The downtown Los Angeles streets were back to normal Saturday for hundreds of homeless people after advocates for the homeless rallied earlier at Los Angeles City Hall to urge city leaders to remove criminal penalties forbidding setting up encampments and leaving personal items on sidewalks and other public areas.
“We hope that you will take action that day to decriminalize homelessness, decriminalize the possession of property in public areas,” Becky Dennison, a co-founder of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, told council members Friday.
The removal of the misdemeanors faces resistance from some residents groups. Mark Ryavec, with the Venice Stakeholders group, said criminal penalties are needed for enforcing the law.
“The misdeameanor penalty must remain or campers will not comply with orders of city workers to remove their belongings to effectuate clean-ups,” he said.
The pressure on city leaders to change the encampment laws could also come from another source. The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently revised their funding criteria to penalize grant applications from municipalities that criminalize homelessness, which could hurt Los Angeles’s chances of receiving federal funding, some city and county officials have said.
Dennison’s group, LACAN, and more than 100 other groups and “civic leaders” have signed onto a letter urging action by the city on decriminalization.
The letter also calls on the City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti to set aside $100 million per year to build permanent supportive housing for the homeless and those who are low-income, and to stop spending an estimated $87 million per year on law enforcement programs affecting the homeless.
Dennison also urged the council today to act with more urgency in finding the money that city leaders promised they would spend to tackle homelessness.
She said the council is expected to set up a fund account next Tuesday, but none of the promised $100 million has yet to be identified.
“You need to find some money and you need to find it now,” she said.
City leaders also announced in September that they plan to declare a state of emergency regarding homelessness, which could ease rules that currently slows down the ability to make shelter or housing available to the homeless.
An ordinance to officially declare the emergency is also expected to be debated soon by the City Council.
— City News Service