When Sitting is a Crime
By Lyric Kelkar & Rudy Espinoza
Tomorrow, the City Council will be hearing a motion that will have dire implications for thousands of the most vulnerable Angelenos. The new law threatens to further criminalize poverty and it also provokes an important discussion on the approaches to care during an unprecedented pandemic that has thrown many into economic despair.
Municipal Code Section 41.18 regulates “loitering” on public rights of ways like sidewalks and streets:
No person shall stand in or upon any street, sidewalk or other public way open for pedestrian travel or otherwise occupy any portion thereof in such a manner as to annoy or molest any pedestrian thereon or so as to obstruct or unreasonably interfere with the free passage of pedestrians.
For years, this section of LA’s municipal code has been highly contested. As the number of unhoused Angelenos has risen, section 41.18 has been used as a means to remove those who have sought refuge under freeway underpasses, sidewalks and other spaces in our city.
The intention behind tomorrow’s proposal is to manage the growth of encampments and to “return” the public right of way to [housed] residents. The proposed ordinance will make it illegal for the unhoused to do the following and more:
Leave less than 5 ft on any sidewalk for passersby (to align with ADA compliance);
Sit/sleep within 500 feet of freeways, underpasses, tunnels, onramps, off ramps, or any city shelter that was established after January of 2018;
Sit/sleep in any public space if shelter is offered to them; and,
Defend their property or refuse to move.
This motion will also change code 56.11 - better known as the “Bulky Item Ordinance” - to match these updates to 41.18. This means that it will allow for any personal property to be confiscated that sits within these new restrictions. In fact, 56.11 was recently evoked to regulate street vendors who voiced opposition. Vendors rightly stated, they are not “bulky items.”
For the casual observer, these changes are focused on managing the accelerating numbers of Angelenos who have lost their home.
If an unhoused person can’t sit, lie, and sleep on the sidewalk, where else can they go?
According to the 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count convened by LAHSA every year, there are over 41,000 residents within City limits that are unhoused, and only around 15,500 shelter beds. The number of residents who are experiencing homelessness is up 16% from 2019, and the count was done in January of this year - two months before the City shut down due to the pandemic and economic precarity skyrocketed. During the months of the pandemic, over 8 million people nationally have fallen into poverty - meaning they are less food secture, more likely to miss rent payments, and experiencing higher levels of anxiety. Over the next several months as protections for tenants dwindle, Los Angeles is looking at 120,000 households falling into homelessness - this includes over 184,000 children.
At the start of the pandemic, there was an attempt to house the unsheltered through Project Roomkey. The goal was to utilize and pay hotels to open their empty rooms so the most vulnerable of those experiencing homelessness could seek shelter and properly isolate to prevent infection from COVID-19. The original goal was to get 15,000 rooms in Los Angeles opened for shelter. As of yesterday, only 3,485 hotel rooms have been contracted and of those only 3,180 occupied - sheltering a total of 3,808 people.
41.18 will not only criminalize the unhoused, it will make the poor, poorer.
The ACE citations or misdemeanors unhoused residents will receive will not bring them closer to finding a home, and instead put them in a place to pay fines with money they don’t have, or worse, get them put in jail. Criminalizing people for being poor builds further systems of debt and excludes them from things like housing, credit, and broader access to healthy capital. Approving this ordinance means codifying deeper systems of poverty for our already highly vulnerable neighbors.
But this type of criminalization isn’t restricted to only the unhoused. Our society makes being poor a crime. It also makes it expensive. Many studies have been done on the “high cost” of being poor, and analysis abounds on the expensive food, financial products, and housing options that the poor must contend with as compared to the wealthier counterparts. The future of our city will depend on how we bring the poor in, not how we push them out. Right now, there is a tangible and needed push to invest in systems of care. Assisting people who are in need of services requires full systems, not just single policies that default to criminalization.
We sympathize with the conundrum our leaders are grappling with: how do you build broad support in neighborhoods for “bridge housing” and other shelter options without addressing the desires of some residents for immediate “clean up” of their communities. This challenge requires a compassionate and patient outlook on policymaking that steps away from “quid pro quo” policy decisions (i.e. if you support this project, we’ll sweep the street), towards a compelling vision for what our communities can look like if we took care of our most vulnerable and put the needs of people before the needs of property. This vision can be assembled with a new narrative that doesn’t pit Angelenos against each other, and seeks to unite people across class lines, as opposed to separate them. Many of us are one crisis away from losing our home. We should seek solidarity in the fact that many of us are much more vulnerable than we realize.
The best policies will require us to tap the many experts throughout our City who study these complex issues and can help weave comprehensive plans. Changing 41.18 to remove the unhoused from some streets, will not remove the unhoused from our priority list.
Criminalizing the unhoused will not make the problem go away, but only worsen it.
This moment calls for innovation, not criminalization.
Tune into tomorrow’s City Council meeting at 10 AM. Take Action with instructions from this toolkit from Services Not Sweeps.