Federal District Judge David O. Carter has issued a preliminary injunction in a really interesting ruling that has something in it to offend everyone:
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday ordering the city and county of Los Angeles to ensure that every homeless person living in the notorious Skid Row district has housing by October 18 this year.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
Judge David O. Carter granted a preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiffs in the case last week and now is telling the city and county that they must find single women and unaccompanied children on skid row a place to stay within 90 days, followed by helping families within 120 days and finally, by Oct. 18, offering every homeless person on skid row housing or shelter.
“Los Angeles has lost its parks, beaches, schools, sidewalks, and highway systems due to the inaction of city and county officials who have left our homeless citizens with no other place to turn,” Carter wrote in a 110-page brief laced with quotes from Abraham Lincoln and an extensive history of how skid row was first created.
Elsewhere in the decision, the Judge Carter — a Bill Clinton appointee — cited claims of “systemic racism,” and argued that homelessness is partly a result of historical racial discrimination.
In an unusually complex set of instructions, Judge Carter also ordered $1 billion earmarked by the city for spending on the homeless, announced Monday evening as part of L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s “Justice Budget,” to be placed in an escrow account. He also ordered a 90-day audit of city and county spending on the homeless, and a 30-day “audit of any funds committed to mental health (MH) and substance use disorder (SUD) treatment.”
The full opinion is here.
Pluses:
Judge Carter is right about skid row being a long-standing disgrace. In the 50s and 60s, Los Angeles forced the closure of numerous dilapidated Skid Row residential buildings, including SRO hotels, resulting in the former residents becoming homeless. That, and the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the late 1960s, plus the explosion of illegal drug use, laid the groundwork for the gigantic, sprawling Skid Row of today.
The 30 and 90 day audits of homeless program spending are a great idea, and should be conducted in any city that has both: A.) Big spending on homelessness, and B.) A growing homeless problem despite/because of that increased spending. How much of that money is going directly into the pockets of “activists” and “homeless advocates”? I’m looking at you, Austin.
Likewise the halt to spending from that $1 billion slush fund account. Just where is all that money going?
“Los Angeles has lost its parks, beaches, schools, sidewalks, and highway systems due to the inaction of city and county officials who have left our homeless citizens with no other place to turn.” Mostly true, but the homelessness that plagues Los Angeles is due not to government inaction, but government action in promulgating policies and regulations, both those designed to limit and discourage private sector housing that would otherwise meet the demand for housing (see: slums and SROs), and those designed to lure sturdy beggars, transients, drug addicts and the mentally ill to the area (California’s generous welfare state policies and the need to feed the Homeless Industrial Complex). Plus aggressive policing of the homeless has not been tried and failed, it’s been declared difficult and left untried.
Minuses:
Critical Race Theory is garbage, and using “racism” as a justification for the above infects the entire decision with clearly unconstitutional concerns.
There’s a saying that for any question that begins “Can a federal judge…” the answer is always “Yes.” (Though I should note that Carter is a District Judge for the Central District of California, not the higher Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.) But a federal judge can no more conjure material goods out of the air than King Canute could control the tides. If you declare that every homeless person has a “right” to housing, you guarantee a lot more people will become homeless to enjoy the free ride. This is what previous generations understood as “moral hazard.”
I suspect that the “L.A. Alliance for Human Rights” doesn’t actually want to solve the problem of homelessness, they just want a bigger cut of the Homeless Industrial Complex pie.