We're Capable of Doing Better on Homelessness

Laying out the real causes and solutions to homelessness

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I was having coffee with an old friend from college, we started talking about homelessness and I could feel him spiraling out a bit as he considered the magnitude of the problem. This is totally understandable. My friend is extremely smart, he reads the news closely, he knows the discourses around homelessness well and wants to be compassionate. But I watched him talk himself into the corner I see people normally fall into, a resignation that the problem will keep getting worse until somebody does something at the federal level and there’s nothing we can do about it. I disagree with this position because it lets local governments off the hook for how they handle homelessness and it makes us as individuals feel powerless. I’m not an expert on homelessness policy by any means, but I have supported a number of LA city council campaigns that have centered around homelessness and I’ve done a decent amount of mutual aid outreach over the years. LA is in many ways distinctive from much of the rest of the country, we have always had a substantial unhoused population, but I believe we are both a warning sign for much of the rest of the country but could also be a beacon of how to tackle homelessness better. Since homelessness is truly a national crisis at the moment, with a historic 770,000 people experiencing homelessness last year, it’s vitally important to consider what we can do to address the crisis.

Here’s my introduction on thinking about homelessness with clarity and compassion.

Dehumanizing homeless people is the project of fascists- don’t help them. One of the most disturbing news stories last year was Daniel Penny brutally choking Jordan Neely, a Black homeless man, to death on the New York Subway- a murder that can only be described as a lynching. The really horrifying thing was how many people thought Penny did nothing wrong, and eventually he was acquitted of second-degree manslaughter. After being acquitted, he was invited to watch the Super Bowl with Trump and got a cushy gig with Marc Andreesen, the MAGA freak responsible for making Meta cater to the right. When you’re having brunch with someone and they talk about homeless people as though they’re subhuman, understand that they are aligning with Daniel Penny and his defenders. When people in your local nextdoor are working themselves up into a frenzy over a tent that popped up in your neighborhood, they are doing the work of fascists, whether they know it or not. If we are serious about rejecting fascism, we need to thoroughly reject the politics that assert that people like Neely deserve to die simply for yelling on a train. In 2023, 2,500 people died on the streets of LA county. They died for a vast variety of reasons, but I would argue that the pervasive dehumanizing attitude people have towards unhoused people, treating them as a monolithic, disposable population, is ultimately why those deaths were allowed to occur.

Since we’re refusing to dehumanize unhoused people, that leads me to my next point: If you know one unhoused person, you only know one unhoused person. People so often want to categorize unhoused people as entirely “drug addicts with mental illness” who can only be helped by being forced into prisons or permanently locked-down mental hospitals. In my experience, there are certainly people whose severe mental illness contributed to them ending up on the street, and plenty of people do struggle with substance use, but they aren’t the only people living on the street. You can encounter mothers with young children who couldn’t stay on top of their rent and childcare and may have also fled domestic violence. You meet seniors who quit their jobs to take care of a dying family member and find themselves no longer able to find a stable job. You run into young people who aged out of the foster care system. You meet plenty of people who consistently work, but don’t earn enough to afford the shocking rents in LA. In my part of the city you meet veterans who are living here because they need to access the VA hospital in my neighborhood. This is why I believe you need a lot of people who work in local government, in addition to volunteer neighbors in the community, to work together to identify the specific needs of people on the street and find solutions that work best for their specific circumstances.

Any of those people might be experiencing mental illness or using hard substances, but they won’t magically get off the streets if their addiction or other mental problems are alleviated. I can’t speak for every unhoused person in LA, but in my experience most of the people I’ve met had lived here for awhile before becoming unhoused- they’re not drifters from other states. Why each individual person ended up on the streets is usually a complex array of factors, and what they will need to get off the streets varies greatly from person to person. It broadly can be said that every unhoused person represents a failure of capitalism as a way of organizing our political economy, but beyond that there is no silver bullet, one size fits all solution to homelessness. There is one method that we absolutely know does not work, however…

Criminalization will never solve homelessness. LA county has attempted every manner of banishing people from existing in public and forcing them into jails and the prison system. While this works well for disappearing unhoused people from the city boundaries of wealthy enclaves like Beverly Hills, most of what it really accomplishes is simply displacing people from one part of the county and making them the problem of a different jurisdiction. When you ticket and arrest people who are guilty of nothing besides existing outside, you at best just remove them from public sight for a few weeks before they come back onto the streets with nothing but the clothes on their backs. A phrase used in LA abolitionist spaces is that “you can’t get well in a cell”, even if you’re an unhoused person experiencing addiction or mental health struggles, there is simply no way for those conditions to improve in one of the largest and deadliest jail systems in the world. Los Angeles currently uses a municipal code called 41.18, a “sit, sleep, lie” ban criminalizing all forms of existing outside in certain designated zones. In effect what this accomplishes is piling up tickets and court debts on people with no money, while simultaneously concentrating people on other nearby blocks. I live near a 41.18 zone in a busy commercial district, and while it’s successfully made the tents disappear, the number of RVs and tents a few blocks away in the next city council district has absolutely exploded.

What’s infuriating about this moment is that we are probably about to enter an unprecedented era of brutal criminalization of unhoused people. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled on a case called Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allows cities to criminalize homelessness much more aggressively. Democratic politicians across California submitted testimony supporting being given more authority to throw unhoused people in jail. Immediately after the Grants Pass ruling, Gavin Newsom personally came to LA to throw away people’s tents on camera, one of the more disgusting political stunts I’ve ever seen! With Trump in office, it’s obvious that the GOP intends to unleash unholy terror against unhoused people, and they’ve been given every authority to do so. Even as pockets of LA politicians are attempting to forge a better path, we just elected a right-wing law and order scumbag as district attorney, he will almost certainly be prosecuting unhoused people more aggressively and using Grants Pass to justify it.

So what is to be done then? If things are so grim, how can we respond effectively and compassionately?

Internalize the phrase: “nothing about us without us”. The best way to make yourself an effective advocate for other people is to get good at actually listening to people who have been directly impacted. Unhoused people can tell you what they need to survive and get off the streets, they are the best teachers you can have. Theo Henderson is a formally unhoused person who does a great podcast called We The Unhoused that he started while he was living on the street, he directly interviews people who are homeless as well as providing a lot of great political education. I also always recommend people get familiar with the organization LA Community Action Network (LA CAN), one of the best community organizing spaces I’ve ever come across. Based in Skid Row, they do an incredible job helping unhoused people become advocates for the change we need to make sure the most vulnerable are never abandoned. You can get the best analysis and education about how and why the city fails to keep people alive by following them on social media.

I’d also encourage anyone who wants to understand homelessness better to read about the Echo Park Lake encampment that became an explosion point in LA politics from 2020 to 2021. During the pandemic a large tent encampment sprung up in the iconic Echo Park Lake, since people couldn’t go into homeless shelters they needed to build their own community to try to survive the pandemic while living outside. They worked with supportive housed neighbors and built a garden and community shower, they figured out regular trash pickup, in a very dire moment in LA history it was a heartwarming thing. Of course, the city couldn’t allow that to continue and they sent in an army of riot cops to clear the encampment violently. Roughly five hundred community members showed up to oppose the eviction and were brutally arrested. You can read more about the encampment and its destruction in this report written by UCLA academics in collaboration with the unhoused people who lived there.

So what are some concrete policies we should rally behind? Housing is the only way out of homelessness. It seems like this should be obvious but it is truly remarkable how many people twist themselves into Gordian knots to deny this. Rental housing in LA is treated as a sacred speculative asset that landlords can never be reigned in to provide at rates that working people can actually afford. Because our rents are so astronomically high, the MIT living wage calculator says a single adult needs to make $27.81 an hour to afford housing on their own. Our minimum wage is $16.50. Yes we have to force employers to pay better, but wages can never keep up if the rents continue to soar year after year. Until there is adequate housing supply to make up the gap between market rate housing and what people on the lowest end of the economic spectrum can pay, we’re always going to have a crisis. Luckily there are lots of ways the city and county could build housing, there’s a lot of public land owned by the county or the state that can be converted into building housing. There’s a whole movement to build social housing, divested from the for-profit rental market entirely, and there’s lots of different models we can try.

When you inevitably encounter exasperated neighbors telling you that they can’t stand the RVs on the streets and the needles in their parks, remind them that they only way out is allowing low income housing to be built in your neighborhood. There is an infuriating dissonance that ricochets around people’s skulls where they simultaneously believe they should be unburdened from having to think about homeless people, but also shouldn’t be responsible for helping them to actually get a home. I think deep down a lot of people tend to be so virulently anti-homeless because each unhoused person represents how threadbare our social safety net is. Facing the truth that decades of austerity and rigidly free-market neoliberalism has led us to this means admitting that something fundamental has to shift in our society, and that’s overwhelming. The truth is: we are all bound to one another, until we take collective responsibility for each other’s well being, the crisis of homelessness will never be solved.

Further Reading:

The Stop LAPD Spying coalition released a remarkable report entitled “Automating Banishment” a few years back about the intersection of corporate real estate interests and LAPD. They specifically drill into the ways in which LAPD uses surveillance technology from Palintir (yes, the Peter Thiel company), to target and remove undesirable people from public. It’s a brilliant analysis of the legacy of settler colonialism and racism and how that bares down on unhoused people today. The summary is only twelve pages and very digestible!