“No Defense of the Indefensible”: L.A. Judge Makes Landmark Homelessness Ruling
postalley.org
postalley.org
The article links to the full decision as well.
Money can't solve anything on its own, but you can't solve a problem without it either.
That reveals something about my subconscious; in my mind, there are few items of outdoor furniture as simple, rewarding, and pleasant to spend time on (alone or with loved ones) as a flat, comfortable bench.
Remarkable times in LA. Thank you for sharing this.
It is also laughable to think a judge has a grand plan to solve a societal issue. So a judge appointed himself to be the supreme planner of the city? The idea that a judge thinks himself can solve the homeless problem with a big plan is by itself pathetic.
The city does not need to be 100% responsible for every contributing factor to have a responsibility here just as a drunk driver is not off the hook because it was also raining when he crashed into someone.
Nowhere in the ruling does it claim to solve the broader issue of homelessness or dictate a long-term plan for the city. But it does say that the city can't simply let the situation fester while they noodle for decades on initiatives and broader plans.
This is basically your boss “solving” issues by assigning the task to you.
The bosses lack of expertise is irrelevant so long as you are actually capable of doing what is asked.
There’s no as actual plan, just “you will put the money you promised to spend on this in escrow so as to not put the plaintiff’s in a worse situation than you have already announced the intent to, and then you will make certain explanations and achieve certain goals by set times”. A plan would specify how those results will be met.
> It is also laughable to think a judge has a grand plan to solve a societal issue.
This is not a plan nor is it aiming to solve a societal issue.
> So a judge appointed himself to be the supreme planner of the city?
No, the appointment was by the President of the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate, and the position is judge of the adherence of parties brought before his court with federal law, with the broad power to order behavior changes where there are breaches in that adherence with harms to other parties.
> The idea that a judge thinks himself can solve the homeless problem with a big plan is by itself pathetic.
The particular identified Constitutional breaches involved in the city of LA creating Skid Row and then actively choosing a containment polcy to trap people there and prolong the harms deliverately inflicted is not equivalent to the broader “homeless problem”, and the order here isn’t a solution to either the former or the latter but a direction to cease and mitigate the active and ongoing harm LA is doing to the subjects of the former. A solution (or at least, compensatory remedy) for the former, narrower, problem would likely be a component of the final judgement if (as seems likely) LA loses the case, this is merely a preliminary injunction to avoid irreparable harm during the pendency of thr trial, not a remedy for past harm or permanent solution.
Yes, it would be crazy if the judge was doing what you describe, but the judge is doing something much narrower.
SF is another example of what happens when public policy gets it wrong, our false compassion is killing people and city leaders are doing less than nothing about it.
If we're on the subject of compassion, millions who are no longer able to acquire effective pain relief could use some.
> If we're on the subject of compassion, millions who are no longer able to acquire effective pain relief could use some.
Could you clarify what you mean by that?
However, the driving factor for homelessness in SF, is the fact that there is no where for people to live. Thats part of why eviction is so stupidly hard in SF. Once you become homeless it is functionally impossible to get out.
The Reagan canard is also just that; The Supreme court ruling sought by the ACLU during the Carter administration is why people are out on the street, the govt can't legally commit people like that anymore.
Evictions are hard here for the same reasons that its trivial to get fentanyl in front of the federal building that houses the DEA - failed govt policy.
https://www.pacificresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/H...
"Roughly 34 percent of the homeless in San Francisco are homeless due to direct economic factors, such as evictions and job losses. Another 12 percent became homeless when they lost the safety net of family or friends."
"About 15 percent are due to drug addiction or substance abuse."
The City has even had to sue other counties for dumping: https://www.ktvn.com/story/30191022/nevada-san-francisco-rea...
Its very well known that SF has drug tourists, its so obvious if you're on the streets here...
And somehow this makes you an expert or informed on the matter?
> 95% of the people on the street are not from SF
This is likely the case for every metro in the world. And?
> well known that SF has drug tourists
Facts and research, please. You seem keen to peddle the homeless as drug-addled perpetrators stereotype.
Even the Mayor of SF has talked about how SF has drug tourists and how they need to be prevented from receiving services. You don't seem to be very informed about SF.
I'm not interested in the incredibly small percentage of people exploiting the system that isn't helping them in the first place, but the large percentage of homeless - transient or long term - that need services but are fought every part of the way by ignorance like this.
Pulling numbers out of thin air doesn't make them true.
They also asserted that if our local DA actually did something about dealing on the streets we'd lose that same number of homeless people and they'd return to wherever they came from before SF, or go to Oakland. SF has turned itself into an "attractive nuisance" due to our unchecked open air drug markets.
I'm sure it did, and it's not just completely made up with absolutely no corroborating evidence to back it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson
Carter era federal law signed into effect 1980:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_of_Institutionali...
Other links:
Why haven't they fixed it since then?
San Francisco is trying a new approach but has only managed to get ONE person into conservatorship in the last 2 years because of all the roadblocks put up by a group called "The Coalition on Homelessness".
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/conservatorship-off-to-a-slo...
To give you an idea, you have to be 5150'ed (aka put on a psychiatric health hold) 8 times in order to receive inpatient treatment. 8 times. If you told someone they'd have to try to kill themselves 8 times before they got help, they'd probably call you nuts.
I'm still not seeing what that do with "Reagan".
If it's a law he instituted, that law could be changed back, yes?
There are almost no homeless people in the surrounding areas because they come to SF for drugs and they know they won't be prosecuted for living their lifestyle. We're literally killing people by tolerating their bad behavior.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/us/san-francisco-drug-cri...
Here's a current article written by a local advocate, its unfortunately paywalled but you're probably aware of ways around that.
Here's a snippet:
I called Thomas Wolf, one of the loudest critics of the city’s policies, to run past him what I was hearing from professors and other experts who have spent their lives studying drug use.
“Forgive me for saying this,” Mr. Wolf politely told me, “but those people who you said you talked to — the experts — they have never shot dope, man. They never stuck a needle in their neck. They never spent a night on the street.”
Mr. Wolf has done all of those things, which makes him one of the most poignant voices in the debate over what San Francisco should do to address an epidemic that claimed 713 lives last year, more than twice as many as died from the coronavirus in the city in 2020.
“You can study homelessness and addiction in a book all day long,” Mr. Wolf told me. “But until you have experienced the power of addiction and the things you thought you would never resort to, you don’t really understand.”
Alcohol and "legal drugs" are not the problem.
I don't doubt that opioids have contributed, but alcohol and other legal drugs are a major problem too. If this ruling is based on government caused harm, then it would require investigating the availability of alcohol due to policy too.
You can count the number of people on the street, maybe 1 in 15 has an alcoholic beverage, the rest are smoking meth/fenty/heroin.
SF's problems are all about drugs.
It seems alcohol is still the most abused substance in the homeless population. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29852450/
This is basically what you'll see every few feet in San Francisco's Tenderloin district:
https://twitter.com/DTenderloine/status/1382405311009488897
(Warning, extremely graphic)
Alcohol is certainly abused, but not as publicly as Heroin/Fentanyl....
Edit: They have. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-judge-orders-lo...
> Judge Carter ordered the city to place $1 billion in escrow; ordered the cessation of all sales or transfers of public lands;
Does the judge have the power to order such things?
Seems like in limited circumstances where the government itself is implicated in harm, than yes.
The state-created-danger doctrine does not mean any of those [1,2]. The law is about direct physical harm by the inaction of individual officers, not any vague policy implications. This judge's interpretation of the law is as crazy as his ideology.
1 https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/legal-doctrine-of-state-cr...
2 https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
No, it's not. Your own links directly contradict that; see, for example, the second paper and page 10 (not an officer of the law, not direct physical harm) and page 18 (officers of the law but no direct harm of any kind).
> when the government was an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions that lead to the need for aid. This is known as the “state-created-danger” doctrine. Judge Carter invokes this as the primary justification for his sweeping order
Most social problems aren't the clearly demonstrable product of deliberate government choice of the harm in this way.
The actual order is linked and has fairly extensive citations of precedent on that point, but, generally, yes, the federal courts have fairly extensive power to order equitable relief, even on a preliminary basis, where it finds actual (or, for preliminary orders, probable) Constitutional violations (and in some other cases, as well.)
You mean legally?
IANAL. IANAA, but I have lived all my life in a common law country, FWIW.
Ultimately, my guess is that a superior court will set the judgement aside while upholding some elements as correct, then direct the city and county to address those specific elements deemed to have merit.
The end result would be legislative change in the context of elements deemed valid.
Or perhaps I am overly optimistic....
It should be interesting to watch. My guess is we won't hear the final result for a few years... as usual.
That’s…actually not all that true, especially in the case of systematic racial discrimination by local government. School integration, including bussing, is a pretty good example where policy was often dictated in fairly explicit detail by the courts.
It's very odd to jump directly to writing detailed policy on a first judgment. Usually it's only that a specific policy is not allowed or general issue must be corrected. Usually it takes a failure of valid corrective policy to be implement for the courts to force a specific policy which they have devised.
It is not at all unusual for preliminary injunctions, when they are issued at all, to include specific mandated interim actions to prevent or interrupt ongoing harm. That’s, in fact, the whole reason preliminary injunctions exist.
Disclaimer: IANAL, and all that...
The constitution is the floor the stool sits on, and it supports common law both implicitly (cf, e.g., [1]), and explicitly (cf the 7th Amendment).
[1] https://constitutionalism.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/common-la...
The judge didn’t decide to spend a billion dollars. The judge ordered the city to put $1 billion dollars the mayor had pledged to the cause of homelessness in escrow. The actions ordered by the court may cost more or less than $1 billion.
The courts have broad authority to order government or other parties to take action to remediate (or cease exacerbating) unlawful harms they have caused; and $1 billion isn’t anywhere near the maximum that it has cost the subject of such an order to comply.
I'd fully expect this to get quickly overturned on appeal.
By way of example, assume, for the sake of contradiction, that your argument is valid. Then, by similar reasoning, I could argue that any argument I disagree with can be taken to unreasonable extremes, and is therefore invalid, etc. etc. :P
Um, if you actually read the detailed recitation of relevant fact findings in the decision, I don’t think you can trace most dangers back to the state with similar proximity.
> Take someone hit by a drunk driver, for example. The government repealed Prohibition, regulates and licenses alcohol production and sale, and is fully aware of the risks of drivers abusing alcohol (DUI laws, PSAs, etc). That sure sounds like an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions of the danger.
That’s not nearly the specificity of the harms to particular persons that is established with the skid row containment policy.
I hasten to note that many of everyone's favorite decisions came out of this process, so it seems to work. But from a civil law background, it just looks bizarre. Why would anyone design a system like this?
I agree that representation is lacking. I can't get an intelligent response from my reps, if I even get a response at all.
Note that they spent many years analyzing the failure modes of previous republics, and attempting to design a system resistant to those failure modes.
I mean, we're still on our first republic (at least at the moment), while France is on its fifth, so obviously they did something right.
Third if you count the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The Civil War failed, so that one doesn't count. The post-Civl War United States continued to operate under the same Constitution. There were some new amendments, certainly, but it wasn't scrapped and rewritten from scratch, and the overall form of the government of the United States remained the same.
Now, you can look at a case like this, and say that what the judge did is pretty authoritarian. But there's an appeals court above this court, and LA has already appealed. If this judge overstepped, the ruling can be overturned.
While I agree that Skid Row is a disaster. If I were a Californian, I don't think I'd be comfortable with this degree of legislating from the bench.
As a Californian, I’m not comfortable with the degree of active racial and other unlawful discrimination and actively seeking to preserve the harms of that discrimination carried out by the City of Los Angeles with no impediment from the State of California.
As an American, I’m not at all unhappy with the federal courts stepping in this way when a state, or a subdivision thereof, violates the rights secured to the people under the Constitution.