Neither George H. W. Bush nor Bill Clinton did much to reverse the gutting of federal programs to house the homeless instituted during the Reagan years. In fact, Clinton approved one annual budget for HUD substantially lower than the lowest Reagan had ever signed. Surprisingly, it was George W. Bush’s administration, in 2003, that launched the first serious presidential initiative against homelessness since the 1980s. In so doing, he changed the terms of how the federal government confronts homelessness itself.
Bush’s homeless czar embraced a “housing first” policy, easing longtime restrictions that denied permanent housing to homeless people until they brought their drug or alcohol addictions under control. The fact that most homeless people would be more likely to kick their habits with a roof overhead than with all the stress and temptation that comes with living on the streets certainly made intuitive sense. The president’s initiative, launched in 2003, promised to eradicate chronic homelessness in 10 years. It didn’t, but the chronic homeless population began to shrink—between 2005 and 2012, the number dropped 43 percent, from 176,000 in 2005 to 100,000 in 2012, though it inched back up to 110,000 last year.
Los Angeles, though, still saw homelessness as a criminal problem, one that could be attacked by endless police sweeps and night busts. This policy only intensified during the initial years of the downtown boom over the last decade. In the spring of 2006, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa even tore out all the public toilets that the Skid Row homeless used. That September, he launched the Safer Cities Initiative in concert with LAPD chief William Bratton, and a 50-officer task force was sent to Skid Row to arrest the homeless—sometimes for felonies but more often for jaywalking, drug use, sleeping on the streets during the day, and urinating or defecating in inappropriate locations, a criminal activity that had only gotten worse since the mayor’s wholesale scrapping of the public toilets.
Eventually, the stepped-up enforcement led to two lawsuits that forced the city to start rethinking its approach. In 2006, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered L.A. to stop its zealous enforcement of a law fining homeless people for sitting, sleeping or lying on any street or sidewalk with a penalty of up to $1,000 and/or six months in jail. The city’s lawyers had argued that there were enough shelter beds and permanent housing to make sleeping on the streets a choice. “We went to every place listed for Skid Row,” recalls Carol Sobel, the lead attorney on behalf of a group of homeless plaintiffs who had been arrested under the law. “And basically we were able to demonstrate that there were half the units the city said there were.” Sobel won another federal appeals court decision against the city for seizing and destroying homeless people’s possessions when they left them temporarily to shower, get food or go to the bathroom.
In 2004, while Sobel was still pursuing these lawsuits, an economic roundtable underwritten by the city housing authority published a 10-year plan to end homelessness in Los Angeles County. Among the report’s self-evident findings was that the greatest concentrations of homeless people tended to be in the county’s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods. After two years of apparent inactivity, the plan was reintroduced at a press conference held in a Skid Row mission—only now it had a new name: “Bring L.A. Home.” City and county leaders vowed to spend $50 million to prevent homelessness and expeditiously bring people off the streets.
“Some would say this is just another press conference,” Villaraigosa said at the time, “that the recommendations are a litany of the things we have to do, that there’s really not a plan.” Certainly, that was Sobel’s impression. “It was a 10-year plan to end homelessness in Los Angeles,” she says. “Between the cover page and the last page, there was no plan.” After the press conference, Bringing L.A. Home wasn’t heard from again.
But new ideas were entering the long stale politics of homelessness—both nationally and, finally, reluctantly and in small ways, in Los Angeles itself. All that gentrification in all those cities over the last decade had exposed just how visible the homeless problem was.
In the past few years L.A.’s homelessness efforts have become more streamlined, more sharply focused and marked by a spirit of cooperation after years of conflict among local government agencies, nonprofit providers and political and business leaders who have come to realize that police sweeps, no matter how frequent or draconian, are not going to oust people who have nowhere else to go.
These local efforts stem in part from a broader national movement. In 2010, the Obama administration announced a bold anti-homelessness campaign. “Opening Doors” proposed to eliminate chronic and veteran homelessness by 2015 and to end homelessness among families by 2020. These heady goals were to be achieved through better targeting of existing resources, rather than through any dramatic increase of funding from Washington.
It was a program well suited to President Obama’s governing philosophy—the embrace of Big Data and better, if not bigger, government and the idea that even if there wasn’t much new money to be found to build housing for the homeless, government could do a better job than the uncoordinated bureaucratic mess that most homeless people encounter when trying to get what help is available.
Crucial to Obama’s Opening Doors initiative is a 2009 congressional amendment to homeless legislation that compelled nonprofits, religious organizations and nonprofit providers to begin working together more closely, or else lose their federal funds. Together, these interest groups were required to implement a Coordinated Entry System—a single process for identifying and prioritizing clients who apply for housing and to more effectively reach those who don’t usually apply.