This ad from 1913 for Pacific Home Builders reflects how Los Angeles and the country relied on the westward migration of Anglos to make a profit by selling real estate. Homes were not just structures to live in but a mark of prosperity and profit for shareholders.
Kate Cagle did a great piece covering the ongoing battle royal between Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva and…everyone else. She captured really well the dissonance between what the Sheriff said he was doing – by golly, he was walking around in his hat and DOING SOMETHING (ensuring it was well-documented by his press team, of course) and if you don’t like it why don’t YOU go to Venice Beach – and what the LASD actually did, which was shuffle people around, causing them great inconvenience, who then ended back where they started.
Contrast Cagle’s work with the LASD propaganda, which shouts, “Help is on the way!” It touts both compassion AND common sense. And I mean, a cheering crowd, really?
It’s Day One for LA Sheriff HOST Deputies (Homeless Outreach Services Team) who marched onto the Venice Boardwalk to the sound of cheers from nearby residents who had come to witness the bold move from the County’s top cop.
The language really runs the gamut. The above quote sounds like an army regimen coming to town. Villanueva himself has said, “We’re coming for you” – ominous. Then there are the usual terms of “clean up” and “clearing,” which treat people and their belongings like trash or excess shrubbery. “Actions” is unbearably vague. Describing Venice Beach as “out of control” (I guess that refers to the people?). Then there is Villanueva’s insistence that he’s not arresting people and he’s helping, which reads as insincere because he cannot hide his disdain for what he has called the “lifestyle.” And in a wide-ranging June 12 interview he said this:
Until we start regulating public space and reclaiming it on behalf of the whole community, we’re only inviting further chaos, further anarchy, and more misery. So you have to start somewhere.
The stakes are high and getting higher. Anarchy! Misery! The answer: Reclaiming public space!
Really, it’s “forced displacement and criminalization of unhoused people,” as a group of advocates stated. The LASD actions in Venice (like the LAPD and Echo Park) are really only moving people around, pushing them to other locations (where they may be less safe) and breaking up a community where people feel like they know who is around them and what the potential dangers are.
And it probably doesn’t need to be added that law enforcement action isn’t FOR the houseless:
“Cops across the country have homeless units,” said Paul Boden, the executive director of the not-for-profit Western Regional Advocacy Project. “Why? Not to protect homeless people. You’re not trying to mitigate homelessness. You’re trying to mitigate the presence of homelessness.”
Law enforcement concern with people who are living “on the street” – either camping or making due some other way – has a long history as I discussed in my last newsletter. The idea that streets are for moving, not sitting, lounging, talking, or congregating, wasn’t some inherent truth that was obvious to everyone. It was common for people to congregate in the street, to purchase merchandise from vendors, and catch up on gossip. One New York commission described said street “impede rather than facilitate travel.” But Anglo urbanizers wanted the city to be attractive to industry and the real estate industry wanted people to buy into the idea of Los Angeles as an “Anglo-Saxon paradise.”
As a result of criminalization from strict criminal codes and the power of Anglo politicians and economic interests, people not living in houses or apartments were immediately suspect. They were moral derelicts from out of town. They were potential criminals. They showed examples of “anti-social behavior” (like living). It’s also worth adding that media played a role in pushing these narratives. The Los Angeles Daily Times, the most popular newspaper in Southern California at the turn of the century, wrote many articles to encourage Anglo settlers to flock to the city and praised law enforcement for being “on top of” any perceived crime problems. (Newspaper accounts of crimes were also admissible at trial, so long as a jury found them credible.)
LA Times headline, October 12, 1908
The truth, as many have reported, is that those who are houseless are over 6 times more likely to be killed by police and more likely to be the victims of violence.
Such moral panic-style arguments elide what is actually the very multi-prong issue of housing as well as what I think is a political debate about what the “public streets” are for. To talk about the first, it’s pretty well established by experts who actually study houselessness people that the population is diverse and not all have the same needs. Some people are high-need, often medically, and already require substantial care from the state to cover medical bills or hospital stays. Some people are cycling through bouts of living arrangements – living in cars, camping, couch surfing – often because of low wages/ lack of work, and a lack of other desirable options. (For example, “shelters,” a broad term for all sorts of communal living, often have curfews, pet rules, drug prohibitions, etc.) These were the people I encountered most as a community college teacher – I had a number of students every year who were living in their car periodically because they had nowhere else to stay and/ or because that was preferable to other options.
People say, “Homelessness is complicated,” but it’s not really. There are fairly well-studied solutions and ideas, but no one wants to bother to implement them, I think, because it’s more politically viable to yell “homelessness!” and get people riled up, especially in California. (Another issue I think gets treated the same way is “immigration,” which covers a wide variety of human movement across borders.)
Sheriffs in particular like to grab these floating, vague societal panics because they jimmy up votes. (Police chiefs do, too, but because they are not elected, they will tend to soften their rhetoric in order to be aligned with other city politicians.) As we saw with Villanueva, sheriffs often are dealing with houselessness and other concerns because of their wider jurisdiction and broader availability of resources. For example, sheriffs can better control jail populations, and there has been an uptick across the country of sheriffs using their jail for rehab purposes or as makeshift shelters. They do all of this despite the overwhelming evidence that criminalizing not having shelter doesn’t do any good.
Note: The magnificent Cerise Castle and Knock LA broke the news last night that Villanueva had set aside 200o jail beds for houseless people who “do not comply.” (They say they are for “custody holds,” which means a 48-hour stint, just enough to ruin someone’s health and life.)
This gets to the more philosophical point. Sheriffs like to see themselves as agents of order, or, as Villanueva says, to “properly regulate public spaces.” In California, as in many other places, people on the street have long been since as a hindrance to profitable activity even though the existence of such a marginalized population is, in fact, a by-product of the very system that is seeking to criminalize them in the first place.
But, of course, it’s far easier to say that “solving homelessness” is “complicated,” requires thinking about “both sides,” and needs “action not inaction.” It’s harder to rethink why we’ve made it so “complicated.”