Los Angeles Will Spend Billions On Homelessness Under Lawsuit Settlement

Los Angeles County and city will spend billions of dollars on its homelessness crisis thanks to a lawsuit settlement reached this month.

Together, the county and city agreed to provide tens of thousands more shelter beds by the end of 2026 for residents with mental health and substance abuse issues.

The settlements end a 2020 lawsuit from the LA Alliance for Human Rights, a coalition that includes businesses, residents, landlords, homeless people, and others, who claimed the city and county failed to address the homelessness issue and caused dangerous conditions.

Los Angeles County settled its part of the lawsuit this month, and it was approved Thursday by a federal judge. The city previously reached its settlement agreement earlier this year.

The county agreed to provide 3,000 new mental health and substance use treatment beds.

Meanwhile, the city agreed to nearly 20,000 new beds of either interim or permanent housing and has said it will spend around $3 billion over five years to construct the housing.

“This is an extraordinary step forward,” U.S. District Judge David Carter said. “It’s going to save a lot of lives.”

Los Angeles has a huge homelessness population, with more than 69,100 homeless people in Los Angeles County and about 42,000 in Los Angeles itself as of February.

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California has started to take a more direct approach to its homelessness crisis, which is rapidly worsening.

California’s new court-ordered treatment program goes into effect next week, a significant attempt by the state to get a handle on homelessness, as well as the addiction and mental illness issues that come with it.

The Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Act program allows families of adults suffering from a serious untreated psychotic disorder to file a petition in civil court for court-ordered treatment. Clinicians, first responders, and others can also file a petition. If the petition is approved, a judge can order a year-long care plan, which can be renewed for a second year.

While the program is technically voluntary, judges do have leverage. The court cannot force people to take medication or lock them up, but if a person is not successful in CARE Court, that can be used later to put a patient in a mental institution or conservatorship.

California has about 170,000 homeless people, the biggest homeless population in the country, according to a report last year from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Nearly a third of the country’s homeless people live in California, according to a June statewide study from a research group at the University of California, San Francisco.

Other California cities have particularly dire homelessness problems as well, and have struggled to find long-term solutions to curb the problem.

San Francisco has been in the throes of a homelessness crisis for years now, and it has only gotten worse since before the pandemic. About 38,000 people are homeless in the Bay Area on a given night, up 35% since 2019.

Last week, Sacramento’s top prosecutor sued the city over its homeless encampments, accusing city officials of allowing the homeless population to become a public nuisance.