CommentsDEEGAN ON LA---“As with many issues involving individuals experiencing homelessness, no party appears to be addressing this problem with any urgency”.
With those words, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter stepped into the homeless problem in Los Angeles and he suddenly looks like our missing homeless czar.
His immediate concern is relocating several thousand homeless that camp out near freeway ramps and under freeway overpasses and bridges. He has ordered the city to do this, and gave officials one week-until May 22-to come up with a plan for providing humane housing for what are estimated to be 6,000 to 7,000 freeway adjacent homeless.
As of press time, the county has asked the judge to vacate his order, while the city has asked for a two week extension. Both the city and county want more time to work out a solution to this aspect of the homeless problem. Both have already spent years attacking the crisis in LA with mixed results. The streets are still full of homeless.
Mayor Garcetti's initial reaction to the federal judge’s intervention in Los Angeles was "The judge has asked us to work with him to prioritize folks that are there, living under and over freeway overpasses, and we hope in the coming week that we can come to some common agreements with all the parties in the court case”. But, later in the week, Garcetti hedged, saying “Don’t get me wrong. Living under gas fumes is not good. But there’s 100 health concerns we have on the streets. This is one of them.”
The federal injunction states that “To protect those individuals experiencing homelessness currently living near freeway overpasses, underpasses, and ramps, the Court hereby issues a preliminary injunction requiring that they be relocated away from such areas.”
Judge Carter joins an elite set of Federal officials inserting themselves into how City Hall does its business of running Los Angeles. The FBI has allegedly been investigating Councilmember Jose Huizar (CD14) for corruption; some reports allege that his aide accepted a paper bag filled with a half-million dollars in cash in return for a favor; his city council colleagues, led by Council President Nury Martinez asked him a few days ago to step down from active service while under investigation. His colleague, former Councilmember Mitch Englander (CD12) was recently indicted on corruption charges that could land him in prison for fifty years.
Judge Carter is more interested in humanity than criminality. Two years ago, he shook up the Orange County homeless problem. Now, he’s here in LA issuing orders to the city how it must take action. Foot dragging on homeless issues is what he’s talking about. Is Judge Carter doing what the Mayor and the City Council have had limited success at with programs like the Mayor’s “A Bridge Home” or the city-county-state collaboration called “Project Roomkey”?
In OC, Judge Carter strode into the middle of an us versus them homeless crisis that saw NIMBY’s objecting to a county board of supervisors decision to move homeless tents out of the Santa Ana River Trail and into the tony OC enclaves of Irvine, Huntington Beach and Laguna Niguel.
The settlement presided over by Carter, calls on different regions of the county to make certain there’s a “respective responsibility” for homeless people. It’s the “my land is your land” type of approach that Los Angeles is trying to achieve with Garcetti’s “A Bridge Home” program that places homeless housing across the city in every council district.
The lawsuit, filed in March by the LA Alliance for Human Rights, asked the judge to set a "legally enforceable mandate" to establish homeless services and enough beds for anyone who needs one on any given night.
Circling back to why he is here, Judge Carter is seemingly filling a leadership vacuum by injecting some urgency into the homeless problem in Los Angeles. Strides have been made, successes have been reported, but we still have thousands of homeless living on the streets. Just how many will be revealed when the results of the annual homeless count are released soon.
Anticipating that report, the “urgency” that Judge Carter finds missing in dealing with the homeless, and not only the freeway category but all homeless in LA, remains an urgent issue.
The last words from Judge Carter, directed to the city and county, when they told him that they could not agree on the cost-sharing involved in relocating homeless from freeway adjacencies, were “They better sort this out.”
(Tim Deegan is a long-time resident and community leader in the Miracle Mile, who has served as board chair at the Mid City West Community Council and on the board of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition. Tim can be reached at [email protected].)
-cw
