As national housing crisis spirals, cities criminalize homeless people, ban tents, close parks

LOS ANGELES – Jimmy Glen Woods picks up bicycle parts and other items a neighbor left outside his gray tent, sprucing up the small area he calls home in MacArthur Park, a 32-acre oasis of grass and trees in the shadow of the city’s skyscrapers.

The U.S. Army veteran takes pride in the appearance of the place where he's lived at times over the years.

Officials set a Friday deadline for people living in the park to leave for what the city calls deferred maintenance.

Woods, 72, says he is considering his options: He could seek help from Veterans Affairs or from a nonprofit offering housing. Or maybe he'll just move his tent across the street, where city officials say a new encampment will be allowed while maintenance workers spruce up the park.

“I used to (say), ‘Why me?’ You know what? You live and you learn," he says. "It was pretty good when I found out the spirit never dies.”

Woods is one of thousands of homeless Americans being forced out of encampments in public parks, business districts and residential areas as city officials struggle to balance skyrocketing homeless populations, an unaffordable housing crisis and the demands of property and business owners who object to often-filthy, unregulated encampments in front of their stores and homes.

Texas passed a statewide anti-camping law in June, Los Angeles passed a camping ban last month and Miami is considering one. Confrontations among police, encampment residents and activists have taken place in Denver, Portland, Oregon, Seattle and several California cities.

The number of cities with anti-camping laws rose by at least 50% since 2006, according to a report in 2019 by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (now called the National Homelessness Law Center). Advocates for the unhoused argue the pandemic exacerbates long-existing housing problems and criminalizing the homeless should never be a solution.

A federal study by the Departments of Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development conducted shortly before the pandemic found that four cities – Chicago, Houston, Tacoma, Washington, and San Jose, California – spent nearly $20 million in a single year on outreach, monitoring and cleanup of encampments.

City officials say they are getting more complaints about encampments as Americans reenter civil life after months of pandemic quarantines.

"A lot of the pressure that cities are feeling right now is that we want to come out of the pandemic, we all want to get back to normal," said Tess Colby, deputy director of the Seattle Department of Human Services. "Now that housed folks want to get back out, to get back to normal, we've bumped into a problem that has been a long time in the making."

People living on the street need homes

In Los Angeles, about 250 people have left MacArthur Park after repeated encouragement by authorities and advocates for the unhoused. Monday, workers erected chain-link fencing around the perimeter.

Workers with the nonprofit People Assisting The Homeless (PATH) stopped by tents to offer advice and assistance regarding relocation. Elsewhere in the park, people waited to use two portable toilets along Alvarado Street on the eastern edge, while others gathered on benches as Latin music played.

Los Angeles Police Department officers observed from a distance. City officials are taking a cautious approach at MacArthur Park after police swept through nearby Echo Park in March, arresting more than 180 people who refused to leave, from unhoused people to activists trying to protect them.

The city’s inability to solve homelessness has frustrated some property owners and politically weakened incumbent Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is term-limited.

Los Angeles officials said their efforts at MacArthur Park are aimed at making the area better for people who want to use the park to relax in daytime, while addressing concerns about gang violence directed at encampment residents.

“There was a real criminal aspect that was happening in this park that was victimizing our unhoused neighbors just as much as our housed neighbors,” said Jennifer Hark Dietz, PATH's deputy CEO. “We’ve heard that time and time again from the people we serve, just how at risk they really felt there but didn’t know where else to go.”

Hark Dietz is well aware of the criticism of how city officials handled Echo Park. She said months of intensive outreach to the MacArthur residents should prove effective, from providing mental health counseling to offering hotel rooms via the state's Project RoomKey. “Our goal ultimately is to help everyone make it into a home of their own. I think when we do that with dignity, we see positive results.”

National housing crisis is getting worse

Housing advocates agree the number of people experiencing homelessness is rising nationally. An annual comprehensive count was suspended last year during the pandemic.

"The visibility of the homeless population is greater than it ever has been. The encampments are bigger, there are more tents. And that's created a very real concern," said Heidi Marston, 34, executive director of Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a joint city-county agency.

Marston's agency oversees the MacArthur Park cleanup, and she noted that 47% of city residents consider homelessness the single biggest problem facing LA. The second-ranked concern is affordable housing, at 21%, according to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll.

Given public sentiment, she said, the city's leaders push for solutions, ranging from encampment cleanups to additional affordable housing.

"It's the difference between managing homelessness and addressing it to end it," she said.

In many cities, some Americans can't find a place to live.

In addition to skyrocketing house prices, national median rents rose 16% from January to September – five times faster than typical, according to Apartment List, an online marketplace for apartment listings. As pandemic eviction moratoriums expire, states have been slow to dole out federal rental assistance to people struggling to pay their bills.

"If you think it's bad now, it's going to get much worse," said Eric Tars, legal director for the National Homelessness Law Center. "People have been maxing out their credit cards, staying with friends and family. They've been stretched until they can't stretch anymore, and now things are breaking all across America."

Tars and his colleagues have filed lawsuits against anti-camping ordinances, arguing that targeting people who are merely trying to sleep amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

"We all agree that no one wants people living in the parking lot," he said. "The way to end encampments is to make them unnecessary, not illegal."

Government leaders search for housing solutions

Activists and government leaders said the increase in homelessness reflects choices made – and reaffirmed consistently – by Americans, from zoning favoring single-family homes to officials who repeatedly exempt developers from incorporating affordable housing into their projects. The problem is worse for communities of color, where generations have been excluded from homeownership by mortgage redlining.

"We didn't just find ourselves here. There are decisions and consequences that happened to bring us here," said Britta Fisher, chief housing officer for Denver. "We've seen a steady march to this place."

The Denver metro area has seen a 99% increase in people experiencing homelessness since the pandemic began, said Fisher, 41, and 33% of households feel pinched by housing costs. People of color and those with disabilities have long been overrepresented within the population experiencing homelessness, and the number of women seeking shelter has tripled since the pandemic's start, she said.

The shift away from a "traditional" homeless population prompted Denver to create more shelters available anytime, rather than just at night. Those shelters give people a place to store their belongings and make it easier for people to get health care via a doctor's appointment, rather than waiting for a crisis and using the far more expensive emergency room, Fisher said. Seattle adopted a similar model.

"Humans do better when they're rested and fed – that's pretty basic, and it really works," Fisher said. "We know that whatever those challenges are that people face, if you're worrying every night where you are going to sleep and whether you're going to be safe, it is that much more difficult to be sober, to be ready for work."

Denver officials deployed a team of park rangers to more strictly enforce anti-camping rules, such as prohibitions against attaching things to trees or erecting a tent on the sidewalk.

Some conservative leaders have called for punitive anti-homeless policies.

In 2019, the Trump administration issued a report on homelessness that suggested the solution was to make housing cheaper while making it less "attractive" to live on the streets via tougher police enforcement. President Donald Trump accused San Francisco and Los Angeles of violating the federal Clean Water Act for failing to keep human waste and drug paraphernalia out of the Pacific Ocean, which the cities strongly refuted.

The Trump administration argued that allowing developers to erect more housing would inevitably lead to lower housing costs.

Advocates for the unhoused said city after city has demonstrated that the free market approach doesn't work, largely because people who have houses don't want to see their neighborhoods changed if low-income people, who disproportionately are people of color, move in.

"The pandemic laid bare the reality that for decades, the United States has under-invested and disinvested in our housing infrastructure. That we have people living in encampments across our country is a direct result of this federal negligence," said Michael Anderson, director of the Housing Trust Fund Project at Community Change, a civil rights organization based in Washington.

He said, "Right now, income-eligible families might be on a three- or four-year waitlist before getting help. That is wrong and cruel and one of the many reasons people are forced to live in encampments."

Health care experts said it is difficult to provide services to homeless people if they are worried about being criminalized or made to feel like they have nowhere to go.

In Miami, Dr. Hansel Tookes, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Miami and founder of the IDEA Exchange, the state's only legal syringe exchange program, said clearing encampments increases health risks for people experiencing homelessness.

"When encampments are swept, we have gaps in care. If we can't find people, we aren't able to deliver HIV medication or clean needles and it's unsafe for everyone," said Tookes, who opposes Miami's proposed anti-camping ordinance. "People rely on us for everything from a cold bottle of water to a telehealth appointment with a physician."

Building affordable housing could curb homelessness

Shams DaBaron, 52, a housing advocate in New York City who was previously homeless, said many people feel safer sleeping on a park bench or in an encampment than in a crowded, noisy shelter where they might face physical and sexual abuse.

Bulldozing encampments "only serves to traumatize vulnerable people further," he said.

Last year, DaBaron was among a group of 1,200 people moved from the streets to a New York City hotel, which neighboring groups opposed. Unlike many cities, New York has a "right to shelter" law, requiring city officials to provide emergency shelter for anyone who needs it.

In July, city leaders raised the value of housing vouchers, expanding the pool of rentals available. The cost? About $900 million over the next five years, even after accounting for about $200 million in savings at emergency shelters and street-level enforcement.

In nearby Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka said he often feels intense pressure from the business community to address the estimated 2,300 unhoused residents, whether that's by pushing them out of parks or persuading them to leave the city entirely.

"People want you to do something about homelessness. They just don’t want you to do it around them," Baraka said. "The loudest voices are the ones who want you to get them out of the park, out from the underpasses, out of the train station."

In March, the city opened NEWARK Hope Village built out of shipping containers. It has served 27 people, and there's a 100-person waiting list. The city hopes to create 120 housing units in Hope Village.

Baraka said leaders have a moral imperative to help those who need it.

"We're the richest country in the world. At the end of the day, it's really an embarrassment to have people who had their income increase exponentially during the pandemic and yet other people are losing their homes," he said. "It's embarrassing to democracy, to equality, to our exceptionalism."

Biden's $327 billion housing plan

President Joe Biden is pushing Congress to pass a $327 billion proposal to provide housing for millions of Americans, including $90 billion in direct rental assistance that could provide homes for 1 million households. Congress is debating the proposal this week as part of two large spending plans offered by Biden.

"Allowing homelessness to exist is a public policy choice. We have the resources. The only thing we lack is the political will to fund those solutions at the necessary scale," said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Like many advocates, Yentel nervously watches negotiations in Congress, hoping that enough money stays in Biden's proposal to make a difference. Often, she said, housing funding gets trimmed to balance budgets, then scarce dollars are allocated as pet projects for elected officials, weakening the impact.

"These investments could literally end homelessness in our country for once and for all," said Yentel, 49. "If we miss this moment, it won't come again for years or decades."

Julián Castro, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama, supports the Biden plan. "If we fail to make these investments, our housing affordability crisis could become catastrophic," he said.

In Los Angeles, Woods and residents of a dozen other tents bide their time this week at MacArthur Park, their tents arranged among the trash and MS-13 graffiti surrounding the small lake at the center.

Woods says he served in Germany during the Vietnam era and later got into legal trouble, which led to intermittent homelessness.

He might not have an address, but Woods says he considers Los Angeles home, even if he doesn't know where he will be sleeping.

“I was going to move today, but I said no," he says. "I was tired."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: COVID-19: As homelessness grows, cities test new laws, solutions