[This is an email from my friend Mark Lipman, who was homeless in LA County for a while and served on Culver City’s Advisory Committee on Housing and Homelessness. Mark is now a writer living in another country—Pete Rockwell]
They certainly aren’t wasting any time with their cruelty. Take a look at the Jones Settlement. That came out when Los Angeles’ anti-camping ordinance was struck down as unconstitutional—and I believe it applies to the whole region. In brief, they can’t enforce the ordinance if they don’t give people a place to go (shelter). Culver City doesn’t have any shelters so the big question is where do they expect people who are unhoused to go?
For cost: it costs the city approximately $1,000 for every arrest just to be forced to release people back onto the street after three days. Arresting people for not having a place to live does not solve the problem, it only makes the problem worse. We’ve been through this before and them trying to go backwards really is a sign of willful ignorance.
The only real solution is the Direct Housing program, which is based on 30 years of proven success from properly implemented housing first models.
There is too much money going into “servicing” homelessness instead of solving it; there is too much money going into policing homelessness, instead of housing people. They hem and haw and continue to refuse to provide the funding for housing people and then blame everyone but themselves. They’re the ones with the check book and the only ones they give any money to are their cronies.
Ask why they haven’t established a vacancy tax to go after these $6,000+/month units that just sit empty? They have done nothing but green light new construction and left us with a bunch of empty units that the average person can’t afford. They have kowtowed to these trillion dollar companies and investment speculators for years, under the guise of ‘progessive’ and can’t comprehend how that led to the housing crisis. I spent years warning them about all this to a bunch of deaf ears and now it looks like we’re back to square one.
Here’s my prediction: They’re going to establish this ban, it’s going to hurt a lot of people and fail miserably without solving the problem, then eventually more self-serving faux-gressives will get on the council promising to just be nice to the unhoused and then do nothing but bow down to big tech and corporate developers and nothing is going to change.