After Grants Pass Decision, What’s Next for L.A.’s Skid Row?

The following article is reprinted from the August 2024 issue of the Catholic Agitator, newspaper of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker. Cover photo: Workers clear a tent encampment in Los Angeles in May 2024. Screenshot from video via LACW Instagram.

The ink was not yet dry on the Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson when a handful of Los Angeles City Council members sought clarity and counsel on how they could leverage this decision, which deems constitutional the further criminalization of poverty and punishment of its victims. Could this decision give them greater latitude in their already robust legislative punishing of the poor? Might this new precedent erase some of the committed obligations and policy shifts Los Angeles accepted through previous legal settlements? Were the 87 other Los Angeles County cities wielding this decision to do legal harm in such a way as to justify L.A. City doing the same? This government barbarism, though unsettling, is really nothing new.

Before California became the 31st U.S. state in 1850, its state legislature had already passed vagrancy and loitering laws criminalizing the rights of particular individuals to exist in public. In 1963, Los Angeles passed a new city-wide anti-camping ordinance—L.A. Municipal Code Sec. 41.18—that declared, “No person shall sit, lie, or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk, or other public way.” Angelenos without private property were given no legal option but to flee public space, evaporate into thin air, or face fines and arrest.

Thanks to the work of many organizations and individuals, in 2006, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Los Angeles in Jones v. the City of Los Angeles to cease enforcement of this city code. Until the City constructed 1,250 units of permanent, supporting housing for the chronically unhoused, the ban would stand. Rather than building the limited housing required to get out of this obligation, the city simply waited, allowing Angelenos to step up by agreeing to tax themselves to build 10,000 affordable housing units.

Before 200 of those Measure HHH units had been completed in 2021, in an effort to further criminalize homelessness, the Los Angeles City Council and City Attorney’s offices rewrote L.A.M.C. 41.18. Community pressure led the City to remove language around a city-wide ban on camping for language that began to divide up the city into areas of banishment where it would now be illegal to camp: within 1000 feet of any homeless shelters; within 500 feet of “sensitive” locations (parks, schools, and libraries); within 500 feet of freeway onramps, overpasses, and bridges, and so on.

When the city finally opened themselves to accountability almost a year late, the report on 41.18 was damning. After the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority returned a full report in June 2024, the L.A. City Clerk admitted, “This ordinance is only about harmful and costly criminalization.” More than $3 million spent (not including L.A. Police Department salaries and expenses), more than 3,183 citations and arrests, and only two people transitioned to permanent housing. The goal is clear: City Councilmembers want to sanitize their districts.

Now, the tactics the city chooses to erase the visible signs of homelessness are varied. They criminalize survival tactics, which fuels the incarceration of people sleeping on the streets. They seize and throw away the personal property of the unhoused, which encourages those without stable housing to “move along.”

In this moment, city leaders have created intentional chaos on the streets: complex rules around private property, unclear boundaries for legal street-sleeping, a divestment from hygiene infrastructure, and an investment in disruptive street cleaning practices.

At the same time, Mayor Karen Bass has been pedaling her “Inside Safe” program. By bringing people into temporary housing, she is able to break up their encampments. Unfortunately, with little commitment to ensuring people stay housed, many contracts with housing facilities have expired and many tenants have been kicked out or left out of frustration with the programs. For city leaders who prioritize the number of people who transition indoors over the number of people who have found their way to permanent housing, this simply opens up more space to house new people from the break-up of other encampments.

If the goal were to help people on the streets, the priority would be the creation of clear, consistent rules with reasonable grace for the complexities of people’s lives on the streets. If the goal was to keep the streets and encampments clean, the city would invest in permanent infrastructure—restrooms and trash services at minimum. If their aim was to make the homeless crisis better, they would ask, “Are these practices and policies making this crisis worse?” But this has never been the central question to the evaluation of these programs because avoiding harm has never been their goal.

Business interests—wielding public officials or teams of lawyers—have long tried to find ways to clean areas for investment and development. So when a number of business owners sued the city saying it was cruel and unusual punishment to leave the unhoused on the streets, their motivations were anything but altruistic. The city reached a $1.2 billion settlement with the L.A. Alliance oligarchs that obligates them to build 12,961 units of housing.

Appealing the settlement, the L.A. Catholic Worker, along with LA CAN, challenged the agreement. We do not believe that L.A. is only responsible for providing enough beds for 60% of the 2022 Los Angeles unhoused population that does not have significant mental health or substance abuse challenges. Using a number based on a year when COVID-19 protections were protecting many vulnerable people from homelessness should not erase L.A.’s continuing responsibility to ensure the construction of enough beds for every single person who is thrown into the violence of poverty. And, we do not believe that once the city has built beds to meet a percentage of past needs that they should then be able to enforce a city-wide (or district specific) encampment ban.

As L.A. waits to see what will come of that settlement, the nation’s attention went to another legal battle: the Supreme Court’s decision on Grants Pass v. Johnson in regards to the legality of city-wide camping bans. Before this decision, the only thing stopping many civil servants from passing and enforcing bans on city-wide encampments was that a court in Oregon said it might be unconstitutional to do so.

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the government’s right to criminalize homeless acts of survival (like using a blanket or tarp) and deemed punishments like jail time and fines as neither cruel nor unusual, the risk is gone and municipalities are responding with rapid ferocity.

With the many assaults being hurled at our most needy, where then might we find hope? If our “justice” system is predicated on criminalizing conduct, on enforcing what politicians have defined as criminal behavior, Shayla Myers said, it is not going to be the place we turn to for our fight against criminalization itself. And yet we can still celebrate a Justice writing a dissent for a case in front of the Supreme Court about why criminalization of housing insecurity is horrible, ineffective, and cruel. We can still find joy in her uplifting some of the very legal victories the LACW has been a part of. We can continue to use litigation as one tool to help us build the world we dream of.

But let’s be clear, there would be less reason to hope if only the majority of a nine-Justice court got to decide what is right and wrong. In the race to the bottom, doing things constitutionally is the least a city can do.

In L.A., despite having a huge unsheltered population, little immediate change will come from the recent Supreme Court decision because we have forced our civic leaders to adopt better policies. Though the reality of poverty is a reflection of society’s failures, its visible presence on our streets is a reflection of our successes: in the courts, on the streets, and elsewhere. No U.S. communities have solved the crisis of poverty, many have just swept people away and sanitized their streets.

Every time a court issues a decision, there begins a fight for new policies and practices. Organizing those most impacted, concerned neighbors, and faith and community leaders to knock down our politicians’ doors, leverage pressure against them, and demand a different way of behaving is the reason the City of L.A. removed their city-wide anti-camping ordinance in 2021, is the reason it is not politically expedient to simply support the criminalization of the poor here today. And because of that, our city council will have to get through us if they want to pass a new ordinance to be able to enforce Grants Pass. Rest assured, if they try, we are ready to fight them every step of the way.

And while we may be in a different place than communities like Grants Pass, we know we are a part of a movement that recognizes our shared interest with that community, and with many communities in fights that look very different from the ones we are in. Anyone struggling against the criminalization of poverty and the disposal of vulnerable people is part of us. As we return to the drawing board, we do so clear that we are not alone.

And though there is much to bemoan about our “filthy rotten system,” there is no denying, as Shayla reminded me, that it is two well-established property owners on Skid Row (the LACW and LA CAN) that have been the primary clients on a number of pieces of litigation aimed at pushing back on the criminalization of the poor and the weaponization of public and private property. This is a tension which is worth further reflection.

As we await the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics—events that have always sacrificed the well-being of our community for the benefit of a few—we do not know what tactics our systems will think up and implement to harm our most vulnerable. We do not know what new ways NIMBY neighborhoods and businesses will find to assault those we have most failed. But our responsibility to our neighbors—and thus ourselves—does not change as governments, churches, and communities fail to live up to them. All we can do is continue to speak our truths, to use the diverse set of tools available to us in this moment and place, and to reassert each and every day—with a love that honors the anger we experience—“I respectfully dissent,” and live like we mean it.

Matt Harper is a Los Angeles Catholic Worker community member and co-editor of the Agitator.