion-dollar mega-developments like Greenland’s Metropolis in downtown, which, according to some, may end up being LA’s first zombie development, its condos pre-sold to foreign investors and then left largely unoccupied.
Visible divisions have formed. Will Los Angeles be the 21st century cultural capital of the Pacific Rim (one long-held political fantasy about the region) or the Capital of the Third World, another thesis about LA put forward by David Rieff, Mike Davis, and others in the 1990s?
Which one is our reality?
Blocks away from City Hall, people live in tents, cardboard boxes, or sleep unprotected on the sidewalks and in the gutter. Why do we tolerate, let alone ignore, what amounts to an unofficially sanctioned human rights violation district right on the footstep of the city’s political, cultural, and economic heart?
We live in one of the wealthiest cities in the western hemisphere. Twenty-two billionaires call LA home in a U.S. state with more billionaires than every country in the world except China. The city covers almost 475 square miles with a population of 4 million people, within a county that sprawls for over 4,000 square miles and contains over 10 million people.2 Yet, despite its extraordinary wealth and abundance of space, Los Angeles can’t meet the needs of less than one-fifth of its homeless population on any given night.
Despite this calamity, only weeks ago, the City of Los Angeles effectively failed to declare this situation a national—let alone a civic—emergency. LA City Council has pledged money to address the matter, $100 million apparently. Still, no source for that funding has been identified, and it seems that no analysis has been done to determine if that amount is even enough to stem the flow of the dispossessed onto our streets.
Next year the city will budget almost $30 million to pick up trash, clean alleys, and fix the city’s sidewalks. Yet, the Los Angeles affordable housing fund, which in 2008 totaled $108 million, plunged to $26 million in 2014.
Why is this so hard?
Let’s start with a few reasonable insights that might explain the dynamics.
Criminalizing Homelessness is not a Housing Policy.
In June of 2015, the Los Angeles City Council approved two ordinances, allowing the LAPD and Department of Public Works, which oversees the City’s sanitation bureau, to dismantle encampments in parks and sidewalks quickly and without a standing court order.3
To date, LA’s go-to daily solution to initially dealing with the homeless has not been to address the gap between our homeless population and available emergency housing from a social or mental health policy or urban planning perspective but to leave the matter to the Los Angeles Police Department, an organization that couldn’t be more poorly prepared for the job.
Having both declared war on homelessness and signed ordinances effectively criminalizing homeless encampments, our City leaders have, de facto, made the LAPD the first line of offense against the disenfranchised.
At a minimum, this is negligence.
LA spends $87 million of taxpayer money annually to issue citations for vagrancy and to harass and remove the homeless and their belongings from sight.
In more extreme cases, it seems like criminalizing homelessness is reckless, if not inhumane.
Allowing a police organization notorious for its historic brutality against various communities to be pitted against the weak, the aged, and the mentally unwell seems fraught with all sorts of risks. In two recent incidents across the city, LAPD-led confrontations with the homeless have ended in tragic shooting deaths that may lead to multimillion-dollar lawsuits.
Imagine if the money for policing away the problem was redirected towards new housing or spent reconfiguring existing buildings and properties into emergency housing.
For instance, 10 years of policing the homeless (about $900 million) could pay for approximately 40 SRO apartment buildings, each with one hundred 350-square-foot units, or it could pay for the acquisition and renovation of hundreds of buildings.
We could house a sizable number of our homeless population for the same amount of money we waste issuing tickets, harassing and arresting the homeless.
We Might All Be Homeless Soon Enough
LA’s ineffectual approach to addressing homelessness is just the most visible aspect of a retrograde and, frankly, embarrassing lack of creative thinking around the challenges of providing decent, affordable market-rate— forget innovative— housing for an expanding population.
During the 40-year period following World War II, some four million housing units were constructed in Southern California, with more than 1.5 million of those being multi-unit buildings.
That is to say: 100,000 units, both single-family and multi-family, were built every year until the end of the 1970s. This is the same aging housing stock we are continuing to recycle as monthly rental units or, increasingly, as nightly Airbnb bookings.
Today, a time when the state’s population is projected to grow by 38.4 percent in the next decade, we are annually building less than one quarter to one-half of that volume of postwar housing.
According to the city’s own Housing Needs Assessment, L.A. will need to produce about 5,000 units a year moving forward to solve the housing shortage. Instead, we are barely grinding out a thousand new units a year, and of those, most are not affordable to those making less than $40,000 a year.
In a region that virtually pioneered the modern single-family home, we still can’t seem to expand that vision to a larger social program. Schindler, Neutra, Ain, and Entenza would be ashamed.4
By 2030 Los Angeles–Long Beach will average an estimated 6,500 people per square mile, the densest in the nation. Over 50 percent of the population in Los Angeles now rents rather than owns (and on average, those renters spend well over 40 percent of their income on rent), but not enough is being done to meet current, let alone projected, housing needs.
Homelessness, in other words, is our housing shortage in extremis.
The question that remains is now is not just how we will meet the housing needs for this increasingly dense urban landscape, but how soon will many of us be facing housing insecurity?
The New Hysterics
To his credit, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti wants to build 100,000 new housing units by 2021 to address the city’s housing shortage.5
Predictably, a new form of reactionary anti-growth and anti-density populist activism has emerged to check the mayor’s plans.
The Coalition to Preserve LA has raised the specter of a ballot measure that would create a total moratorium for any development project requiring a City Council vote to increase the number of housing units allowed on a particular site.
Given how many urban redevelopment sites probably don’t conform to higher density as of right now, this might translate into hundreds if not thousands of new units that won’t get built annually.
To make matters worse, the outrage around density is not assessed in terms of facts on the ground, like actual population dynamics, but in terms of planning and building codes that bureaucrats wrote a half-century or more ago in support of a suburban vision of L.A. that went the way of the atomic age.
The emergence of this proposed housing moratorium is not surprising given Southern California’s long history of blissful suburban ignorance. Unfounded public hysteria around density has been building since at least the 1990s. Only the virulence and folly of this latest form of NIMBYism is surprising. But it is still deplorable. Under the guise of maintaining the “integrity” and “character” of communities (read preserving property values and excluding the less advantaged), the seemingly populist but inevitably conservative and privately backed Coalition to Preserve LA is fighting hard against the Manhattanization of Los Angeles.
Officially, their initiative is called “Restrictions on General Plan Amendments, Required Review of General Plan; Building Moratorium Initiative Ordinance,” an oddly bureaucratic title for a piece of legislation that would exacerbate if not permanently extend LA’s housing shortage crisis in perpetuity.
A Potemkin City or a City of Hope?
If there was an allegory here, it might be that Los Angeles, as seen from the air by a visiting dignitary, is now effectively a giant Potemkin Village, a decorated city that is teetering on several hollow constructs.
Firstly, there is the failing notion that LA is a globally significant metropolis, an Alpha City, capable of managing its growth competently, let alone staging an Olympic event or two;
Secondly, there is the entrenched and clichéd image of LA as a suburban paradise—a myth so well-abused as to cover up our city’s most intrinsic shortcomings: freeway congestion, growing social inequality, and economic unrest. This fable was promoted for the majority of the last century, and it seems it will continue well in this next century;
Lastly, in wealthy westside enclaves as in east side gentrifying neighborhoods, there is the persistent belief that we can continue to pretend that the very evident homeless crisis that now bridges Skid Row and Venice can be policed away.
The confluence of poor or postponed policy decisions, an inability to generate innovative and effective housing models, along with hysterical homeowners who won’t accept growth and density as inevitabilities, and not just political options, spells out a future that looks increasingly bleak.
Yet, there is hope.
In early January of this year, California State Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de León6 proposed spending $2 billion to build new permanent housing or rehab existing housing for mentally ill people living on the street. This is a step in the right direction, but we desperately need more local solutions that are impactful, innovative, and effective.
What Future?
LA remains a city with a future so long as we work on it in the present.
Rampant homelessness in a city overflowing with excessive wealth is not only morally unacceptable but will slowly eat away at our ability to address other social and environmental challenges that Los Angeles will face. Key amongst them: how will we create equitable, enduring housing solutions for everyone, not just the privileged and home-owning?
We need to imagine a future based on a fair distribution of our urban resources.
Fixing and upgrading our existing housing stock and building new housing for both the homeless and our workforce families alike is foundational and will form the moral and political keystone toward a more civilized urban future in Los Angeles.
Notes
There are probably up to 45,000 people on the streets of LA as of January 2021, almost double the figure 5 years ago. County-wide, that figure is closer to 70,000 today.
LA County’s population density is forecast to be 2,531 per square mile by 2023. By comparison, Tokyo’s population density is 16,121.8 residents per square mile
I should acknowledge here that in the five years since I wrote this, many successful, architecturally innovative homeless and affordable housing projects have been built in LA by architects Angie Brooks and Larry Scarpa, Kevin Daly, Killefer Flammang, Koning Eizenberg, Michael Maltzan, Lorcan O'Herlihy, and others.
California needs 1.2 million more affordable homes by 2030 – approximately 120,000 per year – to keep pace with demand. The majority of these homes are needed in and around LA. Source: 2021 California Affordable Housing Needs Report from the California Housing Partnership
On October 15, 2020, Kevin de León began serving as the Los Angeles City Councillor for District 14, replacing Jose Huizar.