LOS ANGELES (CN) — The city and county of Los Angeles returned to federal court Monday in a bid to end a lawsuit over failures to adequately address the sprawling homeless encampments across the city that have earned both repeated rebukes from the judge overseeing the case.
U.S. District Judge David Carter on Monday didn't rule on motions to dismiss the amended complaint by the LA Alliance for Human Rights, a group of downtown residents and business owners. Instead, he ordered a mandatory settlement conference for Feb. 15 to force the city and county to come up with a comprehensive solution to the intractable problem that has only gotten worse in recent years.
"This has been going on too long," Carter told lawyers for the city and county, referring to their efforts to negotiate a settlement on how to tackle the problem.
The judge issued an injunction this past May in which he ordered the city and county to put $1 billion in escrow and use the money to find housing for the thousands of people living on Skid Row, saying he couldn't idly bear witness to preventable deaths.
"This ever worsening public health and safety emergency demands immediate, life-saving action" Carter said at the time. "The city and county of Los Angeles have shown themselves to be unable or unwilling to devise effective solutions to LA’s homelessness crisis."
The Ninth Circuit, however, overturned Carter's injunction, saying the judge had resorted to independent research and based his conclusions on purported facts and theories, such as the long history of systemic racism in housing, that weren't part of the plaintiffs' lawsuit. The LA Alliance then filed an amended lawsuit, incorporating much of the judge's arguments and adding a homeless Black man living on Skid Row as one of the plaintiffs.
Lawyers for the city and the county argued at Monday's hearing that the lawsuit was essentially an attempt to have the court address a political issue that rightly should be dealt with through elections or lobbying.
"It's not a violation of the law that the county hasn't done enough in the eyes of some of its constituents," Skip Miller, an attorney for LA County, said at the hearing. "We're trying to fix the problem; we're not breaking the law."
Much of Carter's frustration with the city's efforts to make meaningful progress addressing the homelessness crisis focused on the slow and inefficient way it has been using the $1.2 billion voters approved more than five years ago to fund permanent housing for homeless people. The judge was specifically miffed at the city's suspension of all deadlines for the Proposition HHH projects because of the Covid pandemic.
"Without these deadlines, Los Angeles residents have no way to hold the city accountable for its promises to create sustainable solutions to homelessness," Carter said last year. "And this complete lack of accountability has consequences — in the four years since Proposition HHH was passed, 5,814 homeless people have died on the streets of Los Angeles. Homeless deaths have increased to at least five deaths per day, and while the homeless have perished on our streets, only 489 housing units have been produced in the four years of HHH funding."
Even as recently as a status conference this past month in LA Alliance litigation, Carter expressed exasperation with the city and county being unable to confirm whether they had met their goal under a 2020 memorandum of understanding to provide 6,700 beds for homeless people who had been camping near freeways.
"I'm concerned about victory being declared over 6,000 beds when we need 66,000," the judge said at the December hearing. "This is just the beginning."
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