The ordinance displaces unhoused people into regions of the city where they cannot be seen, hiding the issue rather than solving it. This is not an issue we can ignore any longer. Furthermore, the unhoused population are often the victims of transinstitutionalization, which means they are moved from the streets to the mental health system to the criminal system and then right back to the streets where they further struggle to survive. Multiple factors have led to L.A.’s current homelessness crisis, including tough-on-crime laws, racist zoning, state cuts to mental health services and wage disparities, all of which impact Black and Latinx communities the most. These failed tactics should push us to explore different solutions, but this ordinance proves otherwise. continues to have the second-largest homeless population in the nation. More than half the $100 million city budget set on alleviating homelessness goes to the police department to enforce these futile and inefficacious laws, yet L.A. City of Boise (2018), that criminalizing homelessness is unconstitutional and that people experiencing homelessness cannot be criminally punished for not having other alternatives than to live and sleep outside on public property.Īnti-vagrancy laws have been used as a solution to homelessness in the past, and they have all failed.

On a constitutional level, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled, from Bell v. If it’s an overnight-only shelter, those lucky enough to obtain a space have to repeat this strenuous process and try their luck again the next night for a basic human necessity. People facing homelessness have to decide between the risk of staying on the streets and getting arrested or leaving their self-made refuge, carrying everything they own to a shelter and abandoning their only safety net - often to just be turned away due to a limited supply of beds. While there are shelters set in place, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority only has shelter beds for about 39% of the homeless population. However, the ordinance only states where people cannot be - it doesn’t state anything about where unhoused people can go. From the refugees displaced during warfare to thousands of families tossed to the streets during the Great Depression to the low-income populations removed by urban renewal in the mid-19th century, homelessness is a chronic and systemic problem that cannot be solved by pushing people to a city’s corners.īackers of the ordinance argue that it would help the city regain public spaces while helping the unhoused population. The issue of homelessness in the United States is a pervasive and complicated topic that has taken on multiple forms throughout history.

3, altering the city’s current anti-camping law to prohibit “sitting, sleeping, lying, storing personal property, or otherwise obstructing the public right-of-way.” This law makes it illegal for the unhoused population to exist in most parts of the city and essentially persecutes people who are simply trying to survive. Los Angeles’ new anti-camping ordinance went into effect on Sept. And yet, the predominant approach to solving the ever-growing national crisis of homelessness is to criminalize it. People are not unhoused because they want to be but rather because they don’t have a choice.

Living on the streets can be a dangerous and dehumanizing experience.

Vagrant laws