Nearly two years ago, the Los Angeles City Council passed a controversial ordinance that banned camping by homeless people near schools, day-care centers and parks as well as any other locations that council members wanted to decree off-limits. All they had to do was submit a resolution with a list of sites, provide some nominal reason for the ban and put it to a vote of the council, which almost always signed off. Signs would then be posted designating the areas off-limits.
As we said when the city passed the anti-camping law, dubbed 41.18 for the municipal code section, shooing people off a sidewalk does not solve homelessness. All it does is move people to another sidewalk. And remember that about 42,000 homeless people were counted in the city in the official 2022 point-in-time count.
In tandem with the anti-camping law, the City Council adopted a street engagement strategy whereby people would be told to leave an area only after they had been offered some kind of temporary housing, which could range from a bed in a group shelter to a motel room.
