Taking a hot shower after a rough day is a game changer but for many people who are homeless, they could have long stretches without them. One local nonprofit is attempting to change that with new mobile showers that will travel across Northern Virginia and D.C.
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Mobile bathroom brings hygiene to people who are homeless in DC area
Taking a hot shower after a rough day is a game changer but for many people without housing they could have long stretches without them. One local nonprofit is attempting to change that with new mobile showers that will travel across Northern Virginia and D.C.
“We talk to individuals who haven’t had showers in five weeks, in two months,” said Sylisa Lambert-Woodard, the president and CEO of Pathway Homes.
The Mobile Outreach Unit is a retrofitted trailer with three full private bathrooms complete with hot showers that people who are homeless can use. One of the bathrooms is fully wheelchair accessible.
“It’s not just the shower,” Lambert-Woodard said. “The shower is the entree. It’s a way of being able to engage individuals. It’s an opportunity for individuals to engage, to research, receive services, and ultimately restore their own hope and dignity through health and hygiene.”
According to Pathway Homes, only two of the 41 homeless shelters in Northern Virginia offer drop-in shower services for people not living in the shelter. Lambert-Woodard estimated that around five in D.C. allow drop-by bathing.
“It’s 18 degrees out here, and people are still trekking over to get a shower, and what individuals are sharing with us is that the shower actually gives them a new sense of hope and renewal,” Lambert-Woodard said.
Miriam’s Kitchen in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of D.C. will be one of the stops for this mobile shower trailer. CEO Scott Schenkelberg told WTOP they offer, meals, clothes, case management to find housing and advocacy work, “But people are always in need of hygiene.”
“Every time we’ve asked guests, what could we do to make your life a little bit better until we find housing for you?” Schenkelberg said. “They always ask for showers and our facility just is not built to be able to provide showers.”
They plan for the Mobile Outreach Unit to be outside Miriam’s Kitchen every other week.
In addition to providing showers, they will provide health and hygiene kits, with band aids, toothbrushes and toothpaste, that people can take with them.
“Can you imagine going for weeks without having a shower, I mean, we all feel I would think very gross afterward,” Schenkelberg said. “But it also is about affirming dignity and building trust. Because when people ask for something, and you repeatedly say ‘no.’ We can’t do that. It’s really hard. It doesn’t help build trust.”
A local nonprofit has built new mobile showers that will travel across Northern Virginia and D.C.
(WTOP/Luke Lukert)
WTOP/Luke Lukert
According to Pathway Homes, only two of the 41 homeless shelters in Northern Virginia offer drop-in shower services for people not living in the shelter.
(WTOP/Luke Lukert)
WTOP/Luke Lukert
The Mobile Outreach Unit is a retrofitted trailer with three full private bathrooms complete with hot showers that people without homes can use.
(WTOP/Luke Lukert)
WTOP/Luke Lukert
They plan for the Mobile Outreach Unit to be outside Miriam’s Kitchen every other week.
(WTOP/Luke Lukert)
WTOP/Luke Lukert
In addition to providing showers, they will provide health and hygiene kits, with band aids, toothbrushes and toothpaste, that people can take with them.
(WTOP/Luke Lukert)
WTOP/Luke Lukert
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On her first day in office, Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness.
The declaration allowed the city to cut through red tape, including through no-bid contracts, and to start Inside Safe, Bass’ signature program focused on moving homeless people off the streets and into interim housing.
On Tuesday, nearly three years after she took the helm, and with homelessness trending down two years in a row for the first time in recent years, the mayor announced that she will lift the state of emergency on Nov. 18.
“We have begun a real shift in our city’s decades-long trend of rising homelessness,” Bass said in a memorandum to the City Council.
Still, the mayor said, there is much work to do.
“The crisis remains, and so does our urgency,” she said.
The mayor’s announcement followed months of City Council pushback on the lengthy duration of the state of emergency, which the council had initially approved.
Some council members argued that the state of emergency allowed the mayor’s office to operate out of public view and that contracts and leases should once again be presented before them with public testimony and a vote.
Councilmember Tim McOsker has been arguing for months that it was time to return to business as usual.
“Emergency powers are designed to allow the government to suspend rules and respond rapidly when the situation demands it, but at some point those powers must conclude,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
McOsker said the move will allow the council to “formalize” some of the programs started during the emergency, while incorporating more transparency.
Council members had been concerned that the state of emergency would end without first codifying Executive Directive 1, which expedites approvals for homeless shelters as well as for developments that are 100% affordable and was issued by Bass shortly after she took office.
On Oct. 28, the council voted for the city attorney to draft an ordinance that would enshrine the executive directive into law.
The mayor’s announcement follows positive reports about the state of homelessness in the city.
As of September, the mayor’s Inside Safe program had moved more than 5,000 people into interim housing since its inception at the end of 2022. Of those people, more than 1,243 have moved into permanent housing, while another 1,636 remained in interim housing.
This year, the number of homeless people living in shelters or on the streets of the city dropped 3.4%, according to the annual count conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The number of unsheltered homeless people in the city dropped by an even steeper margin of 7.9%.
The count, however, has its detractors. A study by Rand found that the annual survey missed nearly a third of homeless people in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — primarily those sleeping without tents or vehicles.
In June, a federal judge decided not to put Los Angeles’ homelessness programs into receivership, while saying that the city had failed to meet some of the terms of a settlement agreement with the nonprofit LA Alliance for Human Rights.
Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, said the end of the emergency does not mean the crisis is over.
“It only means that we must build fiscally sustainable systems that can respond effectively,” she said. “By transitioning from emergency measures to long-term, institutional frameworks, we’re ensuring consistent, accountable support for people experiencing homelessness.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
Amid a surge in homeless people gathering at night on the Newton Green, local and county officials are discussing potential solutions.
Among the first steps likely to be taken are surveys of just who is congregating on the Green and what social services are available to them, according to Newton Town Manager Thomas Russo, who organized an Aug. 27 meeting on the issue.
While the issue is complex in an area with ‘urban versus suburban versus rural concerns,” Russo said, the group hopes “to be a model for the state,” in helping the homeless population.
“The skills and desires are there,” he said in an interview, calling the initial meeting encouraging.
The gathering of about 20 people included representatives from state and Sussex County government as well as social service agencies. Among the topics discussed was a program adopted by the city of Newark, which has faced similar issues.
“It was a good staring point for me and our future endeavors as we face this issue,” Russo said of the nearly two-hour-long, private session. “It is an issue in Newton, but it’s not ‘Newton only.’ Each person who shows up on the Green is an individual story with individual needs.”
As the seat of county government and social services, and with a centrally located park that provides open space, benches and street lighting, Newton has become a place where those with nowhere else to go can gather at night.
Theose without shelter have been attracted to the park for decades. Still, while no definitive count has been taken, the numbers appear to be on the rise recently, officials say, as the homeless see the Green as a place they can find safety in numbers.
“In recent months, officers have responded to an increasing number of quality-of-life concerns involving the population on the County Green,” Newton police wrote in a post in an Aug. 22 Facebook post. “These efforts have led to 45 summonses in June, 66 in July, and 74 as of August 22nd for violations of local and state laws.”“I commend the men and women of the Newton Police Department for their dedication to protecting our community,” Russo added in the same post. “But enforcement alone will never be the full answer. Homelessness is a challenge faced across the country, and it requires both compassion and creativity.
The Green is county property and within the past couple of years, the Sussex County commissioners have tried to address the issue.
The county last year tore down the gazebo which stood on the Park Place side of the rectangular park. The official reason given was that the structure had fallen into disrepair, but the gazebo had also become a spot for drug use and a sleeping space. At least one “sexual offense” has also been recorded there, police reported last year.
The county also established an 11 p.m. curfew for the area, giving Newton police a reason to clear the park as midnight approached. When that did not eliminate the issue of people sleeping in the Green, town officers began writing citations for trespass to those found violating the curfew.
“It was an effort to get them to move from A to B,” Russo said in the interview. “The problem was they only came back to A.”
A municipal judge has a choice on how to handle the violations — either through a fine or jail time. Being indigent, few of those cited have paid the fine. The Sussex County jail, meanwhile, stopped housing prisoners in November 2019, when the county signed a contract to send its inmates to the Morris County Correctional Facility in Morristown.
Sussex Sheriff Michael Strada, who was not invited to the Newton session, said anyone sentenced to jail in Newton would have to be sent to the Morris County lockup. “We pay [Morris County] for that right, and then there is a per-day fee as well,” Strada said.
Despite the slim chances of a fine being paid, officers are still writing three to four summons a day, according to Russo. “It hasn’t made a difference at a hundred a month,” he said.
The latest meeting was called, he added, “to find out what resources I have” to work with as well as to gather the support needed.
He said Jessica Caldwell, Newton’s town planner, will examine state and nationwide programs dealing with the homeless.
Also at the meeting was Barry Dreger, an aquaintance of Russo’s who is working with Newark on its own homeless issues. He will look at the overall homeless population in Sussex and surrounding areas as well as what services are available.
Russo said he wants to involve not only government agencies at all levels, but private and not-for-profit service providers and smaller-scale programs such as those run by local churches.
“This is going to be a long-term commitment,” the manager said. While the current issue may involve only a dozen or so homeless people at night, it “could grow to 30 next year and 50 the year after,” he said. “We can’t have that on the Green nor on Spring Street. Why has it become Newton’s responsibility?”
A historic marker telling the history of the Newton Green is seen in this July 2024 file photo. Local and county officials met to discuss how to help homeless people sleeping overnight in the park.
At least one piece of help came immediately at the meeting, Russo said. County officials agreed to use some of the money they have received through a national settlement tied to the opioid crisis.
At the commissioners’ Aug. 20 meeting, the board noted that Sussex County has received $350,000 as its share of a lawsuit settled between New Jersey municipalities and companies that manufactured opioids. The suit alleged the companies’ deliberate efforts to downplay the addictive nature of the drugs.
New Jersey affordable housing programs may also have some funding available for homeless services, Russo said.
He said the group has scheduled a second meeting for Sept. 8.
A pickleball game in this leafy Oregon community was suddenly interrupted one rainy weekend morning by the arrival of an ambulance. Paramedics rushed through the park toward a tent, one of dozens illegally erected by the town’s hundreds of homeless people, then play resumed as though nothing had happened.Mere feet away, volunteers helped dismantle tents to move an 80-year-old man and a woman blind in one eye, who risked being fined for staying too long. In the distance, a group of boys climbed on a jungle gym.Video above: City forcing deadline on unhoused population to remove belongingsThe scenes were emblematic of the crisis gripping the small, Oregon mountain town of Grants Pass, where a fierce fight over park space has become a battleground for a much larger, national debate on homelessness that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The town’s case, set to be heard April 22, has broad implications for how not only Grants Pass, but communities nationwide address homelessness, including whether they can fine or jail people for camping in public. It has made the town of 40,000 the unlikely face of the nation’s homelessness crisis, and further fueled the debate over how to deal with it.”I certainly wish this wasn’t what my town was known for,” Mayor Sara Bristol told The Associated Press last month. “It’s not the reason why I became mayor. And yet it has dominated every single thing that I’ve done for the last three-and-a-half years.”Officials across the political spectrum — from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in California, which has nearly 30% of the nation’s homeless population, to a group of 22 conservative-led states — have filed briefs in the case, saying lower court rulings have hamstrung their ability to deal with encampments.Like many Western communities, Grants Pass has struggled for years with a burgeoning homeless population. A decade ago, City Council members discussed how to make it “uncomfortable enough … in our city so they will want to move on down the road.” From 2013 to 2018, the city said it issued 500 citations for camping or sleeping in public, including in vehicles, with fines that could reach hundreds of dollars.But a 2018 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals changed the calculus. The court, whose jurisdiction includes nine Western states, held that while communities are allowed to prohibit tents in public spaces, it violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment to give people criminal citations for sleeping outside when they had no place else to go.Four years later, in a case challenging restrictions in Grants Pass, the court expanded that ruling, holding that civil citations also can be unconstitutional.Civil rights groups and attorneys for the homeless residents who challenged the restrictions in 2018 insist people shouldn’t be punished for lacking housing. Officials throughout the West have overstated the impact of the court decisions to distract from their own failings, they argued.”For years, political leaders have chosen to tolerate encampments as an alternative to meaningfully addressing the western region’s severe housing shortage,” the attorneys wrote. “It is easier to blame the courts than to take responsibility for finding a solution.”In Grants Pass, the town’s parks, many lining the picturesque Rogue River, are at the heart of the debate. Cherished for their open spaces, picnic tables, playgrounds and sports fields, they host everything from annual boat-racing festivals and vintage car shows to Easter egg hunts and summer concerts.They’re also the sites of encampments blighted by illegal drug use and crime, including a shooting at a park last year that left one person dead. Tents cluster along riverbanks, next to tennis courts and jungle gyms, with tarps shielding belongings from the rain. When the sun comes out, clothes and blankets are strung across tree branches to dry. Used needles litter the ground.Grants Pass has just one overnight shelter for adults, the Gospel Rescue Mission. It has 138 beds, but rules including attendance at daily Christian services, no alcohol, drugs or smoking and no pets mean many won’t stay there. Cassy Leach, a nurse, leads a volunteer group providing food, medical care and other basic goods to the town’s hundreds of homeless people. They help relocate their tents to comply with city rules.At one park last month, she checked on a man who burned his leg after falling on a torch lighter during a fentanyl overdose and brought him naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal medication. In another, she distributed cans of beans, peas and Chef Boyardee mini ravioli from a pickup truck.”Love, hope, community and a safety net is really as important as a shower and water,” Leach said. Dre Buetow, 48, from northern California, has been living in his car for three years after a bone cancer diagnosis and $450,000 in medical bills. The illness and treatment kept him from returning to his old tree-trimming job, he said.Laura Gutowski’s husband died from a pulmonary embolism and she suddenly found herself, in her 50s, with no income. They didn’t have life insurance or savings and, within a month, she was sleeping outside in the city she grew up in.”I used to love camping,” she said through tears. “And now I can’t stand it anymore.”Volunteers like Leach came to her rescue. “They’re angels,” she said. But some residents want to limit aid because of the trash left behind after encampment moves or food handouts. The City Council proposed requiring outreach groups to register with the city. The mayor vetoed it, laying bare the discord gripping Grants Pass.Before the council attempted, unsuccessfully, to override the veto last month, a self-proclaimed “park watch” group rallied outside City Hall with signs reading, “Parks are for kids.” Drivers in passing cars honked their support.The group regularly posts images of trash, tents and homeless people on social media. On Sundays, they set up camp chairs in what they say is a bid to reclaim park space.Brock Spurgeon says he used to take his grandkids to parks that were so full it was hard to find an available picnic table. Now, open drug use and discarded needles have scared families away, he said.”That was taken away from us when the campers started using the parks,” he said.Still, Spurgeon said his own brother died while homeless in a nearby city, and his son is living in the parks as he struggles with addiction. Once, he said, he realized with shock that the homeless person covered with blankets that he stepped past to enter a grocery store was his son.”I miss my son every night, and I hold my breath that he won’t OD in the park,” Spurgeon said. Mayor Bristol and advocates have sought to open a shelter with fewer rules, or a designated area for homeless people to camp. But charged debates emerged over where that would be and who would pay for it.While support for a designated campground appears to be growing, the problem remains: Many homeless people in Grants Pass have nowhere else to live. And some advocates fear a return of strict anti-camping enforcement will push people to the forest outside town, farther from help.Even if the Supreme Court overturns the 9th Circuit’s decisions, Bristol said, “we still have 200 people who have to go somewhere.” “We have to accept that homelessness is a reality in America,” she said.
GRANTS PASS, Oregon —
A pickleball game in this leafy Oregon community was suddenly interrupted one rainy weekend morning by the arrival of an ambulance. Paramedics rushed through the park toward a tent, one of dozens illegally erected by the town’s hundreds of homeless people, then play resumed as though nothing had happened.
Mere feet away, volunteers helped dismantle tents to move an 80-year-old man and a woman blind in one eye, who risked being fined for staying too long. In the distance, a group of boys climbed on a jungle gym.
Video above: City forcing deadline on unhoused population to remove belongings
The scenes were emblematic of the crisis gripping the small, Oregon mountain town of Grants Pass, where a fierce fight over park space has become a battleground for a much larger, national debate on homelessness that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
The town’s case, set to be heard April 22, has broad implications for how not only Grants Pass, but communities nationwide address homelessness, including whether they can fine or jail people for camping in public. It has made the town of 40,000 the unlikely face of the nation’s homelessness crisis, and further fueled the debate over how to deal with it.
“I certainly wish this wasn’t what my town was known for,” Mayor Sara Bristol told The Associated Press last month. “It’s not the reason why I became mayor. And yet it has dominated every single thing that I’ve done for the last three-and-a-half years.”
Officials across the political spectrum — from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in California, which has nearly 30% of the nation’s homeless population, to a group of 22 conservative-led states — have filed briefs in the case, saying lower court rulings have hamstrung their ability to deal with encampments.
Like many Western communities, Grants Pass has struggled for years with a burgeoning homeless population. A decade ago, City Council members discussed how to make it “uncomfortable enough … in our city so they will want to move on down the road.” From 2013 to 2018, the city said it issued 500 citations for camping or sleeping in public, including in vehicles, with fines that could reach hundreds of dollars.
But a 2018 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals changed the calculus. The court, whose jurisdiction includes nine Western states, held that while communities are allowed to prohibit tents in public spaces, it violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment to give people criminal citations for sleeping outside when they had no place else to go.
Four years later, in a case challenging restrictions in Grants Pass, the court expanded that ruling, holding that civil citations also can be unconstitutional.
Civil rights groups and attorneys for the homeless residents who challenged the restrictions in 2018 insist people shouldn’t be punished for lacking housing. Officials throughout the West have overstated the impact of the court decisions to distract from their own failings, they argued.
“For years, political leaders have chosen to tolerate encampments as an alternative to meaningfully addressing the western region’s severe housing shortage,” the attorneys wrote. “It is easier to blame the courts than to take responsibility for finding a solution.”
In Grants Pass, the town’s parks, many lining the picturesque Rogue River, are at the heart of the debate. Cherished for their open spaces, picnic tables, playgrounds and sports fields, they host everything from annual boat-racing festivals and vintage car shows to Easter egg hunts and summer concerts.
They’re also the sites of encampments blighted by illegal drug use and crime, including a shooting at a park last year that left one person dead. Tents cluster along riverbanks, next to tennis courts and jungle gyms, with tarps shielding belongings from the rain. When the sun comes out, clothes and blankets are strung across tree branches to dry. Used needles litter the ground.
Grants Pass has just one overnight shelter for adults, the Gospel Rescue Mission. It has 138 beds, but rules including attendance at daily Christian services, no alcohol, drugs or smoking and no pets mean many won’t stay there.
Cassy Leach, a nurse, leads a volunteer group providing food, medical care and other basic goods to the town’s hundreds of homeless people. They help relocate their tents to comply with city rules.
At one park last month, she checked on a man who burned his leg after falling on a torch lighter during a fentanyl overdose and brought him naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal medication. In another, she distributed cans of beans, peas and Chef Boyardee mini ravioli from a pickup truck.
“Love, hope, community and a safety net is really as important as a shower and water,” Leach said.
Dre Buetow, 48, from northern California, has been living in his car for three years after a bone cancer diagnosis and $450,000 in medical bills. The illness and treatment kept him from returning to his old tree-trimming job, he said.
Laura Gutowski’s husband died from a pulmonary embolism and she suddenly found herself, in her 50s, with no income. They didn’t have life insurance or savings and, within a month, she was sleeping outside in the city she grew up in.
“I used to love camping,” she said through tears. “And now I can’t stand it anymore.”
Volunteers like Leach came to her rescue. “They’re angels,” she said.
But some residents want to limit aid because of the trash left behind after encampment moves or food handouts. The City Council proposed requiring outreach groups to register with the city. The mayor vetoed it, laying bare the discord gripping Grants Pass.
Before the council attempted, unsuccessfully, to override the veto last month, a self-proclaimed “park watch” group rallied outside City Hall with signs reading, “Parks are for kids.” Drivers in passing cars honked their support.
The group regularly posts images of trash, tents and homeless people on social media. On Sundays, they set up camp chairs in what they say is a bid to reclaim park space.
Brock Spurgeon says he used to take his grandkids to parks that were so full it was hard to find an available picnic table. Now, open drug use and discarded needles have scared families away, he said.
“That was taken away from us when the campers started using the parks,” he said.
Still, Spurgeon said his own brother died while homeless in a nearby city, and his son is living in the parks as he struggles with addiction. Once, he said, he realized with shock that the homeless person covered with blankets that he stepped past to enter a grocery store was his son.
“I miss my son every night, and I hold my breath that he won’t OD in the park,” Spurgeon said.
Mayor Bristol and advocates have sought to open a shelter with fewer rules, or a designated area for homeless people to camp. But charged debates emerged over where that would be and who would pay for it.
While support for a designated campground appears to be growing, the problem remains: Many homeless people in Grants Pass have nowhere else to live. And some advocates fear a return of strict anti-camping enforcement will push people to the forest outside town, farther from help.
Even if the Supreme Court overturns the 9th Circuit’s decisions, Bristol said, “we still have 200 people who have to go somewhere.”
“We have to accept that homelessness is a reality in America,” she said.
LOS ANGELES, CA – Today, the TransLatin@ Coalition commemorated a significant milestone as it marked the launch of its 15th Anniversary Campaign during a press conference held in Los Angeles. The event also served as a platform to unveil the organization’s 2023 Annual Report, shedding light on its journey, accomplishments, and ongoing commitments.
Led by Bamby Salcedo, President and CEO of the TransLatin@ Coalition, the press conference highlighted the perilous situations faced by transgender and Latinx individuals in their home countries, where they often confront insurmountable violence.
Salcedo emphasized the harsh reality that many flee to cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco seeking asylum, only to encounter further violence and danger, often leading to deportation and, tragically, sending them back to potential harm or death.
A poignant moment of the event was the unveiling of a new logo commemorating the organization’s 15th anniversary, aptly dubbed their “quinceañera.” This symbolizes not only a milestone but also a renewed commitment to advocacy and support for the TransLatin@ community.
In a groundbreaking announcement, Salcedo revealed plans for a $35 million state of the art multiservice and multipurpose space aimed at providing a safe and secure space for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals. With $20 million already secured, this initiative underscores the organization’s dedication to addressing the pressing needs of the community.
The TransLatin@ Coalition, founded in 2009 by a group of transgender and gender nonconforming immigrant women in Los Angeles, has evolved into a nationally recognized organization with a presence in 10 states across the U.S. It offers direct services to transgender, gender nonconforming, and intersex individuals in Los Angeles, with a focus on empowering and improving the quality of life for its members.
Since its inception, the organization has achieved numerous milestones, including the establishment of the Center for Violence Prevention and Transgender Wellness in 2015, the opening of the first-ever TransLatin@ office in 2016, and the launch of the #TransPolicyAgenda in 2019.
The TransLatin@ Coalition’s advocacy efforts have also extended to legislative triumphs, such as the passage of AB2218 in 2020, which allocates grant funding for transgender wellness and equity programs, and supporting bills like AB1163 and AB 1487, aimed at advancing transgender rights.
With the recent expansion to include the El Monte site and the opening of a new building on Sunset, the TransLatin@ Coalition continues to broaden its reach and impact, reaffirming its commitment to serving the community and creating inclusive spaces where history is made and celebrated.
“Beautiful and amazing people, who are trans, gender non-conforming, or intersex, please know that you are beautiful and amazing and that you are valued. Do not feel alone. There is a whole movement that is fighting for you. Continue to assert your presence within the tapestry of our society. We love you, we see you, we thank you,” Salcedo told the Blade.
As the organization looks ahead to the next 15 years and beyond, its mission to advocate for the specific needs of the TransLatin@ community remains steadfast, guided by values of altruism, respect, transparency, and collaboration.
The millions of people who crowd into New York City’s busiest subway stations every day have recently encountered a sight reminiscent of a frightening, bygone era: National Guard troops with long guns patrolling platforms and checking bags.
After 9/11 and at moments of high alert in the years since, New York deployed soldiers in the subway to deter would-be terrorists and reassure the public that the transit system was safe from attack. The National Guard is now there for a different reason. Earlier this week, Governor Kathy Hochul sent 1,000 state police officers and National Guard troops into the city’s underground labyrinth not to scour for bombs but to combat far more ordinary crime—a recent spate of assaults, thefts, and stabbings, including against transit workers.
The order, which Hochul issued independently of the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, prompted immediate criticism. Progressives accused her of militarizing the subways and validating Republican exaggerations about a spike in crime, potentially making people even more fearful of using public transit. Law-enforcement advocates, a group that typically supports a robust show of force, didn’t like the idea either.
“I would describe it as the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage,” William Bratton, who led the police departments of New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, told me. “It will actually do nothing to stop the flow of blood, because it’s not going to the source of where the blood is coming from.”
Bratton’s success in reducing subway crime as the chief of New York City’s transit police in the early 1990s led then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to appoint him as NYPD commissioner. He returned to the post under a much different mayor, Democrat Bill de Blasio, nearly two decades later. During a 40-minute phone interview yesterday, Bratton acknowledged that many New Yorkers perceive subway crime to be more pervasive than it really is; rates of violent crime in New York City (and many other urban centers) have come down since the early months of pandemic and are much lower than they were in 1990, when he took over the transit police.
Bratton is most famous—and, in the minds of many, notorious—as a practitioner of the “broken windows” theory of policing, which calls for aggressive enforcement of minor crime as a precondition for tackling more serious offenses. The idea has been widely criticized for being racially discriminatory and contributing to mass incarceration. But Bratton remains a strong proponent.
He blamed the fact that crime remains unacceptably high for many people—and for politicians in an election year—on a culture of leniency brought on by well-intentioned criminal-justice reformers. Changes to the bail system that were enacted in 2019—some of which have been scaled back—have made it harder to keep convicted criminals off the streets, Bratton said, while city leaders are more reluctant to forcibly remove homeless people who resist intervention due to mental illness. Bratton said that police officers are less likely to arrest people for fare evasion, which leads to more serious infractions. “We are not punishing people for inappropriate behavior,” Bratton said.
The subways need more police officers, Bratton said, and Adams had already announced a deployment of an additional 1,000 last month. But an influx of National Guard troops won’t be as effective, he argued. They can’t arrest people, and the items they are looking for in bags—explosive devices and guns, mainly—aren’t the source of most subway crime. The highest-profile incidents have involved small knives or assailants who pushed people onto the subway tracks. “What are the bag checks actually going to accomplish?” he asked. “The deterrence really is not there.”
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Russell Berman: What did you think of the governor’s decision to send the National Guard and the state police into the subways?
William Bratton: I would describe it basically as a public-relations initiative that is the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage. It will actually do nothing to stop the flow of blood, because it’s not going to the source of where the blood is coming from.
The problem with crime in the subways, as with crime in the streets, is the idea that we are not punishing people for inappropriate behavior, whether it’s as simple as a fare evasion or something more significant—assaults and robberies and, in some instances, murders.
The presence of the National Guard in the subway system is not needed, not necessary; nor are, for that matter, state troopers. The NYPD and the MTA are fully capable of policing the subways and the train systems.
Berman: This is going to remind people of what New York was like in the months and years after 9/11, when you routinely saw National Guard troops doing bag checks in busy stations. Was it more effective to do that then, because people were worried about what was in those bags? Now they are more worried about other things.
Bratton: That was appropriate then. People understood that what the National Guard was looking for in that era were bombs. So the bag checks made sense. It wasn’t so much the level of crime in the subways. What they were fearful of was terrorists, so the use of the National Guard for that purpose was appropriate at that time.
What is the problem in terms of crime in the subway? It is the actions of the mentally ill, who have been involved in assaults and shoving people onto the tracks. It is the actions of a relatively small number of repeat criminals. And what are the bag checks actually going to accomplish? If you are carrying a gun, if you’re carrying a knife, you walk downstairs and see a bag check, you’re going to walk back up the stairs and down the block and go in another entrance and go right on through. So the deterrence is really not there.
Berman: Did those bag checks back then after 9/11 ever find anything significant, or was it mostly for making people feel like someone was watching?
Bratton: I’m not aware that anything was ever detected. Might something have been deterred? Possibly somebody who was coming into the subway with a device and decides, Well, I’m not going to do it after all. But I can’t say with any certainty or knowledge.
Berman: Governor Hochul is also proposing a bill that would allow judges to ban anyone from the public-transit system who has been convicted of assault within the system. What do you make of that?
Bratton: It would be difficult to enforce. They’d be banned from the system, but if they’re on the system behaving themselves, who’s going to know?
Berman: Earlier you mentioned that law enforcement should be punishing fare evasion more than they do. When people hear that, they might think of the “broken windows” theory of policing. These people aren’t necessarily violent; they’re just jumping the gate. Is your argument that you’re trying to address higher-level crime by prosecuting lower-level crime?
Bratton: “Broken windows” is correcting the behavior when it’s at a minor stage before it becomes more serious. Somebody who’s not paying their fare might be coming into the subway system with some type of weapon. Oftentimes they’re coming into the system to commit a crime—or, if they encounter a situation in the subway, out comes a box cutter, out comes the knife, out comes the gun. The situation escalates.
LOS ANGELES — A family of five adults and 13 children, including several toddlers, who had been living on the streets of Los Angeles since September have a safe place to stay as a local nonprofit works to find them housing.
The family members, who are from Honduras, lived in a small tent near MacArthur Park in Westlake. They fled the country due to violence five years ago, and ended up in Austin, Texas, but came to L.A. after losing their housing due to issues with their work permits.
“One hundred times better here, to be honest,” said Ana Madrid . “Here we have the opportunity to be better to get a permit and work.”
For months, the husband and wife and their two children had been on the streets along with three adult cousins, and 11 other children, including an 8-month-old baby.
Madrid said the sidewalk is where they spent Christmas, New Year’s Eve and days in the rain.
“To use the restroom, if we didn’t have money, we couldn’t use it, and we had to beg people to let us use it,” said Madrid. “It’s a very sad situation.”
Her husband, Jorge Luis Garcia, said his children hadn’t been able to go to school because other children have attacked him outside.
Madrid said the family had spoken with Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, but because the family is so large, it was difficult placing them somewhere.
However, good news came Thursday afternoon.
The Dream Center said it became aware of the family’s situation and said it would be able to place them in a shelter.
“Thank God this will now pass,” said Madrid.
The tent on Alvardo Street was taken down Friday as the family was relocated.
The Dream Center, a resource center focused on providing support to those affected by homelessness, is helping the family with housing, daycare, jobs and immigration paperwork.
“The Dream Center has always tried to react swiftly to provide solutions in every situation especially where children live on the streets,” the organization said in a statement. “It’s always a joyful moment when you can provide a safe place for families to take a deep breath from life’s struggles and to help them rebuild.”
Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez also issued a statement saying, “Our office was informed of this family on Wednesday and immediately made contact to assess the situation and conduct an intake. We are actively working with the family, and a network of partner agencies, to urgently secure resources and housing for them.”
Garcia was very excited when ABC7 informed him of the development. He said he wanted to thank everyone that has helped his family, adding that he just wants a better place for his children.
“What I want is for them is to be good, to be someone, to study, have a better life and be in a better situation,” he said.
San Mateo County officials are hoping to add an unusual tactic to their multi-pronged approach to tackling the homelessness crisis: making it a crime to refuse to accept available, temporary housing.
In a unanimous vote this week, county supervisors moved forward with the proposal — despite significant opposition from civil rights groups and some homeless advocates — which would allow authorities to issue a misdemeanor violation to anyone living in a homeless encampment who refuses to move into available, temporary housing after a health evaluation and at least two warnings.
“One of the toughest challenges we face is addressing and assisting those in encampments who tend to decline services or refuse services,” Supervisor Dave Pine said at Tuesday’s board meeting. “The hope is it will be a tool to help move individuals into shelter.”
Opponents worry it will criminalize homelessness.
But Pine, along with board President Warren Slocum, co-sponsor of the ordinance, said the measure is the latest in a host of comprehensive solutions — including a street medicine team and the conversion of hotels to temporary housing — aimed at reducing homelessness in San Mateo County.
“Forty homeless people die in San Mateo county every year. … That’s just not acceptable,” Slocum said. This proposal “isn’t about criminalizing people, it’s about helping those who really may not be able to help themselves. … We really do have the capacity to house people and get people the help they need.”
Officials said the county has up to 30 unused shelter beds available every night, though that falls short of the estimated 44 people living in homeless encampments across unincorporated San Mateo County. Many more encampments are located in the county’s 20 cities, including Daly City and Redwood City, but this ordinance would apply only in unincorporated areas.
After San Mateo made investments to respond to the homelessness crisis in the last two years, the number of people on the streets significantly dipped, with more accessing shelter facilities, according to County Executive Officer Mike Callagy.
“We’re down now to the hard-to-reach population, the population that doesn’t want to come in,” Callagy said.
If the proposal reaches final approval next week, someone in an encampment who refuses an offer for an available bed will have 72 hours to change their mind, receiving two written warnings. After that, authorities could issue a misdemeanor citation, which Callagy said would be handled through diversion programs, like mental health court.
But no one would be cited if county officials don’t have a bed available, Callagy said. He stressed that the goal is not to issue tickets or route people into the criminal justice system but to get services and housing to those in need.
“We believe that once offered those options, most people will avail themselves to the services,” Callagy said. He hopes the citations are rarely issued but are used as a deterrent.
“At the end of the day, it’s about saving lives,” said David Canepa, another county supervisor. “I don’t buy into the narrative that we should do nothing.”
County officials touting the proposal said it was based on a Houston ordinance, adopted in 2017, that made homeless encampments on public property illegal and tried to funnel people into temporary housing. While the program has been highlighted for its success at removing encampments and helping people get off the streets, the Houston Chronicle found that tickets and arrests for violating the provision — given only after a warning and an offer of housing — continue to increase.
In Los Angeles, city officials have been making efforts to address growing encampments by encouraging people to accept temporary shelter and enforcing laws that forbid blocking sidewalks or other specific places.
In San Mateo County, the proposed ordinance has drawn critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, religious leaders and the San Mateo County Private Defender Program, which represents indigent defendants. Critics say they worry about the unintended consequences of such a law.
“Policing is no way to get people into treatment,” said William Freeman, senior council of ACLU of Northern California, decrying the “seriously flawed ordinance.”
While he praised the county for its recent work on homelessness, he said that “anti-camping ordinances invite over-policing and abuse.”
Lauren P. McCombs, an Episcopal deacon and a leader for Faith in Action Bay Area, called the criminalization of homelessness “inhumane treatment of our unhoused neighbors.”
“Our county needs to solve this crisis by ensuring safe and affordable housing options that are available to all residents, with strong incentives and not threats of incarceration,” McCombs said.
County officials on Tuesday took into account some concerns from the public, amending the ordinance to include a health evaluation before warnings are issued and a review process scheduled to launch after a few months.
Supervisor Noelia Corzo said her half-brother is homeless in San Mateo County, so she knows first-hand how complex the issue is. She said she is proud of the county for “doing something different.”
“I don’t take this lightly,” she said, “but not doing anything is not working either.”
You can sense it in the ubiquitous “Help Wanted” posters in artsy shops and restaurants, in the ranks of university students living out of their cars and in the outsize percentage of locals camping on the streets.
This seaside county known for its windswept beauty and easy living is in the midst of one of the most serious housing crises anywhere in home-starved California. Santa Cruz County, home to a beloved surf break and a bohemian University of California campus, also claims the state’s highest rate of homelessness and, by one measure based on local incomes, its least affordable housing.
Leaders in the city of Santa Cruz have responded to this hardship in a land of plenty — and to new state laws demanding construction of more affordable housing — with a plan to build up rather than out.
Many Santa Cruz business owners back the city’s plan for high-rise development, saying the city needs more affordable housing for servers and retail workers.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A downtown long centered on quaint sycamore-lined Pacific Avenue has boomed with new construction in recent years. Shining glass and metal apartment complexes sprout in multiple locations, across a streetscape once dominated by 20th century classics like the Art Deco-inspired Palomar Inn apartments.
And the City Council and planning department envision building even bigger and higher, with high-rise apartments of up to 12 stories in the southern section of downtown that comes closest to the city’s boardwalk and the landmark wooden roller coaster known as the Giant Dipper.
“It’s on everybody’s lips now, this talk about our housing challenge,” said Don Lane, a former mayor and an activist for homeless people. “The old resistance to development is breaking down, at least among a lot of people.”
In recent years, Santa Cruz has approved development of modern multistory housing complexes, part of a broader effort to add housing stock.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Said current Mayor Fred Keeley, a former state assemblyman: “It’s not a question of ‘no growth’ anymore. It’s a question of where are you going to do this. You can spread it all over the city, or you can make the urban core more dense.”
But not everyone in famously tolerant Santa Cruz is going along. The high-rise push has spawned a backlash, exposing sharp divisions over growth and underscoring the complexities, even in a city known for its progressive politics, of trying to keep desirable communities affordable for the teachers, waiters, firefighters and store clerks who provide the bulk of services.
A group originally called Stop the Skyscrapers — now Housing for People — protests that a proposed city “housing element” needlessly clears the way for more apartments than state housing officials demand, while providing too few truly affordable units.
City officials say the plan they hope to finalize in the coming weeks, with its greater height limits, only creates a path for new construction. The intentions of individual property owners and the vicissitudes of the market will continue to make it challenging to build the 3,736 additional units the state has mandated for the city.
“We’ve talked to a lot of people, going door to door, and the feeling is it’s just too much, too fast,” said Frank Barron, a retired county planner and Housing for People co-founder. “The six- and seven-story buildings that they’re building now are already freaking people out. When they hear what [the city is] proposing now could go twice as high, they’re completely aghast.”
Frank Barron is among the activists who say the City Council’s development plans are out of character for the laid-back beach town.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Susan Monheit, a former state water official and another Housing for People co-founder, calls 12-story buildings “completely out of the human scale,” adding: “It’s out of scale with Santa Cruz’s branding.”
Housing for People has gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the March 2024 ballot that, if approved, would require a vote of the people for development anywhere in the city that would exceed the zoning restrictions codified in the current general plan, which include a cap of roughly seven or eight stories downtown.
The activists say that they are trying to restore the voices of everyday Santa Cruzans and that city leaders are giving in to out-of-town builders and “developer overreach laws.”
The nascent campaign has generated spirited debate. Opponents contend the slow-growth measure would slam on the brakes, just as the city is overcoming decades of construction inertia. They say Santa Cruz should be a proud outlier in a long string of wealthy coastal cities that have defied the state’s push to add housing and bring down exorbitant home prices and rental costs.
Diana Alfaro, who works for a Santa Cruz development company, said many of the complaints about high-rise construction sound like veiled NIMBYism.
“We always hear, ‘I support affordable housing, but just not next to me. Not here. Not there. Not really anywhere,’ ” said Alfaro, an activist with the national political group YIMBY [Yes In My Back Yard] Action. “Is that really being inclusive?”
Zav Hershfield, a renters’ rights activist, advocates rent control caps and housing developments owned by the state or cooperatives.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The dispute has divided Santa Cruz’s progressive political universe. What does it mean to be a “good liberal” on land-use issues in an era when UC Santa Cruz students commonly triple up in small rooms and Zillow reports a median rent of $3,425 that is higher than San Francisco’s?
Beginning in the 1970s, left-leaning students at the new UC campus helped power a slow-growth movement that limited construction across broad swaths of Santa Cruz County. Over the decades, the need for affordable housing was a recurring discussion. The county was a leader in requiring that builders who put up five units of housing or more set aside 15% of the units at below-market rates.
But Mayor Keeley said local officials gave only a “head nod” to the issue when it came to approving specific projects. “Well, here we are, 30 or 40 years later,” Keeley said, “and these communities are not affordable.”
Santa Cruz County, known for its windswept beauty and easy living, is in the midst of one of the most serious housing crises anywhere in California.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Today, with 265,000 residents, the county is substantially wealthy and white.
An annual survey this year found Santa Cruz County pushed past San Francisco to be the least affordable rental market in the country, given income levels in both places. And many observers say UC Santa Cruz students contend with the toughest housing market of any college town in the state.
State legislators have crafted dozens of laws in recent years to encourage construction of more homes, particularly apartments, across the state. While California has long required local governments to draft “housing elements” to demonstrate their commitment to affordable housing, state officials only recently passed other measures to actually push cities to put the plans into practice.
Under the new regulations, regional government associations draw up a Regional Housing Needs Assessment, designating how many housing units — including affordable ones — should be built during an eight-year cycle. The state Department of Housing and Community Development can reject plans it deems inadequate.
For years 2024 to 2031, Santa Cruz was told it should build at least 3,736 units, on top of its existing 24,036.
For decades, Santa Cruz culture has centered on quaint shops and restaurants along sycamore-lined Pacific Avenue.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Santa Cruz and other cities have been motivated, at least in part, by a heavy “stick”: In cases when cities fail to produce adequate housing plans, the state’s so-called “builder’s remedy” essentially allows developers to propose building whatever they want, provided some of the housing is set aside for low- or middle-income families. In cities like Santa Monica and La Cañada-Flintridge, builders have invoked the builder’s remedy to push ahead with large housing projects, over the objections of city leaders.
The Santa Cruz City Council resolved to avoid losing control of planning decisions. A key part of their plan envisions putting up to 1,800 units in a sleepy downtown neighborhood of automobile businesses, shops and low-rise apartments south of Laurel Street. Initial concepts suggested one block could go as high as 175 feet (roughly 16 stories), but council members later proposed a 12-story height limit, substantially taller than the stately eight-story Palomar, which remains the city’s tallest building.
City planners say focusing growth in the downtown neighborhood makes sense, because bus lines converge there at a transit center and residents can walk to shops and services.
“The demand for housing is not going away,” said Lee Butler, the city’s director of planning and community development, “and this means we will have less development pressure in other areas of the city and county, where it is less sustainable to grow.”
Santa Cruz planning director Lee Butler advocates concentrating new development downtown, rather than building in areas where growth is less sustainable.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A public survey found support for a variety of other proposed improvements to make the downtown more attractive to walkers, bikers and tourists. Among other features, the plan would concentrate new restaurants and shops around the San Lorenzo River Walk; replace the fabric-topped 2,400-seat Kaiser Permanente Arena, which hosts the Santa Cruz Warriors (the G-league affiliate of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors), with a bigger entertainment and sports venue; and better connect downtown with the beach and boardwalk.
Business owners say they favor the housing plan for a couple of reasons: They hope new residents will bring new commerce, and they want some of the affordable apartments to go to their workers, who frequently commute well over an hour from places such as Gilroy and Salinas.
Restaurateur Zach Davis called the high cost of housing “the No. 1 factor” that led to the 2018 closure of Assembly, a popular farm-to-table restaurant he co-owned.
“How do we keep our community intact, if the people who make it all happen, the workers who make Santa Cruz what it is, can’t afford to live here anymore?” Davis asked.
One opponent calls the plan to add high-rises to the city’s picturesque downtown “out of scale with Santa Cruz’s branding.”
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s plan indicates that 859 of the units built over the next eight years will be for “very low income” families. But the term is relative, tied to a community’s median income, which in Santa Cruz is $132,800 for a family of four. Families bringing home between $58,000 and $82,000 would qualify as very low income. Tenants in that bracket would pay $1,800 a month for a three-bedroom apartment in one recently completed complex, built under the city’s requirement that 20% of units be rented for below-market rents.
The people pushing for high-rise development say expanding the housing supply will stem ever-rising rents. Opponents counter that the continued growth of UC Santa Cruz, which hopes to add 8,500 students by 2040, and a new surge of highly paid Silicon Valley “tech bros” looking to put down roots in beachy Santa Cruz would quickly gobble up whatever number of new units are built.
“They say that if you just build more housing, the prices will come down. Which is, of course, not true,” said Gary Patton, a former county supervisor and an original leader in the slow-growth movement. “So we’ll have lots more housing, with lots more traffic, less parking, more neighborhood impacts and more rich people moving into Santa Cruz.”
Leaders on Santa Cruz’s political left say new construction only touches one aspect of the housing crisis. Some of the leaders of Tenant Sanctuary, a renters’ rights group, would like to see Santa Cruz tamp down rents by creating complexes owned by the state or cooperatives and enacting a rent control law capping annual increases.
“No matter what they build, we need housing where the price is not tied to market swings and how much money can be squeezed out of a given area of land,” said Zav Hershfield, a board member for the group.
The up-zoning of downtown parcels has won the support of much of the city’s establishment, including the county Chamber of Commerce, whose chief executive said exorbitant housing prices are excluding blue-collar workers and even some well-paid professionals. “The question is, do you want a lively, vital, economically thriving community?” said Casey Beyer, CEO of the business group. “Or do you want to be a sleepy retirement community?”
The town clock is one of several landmarks in the beach town.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Just days after the anti-high-rise measure qualified for the March ballot, the two sides began bickering over what impact it would have.
Lane, the former mayor, and two affordable housing developers wrote an op-ed for the Lookout Santa Cruz news site that said the ballot measure is crafted so broadly it would apply to all “development projects.” They contend that could trigger the need for citywide votes for projects as modest as raising a fence from 6 feet to 7 feet, adding an ADU to a residential property or building a shelter for the homeless, if the projects exceed current practices in a given neighborhood.
The authors accused ballot measure proponents of faux environmentalism. “If we don’t go up,” they wrote, “we have less housing near jobs — and more people driving longer distances to get to work.”
The ballot measure proponents countered that their critics were misrepresenting facts. They said the measure would not necessitate voter approval for mundane improvements and would come into play in relatively few circumstances, for projects that require amendments to the city’s General Plan.
While not staking out a formal position on the ballot measure, the city’s planning staff has concluded the measure could force citizen votes for relatively modest construction projects.
The two sides also can’t agree on the impact of a second provision of the ballot measure. It would increase from 20% to 25% the percentage of “inclusionary” (below-market-rate) units that developers would have to include in complexes of 30 units or more.
The ballot measure writers say such an increase signals their intent to assure that as much new housing as possible goes to the less affluent. But their opponents say that when cities try to force developers to include too many sub-market apartments, the builders end up walking away.
Santa Cruz’s housing inventory shows that the city has the potential to add as many as 8,364 units in the next eight years, when factoring in proposals such as the downtown high-rises and UC Santa Cruz’s plan to add about 1,200 units of student housing. That’s more than double the number required by the state. But the Department of Housing and Community Development requires this sort of “buffer,” because the reality is that many properties zoned for denser housing won’t get developed during the eight-year cycle.
As with many aspects of the downtown up-zoning, the two sides are at odds over whether incorporating the potential for extra development amounts to judicious planning or developer-friendly overkill.
Joyful, left, and Valerie Christy, right, jam for fun and a few dollars in downtown Santa Cruz.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The city’s voters have rejected housing-related measures three times in recent years. In 2018, they decisively turned down a rent control proposal. Last year, they said no to taxing owners who leave homes in the community sitting empty. But they also rejected a measure that would have blocked a plan to relocate the city’s central library while also building 124 below-market-rate apartment units.
The last time locals got this worked up about their downtown may have been at the start of the new millennium, when the City Council considered cracking down on street performers. That prompted the owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz, another local landmark, to print T-shirts and bumper stickers entreating fellow residents to “Keep Santa Cruz Weird.”
Santa Cruzans once again are being asked to consider the look and feel of their downtown and whether its future should be left to the City Council, or voters themselves. The measure provokes myriad questions, including these: Can funky, earnest, compassionate Santa Cruz remain that way, even with high-rise apartments? And, with so little housing for students and working folks, has it already lost its charm?
Less than 24 hours after news broke that a serial predator might be targeting some of Los Angeles’ most vulnerable residents, police on Saturday announced the arrest of a suspect linked to the homicides of three homeless men across the city in the past week.
Jerrid Joseph Powell, 33, is accused of walking up to men in three different Los Angeles neighborhoods over a four-day span, killing each for no apparent reason, Police Chief Michel Moore said Saturday.
Moore described the killings as “senseless” and said footage of at least one homicide shows Powell acting borderline indifferent as he takes a man’s life.
“It was chilling and I’ve been in this work for four-plus decades,” Moore said of the Monday killing of Mark Diggs. “The cold-blooded manner in which he walks up and shoots this individual without any hesitation, no interactions.”
Powell was arrested Wednesday night by Beverly Hills police after his car was linked to the Sunday killing of 42-year-old Nicholas Simbolon in San Dimas. Powell allegedly robbed Simbolon at his home and shot him in what authorities have termed a “follow home robbery.” Simbolon, who worked for the L.A. County chief executive’s office, is survived by his wife, his mother and two sons, officials said.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said a 2024 BMW belonging to Powell was spotted at the scene of Simbolon’s slaying, and Beverly Hills police spotted the car and arrested Powell after a traffic stop late Wednesday.
Moore said investigators linked the car to the killings of the homeless victims, though he didn’t say how, and confirmed that a handgun recovered during Powell’s arrest has been tied to all four shootings.
While Powell was already in custody before Friday’s news conference, Moore said Saturday that investigators did not definitively connect him to the killings of the homeless victims until sometime “in the last 16 hours.”
A motive remains unclear. Moore said it appeared that the gunman was attacking homeless people who were isolated from groups. None of the homeless victims appear to have been robbed. It also does not appear Powell knew Simbolon or the homeless men.
Powell has a lengthy criminal history, including felony convictions, according to Moore, who said police are looking for additional victims. Moore said investigators will try to reconstruct Powell’s movements to see if he left “a path of destruction behind him that we have not yet determined.”
Authorities said the first shooting happened at 3:10 a.m. on Sunday in South L.A., when 37-year-old Jose Bolanos was found dead in an alleyway near 110th Street and Vermont Avenue. Bolanos was sleeping on a couch when he was shot, Moore said.
Roughly 24 hours later, Diggs, 62, was shot in the 600 block of Mateo Street in the Arts District. Diggs was pushing a shopping cart and had stopped to plug in his phone, according to Moore, who said the victim was about to go to sleep when the assailant opened fire.
The third shooting occurred Wednesday around 2:30 a.m. near Avenue 18 and Pasadena Avenue in the Lincoln Heights area, where the body of a 52-year-old Latino man was discovered. Police have not released the man’s identity yet, pending notification of his family.
The shootings came to light Friday hours before a gunman shot five homeless people beneath a Las Vegas freeway overpass, authorities said. One man died of his injuries and another was in critical condition. The other victims were listed as stable, police said. No one has been arrested in that case.
Murder charges are expected to be filed early next week, according to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón. He said prosecutors will consider filing special circumstances enhancements in the case. If that happens, Powell would face life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The spasm of violence sparked immediate concern among the city’s homeless populations and those who minister to people living on the city’s streets. In an emergency meeting with outreach coordinators and service providers on Friday afternoon, LAPD officials asked advocates to urge people to either seek shelter space for the night or at least stay in groups until the killer was caught.
News of the suspect’s arrest on Saturday made Jose Fajardo, 64, feel more at ease.
“This is good news,” he said, smiling. “For those of us living outdoors, it gives us a sense of peace knowing he’s been caught.”
Fajardo was unaware of the killings until a Times reporter informed him about it Friday night. He lives in the Vermont Vista neighborhood, where the first homicide occurred six days ago.
The killings made him rethink scavenging for recyclables Saturday morning, since the slayings often took place during the early hours of the day. Instead, he slept in.
Not far from where Fajardo stayed, 41-year-old Eric Muñoz was sweeping trash outside of his RV. He said he was an acquaintance of Bolanos, the man killed near 110th and Vermont.
“He was cool and never got into arguments with people and would try to avoid conflicts,” Muñoz said. “He often spoke about his family, his daughter and how he wanted to get his life in order and return to them. I told him do it, just go and do it. ”
Hearing of the arrest Saturday afternoon, Muñoz nodded in approval.
“I’m glad they got the person,” he said. “Give him the chair.”
But the arrest did not make Muñoz feel any safer. He’s always on alert, and the killings made him worry that someone could easily attack him while he’s sweeping the area outside of his RV.
“I stay here with my girlfriend, they can also just get in the RV and do something,” he said, pointing to a side window of the vehicle. “Someone already broke a window, so you never know. I’m always on alert.”
In Little Tokyo, 46-year-old Amber Schoen had just returned to her tent after washing her clothes when her sister drove up and rushed toward her.
“She didn’t say hi or anything, she just immediately said, ‘I want you to know there’s a serial killer on a mad rampage killing people who are sleeping on the ground,’” Schoen said. “She just wanted me to be careful.”
Schoen was relieved to hear of the arrest, but said she knows she needs to remain vigilant sleeping on the street.
“You can’t let the foot off the gas, so to speak,” she said. “I try to stay in my tent at night and not go out.”
Times staff writer Richard Winton and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Los Angeles police have launched a search for a killer suspected of fatally shooting three homeless people in separate incidents around the city, police officials announced Friday.
All three killings occurred in the early morning hours over a three-day span in November, Police Chief Michel Moore said at an afternoon news conference at police headquarters downtown, where he was joined by Dist. Atty. George Gascón and Mayor Karen Bass.
“This is a killer preying on the unhoused,” Bass said.
The first victim was shot about 3:10 am. on Nov. 26 in an alley near the intersection of 110th Street and Vermont Avenue in South L.A., police said. The man, identified by police as Jose Bolanos, 37, was found dead with a gunshot wound.
The following day, Mark Diggs, 62, was shot and killed about 4:45 a.m. in the 600 block of Mateo Street. Moore said Diggs was pushing a shopping cart and had stopped to plug in his phone and was about to go to sleep when the assailant approached him and shot him.
The third shooting occurred on Nov. 29 about 2:30 a.m. near the intersection of Avenue 18 and Pasadena Avenue in the Lincoln Heights area, where the body of a 52-year-old adult Latino man was discovered.
Los Angeles police are seeking help to find a suspect and a vehicle possibly involved in the death of three people.
(Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Police Department)
Police did not identify the victim pending notification of his family.
Moore said in all three instances the victims were alone and out in the open.
“Each one was shot and killed as they slept” or were preparing to turn in for the night, Moore said.
Moore said the department has set up a task force of investigators that is working 24/7 to apprehend the killer.
Bass urged the city’s homeless residents not to sleep alone and to seek available services. She said homeless outreach workers have been informing those living on the street about the killings and the search for the killer.
“To the person responsible for this, I say this: We will find you, we will catch you and you will be held accountable.”
“An assault on one of us is an assault on all of us,” Gascón said.
Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.
Crouching at the entrance of San Francisco City Hall, Jason Jacobs brushed gold paint onto the ornate doorway of the Beaux-Arts building.
“Whether I paint the gates or not, they’re gonna get their breath taken away,” said Jacobs, a San Francisco native who often marvels at the stunning architecture.
Fresh paint. Street cleanings. Homeless sweeps. Colorful art. Workers like Jacobs beautified the city, days before politicians, executives and journalists from around the world descend on San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference. From Saturday to Nov. 17, the international event is expected to bring more than 20,000 people to the city and attract thousands of protesters.
APEC is made up of 21 member economies, including the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and Canada. The members account for nearly 50% of global trade and 40% of the global population, giving the U.S. a big platform to promote policies that advance free and open trade in the Asia-Pacific region.
A highly anticipated meeting between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping during the summit could also help ease tensions between the two countries.
The stakes are high for the U.S. but also for San Francisco, which is hosting the APEC summit for the first time. It’s the biggest gathering of world leaders in San Francisco since 1945, when representatives from 50 nations signed a charter that established the United Nations.
The global spotlight will shine on a city filled with stark contrasts — home to billion-dollar tech companies and streets lined with homeless encampments.
“You can go to the deepest, darkest parts of the Tenderloin or you can go to the top of the Hyatt Regency,” said Jacobs, a painter at City Hall.
Blocks away from the Moscone Center, where the summit’s main events will be held, Christie Palominos sorted through her belongings. Palominos said she’s trying to figure out what she wants to keep before she moves into permanent housing. Piles of clothing, a shopping cart, bags, coloring books and a variety of objects surround her.
Christie Palominos, 47, sorts through her belongings blocks away from the Moscone Center, where main events for the APEC summit are scheduled to be held.
(Queenie Wong/Los Angeles Times)
Palominos, 47, didn’t know world leaders would be in town, but she said one of her homeless friends has been asked by the same police officer to move multiple times.
“They’re clearing out the homeless people because they don’t want them to see this,” she said.
Grappling with family issues, drug addiction and mental health problems, Palominos said she’s been hopping among San Francisco homeless shelters for more than a year. It’s not easy for homeless people to find a spot in a shelter.
“Usually I stay as long as I can, but it’s kind of hard because there are certain people who pick on you. They think they’re better than you,” said Palominos, who has a bruise under her eye and a bandage wrapped around a bloody finger.
On the streets, Palominos said she’s seen traumatic acts of violence like a shooting and stabbing. Struggling with addiction to crystal meth, Palominos said she’s been clean for five days.
“Walk a day in my shoes,” she said. “I guarantee that some of these rich people who walk around in these high-rises wouldn’t survive.”
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition for Homelessness, said her organization has been hearing about more homeless encampment sweeps ahead of the international conference. With shelters seeing spaces already filling up or limiting openings, Friedenbach said it’s “really frustrating” because the city is just displacing groups of homeless people when they’re moved around. Instead, advocacy groups were hoping for more temporary housing for the homeless during the conference.
“They want to clean up the city’s image and use this conference as a way to draw back tourism,” she said. “These efforts never work because folks don’t have disappearing power. People are out there because there’s not enough housing. There’s not enough shelter.”
In 2022, 7,754 people experienced homelessness in San Francisco. About 43% or 3,357 were staying in shelters, according to city data.
Homelessness has been a contentious issue in San Francisco. In December, a federal judge temporarily blocked the city from clearing certain homeless encampments without offering shelter. The court order stemmed from a 2022 lawsuit the Coalition on Homelessness filed against San Francisco, alleging that city workers are trying to drive homeless people out of town and are seizing and destroying their property “with the express purpose of removing visible signs of homelessness from San Francisco’s street.” The city is still allowed to clear streets for emergencies, health and safety reasons and to temporarily clean.
Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications and legislative affairs at the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said in an email the city isn’t expanding shelter capacity just for the summit but did set aside funding to add roughly 300 shelter beds as winter approaches.
The Interfaith Winter Shelter, which has a site at Natoma and 8th streets, is scheduled to be open during the summit and the city is expanding shelter capacity at three adult congregate shelters, she said.
“When our community hosts events, like APEC, we want to put our best foot forward,” she said.
That hasn’t stopped Republicans from holding up San Francisco as an example for what happens when Democratic politicians are in charge. In June, Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, shot a campaign ad that portrayed San Francisco as city that has “collapsed because of leftist policies.”
“We came in here, and we saw people defecating on the street,” said DeSantis, standing next to a graffiti-sprayed buildings. “We saw people using heroin. We saw people smoking crack cocaine, and you look around, the city is not vibrant anymore. It’s really collapsed because of leftist policies.”
The city has been struggling to recover from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, when San Francisco grappled with office and business closures partly due to government-mandated shutdowns that affected a vibrant downtown filled with retailers, restaurants and bars.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a press conference Thursday that the tattered urban images people see on social media about San Francisco capture a snapshot in time in certain neighborhoods, ignoring the rest of the picturesque city.
“I see a lot of beauty all over San Francisco…,” she said. “My hope is that people will have the opportunity to experience San Francisco for themselves and tell the whole story.”
The skyline of downtown San Francisco with the Golden Gate bridge.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
Later in the day, Breed and Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a new plant nursery and education center in the Soma neighborhood.
Newsom, who met China’s president last month, said before a big event like the APEC summit everything’s got to “get dialed up” just like when people clean up their house before they have visitors.
“This place is beloved and its best days are in front of it, not behind it,” he said. “And all those doomsdayers. All those negative folks. You know what? They haven’t offered anything.”
Still, business closings have also heightened fears about the future of downtown San Francisco. Major retailers including Nordstrom, T-Mobile, Whole Foods and Anthropologie have left amid concerns about less foot traffic, sluggish sales and safety. The pandemic also fueled more online shopping, which meant people didn’t feel the need to visit stores as often. Still, businesses such as Ikea, are also opening new stores in San Francisco and artificial-intelligence startups have been flocking to the city.
San Francisco Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Rodney Fong said cities are re-imagining what their urban centers feel like as technology changes the way people work. With APEC expected to generate $53 million for the local economy, according to the San Francisco Travel Assn., businesses throughout the city also have an opportunity to rope in more sales.
“This is a really important moment for San Francisco and we’re really looking forward to showcasing all the innovations,” Fong said.
Ahead of the conference, the Webster Street pedestrian bridge, which was once light gray, is now freshly painted red in Japantown. Two new decorative crosswalks were being installed in Chinatown and North Beach. The green grime that once covered the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, located near the conference, is gone.
On a sunny day before the summit, workers washed the streets and placed new grass at the Yerba Buena Gardens because of heavy use over the summer. A green fence, scheduled to be removed Tuesday, wrapped around the park with a sign that read “Improvements in Progress.”
At the Moscone Center, some of the city’s most picturesque spots are on signs about the event. The Palace of Fine Arts. City Hall. The Golden Gate Bridge, next to blue water and a sandy beach. “APEC is going to be EPIC,” one sign reads.
Longtime San Francisco natives like Jacobs can’t envision living anywhere else.
Shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had struck a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Republican leaders began circulating a fact sheet to their members listing the victories McCarthy had secured. The first bullet point captured what was supposedly the whole point of the negotiations for the GOP: The newly christened Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending.
An item further down the list, however, revealed far more about the agreement—and about how committed modern-day Republicans really are to their party’s small-government principles. That bullet point noted that the bill would “ensure full funding for critical veterans programs and national defense priorities, while preserving Social Security and Medicare.” At the end of a weeks-long negotiation, Republicans were bragging that they had exempted as much as half of the federal budget from the spending cuts they had fought so hard to enact. What they didn’t say was that for all of their rhetoric about reducing spending, they didn’t actually want to cut that much of it.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which the House approved tonight on a vote of 314-117, will avert what would have been a first-ever national default, lift the debt ceiling through the next presidential election, and save Congress from a crisis of its own making. The bill, which is expected to clear the Senate in the next several days, is hardly what Democrats would have passed had they retained their House majority last fall. But in terms of “fiscal responsibility,” the proposal does vanishingly little. “It does nothing to change the unsustainability of the federal budget,” Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal-watchdog organization, told me. “It’s taken off the table everything that would have an effect.”
It’s not that Republicans lost the budgetary battle because of Biden’s tough negotiating. They didn’t even try for major spending cuts in this round of talks. McCarthy followed former President Donald Trump in abandoning the party’s long-standing push to tackle the biggest drivers of the national debt: Social Security and Medicare. Biden and the Democrats were willing to cut the Pentagon’s budget, which accounts for nearly half of all federal spending outside of entitlement programs. But the speaker nixed that idea too. “Spending cuts are very popular in the abstract, much less so in the specific,” Bixby said.
By the time McCarthy and Biden began negotiating in earnest, there wasn’t much left to cut. “You just can’t get major savings from the rest of what’s left,” Bixby told me. McCarthy was ultimately able to trim a few billion dollars from last year’s budget. That’s enough for him to claim that the Fiscal Responsibility Act cuts year-over-year spending for the first time in a decade, but in the context of the nearly $6 trillion that the federal government spent in 2022, it’s a pittance.
McCarthy succeeded in getting much of what he said he wanted, but that’s only because he didn’t ask for much. Congress will take back $28 billion in unspent COVID-relief funds, and Republicans chopped off as much as one-quarter of the $80 billion Democrats earmarked for the IRS as part of their Inflation Reduction Act last year. But the reduction in IRS funding could actually increase the deficit in the long term, because the purpose of the money was to secure higher revenue for the government by cracking down on tax fraud. The toughest provision for progressives to swallow is additional work requirements for childless adults ages 50 to 54 who receive food stamps and cash welfare. Other changes, however, will expand the food-stamp program to veterans and homeless people, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office yesterday estimated that the government will end up spending more money on food stamps, not less, as a result.
The CBO projected that the bill would save $1.5 trillion over the next decade. But its estimate assumes that Congress will stick to lower spending levels for far longer than the two years that the legislation requires. The speaker has touted other reforms in the bill, such as a requirement that the administration find cuts to offset expensive new rules or regulations, and a provision that calls for an across-the-board 1 percent cut in spending if Congress fails to pass the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government each year. But neither of these is guaranteed.
The best that fiscal hawks could say for the agreement was that it temporarily halted spending growth. Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told me that the most significant part of the deal was the “change in behavior” it represented. In recent years, she said, “lawmakers have only added to the deficit. They haven’t had any bipartisan deals that have brought the deficit down in a decade.”
McCarthy and his allies have argued that he extracted as many concessions as he could, considering that Democrats control the White House and the Senate whereas Republicans barely have a majority in the House. As speaker, McCarthy must protect the members most vulnerable to defeat next year, and he evidently determined that demanding cuts to some of the government’s most popular programs—Social Security, Medicare, the military, and veterans—could threaten the GOP majority.
House conservatives were quick to denounce the agreement. To them, the cuts McCarthy secured were a woefully insufficient price for suspending the U.S. borrowing limit for the next year and a half. “Trillions of dollars of debt for crumbs,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chair of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told reporters yesterday. “This deal fails, fails completely.” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado noted that by only freezing rather than cutting spending, the legislation would “normalize” the growth of the federal government that happened during the coronavirus pandemic, even after most of the COVID-specific spending wound down.
A few conservatives accused McCarthy of betraying the commitments he made to the party when he narrowly won the speakership in January. But even the Freedom Caucus spared the Pentagon and the biggest safety-net programs in its own proposals.
Republicans have flinched on cutting spending before. Although the House GOP passed a debt-ceiling bill last month stuffed with conservative priorities, the party did not adopt a spending blueprint that would have detailed how it planned to balance the budget without raising taxes. And last week, Republicans abruptly postponed committee votes on four traditionally noncontroversial appropriations bills that contained spending cuts. GOP leaders cited the ongoing debt-limit talks as a reason, but congressional observers suspected that the party lacked the votes to advance the bills to the House floor.
The GOP’s supposed zeal for smaller government has long been inconsistent. Most Republican lawmakers were happy to support spending sprees led by Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump. Only when Democrats have occupied the White House has the GOP demonstrated any interest in spending restraint.
But that may be changing. In the 2011 debt-ceiling talks, Republicans forced Barack Obama to bargain over entitlement programs and accept deep cuts that applied equally to the military and domestic programs. Now the GOP is poised to hand Joe Biden a debt-ceiling increase of roughly the same duration in exchange for hardly any spending cuts at all.
The party’s hardliners fought the deal but could not stop it. They appear unlikely to try to oust McCarthy over the agreement, and Republicans might not get another opportunity to force their agenda through for the rest of Biden’s term. That they chose to fight over so little represents a huge concession of its own, an acknowledgment that despite all their denunciations of out-of-control spending, Republican leaders recognize that what the federal government funds is more popular than they like to claim.
When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford? Why didn’t they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious—if homelessness is about personal failure, it’s easier to dismiss as something that couldn’t happen to us, and harsh treatment is easier to rationalize toward those who experience it.
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But when you zoom out, determining individualized explanations for America’s homelessness crisis gets murky. Sure, individual choices play a role, but why are there so many more homeless people in California than Texas? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in New York than West Virginia? To explain the interplay between structural and individual causes of homelessness, some who study this issue use the analogy of children playing musical chairs. As the game begins, the first kid to become chairless has a sprained ankle. The next few kids are too anxious to play the game effectively. The next few are smaller than the big kids. At the end, a fast, large, confident child sits grinning in the last available seat.
You can say that disability or lack of physical strength caused the individual kids to end up chairless. But in this scenario, chairlessness itself is an inevitability: The only reason anyone is without a chair is because there aren’t enough of them.
Now let’s apply the analogy to homelessness. Yes, examining who specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability created by disability or poverty, domestic violence or divorce. Yet when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless. In musical chairs, enforced scarcity is self-evident. In real life, housing scarcity is more difficult to observe—but it’s the underlying cause of homelessness.
In their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate that “the homelessness crisis in coastal cities cannot be explained by disproportionate levels of drug use, mental illness, or poverty.” Rather, the most relevant factors in the homelessness crisis are rent prices and vacancy rates.
Colburn and Aldern note that some urban areas with very high rates of poverty (Detroit, Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia) have among the lowest homelessness rates in the country, and some places with relatively low poverty rates (Santa Clara County, San Francisco, Boston) have relatively high rates of homelessness. The same pattern holds for unemployment rates: “Homelessness is abundant,” the authors write, “only in areas with robust labor markets and low rates of unemployment—booming coastal cities.”
Why is this so? Because these “superstar cities,” as economists call them, draw an abundance of knowledge workers. These highly paid workers require various services, which in turn create demand for an array of additional workers, including taxi drivers, lawyers and paralegals, doctors and nurses, and day-care staffers. These workers fuel an economic-growth machine—and they all need homes to live in. In a well-functioning market, rising demand for something just means that suppliers will make more of it. But housing markets have been broken by a policy agenda that seeks to reap the gains of a thriving regional economy while failing to build the infrastructure—housing—necessary to support the people who make that economy go. The results of these policies are rising housing prices and rents, and skyrocketing homelessness.
It’s not surprising that people wrongly believe the fundamental causes of the homelessness crisis are mental-health problems and drug addiction. Our most memorable encounters with homeless people tend to be with those for whom mental-health issues or drug abuse are evident; you may not notice the family crashing in a motel, but you will remember someone experiencing a mental-health crisis on the subway.
I want to be precise here. It is true that many people who become homeless are mentally ill. It is also true that becoming homeless exposes people to a range of traumatic experiences, which can create new problems that housing alone may not be able to solve. But the claim that drug abuse and mental illness are the fundamental causes of homelessness falls apart upon investigation. If mental-health issues or drug abuse were major drivers of homelessness, then places with higher rates of these problems would see higher rates of homelessness. They don’t. Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Delaware, and Wisconsin have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country, but relatively modest homelessness levels. What prevents at-risk people in these states from falling into homelessness at high rates is simple: They have more affordable-housing options.
With similar reasoning, we can reject the idea that climate explains varying rates of homelessness. If warm weather attracted homeless people in large numbers, Seattle; Portland, Oregon; New York City; and Boston would not have such high rates of homelessness and cities in southern states like Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi such low ones. (There is a connection between unsheltered homelessness and temperature, but it’s not clear which way the causal arrow goes: The East Coast and the Midwest have a lot more shelter capacity than the West Coast, which keeps homeless people more out of view.)
America has had populations of mentally ill, drug-addicted, poor, and unemployed people for the whole of its history, and Los Angeles has always been warmer than Duluth—and yet the homelessness crisis we see in American cities today dates only to the 1980s. What changed that caused homelessness to explode then? Again, it’s simple: lack of housing. The places people needed to move for good jobs stopped building the housing necessary to accommodate economic growth.
Homelessness is best understood as a “flow” problem, not a “stock” problem. Not that many Americans are chronically homeless—the problem, rather, is the millions of people who are precariously situated on the cliff of financial stability, people for whom a divorce, a lost job, a fight with a roommate, or a medical event can result in homelessness. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, roughly 207 people get rehoused daily across the county—but 227 get pushed into homelessness. The crisis is driven by a constant flow of people losing their housing.
The homelessness crisis is most acute in places with very low vacancy rates, and where even “low income” housing is still very expensive. A study led by an economist at Zillow shows that when a growing number of people are forced to spend 30 percent or more of their income on rent, homelessness spikes.
Academics who study homelessness know this. So do policy wonks and advocacy groups. So do many elected officials. And polling shows that the general public recognizes that housing affordability plays a role in homelessness. Yet politicians and policy makers have generally failed to address the root cause of the crisis.
Few Republican-dominated states have had to deal with severe homelessness crises, mainly because superstar cities are concentrated in Democratic states. Some blame profligate welfare programs for blue-city homelessness, claiming that people are moving from other states to take advantage of coastal largesse. But the available evidence points in the opposite direction—in 2022, just 17 percent of homeless people reported that they’d lived in San Francisco for less than one year, according to city officials. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern found essentially no relationship between places with more generous welfare programs and rates of homelessness. And abundantotherresearch indicates that social-welfare programs reduce homelessness. Consider, too, that some people move to superstar cities in search of gainful employment and then find themselves unable to keep up with the cost of living—not a phenomenon that can be blamed on welfare policies.
But liberalism is largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue. Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups that have historically been shunted to the peripheries of the housing market. But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.
This contradiction drives the ever more visible crisis. As the historian Jacob Anbinder has explained, in the ’70s and ’80s conservationists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups, and left-wing organizations formed a loose coalition in opposition to development. Throughout this period, Anbinder writes, “the implementation of height limits, density restrictions, design review boards, mandatory community input, and other veto points in the development process” made it much harder to build housing. This coalition—whose central purpose is opposition to neighborhood change and the protection of home values—now dominates politics in high-growth areas across the country, and has made it easy for even small groups of objectors to prevent housing from being built. The result? The U.S. is now millions of homes short of what its population needs.
Los Angeles perfectly demonstrates the competing impulses within the left. In 2016, voters approved a $1.2 billion bond measure to subsidize the development of housing for homeless and at-risk residents over a span of 10 years. But during the first five years, roughly 10 percent of the housing units the program was meant to create were actually produced. In addition to financing problems, the biggest roadblock was small groups of objectors who didn’t want affordable housing in their communities.
Los Angeles isn’t alone. The Bay Area is notorious in this regard. In the spring of 2020, the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published an essay, “It’s Time to Build,” that excoriated policy makers’ deference to “the old, the entrenched.” Yet it turned out that Andreessen and his wife had vigorously opposed the building of a small number of multifamily units in the wealthy Bay Area town of Atherton, where they live.
The small-c conservative belief that people who already live in a community should have veto power over changes to it has wormed its way into liberal ideology. This pervasive localism is the key to understanding why officials who seem genuinely shaken by the homelessness crisis too rarely take serious action to address it.
The worst harms of the homelessness crisis fall on the people who find themselves without housing. But it’s not their suffering that risks becoming a major political problem for liberal politicians in blue areas: If you trawl through Facebook comments, Nextdoor posts, and tweets, or just talk with people who live in cities with large unsheltered populations, you see that homelessness tends to be viewed as a problem of disorder, of public safety, of quality of life. And voters are losing patience with their Democratic elected officials over it.
In a 2021 poll conducted in Los Angeles County, 94 percent of respondents said homelessness was a serious or very serious problem. (To put that near unanimity into perspective, just 75 percent said the same about traffic congestion—in Los Angeles!) When asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how unsafe “having homeless individuals in your neighborhood makes you feel,” 37 percent of people responded with a rating of 8 or higher, and another 19 percent gave a rating of 6 or 7. In Seattle, 71 percent of respondents to a recent poll said they wouldn’t feel safe visiting downtown Seattle at night, and 91 percent said that downtown won’t recover until homelessness and public safety are addressed. There are a lot of polls like this.
As the situation has deteriorated, particularly in areas where homelessness overruns public parks or public transit, policy makers’ failure to respond to the crisis has transformed what could have been an opportunity for reducing homelessness into yet another cycle of support for criminalizing it. In Austin, Texas, 57 percent of voters backed reinstating criminal penalties for homeless encampments; in the District of Columbia, 75 percent of respondents to a Washington Post poll said they supported shutting down “homeless tent encampments” even without firm assurances that those displaced would have somewhere to go. Poll data from Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles, among other places, reveal similarly punitive sentiments.
This voter exasperation spells trouble for politicians who take reducing homelessness seriously. Voters will tolerate disorder for only so long before they become amenable to reactionary candidates and measures, even in very progressive areas. In places with large unsheltered populations, numerous candidates have materialized to run against mainstream Democrats on platforms of solving the homelessness crisis and restoring public order.
By and large, the candidates challenging the failed Democratic governance of high-homelessness regions are not proposing policies that would substantially increase the production of affordable housing or provide rental assistance to those at the bottom end of the market. Instead, these candidates—both Republicans and law-and-order-focused Democrats—are concentrating on draconian treatment of people experiencing homelessness. Even in Oakland, California, a famously progressive city, one of the 2022 candidates for mayor premised his campaign entirely on eradicating homeless encampments and returning order to the streets—and managed to finish third in a large field.
During the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral race, neither the traditional Democratic candidate, Karen Bass, who won, nor her opponent, Rick Caruso, were willing to challenge the antidemocratic processes that have allowed small groups of people to block desperately needed housing. Caruso campaigned in part on empowering homeowners and honoring “their preferences more fully,” as Ezra Klein put it in The New York Times—which, if I can translate, means allowing residents to block new housing more easily. (After her victory, Bass nodded at the need to house more people in wealthier neighborhoods—a tepid commitment that reveals NIMBYism’s continuing hold on liberal politicians.)
“We’ve been digging ourselves into this situation for 40 years, and it’s likely going to take us 40 years to get out,” Eric Tars, the legal director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told me.
Building the amount of affordable housing necessary to stanch the daily flow of new people becoming homeless is not the project of a single election cycle, or even several. What can be done in the meantime is a hard question, and one that will require investment in temporary housing. Better models for homeless shelters arose out of necessity during the pandemic. Using hotel space as shelter allowed the unhoused to have their own rooms; this meant families could usually stay together (many shelters are gender-segregated, ban pets, and lack privacy). Houston’s success in combatting homelessness—down 62 percent since 2011—suggests that a focus on moving people into permanent supportive housing provides a road map to success. (Houston is less encumbered by the sorts of regulations that make building housing so difficult elsewhere.)
The political dangers to Democrats in those cities where the homelessness crisis is metastasizing into public disorder are clear. But Democratic inaction risks sparking a broader political revolt—especially as housing prices leave even many middle- and upper-middle-class renters outside the hallowed gates of homeownership. We should harbor no illusions that such a revolt will lead to humane policy change.
Simply making homelessness less visible has come to be what constitutes “success.” New York City consistently has the nation’s highest homelessness rate, but it’s not as much of an Election Day issue as it is on the West Coast. That’s because its displaced population is largely hidden in shelters. Yet since 2012, the number of households in shelters has grown by more than 30 percent—despite the city spending roughly $3 billion a year (as of 2021) trying to combat the problem. This is what policy failure looks like. At some point, someone’s going to have to own it.
This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “The Looming Revolt Over Homelessness.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
