LOS ANGELES – On a dirt pocket between a sidewalk and freeway in the Wilmington neighborhood in South Los Angeles, roughly half a dozen people lived in tents for most of the summer. But by 7 a.m. on Sept. 24, three police SUVs and a bright orange truck lined the street next to the freeway entrance.
Two sanitation workers tossed bags filled with food waste, papers, and blankets toward the truck. They were there under city orders to conduct a street cleaning, often called a “sweep.” The community of unsheltered people was no more, but a man named Mystic told Capital B he left the night before, setting up his new nook: a chair flanked by blankets hidden in the bushes away from street view. About 500 feet away, several unhoused people sat waiting for the next bus out of the area. They told Capital B they were going to join a growing encampment a little over a mile away.
These kinds of tent encampment cleanings or sweeps have been a regular occurrence in Los Angeles for years. But lately, the sweeps are almost daily after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June confirmed that cities can remove houseless people and their belongings from public spaces without offering supportive services like shelter. Advocates for unsheltered people say encampment sweeps have surged across the West Coast as well as Florida.
The fallout of the Supreme Court ruling has no greater impact than on Black Americans, who are four times more likely to be unhoused than white people and two times more likely than Latinos. The court’s ruling makes it harder for advocates to combat the criminalization of homelessness, and as advocates and unhoused people have told Capital B, Democrats and Republicans are to blame. It underscores a growing reality across the country: With over 600,000 unhoused people nationwide, there are only enough shelter beds for 53% of the people experiencing homelessness, leaving hundreds of thousands of people with no choice but to sleep in public every night.
The ruling also opened the door for municipalities to levy fines and citations, and even arrest houseless people for sleeping on the streets — and in Los Angeles, the epicenter of a nationwide epidemic of unsheltered people sleeping on the street, the impact is especially acute. There are more than 75,000 unhoused people in LA County and 45,250 unhoused in the city of LA.
The practice is about upholding the idea of order, safety, and cleanliness. Still, advocates say it is not solution-oriented and may push Black people deeper into poverty and housing insecurity.
More than 181,000 people in California are houseless on any given night, according to the latest figures. The vast majority, nearly 80%, are unsheltered, sleeping in vehicles, parks, and on the street. Despite spending $24 billion on various homelessness programs over the past five years, the homelessness problem has continued to worsen in California.
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After the Supreme Court ruling, LA Mayor Karen Bass, the first Black woman to hold the position, said she feared the ruling would usher in a wave of mass incarceration, similar to the war on drugs. Instead, Bass said, LA would pursue options like its Inside Safe program, which offers shelter to unhoused people who have had their encampments swept, and a “master leasing” program that would help formerly unhoused people by renting out blocks of housing units and sublease them to struggling tenants. Under the Bass administration, LA’s unhoused population has declined marginally for the first time in years, but in August, Human Rights Watch released a 300-page report slamming the administration for continuing “cruel, expensive, and ineffective policy” toward homelessness.
In response to Capital B’s inquiry about the ways Los Angeles has responded to the Supreme Court ruling, a city spokesperson said “Mayor Bass will continue to work urgently to save lives and bring Angelenos inside,” adding that her programs have brought “more than 3,000 Angelenos experiencing homelessness inside with supportive service.”
Although no one was ticketed or arrested during the South LA sweep, the items belonging to the unhoused communities that weren’t trashed were said to have been collected by the city workers. But one catch: the storage unit for the property collected is 20 miles away from where this cleaning took place. The journey seemed an insurmountable task for unhoused people, due to the cost of transportation and the distance.
Sweeps and the path to criminalization
At least one California city has attempted to outright ban shelters and supportive services in the aftermath of the ruling while increasing its system of arresting unhoused people for sleeping on the streets.
Even before the ruling, more than half of the 187 largest urban and rural U.S. cities had at least one law prohibiting sleeping in public. But since July, in addition to cities across California, Democrat-led and leaning cities in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Iowa have begun arresting and fining people. Likewise, Republican-led cities and counties across these states and in Texas and Florida have ramped up enforcement.
“What we’ve seen in Skid Row [Los Angeles] since June is a vast increase in citations and arrests for folks that are staying on the sidewalk,” explained Adam Smith, a community organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network. “And the LAPD data shows that the folks that are disparately impacted are Black folks.”
A month after the ruling, California Gov. Gavin Newsom told local governments that the state would begin withholding funding if they did not begin a crackdown on public displays of homelessness.
“This is not about criminalization,” Newsom said at the time. “What’s criminal is neglecting people that are struggling and suffering and dying on our watch.”
Marques Vestal, who has researched how policing, fines, and fees have contributed to the Black homelessness crisis in Los Angeles, said California’s approach to homelessness since the pandemic shows “there are people in this work — city workers, nonprofits, activists — that are really trying to put people into housing, but what we’re seeing is just a massive regulatory failure and shortfalls in terms of where funding is going.”
This year, California’s homelessness increased by 6% compared with last year, driven mostly by the state’s high cost of housing. An audit released in April found the state did not collect enough data for several programs meant to serve the state’s unhoused — including rental assistance and local government grants — to determine whether they were effective. But last month, Newsom rejected a bill to more closely monitor the state’s spending on homelessness programs and their outcomes because he said there are already government mechanisms in place to do this.
Vestal said the Supreme Court ruling underscores what elected leaders are willing and not willing to throw their support behind.
“We haven’t ever seen a period in U.S. history where we’ve had enough sustained political will to house poor and marginalized people, but we’re seeing this willpower to fight over the use of public space.”
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In the months since Newsom’s proclamation, the state has made more than $130 million available to conduct these kinds of street cleanings and tent removals. As the “sweeps” have grown, hundreds of unhoused Californians have been arrested. In just the first six weeks after Newsom’s orders, at least 215 unhoused people were arrested in San Francisco alone.
It’s a practice that has existed quietly for years in some cities, but it has recently exploded nationwide. Even before the ruling, from 2016 through 2022, roughly 40% of all people arrested and cited in Los Angeles were unhoused, and Black people make up roughly 40% of these arrests despite making up just 8% of the city’s population.
As Capital B has previously reported, a series of discriminatory housing laws and the war on drugs is largely credited with growing the homelessness crisis and for the disparate ways it impacts Black people.
In Austin, Texas, Black people experiencing homelessness are almost 10 times more likely than white people to receive a citation for sleeping outside. Nationwide, Black people make up more than 27% of those arrested and charged with crimes most associated with homelessness, like “vagrancy” and “loitering” despite making up 12% of the population.
“Law enforcement has been leading the charge into this path of criminalization,” said Theo Henderson, a 50-year-old man who experienced homelessness in Los Angeles for nearly a decade. “The public believes in police officers over everything before understanding what has created the situation we find ourselves in.”
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Activists and researchers have told Capital B that cities should not have the ability to destroy encampments with impunity. The sweeps cause unhoused people to lose important belongings such as food and medicine, and documents such as identification cards. They make it harder for people to find jobs, housing, and other services, especially if they’re fined or arrested.
After sweeps, unhoused people have reported feeling dehumanized and traumatized, and mental health conditions have worsened. Unhoused people have also said they feel the sweeps communicate to the larger community and to the people experiencing homelessness themselves that they have little worth and are only “throw away” people.
Last month, in a story published by The Los Angeles Times, Bobo, an unhoused Black man in Los Angeles, wrote about his experience and the violence that saturates his life, from everyday people to city workers.
“My mind is going at 100 miles a minute,” he wrote, referring to how being unhoused and the constant threat of displacement and upheaval has rewired his ability to function. “I used to be an efficient, productive member of society. Now I don’t feel comfortable enough to sit for five minutes.”
Research consistently shows that the enforcement of anti-homeless laws fail to sustainably or permanently accomplish the goals lawmakers purport to have.
“There is a narrative around the success of these sweep programs, but it’s only reaching a couple of thousand of people,” Smith said. “Nevermind that a third of them exit the shelter program, whether back to the streets or, unfortunately, to a casket.”