If a bed in a homeless shelter is taken, is that bed “still there?”
Plaintiffs in the five-year-old lawsuit alleging that the City of Los Angeles has failed to address homelessness say the answer is a resounding “no.” But the city wants to be different.
According to the testimony of City Manager Matt Szabo, the bed built by the city remains “there” whether someone sleeps on it or not.
That dispute is one of several at the heart of a trial in Los Angeles federal court to determine whether the city should be held in contempt for failing to comply with an agreement, signed more than 3½ years ago, that requires it to produce more than 12,000 shelter or housing beds and remove nearly 10,000 homeless encampments from the street.
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter began the trial in November with a scathing review of “the city’s pattern of rejection of the settlement agreement and the deadlines contained in it for performance or compliance with the performance of the work that only lead to litigation.”
Four days of testimony, spread over nearly two months, produced an incredible record of confusion and disagreement over the meaning of basic terms like “homeless camp” and “served people,” leaving the impression of a city that distorts definitions when it can’t live up to common ones.
If a social worker tells a person on the street that a shelter bed is waiting for them, is that a “donation”? Not by the city’s definition, Szabo testified Monday. The supply only happens when someone enters the shelter to occupy a bed.
The distinction is important because the court required the city to “provide” shelter to anyone whose tent or shelter must be removed in order to solve the problem. But the city can’t track how often “offers” are made, Szabo acknowledged.
“We chose to use PEH [person experiencing homelessness] acted as our best good faith effort to comply with that requirement.” “It’s a metric that we can reasonably verify.”
“PEH is worshipped,” he testified, said the people sitting on the bed.
The city’s defense is that it is doing everything it can and is making progress toward a May 2022 settlement goal.
“The good news now is that the city has improved tremendously since then,” argued Theane Evangelis, lead attorney for the city’s outside law firm. “Serving more than 8,000 people, with more than 8,000 beds online, more than 5,000 ongoing. Your Honor, these numbers reflect Herculean efforts to combat homelessness, not a pattern of delay or prevention.”
The 2020 lawsuit was filed by the LA Alliance for Human Rights, a group made up primarily of business and property owners who want clean streets. The case was also named Los Angeles County, which reached a separate settlement in 2023. The group’s attorneys argue that the city is deliberately obfuscating to cover up its inadequate efforts to meet its settlement.
“Our clients, the housing and homeless communities, have been promised more than just talk, Your Honor,” said their attorney Elizabeth Mitchell in her opening statement. “They were promised that strict measures would be taken, and they were confirmed by the data, overseen by this court. Three years after this court’s decision, the city is still struggling with housing shortages.”
Two advocacy groups — the LA Community Action Network and the Los Angeles Catholic Worker — are intervening on behalf of the homeless in the case. Representing them, Los Angeles Legal Aid Foundation attorney Shayla Myers argued passionately that they need to be protected on both sides of the case.
He is particularly focused on the city, which he accuses of using the encampment reduction program “to erase the visible evidence of homelessness on our streets and hide the fact that homelessness is not getting better.”
Under cross-examination by Myers on Monday, Szabo struggled to defend his testimony that the city continues to maintain the 7,000 beds it was required to produce under a previous agreement that expired at the end of June. He clarified that this is talking about visible beds built by the city and he admitted that more than 2,000 of those beds were rented with a temporary subsidy that expires in two years.
“I don’t know how many are still in use today,” he said.
The contempt hearing, a mini-trial within the case, is the latest in a marathon case that included: a 110-page order — overturned on appeal — that would have required the city to house everyone on Skid Row; an ordinance requiring the city to provide housing for all people living under the freeway; 7,000 beds; additional housing that requires the city to build 12,915 more beds and remove 9,800 campsites; the slow-burning battle over what constitutes a camp – for residential purposes it is a single tent, car or shelter; ordering a $3 million audit of the city’s homeless programs; a hearing that those plans be placed under receivership; the hiring of a 15-member outside legal team to fight the admissions charge of $1.8 million and counting; the appointment of a guardian in place of a receiver; and the appeal of the appointment of that guardian, which was not even the last appeal in the case.
The current hearing is focused on one section of the 2022 agreement that outlines — in retrospect, poorly — seven progress metrics the city must report to the court on a quarterly basis.
Three address beds: “the number of housing or shelter opportunities created or otherwise acquired, the number of beds or opportunities offered, and the number of beds or opportunities currently available in each Council district.”
And four, through a qualified person, “as much as possible,” talk to people: “the number of PEHs involved, the number of PEHs who have accepted offers for accommodation or housing, the number of PEHs who have rejected offers for accommodation or housing and why the offers were rejected, and the number of camps in each Council District.”
“To the extent possible” was the mainstay of the city’s explanation for why it used the number of occupied beds as a catchall for the city’s interactions with people.
Acknowledging that the city did not report all of the required items, Evangelis argued in his opening statement in November that the agreement “specifies that, quote, the city will work with LAHSA to include some of those items, quote, as much as possible. That’s critical.”
The testimony that follows paints a picture of how difficult and time-consuming it can be to collect that information from a homeless database called HMIS — not maintained by the city but by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority — but little evidence that the city pursued it “to the extent possible” with much enthusiasm.
The endless motion of the trial bore the brunt of at least one City Council member who supported the case in principle.
“Investments authorized by this case have contributed to the City’s reduction in housing poverty for the first time after years of increases,” Council Member Nithya Raman wrote in a November post on her website shortly after the downgrade began.
“However, litigation is now proceeding in ways that feel far removed from the goal of providing shelter and housing to people living on the streets of LA.”
Repeated hearings and requests for data “tax an already robust system, and add confusion and significant costs,” he wrote. “In a city with limited funds and resources, the demands of the Court are now removing as many people as possible from the job of building houses.”
Who is responsible for the subsequent trial may be discussed. That they will continue seems certain. Now there’s a new approach after a state court judge ruled last week that the City Council illegally considered part of the deal — a reduction of 9,800 campers — in a closed session without public participation.
Citing a Times report that questioned whether the Council had even voted on the settlement plan, “a sensitive and important matter before the Court,” Carter ordered a new trial, at a date yet to be set, to examine whether the city “willfully and intentionally misrepresented the facts to the Court.”
