LA Times Article On The History Of Homelessness In LA Is A Must Read

PLANNING WATCH - 

Charlie Chaplin’s character in The Little Tramp (1915). Now we call them homeless people.

When I first saw the LA Times feature article on the history of homelessness in Los Angeles, I was skeptical.  After all, I have written dozens of Planning Watch columns on this topic,  and I have heard all the excuses, such as drug addiction, mental illness, and movement of people to sunny LA to escape cold winters.  Some of these excuses are in the LA Times article, but most of the article is accurate, which is why I recommend it.

What follows is a summary of the Los Angeles Times article.  I list what the article got right and then what it got wrong.

What the LA Times article gets right:

• What is now called homelessness has existed in LA from at least the 1880s, with a major increase beginning in the 1970s.   This increase is still underway, and homelessness has spread from Skid Row in LA’s downtown (Main on the west, Alameda on the east, 2nd Street on the north, and 7th Street on the south) to the entire metropolitan area.
• From the 19th  century to the present, in LA homelessness has been treated as a police problem, not an optional social problem.
• The term Skid Row came from Seattle’s Skid Road, where, starting in the 1850s, logs skidded down Yesler Avenue to a waterfront sawmill.  Skid Row eventually became the name of downtown neighborhoods where homeless people were concentrated.
• By 1937, the LAPD estimated that there were 300,000 to 600,000 transients in Southern California, many from out-of-state and living in “Hoovervilles.”  L.A. County sheriff’s deputies burned down the tin-roofed shanties that housed more than 100 homeless people on the banks of the Los Angeles River and the Rio Hondo Wash.  In 1940 the city of Los Angeles destroyed any remaining Hoovervilles.
• The outbreak of World War II ended the Great Depression, but created a new housing crisis.  When the United States entered the conflict in December 1941, the city became a hub for military manufacturing.  Housing construction slowed dramatically, leaving many new war workers with nowhere to live, while LA’s population grew by 31% between 1940 - 1950.
• In late 1945, an estimated 162,000 families in Los Angeles, including 50,000 veterans, lived in tents, garages, vehicles, and other substandard accommodations.
• In the 1950s Los Angeles city government responded to the “Red Scare” by cancelling new public housing.  Shortly after that City Hall worked closely with the Federal government’s slum clearance/urban renewal programs.  As a result L.A.’s historic Skid Row experienced redevelopment. The City also ordered earthquake retrofitting and other upgrades, and many property owners opted for demolitions, which pushed poor tenants to nearby streets.
• In the immediate postwar era, racist federal lending policies barred developers from building racially integrated housing.  Of the 125,000 units built with Federal Housing Authority funding in Los Angeles County between 1950 and 1954, fewer than 3% were open to people of color.
• In 1968 the Los Angeles City Council adopted an anti-camping ordinance officially directed at hippies, but became an anti-vagrancy ordinance used against the homeless.
• Under Mayor Tom Bradley Los Angeles adopted the Blue Book Plan in 1976.  It consolidated services, shelters, and missions into a 50-block area of LA’s downtown. The goal was to “contain” the homeless, allowing the rest of the downtown to redevelop through urban renewal programs.
• Beginning the late 1970s, 75,000 well-paying industrial jobs in the South Central Los Angele area were moved overseas.  This caused the demographics of LA’s Skid Row to change. For most of its history it was home to an almost exclusively older population of poor alcoholics, disabled, and unemployable men.   But as homelessness exploded, by the early 1980s Skid Row’s streets filled with a younger population, including many Black and Latino men.  Crack cocaine users and convicted felons recently released from prison also headed to LA’s Skid Row.  Their criminal records blocked them from working and qualifying for public assistance plus HUD and CRA housing.
• The State of California also closed large mental institutions in this period, dumping former mental patients onto the city’s streets.
• At the same time, the price of apartments gradually tripled and the price of homes sextupled, controlling for inflation.  As a result, many working class Angelenos were priced out of housing and became homeless.  Los Angeles also had a new type of homeless, people who had lost jobs in the 1881-2 recession.
• L.A. was also becoming a city of renters because the cost of single-family houses rose much faster than inflation and wages.  In the late 1960s the percentage of Angelenos living in homes they owned dipped below 50%, and it has continued to drop ever since, now reaching 36 percent.
• In 1970, L.A. wasn’t among the 10 large counties nationwide with the most crowded housing.  In 1980, it soared to No. 3, then, in 1990, to No. 1, where it has remained ever since.  In 1987, the LA Times reported that 200,000 people in Los Angeles County lived in garages, often without plumbing, heating, and windows.
• The percentage of full-time workers living in poverty nearly doubled between 1969-1989, and the percentage of renters who could afford to buy a home dropped to 16%, compared to 54% a decade earlier. 
• The primary housing program for low-income tenants is the severely underfunded Section 8 voucher program.  Launched in 1974 to reward landlords for building new affordable units, it now provides subsidies to a small number of renters in privately owned apartments.
• In the early 2000s, many of downtown’s half-empty commercial buildings were converted to lofts, expensive apartments, and bars.  Furthermore, LA’s historic Skid Row experienced development pressure from the real estate and business elites in the Central City Association. These commercial property owners realized that homeless people deterred real estate investment.
• By 2002 police sweeps and arrests were an everyday occurrence in LA’s Skid Row.  Extra police officers were assigned, hoping that arrests would motivate homeless people to enter shelters and change their lives.  Nevertheless, this heavy policing model made little difference, and the homeless population continued to grow.
• In 2006, the 9th District Court of Appeals ruled that arrests for sleeping on sidewalks were contingent on sufficient shelter beds for the homeless.  Nevertheless, from 2006 to 2012 private security guards harassed homeless people until the same court stopped this practice.
• During the Great Recession, 2007-09, foreclosed properties were snapped up by financial institutions, including the private equity firm Blackstone, which substantially raised rents.
• As of 2008, Los Angeles had fewer tax-credit financed units than New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia, cities with large amounts of legacy public housing.  Also unlike those cities, Los Angeles also had no municipal homeless shelters, instead offering subsidies to privately run shelters.
• Arrests of homeless people continued to rise, and in 2016 one-sixth of those arrested in Los Angeles were homeless.  Two-thirds of those arrested were Black of Latino, and LA’s Police Chief acknowledged that the LAPD could not solve homelessness by arresting people.
• In 2024 the Supreme Court overruled the 9th Circuit.  Western cites can now clear homeless encampments from parks, sidewalks, and other public areas, even when they do not have sufficient shelter beds.  For Los Angeles and other cities, this ruling did not answer the basic question of how to house the homeless.
• Despite local programs, homelessness continued to rise, evidence that Los Angeles City and County cannot replace the Federal government in housing the homeless. 

What the LA Times article failed to get right:

• The LA Times article is mostly descriptive, and does not address what is euphemistically called the business cycle.  I am referring to the boom-bust gyrations of our capitalist economic system, in which recessions and occasional depressions happen every 4 to 8 years. 

These ups and downs compound a second feature of the US economy, a permanent housing crisis, with similar fluctuations.

• LA boomed during World War II, but housing for workers in military industries  was segregated.  White workers could live in new apartments built in West LA, while Black workers were confined to public housing in South LA.
• Section 3 of the LA Times article attributes homelessness to addiction and mental illness, yet there are 16 million people in the United States with severe mental illness, yet only 600,000 of them (3.75 %) are homeless on any given night.  The remaining 93% are not homeless, indicating that mental illness rarely leads to homelessness.
• Beginning in the 1980s, the then predominantly Black neighborhoods south of the downtown deindustrialized.  As a result, the new unemployed gradually moved north to the Skid Row area in LA’s downtown.
• The LA Times article barely mentions the end of HUD public housing programs, beginning in the early 1970s.  Instead, it reports that since 1986, the primary Federal financing to build affordable housing came from low-income housing tax credits, “indirect and remarkably inefficient program that gives tax breaks to banks and other institutions.”

Despite these shortcomings, I strongly recommend the LA Times article.

(Dick Platkin ([email protected]) is a retired LA city planner, who reports on local planning issues.  He is a board member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA).  Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives.)