They Just Lowered Our Property Values!

Los Angelenos passed Proposition H to fund programs for the homeless back in 2017 through a sales tax increase. The focus was obviously on housing, including bridge facilities (tents, rent subsidies, etc.) while more permanent structures could be built and deployed. Case workers and health specialists were added to the municipal payroll, job training was budgeted, and addiction programs were expanded and accelerated. But as local real estate prices, from sales to rentals, skyrocketed, the legions of homeless people swelled accordingly. Landlords, anxious to take advantage of escalating revenue potential, were finding increasing ways to evict people who were already stretched to the financial breaking point even with their lower rents.

The story of exploding homelessness is happening all across the land, stoked by medical bankruptcies, gentrification of once-affordable neighborhoods, the success of some new industries that lured highly educated hordes of new workers able to afford “a bit more” to live closer to work. They simply and unintentionally pushed old residents out. In the hot urban areas, entirely too often, all of the “affordable neighborhoods,” even in some pretty slummy areas, pushed past the capacity of as much as 20% of the population could afford. 

For some, those with decent jobs, the choices were multiple roommates or a long commute. See my September 9th blog, The Big Disconnect, for more on that subject. But for those on the street, they have to battle local prejudices and fears. After all, having a homeless shelter in your neighborhood doesn’t exactly help your home price increase. So as bridge and permanent homeless facilities were proposed, often on unused city lots, cries of NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) became commonplace. Still, the shelters were beginning to get built, tents and their more permanent replacements.

For those still living on the streets, under bridges or occupying whatever space they can find, life is really hard. Aside from the weather, criminal assaults, rapes, and internal theft, the denizens of the streets – many sick, old, addicted or mentally ill – face the municipal codes that effectively make homelessness illegal... even though the ordinances don’t actually come out and say that. Hundreds of homeless people die on the streets of Los Angeles every year, most being easily preventable deaths.

Writing an Op-Ed for the September 14th Los Angeles Times, attorney Shayla R. Myers with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, tells us the story of one homeless man, 56-year-old “Joe,” a man who had been evicted in the spate of rental increases, who didn’t live long enough to find a new permanent home through the city program. After living for five months in one of those temporary tented units, he simply succumbed to the heat of a hot Los Angeles summer: “The City Council has repeatedly passed laws that made Joe a criminal because he had no place to go other than the street.

“I met Joe at a presentation I did in Koreatown on the criminalization of homelessness. He told the gathering about his experiences with the Los Angeles Police Department. He had lost all of his belongings in one of the countless sweeps of homeless encampments that take place every day in L.A. He just didn’t see a posted notice announcing the cleanup. He left his property for the morning, and when he came back, it had been thrown away.

“In the weeks before he died, Joe was caught up in more than one of these sweeps. The city justifies its actions in part by pointing out that people who are homeless are breaking the law. And they are right. Every day Joe lived on the streets of Los Angeles, he was breaking any number of laws that criminalize homelessness.

“When I visited Joe in Koreatown, he was in violation of city ordinances at least five times over. His makeshift shelter, which replaced the tent that had been taken by LA Sanitation the month before, was unlawfully tied to a nearby tree. It was impermissibly up during the day, to provide some relief from the 90-degree heat. He had a cart to carry his belongings — a forbidden ‘bulky item — and it looked like he had more than would fit in a 60-gallon trash can, the amount allowed by law.

“Each of these actions is prohibited by Los Angeles Municipal Code Section 56.11. And as we sat on the sidewalk and talked about his experiences, we were both in violation of Municipal Code Section 41.18(d), which outlaws sitting, sleeping and lying on the sidewalk....

“So if Joe had not gotten a bed, he likely would have been subjected to that increased enforcement: weekly sweeps and daily harassment intended to drive him from the neighborhood where he had lived for more than a decade and where he had a support system.

“I was in the City Council Chambers in 2015 and 2016 when the ordinance that limits the amount of property the homeless can have was debated and passed, and when ‘dwelling’ was prohibited in vehicles on most L.A. streets. The council members’ discussions focused almost solely on addressing the visible signs of homelessness — tents, sleeping bags, cars — rather than the needs and lived experiences of the people whose existence they were about to regulate. For every encampment swept away or car towed based on those ordinances, there is a person who relied on that tent or car to survive.

“Over the past few years, L.A.’s elected officials have finally begun to acknowledge that people are homeless because of decades of failed policies, because the city is plagued by an affordable housing crisis, because there are simply not enough homes here for the nearly 23,000 people who are unsheltered every night.” 

And that’s just Los Angeles. Add New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Miami... hell every big city in the United States... and you see a nation quite happy to incur an additional massive deficit to reduce taxes for the richest segment of our society – with no real evidence of any trickle-down benefit to those lower on the economic ladder – but pretty much unwilling to invest in supporting the poorest members of our country. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder who and what we, as Americans, have become, in an era of Trumpian rage and selfishness.