City to consider anti-camping zones
Ordinance passed earlier, 13-2, but a second vote is required
The Los Angeles City Council today is expected to consider an anti-camping law that would ban homeless Angelenos and others from sitting, lying and sleeping in certain locations around the city.
The council approved the first reading of the ban 13-2. Because it was not unanimous, a second vote is required.
If passed, the law would let the city create zones where setting up encampments, or merely sleeping and living in a public area, would be unlawful. Such zones could be near homeless shelters and services facilities, tunnels, underpasses and overpasses, bridges, freeway ramps, railways, washes, spreading grounds, as well as near so-called “sensitive use” sites such as day care centers, schools, public parks and libraries. But some began to wonder: “If those areas are offlimits, then what is left?”
Chelsea L. Shover, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, said that when she learned about the proposed ordinance, known as Los Angeles Municipal Code 41.18, she and others in her field wanted to know how the ordinance would affect their day-to-day work.
When doing vaccination outreach at encampments, how would they answer the questions, “Can I set up here? Is this a place where I’m allowed to be?”
She said that she expects those questions will come up and wanted to be able to answer them as part of their efforts as public health professionals to promote the overall health of the people they are aiding. But she said there was no information available to work out what the ordinance would really mean on the ground.
So in recent weeks, Shover and a team of public health researchers, many of whom are working with street-based teams to vaccinate homeless Angelenos against COVID-19, have tried to figure out an answer. Shover worked with Kathryn M. Leifheit, a postdoctorate fellow, and graduate student Ashley Frederes to identify publicly available data from the city, county and state and use it to plot on a map those schools, libraries and other restricted areas.
The resulting map, which they released Monday, showed that, conservatively speaking, nearly half of the city’s land could become off-limits. Leifheit and Shover said in an interview with the Los Angeles Daily News that their estimate of how much ground the ordinance would make off-limits — around 40% — should be seen as an underestimate.
Just the 40% figure was enough to cause Shover to think, “That’s going to cause problems for our work for the health of unhoused people.”
The map does not include places such as the middle of the street, in the way of traffic, and or in a location where there is already a building, they said. They also were unable to obtain a list of freeway on- and offramps or to identify all of the public areas that are near a building’s entrance or exit and so could not plot those locations on the map.
Leifheit says some of the “rhetoric” around the anti-camping measure has framed the law as something that would have only a limited effect on those who sleep, sit and lie down outside.
“But I think that that’s easy to say until you then map it in and see that each of those things, accounts for a lot of the city,” said Shover, who recently spent six months working as a supervising epidemiologist in the county Department of Public Health during the pandemic.
Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas said in a statement, responding to the map, that the council is also looking at ways to reduce the instances in which the law would need to be enforced.
Ridley-Thomas said he has put out a motion in which he “insisted that we move forward with a Street Engagement Strategy that requires thoughtful outreach and engagement well before the ordinance can be enforced.
Based on her experience working with the county, in which Shover oversaw a team that did data and disease control for outbreaks at homeless shelters and encampments, she does not believe the shelter and permanent housing spaces that are available are sufficient to house those now sleeping on the streets.
A recent audit released by the LosAngeles Homeless Services Authority last week aligns with Shover’s concerns. The number of housing and shelter options available in L.A. County have increased over the past three years, the report said, but failed to keep pace with the growth in the homeless population.
Councilman Bob Blumenfield, who represents a west SanFernando Valley district, said Tuesday there are shelter spaces not being used by some living on the street. Many have accepted offers of “transitional” housing, but others have remained on the street, he said.
“The city must continue to create housing opportunities, from PSH [permanent supportive housing] to cabin communities, but letting encampments remain on critical community access points or where unhoused Angelenos are in further danger, especially as there are some vacancies in our new transitional housing sites, is unacceptable,” he said.
But homeless services authority officials are increasingly raising concerns that even as shelters are being built, there still remains a significant gap in the permanent housing that is needed to ensure that those who seek help aren’t let down in the end.
LAHSA Director Heidi Marston said that while there has been “a 16% increase in permanent housing options through investments like [Proposition HHH], there needs to be more investment in permanent housing, because without that people will go into shelter and they will become stuck without anywhere else to go.”
So without housing, and potentially fewer legal locations where they can lie down at night outdoors, people could end up getting fined under the ordinance, Shover fears. That would have the effect of criminalizing homelessness, rather than getting people housed, while also “potentially make a lot of other public health harms worse,” Shover believes.
Proponents of the proposed law disagree.
“This ordinance first of all does not make homelessness illegal,” L.A. City Councilman Paul Kerkorian said after the measure’s initial passage. “It does not criminalize homelessness. It does not make any conduct that is fundamental to being human illegal.”
Krekorian argued that what the law does is that it “guarantees that we will reestablish passable sidewalks. It protects the users of our public infrastructure and the unhoused residents of our city from being put into positions of interaction with automobiles, around loading docks, driveways and so forth. It guarantees access to our fire hydrants, entrances to buildings.”
Shover, however, said housing needs should be prioritized, saying that public health research has shown that having “safe secure housing is a fundamental part of all aspect of health.”
“I’m an addiction researcher,” she added. “We see it in terms of addiction treatment. Outcomes are better when people move from being unhoused to being housed.”
Even as Shover and other public health researchers are raising concerns about the public health effects of the ordinance, Leifheit says that public health reasons have been used to support approval of the anti-camping law.
“I think part of it too is, who we’re talking about when we say public health,” Leifeit said “I think sometimes when people talk about this ordinance as a public health measure, they’re thinking about the people who have to walk around the encampments.”
A key question to ask, Leifheit says, is “Whose health matters in these discussions?”
If the ordinance does pass, Leifheit says she hopes more study and mapping will be done to better understand the effect of such laws.
“Part of the point we’re trying to make is that having this map, and this data to inform a decision that is clearly spatial, I think we’d like to see this kind of mapping effort go into any kind of similar decisions in the future, just to understand the scope of enforcement that might be implied in the language of an ordinance,” Leifheit said.
Shover added that the map would also be needed in a practical sense, because while it can be easy to quickly tell shorter distances, the ordinance calls for buffer areas that are around 500 or 1,000 feet, which the average person may not be able to estimate accurately while on the streets.
“I’ve already shared [the map] with my community partners who are out there with people who are aware this is going on and are worried about what it might mean for the populations they serve, or their own community, for people who are unhoused,” she said.