L.A. to return shelters seized from homeless
‘Tiny houses’ will go back to their builder, who’ll store them
Los Angeles has agreed to return the tiny houses that police and sanitation workers have impounded from homeless people in recent months.
Elvis Summers, who reportedly has built and distributed 37 brightly colored structures over the last year, said he understood that Mayor Eric Garcetti was considering offering a surplus municipal lot as a site for the houses.
But Connie Llanos, the mayor’s spokeswoman, said Thursday that although the mayor appreciates citizen efforts to come up with creative solutions to the homelessness problem, he does not support a village concept.
“Not at this time,” Llanos said. “We’re developing a process on how we could work with nonprofits,” she said.
Summers collected more than $100,000 through online video appeals and crowdfunding sites for his tiny house campaign. Popularized as part of a lifestyle-downsizing movement, the bare-bones structures appeal to homelessness supporters as a simple and safe alternative to people sleeping on the sidewalk. Los Angeles has the largest unsheltered population in the country, and tattered shantytowns have spread citywide, far from their roots in the downtown area.
Officials, however, consider the houses a health and safety hazard; in February, they seized three of the structures from freeway overpasses in South Los Angeles. A fourth was confiscated more recently, Summers said Thursday.
A City Hall protest last month of the seizures drew dozens of selfie-stick-wielding bloggers and supporters.
Summers said he expected to get the houses back in the next two weeks and plans to store them on a church lot in Compton while he continues to look for land — preferably with shower and bathroom access, electricity and other necessities.
He does not see the tiny house village concept as an end in itself, Summers said, but as a way to anchor homeless people so they can receive mental health and substance abuse treatment, counseling and medical care on the way to permanent housing.
“I’m absolutely not trying to enable people,” he said. “It’s just a bridge between the gutter and permanent housing, and it all starts with a good night’s rest.”
The homeless people who lost their tiny houses are living in the streets in tents, even though the city rushed to give some of them rent vouchers, he said.
“No one is accepting them,” he said of the vouchers. “Everyone is still on the streets.”
One of the men suffered a broken back when he was struck by a car while crossing the street and is recuperating in a tent, Summers said. “He just graduated to a cane,” Summers said.