Barnett worried that if Los Angeles County’s progressive District Attorney George Gascón lost to opponent Nathan Hochman, policing could increase in the downtown Los Angeles neighborhood home to thousands of unhoused and formerly unhoused residents. 

“It’s going to be horses back down here,” said Barnett, alluding to the Los Angeles Police Department’s mounted unit. “It’s just going to incarcerate a lot of people, people are going to be going to jail for petty stuff.”

Homelessness was on the California ballot again this year, as it is increasingly playing a role in the state’s politics. A February 2023 survey by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Californians “are most likely to name ‘jobs, the economy, and inflation or homelessness’ as the most important issue for the governor and legislature to focus on. In Los Angeles County, nearly three-quarters of residents said homelessness “is a big problem in their part of the state.” 

Measure A was the clearest referendum on homelessness policy in LA County this year. The measure asked voters whether to extend and double the county’s quarter-cent sales tax that funds services and housing for people experiencing homelessness. And even in less direct ways, LA’s elections shape how homelessness is felt, from local and state ballot measures related to rent control and affordable housing to races for local elected officials who make decisions on the frequency and locations of sweeps, and how homelessness will be criminalized within their jurisdiction. 

But as a voting bloc, people with lived experience with homelessness like Barnett are underrepresented at the ballot box. More than 1 in 5 people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. live in Los Angeles County, and the county’s unhoused population of over 75,000 equals a constituency bigger than most of the county’s 88 cities. These potential voters could inform state and local efforts on homelessness by choosing which elected officials, policies, and programs might best serve them—but structural barriers make them less likely to vote. Data on voting among people experiencing homelessness is scarce, but one estimate found only about 10% of unhoused Americans vote each year.

Los Angeles County is actively working to change this trend with the Flex Vote Center Program, which brings voting directly to shelters and service centers for people experiencing homelessness. The hope is that bringing the polls to locations where unhoused people are already receiving services will reduce one barrier to voting. 

“Voting is the least of their concerns,” said Angel Agabon, 24, who recently experienced homelessness himself and voted for the first time this year at My Friend’s Place, a drop-in center in Hollywood for young people experiencing homelessness. “They got more shit to worry about than voting… They don’t know where they’re going to stay tonight, they don’t know what they’re gonna eat, they don’t know when they’re next meal’s gonna be, so voting, it’s not their primary concern, especially when they’re in this situation.”

The hope is that with Flex Vote Centers, people can go to places where they can get these basic needs met, and also participate in civic life. My Friend’s Place hosted a Flex Vote Center on Monday, October 28, one of 93 sites that the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk opened this year. The County Clerk launched the program back in 2020 along with other efforts aimed at making voting easier, especially among underrepresented groups such as voters experiencing homelessness, voters with disabilities, voters residing in assisted living homes, and geographically isolated voters. Most Flex Vote Centers are open for one or two days during the two weeks leading up to the election, while the county’s regular vote centers are either open for 4- or 11-day voting periods. 

The effort to make voting as accessible as possible has meant placing vote centers at locations including a tiny home village for people experiencing homelessness, a youth shelter, and a transitional housing site for women and children. Because the Flex Vote Center Program doesn’t only focus on unhoused voters, other locations included a jail and detention center, churches, city halls, and health centers, and other community organizations. 

“I think that the combination of having Flex Vote Centers, same-day registration, all of these different things, makes it easier. It’s never going to be easy when you’re living in a tent, but easier for people to be able to vote when they’re unhoused,” said Kat Calvin, founder and executive director of Spread the Vote, which helps unhoused people and others obtain identification documents so they can vote. “I haven’t seen anywhere else in the country that’s worked as hard as they have in LA.”

The effort has had an effect: The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office estimates that in the 2020 November General Election, a total of 2,794 people “who may not have had the opportunity to vote were able to accessibly, securely and independently cast their ballot in the General Election through the Flex program.” 

At My Friend’s Place this year, at least 31 young people registered to vote, according to Mat Herman, a Safe Haven Counselor at My Friend’s Place. In the weeks leading up to the election, My Friend’s Place hosted voter education events on topics like the two major political parties, a primer on voting in local elections, and voting as a member of the BIPOC community. 

“Overall, we really wanted to take this opportunity to educate [people] that just because you’re unhoused doesn’t mean you can’t vote,” said Herman. 

That included letting people know they could vote without a permanent address, by listing the address of My Friend’s Place or using cross streets as their address. Across the U.S., no state requires voters to have a traditional residence to vote, although many potential unhoused voters are unaware of this, according to the National Coalition for the Homelessness. Lacking identification documents can also serve as a barrier in some states. 

Even after registering, people experiencing homelessness still face barriers to voting. All but a dozen states and the District of Columbia have some form of voter ID laws, and roughly half require photo ID to vote. But frequent encampment sweeps makes obtaining proper documents more difficult. “We are constantly having to reorder birth certificates, re-get IDs, etcetera,” said Calvin. 

And not having these documents can have cascading impacts, even in states like California without voter ID laws. 

“If you don’t have an ID, you can’t get a job, you can’t get housing, you can’t get healthcare, you have bigger problems. And so it’s hard to even think about voting and participating in civic life when you don’t know where you’re sleeping tomorrow,” said Calvin. 

Other barriers include overcoming historic and systemic disenfranchisement, as many established voting practices are based on the assumption that a voter has a permanent home address, from important voting information sent via mail to identification requirements in some states. In some ways, these barriers are the last remaining vestiges of the country’s first voting requirements, which only allowed white male landowners to vote. 

Agabon estimates he personally persuaded over a dozen of his peers at My Friend’s Place to register to vote this year, in part by emphasizing the importance of weighing in on matters that directly how the election could impact housing and homelessness. 

“A lot of people don’t know that if you vote for the wrong people, places like this could shut down,” said Agabon. 

Measure A, the ballot initiative on the tax for homelessness services, ultimately passed with 58 percent of the vote. But other ballot measures focused on housing and homelessness didn’t fare as well. A statewide ballot measure aimed at making it easier for cities to expand rent control (which Agabon supported) failed for the third time in recent years. Still, it was important to Agabon and others that unhoused voters have a say in this policy that affects them directly. 

“All the great programs we work with, they are all going to get help getting funded with Measure A,” said Herman. “We’re just trying to show them that this is a huge thing for your community, Measure A.”

The James Wood Community Center, where Barnett voted, was one of two voting locations for Skid Row residents this year. It operated as one of the county’s routine voting centers that opened the Saturday before the election, not a Flex VoteCenter. 

It was an improvement on the 2020 general election, when there wasn’t a single official voting center in Skid Row. The only in-person voting option in the neighborhood was a mobile voting station that popped up only for election day, while other neighborhoods in downtown Los Angeles had voting centers open for four to 11 days. 

For Barnett, the community center location was convenient—just a few blocks from the single-room occupancy hotel where he currently stays. He learned the vote center was open through “word of mouth.”

“We thought they forgot about us,” he said about the wait to find out if a vote center would open in Skid Row this year. “We’re aware of the issues. It was just that we didn’t know if they were gonna let us vote.”

As soon as Barnett heard the James Wood Community Center was open for voting, he made his way over, casting his ballot the first day it opened. “I was early,” he said. 

The post Pop-Up Voting Centers Bring the Polls Directly to Unhoused Angelenos appeared first on Bolts.

In November, Arizona voters will decide on Proposition 312, a ballot measure that would allow property owners to claim a tax refund for costs they’ve incurred to address people illegally camping, using drugs, or defecating in public.

The measure was put forth by critics of the homelessness policies of many Arizona cities, and can be understood by looking at two legal standoffs over unhoused camping in public spaces. One was a massive encampment in Phoenix called “The Zone,” which, at its peak, was home to over 1,000 unhoused people. The other: a mostly dry riverbed in Tucson called Navajo Wash. 

Over the past few years, dozens of unhoused people have taken up camp in a city-owned section of Navajo Wash, which was once dotted with palo verde and mesquite trees that provided some relief from the scorching desert sun. But some neighbors cut many of them down, without the city’s approval, leaving behind over 50 twisted stumps scattered across the patch of land. Those same neighbors later sued the city, demanding the camps be forcibly dismantled. The neighbors claimed they were “negatively impacted by the masses of garbage and human waste.” 

Tucson does not have a policy of clearing every homeless encampment following complaints. Instead, camps that don’t pose public safety risks are allowed to stay. The city helps remove trash, offers services and monitors the encampment. Law enforcement is only called to encampments when there are reports of violent or criminal activity, which are then swept away.

In court, Tucson’s lawyers insisted the city’s handling of Navajo Wash was adequate. City workers had handed out basic supplies like backpacks, tarps, food and water. They cleaned up trash at the site and referred people to services steering them toward a shelter or permanent living situation. The court agreed, ruling that the city adequately abated the “nuisance” without forcibly clearing people away. 

Tucson’s strategy of dealing with homelessness by getting people into permanent housing while offering voluntary services follows a widely-used model called Housing First. This model avoids requiring people to complete programs or meet other preconditions to get housing resources. Its advocates cite research showing this approach increases the likelihood of people remaining in stable housing, accessing medical care and receiving substance abuse treatment. 

However, a growing conservative backlash is taking aim at this philosophy, both by removing encampments like the one at Navajo Wash and opposing the underlying policies they blame for allowing the camps to exist. Instead, they’re pushing cities to use the criminal justice system to bear down on homelessness, despite resistance from police and prosecutors who say the problem can’t be arrested away. They want cities to use criminal enforcement as a way to apply pressure to get unhoused people into treatment and off the streets. 

Republican legislators put Proposition 312 on the ballot. The measure would allow property owners to claim a tax refund for costs they’ve incurred when cities maintain a “public nuisance” or show a pattern of not enforcing laws frequently invoked against unhoused people, like loitering or obstructing public thoroughfares. The legislation does not define what reasonable expenses could include, but proponents of the measure cite private security, surveillance systems and cleanups. No Democrats in the state legislature supported the measure, which cannot be vetoed if approved by voters.

By allowing penalties for governments who use Housing First strategies, Proposition 312 advances this ongoing, nationwide effort to dial up law enforcement as a response to homelessness. But critics worry the shift will strain resources and punish a population that needs support, ultimately proving counterproductive to getting people off the streets and into stable housing. 

Legal precedent has long held that it is not a crime to be homeless—though many cities had laws like bans on sleeping in public which were difficult or impossible to follow when unhoused. Until recently, a federal appellate court ruling provided legal guardrails, saying that, “as long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.”

But this summer, in its ruling on City Of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down those protections, clearing the way for policies and court battles pushing the country toward a more punitive handling of homeless encampments. 

In the ruling’s wake, state and local leaders nationwide have proved eager to ramp up tactics. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, for example, issued an executive order, within a month of the ruling, authorizing sweeps on state-owned land. And in recent months, cities from Spokane, Washington, to Des Moines, Iowa, have added or expanded their own camping bans or resumed enforcement of existing ones.

The Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based think tank, submitted a legal brief in Grants Pass arguing that Housing First fails because many individuals do not want housing, “at least, not at the cost of giving up their addictions or other poor lifestyle choices.” The organization suggested cities could arrest and incarcerate unhoused people to compel them to treat underlying issues. 

“Allowing people to live on the streets or in tents in a park is not a compassionate response to the problem,” Goldwater’s filing reads. “A compassionate response would consist of providing people with the care they need — including taking them into custody against their will if they are incapable of managing themselves.” 

Before it interceded in the Supreme Court case, the Goldwater Institute supported plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to clear The Zone, the large Phoenix encampment that sat between a cluster of county buildings and the state capital complex. Then it brought legislation to Republican Arizona State Senate President Warren Petersen, who helped it through the legislature, and onto the state’s November ballot as Proposition 312.

Representatives from the Goldwater Institute declined to comment, but supporters of Proposition 312 say the goal is to compensate property owners who have spent money due to their city’s inadequate response to homelessness and prevent the development of more large-scale encampments like The Zone. 

“Prop 312 gives us hope that not only will the City of Phoenix not allow another ‘Zone’ to happen, but if so, there would be some compensation for small businesses like ours,” Debbie and Joe Faillace, former owners of a sandwich shop next to the encampment and plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the city, wrote in support of the measure.

Proposition 312 does not clearly define what kinds of remedies are adequate to keep cities off the hook. According to Sheriff Chris Nanos in Pima County (Tucson), law enforcement responds to practically all nuisance complaints — but not always to the liking of residents and neighboring businesses. 

“The law does not say you must take them to the county jail every time. Once you call us, it is our choice. We look at it and consider, do we need to take them to jail for urinating on the side of a building, or do we need to give them a ticket, or do we just tell them to get out of here?” Nanos said. “I think they really want to force the hand of government to do what they want. But you cannot arrest away homelessness.”

The sheriffs who run the state’s largest jail systems, including Pima and Maricopa Counties, have overseen facilities marred by overcrowding, poor conditions a streak of deaths. Jails are already straining to provide mental health and addiction resources for detainees, whose needs outpace the availability of services, Nanos said.

Josh Jacobsen, a business owner and co-chair of the Tucson Crime Free Coalition, a group backing Proposition 312, insisted that the goal isn’t frequent sweeps, which, Jacobsen says, are harmful to the unhoused and do nothing to curb homelessness. Instead, he thinks the city should make arrests, so the criminal justice system can forcefully guide people toward services. 

“With the right amount of pressure, something can be done about it,” Jacobsen said. “The goal is that with the right touch, you can get people to take advantage of services.” 

The county runs several diversion programs, including a specialty court for addressing homelessness, which allow minor charges to be dropped after meeting certain conditions, such as completing an addiction recovery program, though prosecutors warn those programs have limited space. 

In most cases, there is little police can do to meaningfully address nuisance complaints tied to homelessness, said Joe Clure, a retired officer and executive director of the Arizona Police Association, a professional group representing police labor organizations in the state. 

“You do have to manage your human police resources to be most advantageous to community safety. Whether or not that is aggressively going after homeless nuisance violations — that probably would be better left to somebody else than police,” Clure said. “When there is a potential loss of revenue, governments take that very seriously. It probably would move those types of violations up on the priority list. … We will have to be more enforcement-minded.”

“I think they know that mental illness does not cause homelessness,” said Will Knight, decriminalization director at the National Homelessness Law Center. He points instead to issues like stagnating wages, high housing costs and low housing vacancy rates. “But it’s a real easy myth to sell because of what’s the most visible parts of homelessness to most people in the community, who also themselves feel uncomfortable seeing it.” 

For decades, The Zone has been home to unsheltered people, but in recent years, a growing number slept on streets and sidewalks, in tents and other shelters cobbled together from palettes and tarps. Critics of Phoenix’s handling of The Zone accused the city of not enforcing laws against camping, obstructing thoroughfares and using illegal drugs—the same kinds of offenses whose non-enforcement would allow rebates under Proposition 312. 

Last fall, officials cleared The Zone from downtown after business and property owners, represented by the same law firm that led litigation to clear Navajo Wash, sued the city over lost business, employees and property value. Precisely how that clearing was dismantled was shaped by two major forces—one from inside the city’s bureaucracy and one from Washington, D.C.

In 2021, the Justice Department announced an investigation into the Phoenix Police Department, not just for use of force and discriminatory policing, but, for the first time for any department, also how police handled unhoused people’s belongings. The investigation, released earlier this year, found city officials seized and destroyed unhoused people’s property without adequate notice or recourse. Police, who previously played a major role in encampment sweeps and cleanings, also regularly stopped, detained and arrested unhoused people—even when there wasn’t evidence of any crime.

While the investigation was underway, Phoenix created a new Office of Homeless Solutions in 2022. It expanded shelter capacity and developed a protocol for storing unattended property. This new office oversaw The Zone’s clearing.

The office cleared the encampment block-by-block, giving advance notice and connecting people with shelter, Rachel Milne, the city’s Homeless Solutions Director told Phoenix City Council in September. The city worked in a “humane and compassionate manner, offering everyone an indoor alternative place,” Milne said.

“In many circumstances, we are really reevaluating what public safety means,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said at a September city council meeting. Many calls for service that had gone to police now go to the Office of Homeless Solutions, a shift she said was called for by both progressive activists and police. “Sometimes the best person to offer help to a person isn’t an armed officer, but a social worker or mental health expert,” Gallego said. 

Even as the city tested this new approach, Maria Walter, an unhoused person who lived in The Zone, felt disrupted as she wondered where to go next as city officials cleared the area.

“It doesn’t feel good. I don’t feel any safety,” said Walter, who was one of the hundreds who had to leave as the city finished its months-long dismantling of The Zone.

In its final weeks, soon-to-be former residents tried to gather their belongings while city workers swept up what they left behind. On some already cleared blocks, people returned to sleep on the sidewalk, covered by cheap blankets, like the kind used to pad furniture when moving. 

As the city cleared the last block, people wheeled their belongings out in carts. Those headed to a shelter tried to fit their belongings into already overstuffed vehicles. “It’s time to drastically downsize,” a city worker advised. 

Phoenix then opened a sanctioned campground for some 300 people a few blocks away from The Zone, offering meals and services on-site. This year, the city opened a new shelter that allows people to stay with pets and partners and more storage for their belongings. Phoenix plans to add over 500 shelter beds by the end of 2025.

But even with efforts to open new shelters, Arizona still faces a shortage of shelter beds and affordable housing, said Jamie Podratz, public policy advocate at the Arizona Housing Coalition. The coalition, which includes organizations and municipalities providing homeless services, opposes Proposition 312 because the refunds would take away money necessary to provide services that reduce homelessness. Emphasizing clearing encampments or enforcing nuisance laws would only displace unhoused people, and make it harder for them to access help, the coalition argues.

“What’s important is what we do from here—and that’s try to increase the supports available and increase the community response rather than pull away much needed resources to address it,” said Podratz.

Despite its win in the case, the legal battle over Navajo Wash pressured Tucson officials to use a firmer hand when dealing with encampments, especially since the decision has been sent to the Arizona Court of Appeals for review following the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling, said Paul Gattone. A civil rights attorney who has worked on several lawsuits to block the city from displacing unhoused people, Gattone described how Tucson officials have closely monitored Navajo Wash to prevent drug use and ramped up enforcement across the city.

​​”It wasn’t much of a victory for the homeless because the city is still doing sweeps,” he said.

In late September, Tucson officials cleared an encampment at Santa Rita Park, a little over a mile southeast of downtown. The park has baseball diamonds, a skatepark and a growing population of unhoused people.

Leticia Valdez organized her belongings on a cart as police and the cleanup crew assembled. She had planned to stay up all night to prepare, but was too tired. She didn’t have a plan beyond moving her belongings across the street. “It’s just a hassle,” Valdez said. ”Some people don’t have nowhere to go.” 

The fight in Arizona is being replicated, in some form, across the country. 

In October, Florida enacted a law conceived by the Cicero Institute, a leading critic of Housing First, banning unhoused people from camping in public and allowing residents, businesses and state prosecutors to sue cities for not quickly clearing out encampments. Like Goldwater, Cicero petitioned the Supreme Court to eliminate protections of unhoused people in the Grants Pass case. 

Cicero has propagated aspects of its model legislation in states across the U.S. In Tennessee, sleeping on public property is a felony. Over the summer, Kentucky passed a law allowing property owners to use, in some cases, lethal force, against people shoplifting, trespassing or illegally camping. Meanwhile, presidential candidate Donald Trump has promoted camping bans except for sanctioned campgrounds. 

A proposition on California’s November ballot similarly uses the criminal justice system as a main tool for managing homelessness. The ballot measure ramps up criminal penalties for certain drug and theft offenses, but allows people charged with those crimes to avoid prison by completing an addiction or mental health treatment program. Breaking with Housing First advocates who hold that individuals with stable housing are more successful at treating behavioral health issues, proponents of the measure claim involuntary treatment works “because people who receive treatment have a much greater chance of staying housed,” according to the campaign’s website. 

Gattone, the Tucson civil rights attorney, argues that displacing a person violating the law simply for living outside doesn’t fix the problem, it just moves that problem someplace else. Arizona has thousands fewer shelter beds than unhoused people, meaning there is no feasible way for cities to enforce the law without simply sweeping people from one location to another.

“The answer to homelessness is housing,” Gattone said. “People have to live somewhere. They are not going to disappear.”

The post The Next Front in the Fight Over Homelessness Is on the Arizona Ballot appeared first on Bolts.

Now, these experiences have led Cofer, currently a senior policy director at the organization Public Health Advocates, to seek the top job of California’s capital city. Cofer came in first in the nonpartisan mayoral primary in March, an upset victory for a young, Black, female first-time candidate running against several established politicians. In the general election in November, she is facing off against Kevin McCarty, a former Sacramento city council member who more recently served several terms in the state legislature. 

If she wins, Cofer has vowed to take a public health approach to setting policy in Sacramento. “Public health is about maximizing the two things that matter most to humans: the number of years in your life, and the quality of life in your years,” she told Bolts. “And I see that as the major charge of every public-facing institution.” 

For Cofer, this means seeing the city as an ecosystem, understanding homelessness, gun violence and other social problems as akin to infectious disease, and zeroing in on preventing their spread rather than simply treating its effects. “It’s one thing to fight a symptom, it’s another thing to eradicate a disease,” said Asantewaa Boykin, a nurse and activist against police violence who has worked with Cofer on community issues. 

While McCarty has espoused a fairly standard Democratic vision for homeless policy, speaking of the importance of services while also working on laws to restrict where unhoused people can camp, Cofer has called for stopping sweeps of homeless encampments and expanding and improving “safe ground” camping sites. She has also advocated for more funding for violence intervention networks, overhauling the city’s well-meaning but flawed alternative crisis response system, and using the budget to advance a set of clearly articulated values around health and welfare. 

As the primary results showed, hers is an enticing pitch to many in the city who are frustrated that the conventional solutions—a jumbled mixture of services, imperfect temporary shelter options, and homeless sweeps—aren’t working. But Cofer faces various barriers to realizing her vision: a $60-odd-million budget deficit, a district attorney and a state government bent on enforcing the criminalization of homelessness, and housed and homeless residents alike who are deeply mistrustful that anything will meaningfully change. 

In response to an affordable housing shortage and a growing number of people sleeping outdoors, Sacramento has, like many of its counterparts, tried everything from services and temporary housing to criminalization. In 2021, now-outgoing mayor Darrell Steinberg unveiled a costly plan to increase shelter options, but the following year, the city and county each passed ordinances restricting camping on sidewalks or near businesses, infrastructure, and the city’s American River Parkway. 

Then, in the fall of 2022, voters approved Measure O, which outlawed camping on public property. Cofer opposed Measure O, while Cofer’s mayoral opponent McCarty worked on a bill to outlaw camping on the parkway that he suggested could work in tandem with these other restrictive measures. McCarty did not respond to a request for comment for this piece.

Homeless advocates like Anthony Prince, a lawyer for the Sacramento Homeless Union, whose 2,800 members represent nearly half of the city’s unhoused population, argue that the city has wasted much of the money it has spent under Steinberg’s plan. “It was about pop up tents, mass congregant shelters, a few tiny homes scattered here and there, some so-called safe parking sites and safe camping sites,” he said. “This is not housing.”

Charley Willison, an assistant professor at Cornell’s Department of Public & Ecosystem Health, called shelter “a really important first step—if it is used as a transitional housing mechanism. We can’t have shelter being used as the final step.” But she also noted that too many cities create behavioral requirements, like curfews or complete abstention from substances, for shelters that disqualify whole swaths of people. 

Niki Jones, the Executive Director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, believes that the city’s vast expenditures have accomplished little and left housed residents pessimistic, inclined to blame their unhoused neighbors, and thus more likely to support punitive measures against them. “There’s this idea that all this money has gone into homelessness—why isn’t it solved?” she said. “There’s a woman who lives outside who says it really well—she says, ‘They treat us like we blew $80 million.’” 

Meanwhile, homeless advocates in Sacramento say that the municipal government’s repeated  sweeps of unhoused people continue to be destabilizing and traumatizing. It’s a practice that Willison says has been proven ineffective over the long term. “The evidence base shows us that these punitive policies, whether that’s arrests, encampment closures, without links to housing, all make homelessness worse,” she told Bolts. 

Part of the underlying issue, Cofer argues, is that the city has never set explicit priorities for what it wants to accomplish each year, instead opting to create a “status quo budget” based on the previous year’s expenditures. “Unfortunately, when you do that, you keep getting what you’ve always got,” she said. 

To address the root issue of affordable housing and stop people from falling into homelessness in the first place, Cofer supports Sacramento Forward, a policy package put forth by several current city council members that aims to enact “Just Cause” renter protections, mandate a certain percentage of new housing be reserved for low- and very-low-income residents, and prevent corporate purchases of existing housing by giving priority to tenant buyers. If elected, Cofer says she’ll use her power as mayor to expand support for the package and place individual policy items on the agenda for direct approval or an eventual ballot initiative. 

But then, of course, there is the issue of the nearly 9,300 people currently homeless in Sacramento County. Prince has recently served as the lawyer for Camp Resolution, a “safe ground” site that allows people to camp without police interference at minimal expense to the city. Prince stresses that this is not a permanent solution for his clients—“they don’t want to stay there forever,” he told Bolts—but it is safer and more stable than sleeping alone on the street. 

The city initially signed and then renegotiated a lease with the organization Safe Ground Sacramento that promises it will not clear the camp until all of its residents get into permanent housing, but Prince says that officials have also intensified sweeps around the camp and sought various ways to compel residents to leave. Last week, Safe Ground announced that it cannot fulfill the terms of its lease, including providing water and electricity, which Prince worries will give the city another reason to void the agreement.

Cofer has praised the “safe ground” concept as a low-cost interim solution and said she’d extend Camp Resolution’s lease, open more sites around the city, and ensure that any sites have running water, electricity, shower services, and other amenities that allow the people there to live with dignity. She sees the sites as a form of stabilization that might allow people a moment to breathe and get connected to resources that can pave the way for more long-term stability. “60 percent of our unhoused folks have disabilities,” she said. “Are they all receiving disability? Are they all receiving food stamps? Are they all receiving the services that they’re eligible for?”

Cofer also criticizes the city government’s reluctance to robustly fund a suite of programs that could prevent violence, homelessness, and unnecessary police encounters. In 2018, Cofer and others advocated for the passage of Measure U, which would have doubled an existing half-cent sales tax. The revenue from the first half-cent, around $50 million per year at that time, went largely to the police department, but the city said the additional half-cent would go toward things like inclusive economic development targeted at historically redlined neighborhoods, and an affordable housing fund. “That was the campaign promise and that was the way that this measure was marketed to voters,” Cofer said. 

But after the measure passed, most of the revenue from the tax ended up going back to the police department—not illegal, Cofer stressed, but “a breach of trust.” She advocated for the creation of a committee that would advise the council on how to better invest the funds from Measure U, and ended up chairing it from 2019 until the end of 2022. During her time there, the committee piloted a participatory budgeting process that invested money in community-led projects in two Sacramento neighborhoods, which Cofer hopes to continue and focus on youth-related projects if she’s elected. 

Cofer is clear-eyed about the way that Sacramento’s policing budget strains the city’s coffers and takes resources away from other departments. She notes that it’s gone up around $100 million in just four years to reach over $250 million today, and proposes a realignment of the Measure U dollars towards their intended purpose and a return to the 2018-2019 police budget of around $150 million. McCarty is clear that he will not cut police funding if elected. 

But Cofer is also leery about being portrayed as anti-police. She stresses that she empathizes with law enforcement officers and compares their plight to that of teachers: public sector employees burdened with the effects of social issues far outside their remit. 

One attempt to disrupt this paradigm came in the form of the Department of Community Response (DCR), which Mayor Steinberg debuted during the 2020 protests. The idea was to form a team of social workers and mental health specialists to respond to 911 calls related to mental health and homelessness instead of police. But Boykin, whose organization Mental Health First was already doing similar work, told Bolts the department engaged with her only superficially, and conversations soon ended. Jones, who has volunteered with Mental Health First, said that DCR has since betrayed its initial mandate as a police alternative and become imbricated in the broader apparatus of sweeps, displacement, and criminalization. 

“What really came into being was actually just a team that responded to unhoused folks, usually sent there before police,” she said. “They don’t respond instead of police. They respond as a precursor.” 

Cofer wants CDR properly staffed and resourced—she said it needs at least $7 million in additional yearly funds—so that it can fulfill its initial mission of taking over various 911 call types from the police department. This would, in turn, free officers up to respond to calls that involve violent crime, and leave the department less reliant on overtime. “If we’re talking about baking this into 911 response, that means that we have to have staff available 24 hours a day,” she said. “You kind of have to commit.” She also says she’d more closely collaborate with community partners like Boykin’s Mental Health First that have experience doing this work already.

In interviews, both Prince and Willison emphasized that any lasting solutions to the city’s homelessness crisis must come from listening to the people most impacted by it, rather than simply following housed residents’ complaints. 

Generally, Willison said, “the needs, rights and preferences, including the health and well being of people experiencing homelessness, get completely circumvented” in policy discussions around homelessness. A public health approach must prioritize “being responsive to the needs of people experiencing homelessness themselves.” 

Of course, Cofer would also have to contend with the many constituents who want some measure of criminalization, if only because they’re exasperated by the city’s lack of progress on reducing homelessness. Cofer says that it’s understandable that Sacramentans have looked to fixes like the 2022 ballot measure that ramped up enforcement, which she framed as well-meaning but misguided. But convincing residents to be patient as the city attempts to implement longer-term solutions will be a challenge. And it could be a lonely fight, too. 

Sacramento’s District Attorney, Thien Ho, has sued the city twice for failing to enforce its anti-homeless ordinances, and has also threatened a lawsuit over Camp Resolution. And the recent Grants Pass decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has made it harder for officials to argue that their hands are tied when it comes to criminalization. Shortly after Grants Pass, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered state agencies to begin clearing encampments on state-owned land, and strongly suggested that local leaders follow suit. This could further alarm individual council members reluctant to assert the political will to oppose sweeps or build new safe ground sites in their district, leaving it harder for Cofer or any future mayor to get the votes they need to make significant changes on this front. 

Cofer said that she’ll try to work around these challenges by encouraging collaboration and setting an ambitious affirmative vision for Sacramento. “I want us to set the benchmarks. How many people are we going to house this year?” she told Bolts. “And I want the media and advocates and everyone to be able to call in, or go to the city’s website and see how are we doing towards that goal, and I want us to be unafraid of setting an ambitious goal and potentially failing.” 

The post The Epidemiologist Running for Mayor to Bring Public Health to Sacramento Politics appeared first on Bolts.

Desperation defined my reentry to society as I struggled to find stability. Obtaining necessary items, like a state identification card through the Department of Motor Vehicles, proved nearly impossible because I’d left prison without a social security card, which I applied for after release. Weeks passed before it arrived at a friend’s house by mail, preventing me from working during that time. I relied on friends to feed me because I could not work to feed myself. After a string of poor decisions and a drug deal gone bad, I was arrested for murder—just 60 days post-release. A jury sentenced me to life without parole at the age of 24. I have always taken responsibility for my actions; however, I wouldn’t be here if I had been offered reentry assistance—shelter, clothes, and food—upon release from prison.

Thousands have left prison as hopelessly as I did in recent decades. According to reporting by NC Newsline, around 3,000 of the roughly 18,000 people who left North Carolina prisons in 2023 were homeless—that’s about one in six people. 

How many recidivists could have remained free if more schools had been available in prison, if they had left prison with a state ID, or if they had been guaranteed a place to sleep their first night out? People need help to survive after prison. I needed help. 

This year, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper took steps to fix this broken system that failed me years ago. On Jan. 29, Cooper issued an executive order directing the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction (DAC) to lead a coordinated effort with all state cabinet agencies to improve reentry services. 

“This is not only the right thing to do, this is the smart thing to do,” Cooper said in a press conference after signing the order. “Our state’s correctional facilities are a hidden source of talent: People with diverse experiences and skills who really want to change their lives.” 

Among the list of directives to state agencies, Cooper’s order tasked the Department of Health and Human Services with helping connect returning citizens to Medicaid, food assistance and other government services as they prepare for release. The order also directs the state Department of Transportation to increase availability of state ID cards to people preparing for release and expand work release and other employment opportunities to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. 

His order also directs the DAC to “increase access to and completion of educational programs in state correctional facilities” and help incarcerated people “communicate with justice system partners to resolve outstanding warrants, tickets, investigations, obstacles to driver’s license restoration, and other unresolved legal issues prior to release.” 

Cooper’s directive made North Carolina one of four states to join Reentry 2030, a national initiative spearheaded by The Council of State Governments Justice Center to improve access to resources for newly released people and remove barriers that lead to recidivism. Missouri, Alabama, and Nebraska have also adopted the initiative, which asks states to set specific goals to improve reentry. 

When Cooper issued his order in January, he listed a series of benchmarks that he wants North Carolina to hit by the end of the decade—such as increasing the number of incarcerated students earning high school and post-secondary degrees by 75 percent, and reducing the number of people released from prison into homelessness by 50 percent.

When I was released in 2000, reentry services in North Carolina had been stymied by the repeal of parole in 1994. The state’s new mandatory minimum sentencing scheme did not require post-release supervision. When a prison sentence ended, the state released most prisoners without ensuring they had means of survival, such as housing.

To address deficiencies in reentry, the North Carolina legislature passed The Justice Reinvestment Act in 2011, which mandated that people with felony convictions serve the final nine to twelve months of their prison sentence on post-release monitoring out in the community. However, unlike parole, this new post-release mechanism did not require a showing of rehabilitation before early release, nor did it incorporate more reentry services to curb recidivism; measures under the Justice Reinvestment Act only ensured that newly-released people would be monitored. 

Brian Scott, executive director of the North Carolina-based reentry nonprofit Our Journey, attended the signing of Cooper’s executive order at the governor’s mansion earlier this year. Scott, who was released in 2021 after serving 20 years in prison, applauded Cooper’s effort to improve reentry services. But he also raised concerns about how much it might actually change. 

The governor’s executive order, set to expire at the end of 2030, earmarks no new funding to improve reentry services, and could end if a new governor opposes it; Cooper, a Democrat who is term-limited from running again, will be replaced next year by whoever wins this November’s competitive governor election.

“It’s an executive order, not legislation, which means that while it reflects Governor Cooper’s priorities, it might not for the next governor who takes office in 2025,” Scott told me in a text message. “Until [Cooper] can get the North Carolina General Assembly to fund it, not everything can move forward. But this is still a very significant moment.”

Cooper’s order established a statewide reentry council composed of staffers from each cabinet agency who have been tasked with devising a plan on how to improve reentry. That plan, according to the order, should lay out strategies and metrics for agencies to improve economic mobility for people leaving prison, expand access to behavioral health and substance abuse services before and after release, and increase housing opportunities for formerly incarcerated people. 

The council is supposed to release its recommendations by the end of July. That will leave a short window for the governor’s office to move forward before the end of Cooper’s term. 

Kristie Puckett, senior project manager for Forward Justice, an advocacy group that advocates for racial and economic justice in the South, told me she believes that Cooper issued the order too late in his tenure. 

“It’s political,” Puckett said in a phone interview, noting that reform advocates have been asking for provisions in this year’s executive order for at least a decade. “He’s been in office for eight years. He could have directed his cabinet to do this long ago. That’s not progress. It can be repealed as quickly as he signed it … It moves the needle closer to where we need it, but we want real legislation that will last, not a temporary executive order.”

Cooper’s order expands on some steps the state has already taken to improve reentry in recent years. The statewide expansion of Medicaid in 2023 extended those services to newly-released people. Last year, the state DMV and prison system also started working together to issue state IDs to incarcerated people slated for release who expressed interest in obtaining them, however there remained limitations. It’s unclear what additional features of Cooper’s order can move forward or when without more funding. 

Puckett says the biggest benefit from the reentry order could wind up being data from studies that the new statewide reentry council is supposed to conduct on the current state of services for people leaving North Carolina prisons. “We want to know what programs are available. How do incarcerated people access them? How often? What is the white versus Black ratio for successful reentry programs? We can use that data to trace harmful and helpful trends,” Puckett said. 

If North Carolina had prioritized reentry assistance when I left prison in 2000, it is likely I wouldn’t be serving a life sentence today. No one wants to return to prison, but desperation after release can activate the revolving door by compelling someone to rely on crime for survival. A state sentencing commission report in 2022 estimated that 36 percent of people released from North Carolina prisons are re-incarcerated within two years. 

Even if it’s too late for me, Cooper acknowledged in his executive order that giving more people a fresh start after prison could improve public safety, saying that “successful reentry of formerly incarcerated people into their communities leads to a safer North Carolina by reducing crime and breaking the cycle of violence.”

The post On His Way Out, North Carolina Governor Expands Support for People Leaving Prison  appeared first on Bolts.

In a 6-3 decision that fell along this conservative court’s usual ideological lines, the court upheld an Oregon city’s policy of doling out civil and criminal penalties to unhoused people who sleep outside even as the city lacked sufficient shelter. 

Unhoused plaintiffs had sued the city of Grants Pass in federal court, arguing that its camping ban violates the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment. 

The six conservative justices on the Supreme Court, however, disagreed. “The Court cannot say that the punishments Grants Pass imposes here qualify as cruel and unusual,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. 

In her dissent, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused her colleagues of criminalizing the very condition of being homeless. She called on the court to “prohibit punishing the very existence of those without shelter.”

The ruling overturns several decisions by the Ninth Circuit, which covers western states, including Oregon and California. In Martin v. Boise, the Ninth Circuit held in 2018 that cities cannot punish people for sleeping outside without providing adequate shelter options. The Ninth Circuit then reinforced that decision in 2022 when it struck down Grants Pass’ camping ban, siding with the plaintiffs. 

These rulings had put in place some protections from aggressive sweeps of homeless encampments in western states. But a vast suite of public officials, including many Democrats, asked the Supreme Court to lift those protections. The court obliged last week. 

Hours after the decision, Bolts held a roundtable discussion on what the ruling means with three people who have closely studied the effects of camping bans: Charley Willison,  an assistant professor of public health at Cornell University who studies public health and political responses to homelessness; Chris Herring, an assistant professor of Sociology at UCLA who has researched the criminalization of homelessness in liberal California cities; and Eric Tars, senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center, a national advocacy organization that filed an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case in favor of striking down the city’s policy. 

In a wide-ranging discussion, these three experts shared their worry that, even if the Grants Pass decision does not mandate any enforcement, it will only increase aggressive policing tactics against people experiencing homelessness instead of long-term solutions to a worsening housing crisis.

“One thing that does concern me is how much more significant rates of homelessness are now, compared to pre-pandemic,” Willison said. “How will elected officials proceed with this, when the crisis is so extreme?” 

Let’s get to the ruling: Is this a decision you were expecting?

Charley Willison: Unfortunately, I think probably for all of us in the room, this isn’t surprising. We know that cities have been using police to respond to homelessness through punitive civil and criminal penalties for a very long time, definitely for over a century, but becoming more formalized in recent decades. This ruling takes us back to the status quo of just allowing cities to be able to do this. 

Eric Tars: Many elected officials get boxed into non-solutions that are the most politically expedient because their constituents are asking for a quick fix response that can sweep individuals off a corner, using the threat of law enforcement or the enforcement of these laws. But because you’re not solving homelessness, for any of those people who are swept, they are just moved somewhere else and remain a problem. 

In the majority decision, Justice Gorsuch does cite all these claims by cities, that past cases somehow bind their hands and limit them in addressing homelessness. The Martin v. Boise decision, far from binding the hands of communities, actually opens up the policy discussion to solutions that actually work. 

It enables a good elected official to say, ‘Look, I agree with you, people should not be sleeping on that street corner. But the courts have told us, we can’t just sweep them away, unless we provide a better place for them to be. So let’s work together to get that solution that’s actually going to solve homelessness permanently, and is going to give both you as a housed constituent and those unhoused constituents a better result altogether.’ 

So communities lost a tool today to get us to the solutions that we actually need to end homelessness. And that’s disappointing and dangerous.

One of the key differences between Gorsuch’s majority opinion and Sotomayor’s dissent was over the question of whether the Grants Pass law was criminalizing the mere action of camping or, as Sotomayor denounced, whether it criminalized the status of being homeless. What do you make of this distinction?

Tars: No, there is really no distinction, as the dissent makes clear. One of the things that the dissent gets right, but the majority opinion deliberately gets wrong, is that this is not even a case where the rich and the poor of Paris are equally forbidden to sleep under the city’s bridges: This law only applies to people who are putting down blankets and sheltering themselves to form a temporary habitation. 

That means that if you have your own permanent residence and are just going out to enjoy the park, you can put down a picnic blanket, stargaze, whatever—and that’s fine. But if you are doing it because you have nowhere else to go, then the law applies to you and you are forbidden from doing it, and can be penalized for doing it. 

That’s why this does, in fact, criminalize only people who have the status of not having permanent housing or who are homeless. Despite the majority’s opinion, it was designed explicitly to be cruel to people experiencing homelessness.

Chris Herring: In the oral argument, there was a line of questioning to Grants Pass’ attorney asking, ‘Are there any cases of you giving tickets to say, a person passing through as a backpacker in town? Or anyone else who wasn’t actually homeless?’ They could not point to an example. So empirically, we know that the ticketing and this punishment was only also going to those who are unhoused. 

Let’s back up a bit and talk about how U.S. cities currently deal with homelessness. Why do so many places readily turn to police for enforcement of anti-homelessness statutes? What’s the history behind this? 

Willison: A huge part of the history of policing in the United States was about controlling public behavior for the benefit of politically privileged groups. During the 19th century, and through the 20th century, we saw explicit criminalization ordinances, quite similar to the ones we see today, start to be utilized by police departments to control the visibility of people who are sleeping in encampments. It was about hiding the visibility of poverty, of public displays of mental illness, for the preservation of property values for wealthy constituents. 

When the federal government got involved to start formalizing responses to homelessness in cities across the United States, they built this structure known as the “Continuum of Care,” off of the nonprofit structure that already existed—shelters, soup kitchens, things like this. [Editor’s note: A “Continuum of Care” is a local planning body that receives homeless assistance funds from the federal government.] Today, we have a whole wealth of expertise within the “Continuum of Care” system, but in the majority of cities they actually don’t have any teeth to be able to carry out policy responses to homelessness. This is the case in Grants Pass: The “Continuum of Care” is a regional entity that is not a part of local government. 

Tars: The opposition [in the Grants Pass case] pointed to the existence of vagrancy laws at the dawn of the country to say this is something that was baked in at the founding. But those vagrancy laws specified two things. One was that people from outside the city could be criminalized just for coming in and not having a job. They also mandated support to people who became homeless and were residents in the community. So the founders actually would have been appalled by the behavior of Grants Pass, who is criminalizing its own citizens who have lived there, often for decades but have been trapped like so many Americans by the rising costs of housing, while they don’t have rising incomes. 

So this is not in keeping with the more generous parts of the history of our country. That history was renewed during the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt saw one third of his nation with no house and said we are adopting a second bill of rights, including “the right to a decent home” for every American, and he put that rhetoric into policy. From the 1940s up through the 1970s, we did not have mass homelessness in this country; we had a social safety net.

For the past 40 years, we’ve been losing deeply affordable housing, and that has produced the modern homelessness crisis. And their response has not been to renew our commitment to those programs that worked really well for decades, but instead to turn to the law enforcement approach. 

Now that the courts have ruled in favor of the city of Grants Pass, how will this affect the way cities and states criminalize homelessness? Do you expect more people to be fined and even taken to jail? For example, I saw that the city of Missoula, Montana, just passed a new anti-camping law. Do you expect more such ordinances to pop up in the wake of this ruling? 

Herring: I think it’s important to understand what the status quo was, even with the protections of the Ninth Circuit [Martin v. Boise in 2018 and Grants Pass in 2022]. In Grants Pass, what people faced even then was an incredibly punitive system; they currently have to pack up their stuff and move park-to-park every three or four days. Many receive over $200 fines when they’re not able to move quickly enough. 

Similarly, in San Francisco, after the city acknowledged Martin v. Boise, policing and criminalization actually increased. The only difference was that now they had to offer people shelter, and that shelter could be anything; at one point during my research, officers were offering people a one-night bed. If you were surviving on the streets with your survival gear and were offered a shelter for one night, sure, you could go to that shelter. But you’d have to give up your tent, your backpack, and after staying in shelter one night, you would be back on the street with nothing.

This just goes to show that these protections were very minimal to begin with. 

All that was being protected against was a ban of sleeping with a blanket for 24 hours. Now that that’s removed, that means that places can do that. That’s what we’re gonna have to see. Now, in places like San Francisco or certain liberal strongholds, there’s not the political will to be so blatant about that. But in places like Florida, and other conservative areas, absolutely. [Editor’s note: A new Florida law is set to go into effect in October that will ban homeless people from sleeping in public or face the threat of jail.]

This could lead to a race to the bottom of increasingly more punitive policies, moving people around. 

Tars: There is a really well-funded effort being made by billionaires with template legislation that they are shopping around to state legislatures right now, to criminalize homelessness at the state level, to create relocation camps. 

This is also explicitly part of former President Trump’s platform for the presidency, that he wants to create a national camping ban and relocation camps for people who simply can’t afford housing in their jurisdictions. He had similar plans back when he was in office, and the fact that the Supreme Court did not take up Martin v. Boise back in 2019 was what stopped him. 

So now the Supreme Court has basically paved the way both for cities, states and potentially the federal government to engage in more criminalization of people experiencing homelessness.

The court rejected the Eighth Amendment argument, so are there still constitutional protections for people experiencing homelessness? For example, a Justice Department investigation recently found that the Phoenix Police Department violated the civil rights of people experiencing homelessness in its sweeps of encampments. What mechanisms are still in place to be a check on police enforcement?

Herring: This [Eighth Amendment defense] was holding cities accountable. It was the leading legal strategy to give some baseline protection and injunction in cities. It definitely had a huge symbolic effect and moral authority; I think one reason that we saw California lawmakers asking for the court to hear [Grants Pass] in the first place was that they really didn’t like being portrayed supporting cruel and unusual punishment. 

There’s lots of other ways that these legal cases are going to be pursued under the Fourth, Fifth, 14th Amendments dealing with privacy property and due process. But that doesn’t carry the same moral charge to say “you’re not following due process” as committing cruel and unusual punishment. I think that will also have a big impact on how these cases are covered in the news media, and are thought about politically.

Tars: This ruling doesn’t mean we don’t have any legal tools left, the decision was explicit that there are other legal avenues that we can still take. The National Homelessness Law Center is going to be working with all of its legal partners across the country, to continue to find ways that we can vigorously defend the rights of people experiencing homelessness. 

But at the end of the day, even if the Supreme Court had ruled in our favor, that was never going to end homelessness on its own. It was going to give us an important platform that we could build on.

States and localities need to be doing all that they can to address homelessness, including things like increasing funding for truly affordable housing, changing zoning laws to allow for more housing, expanding health care coverage—and at the bare minimum, again, at least rejecting the false notion that jails and fines will solve homelessness.

Do you think there are any positive examples of U.S. cities that are addressing unsheltered homelessness without resorting to punitive solutions? 

Willison: Almost all cities across the country unequivocally use civil and criminal penalties, even in places where they will also have concurrent supportive housing policies that are using housing-first principles to provide people with access to housing and essential social and medical services.

So when we think about how do we move the needle, thinking about intergovernmental incentives is really important. One thing that came up in 2022, is the use of Medicaid 1115 waivers: A lot of states across the country are starting to do this so Medicaid can now pay for time-limited direct housing costs. This is something that’s brand new; these Medicaid 1115 waivers are explicitly targeting homelessness and are providing either direct housing cost or tenancy supportive services for people experiencing homelessness.

Herring: There are also more immediate alternatives to criminalization, which are alternatives to policing. We’ve been seeing cities create new models for responding to 911 calls regarding people experiencing homelessness and mental illness crises. These reroute calls that would go to police to other trained specialists, such as social workers or psychiatrists. 

Of the examples we have, the longest running one is in Eugene, Oregon; it’s called Cahoots. They handle over 20 percent of the total calls; they handle 24,000 calls a year, and of those, only 250 need police backup. [Editor’s note: These are the numbers for 2019.] So police can be involved when necessary but it’s not the go-to response, as it is in so many cities today. 

But some of the places doing best on creating housing also have more anti-homeless laws and some of the highest intensity of policing. The issue is we often hear that these have to go hand in hand: One of the arguments put forward in these liberal cities, and also written into the majority decision, was that these laws supposedly help cities push people into services. And this is just a myth. None of the empirical evidence points to this. Dozens of social scientific studies say rather that this sort of criminalization actually undermines people accessing those services. 

Criminal records prevent people from getting jobs, prevent people from getting housing, prevent people from even getting government assisted housing or getting into drug rehab, and in some cases, even accessing shelters because they have outstanding warrants. It’s really important to recognize how this is counterproductive rather than supportive.

Willison: You have these notions that criminalization must be necessary in some way. We know it makes it so much harder to end homelessness, but these notions persist because of the ways in which people experiencing homelessness continue to be systematically marginalized or excluded from policy debates. And I think something to consider, beyond big and small policy changes, is how to get people into the room. 

There’s a lot of great things that are happening through tenant union organizing, or representation through Continuums of Care, or other other advocacy networks where you can provide adequate representation in policy debates for groups that can’t be there themselves. Right now it’s really one sided, and until we shift the power dynamics, we won’t see shifts in the narratives, which is essential to changing these institutions.

The roundtable has been edited for length and clarity.

The post “Designed to be Cruel”: How Grants Pass Will Ramp Up the Policing of Homelessness appeared first on Bolts.

The result was pandemonium. Police helicopters hovered overhead long into the night. On the ground, LAPD surrounded and kettled protestors and journalists alike and commenced with mass arrests, including at least 16 members of the press; an officer broke one protestor’s arm with his baton. A year later, a UCLA report would confirm the protestors’ worst suspicions about the approach: vanishingly few of the unhoused residents of Echo Park Lake had been placed in long term housing, the whereabouts of many were unknown, and at least six people had died since being evicted from the encampment.  

To Hugo Soto-Martinez, then a union organizer, Echo Park Lake evinced everything wrong with his representative’s approach to homelessness. “This was, without a doubt, the most egregious abuse of power that I’ve ever seen, exhibited by a council member to the most vulnerable community of our city,” he told Bolts. Soto-Martinez decided to challenge O’Farrell, casting the incumbent’s actions as a symbol of the cruelty and ineffectiveness of the city’s response to its ever-growing unhoused population. He won his election decisively last month, beating O’Farrell by 16 percentage points, and was sworn in as city council member on Sunday.

Soto-Martinez joins a new, three-member bloc of progressives on city council who vocally oppose criminalizing homelessness and support expanding tenant protections and deeply affordable housing. Nithya Raman, a former urban planner who joined the council two years ago, has been defending such an approach since then. And Eunisses Hernandez, an abolitionist organizer, won this year against sitting council member Gil Cedillo, who had deployed a similar strategy of encampment sweeps at his district’s MacArthur Park. Raman and Hernandez both supported Soto-Martinez’s campaign, and all three beat incumbents to secure their seat, a rare feat in LA politics; Raman’s win in 2020 marked the first time it had happened on the council in 17 years.

This week, in their first council session, Soto-Martinez and Hernandez quickly paired up to try to extend the city’s eviction moratorium. And Raman’s team is hopeful there will be strength in numbers going forward. “We’re hoping with some of these new friends in the city council, we can work with them to create a more citywide approach to the issue,” Josh Scarcella, Raman’s homelessness deputy, told Bolts.

These council members are coming to power in a city context that has been transformed by the election of Karen Bass as LA mayor and by the recent passage of Measure ULA, a high-value property sale tax that will fund tenant protections, affordable housing, and homelessness support to the tune of nearly a billion dollars per year. “This is a very unprecedented amount of funding that will enable the city to address the housing crisis at its roots—by both providing housing as well as preventing homelessness in the first place,” said Laura Raymond, the co-chair of the committee behind the measure. Its implementation will be overseen by a 15-person committee, and Raymond said that the coalition that fought for Measure ULA is recommending candidates like housing organizers, formerly homeless people, and tenants who have lived in affordable housing units. 

Meanwhile, Bass, who had made housing affordability and humane solutions to homelessness a cornerstone of her campaign, declared a state of emergency on homelessness this week as her first official act as mayor, a move that allows the city to expedite affordable housing and homeless housing projects, among other things. She committed to getting 17,000 people off the street in her first year, saying the city would “make sure we are using every resource possible at the scale that is needed to save lives and restore our neighborhoods.” The progressive council members have expressed support for Bass’s approach, though some local organizers warn that it may put too much emphasis on speedy solutions rather than the long-term planning that may be needed.

With this sea change, Angelenos are facing an extraordinary opportunity to implement alternative models on housing and homelessness—and with that comes intense pressure to prove that their approach carries a better chance of getting more people off the street, humanely, than the city’s current methods of criminalizing homelessness. 

Eric Ares, Hernandez’s incoming director of housing and homelessness, wants to undo what he sees as the prevailing framework by which people conceive of the city’s homelessness crisis. “There’s this false choice: either you accept the status quo, which is the tents as they are in our streets, or you criminalize,” he said. “The people that got voted on to join city council, many of them got voted on to explicitly explore the things that weren’t being addressed:Increasing tenant protections, building more housing intentionally at all affordability levels, especially for those who need it most, non-law enforcement crisis response.”

For much of the past two years, the city council’s work on homelessness has been consumed by fierce debate over the existence and expansion of anti-camping ordinance 41.18, which outlaws the presence of encampments near shelters, parks, schools, bridges, and other infrastructure. (An analysis by the recently elected left-leaning city controller, Kenneth Mejia, estimates it now stretches to include 20 percent of the city’s territory.) Only Raman and now-former councilmember Mike Bonin have consistently voted against 41.18. Council members can also propose individual 41.18 locations within their district, which must be approved by council. 

In one meeting, Hernandez’s predecessor Cedillo successfully lobbied for 28 new enforcement zones in his district; meanwhile, Raman has never proposed a 41.18 zone in her district.

“In the past year, it’s a little bit of ‘every council district for themselves’ when it comes to homelessness,” said Scarcella. Within her district, Raman has established a homeless outreach team, including staff who work on legislation, liaise with service providers, and do direct outreach to encampments. 

The council’s three left-leaning members met regularly in advance of the new session, which began December 13, and both Hernandez and Soto-Martinez are taking cues from Raman’s approach: hiring staff dedicated to homelessness and housing, establishing direct connections to homeless constituents and encampments, and expanding access to public restrooms, a stunning privation for most unhoused people in LA. 

Both newcomers also denounced 41.18 on the campaign trail, and their offices told Bolts that they will not establish new 41.18 zones in their districts. “It just simply doesn’t work,” Soto-Martinez told Bolts. He also is advocating to stop using armed officers in encounters with unhoused people as a matter of course, and for the establishment of an unarmed response team, similar to Denver’s STAR program. 

But both offices will have to quickly figure out how to respond to the daily displacement to which homeless people in LA are subject. During his campaign, Soto-Martinez promised to end the practice of comprehensive sanitation cleanings, often called “sweeps,” which regularly dislocate unhoused people, lead to the destruction of their belongings, and often involve police. But on December 13, Soto-Martinez’s first week in office, the mutual aid group LA Street Care noted on Twitter that the new council member had not acted to cancel a number of sweeps that were scheduled to take place in his district the following day, despite dangerously low temperatures. Within hours, Soto-Martinez’s office had downgraded the sweeps to a so-called “spot-cleaning,” according to LA Taco reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray, a designation that means that nobody is moved and that the LAPD is not involved. 

Kris Rehl, an organizer with LA Street Care, went to all three sites, and was heartened to discover that the office had kept its word. “All three were just cleanings, what was reported,” Rehl said. “The fact that he was so responsive so quickly has made us really optimistic.”

Things get murkier when it comes to the 41.18 zones that Soto-Martinez and Hernandez’s predecessors have already established in the two districts. Scarcella said that the council office doesn’t control whether police enforce the anti-camping zones that exist in Raman’s district owing to the city-wide elements of the ordinance; the office is still trying to determine the best way to handle these situations. “Our goal is to work diligently with the individuals, provide outreach, and try to get them indoors,” he told Bolts, noting that LAPD is more likely to hold off on enforcement “if they see that there’s work being done, and there’s outreach being conducted.” Ares echoed that view. “The plan is to work with all the different partners that we have to ensure that whenever possible, we are leading with care and with services,” he said. 

For all three council members, the end goal is to craft policy for the entire city based on the care-centered models they implement within their own districts. 

The most critical element will likely be proving that they can get people off the streets and into housing.

Raman’s office has prioritized non-congregate housing like motel rooms, rather than shelter beds, in its efforts to get people into the pipeline to long term shelter. Her office was the only one to open a temporary housing site in 2021 called Project Roomkey, a former hotel with nearly 100 rooms, and residents were both allowed to stay as long as they needed and offered assistance on-site in seeking permanent housing. They have successfully rehoused 55 people through the site, which is temporarily closed pending a funding extension, are currently converting a recently purchased site for their permanent housing initiative, Homekey. “Her office has made tremendous improvements in connecting people with housing,” said Rehl. 

Roomkey shut down in late 2022, which Soto-Martinez has criticized, calling it “LA’s most effective sheltering program” and arguing for it to be extended and improved. Bass wants to extend the program, which was federally funded. 

Soto-Martinez also hopes to implement adaptive reuse (renovating existing infrastructure) as a quicker solution alongside building permanent housing—and eventually, social housing. He has his sights set on St. Vincent Medical Center, a massive, vacant hospital complex in his district. “We can refurbish these buildings much faster,” he told Bolts. 

Hernandez told Bolts in February that she would fight to ensure that new developments in her district contained more units for low-income tenants. Ares spoke of the importance of having a joint strategy: speeding up the process of building new affordable housing while preserving the many existing affordable units in danger of expiring, using public land to build social housing, expanding access to temporary shelter, and keeping people in their homes in the first place. “We have to do all those things at once or else we’re not going to see the changes that everyone wants,” he said, invoking Measure ULA’s comprehensive approach to the city’s housing crisis. The measure devotes the bulk of its funds to affordable housing, including construction, adaptive reuse, and preservation, but also covers emergency rent relief and other tenant protections. 

To make citywide changes, they will have to convince other council members of their approach. 

Bonin, who was for some time the lone voice against criminalization on council, declined to seek reelection this year; the district’s new councilmember, Traci Park, is a firm supporter of 41.18, along with several colleagues. But there are a number of other council members who could side with the bloc on issues of housing and homelessness. And the balance of power could shift more fundamentally as well: in the wake of a leaked conversation filled with racist comments between three members of the LA city council and a union leader, Nury Martinez resigned as council president, leaving her seat up for grabs; Kevin de León, meanwhile, is desperately clinging to power amidst universal calls to resign and a recall attempt. 

On the first day of the new session, that tenuous state of play was succinctly illustrated by Soto-Martinez’s first motion in council, which Hernandez co-presented, to remove the Jan. 31 end date from the ongoing pandemic emergency that has protected renters from eviction. They needed eight votes for it to pass, and three other council members joined with Raman to support the motion. With de León absent and Martinez’s seat lying vacant, though, they fell short by just two votes. 

With the outgoing council having voted to end the city’s eviction moratorium on Jan. 31, thousands of tenants who are behind on their rent could lose their apartments. “We definitely know that the increase in homelessness in LA is very much directly tied to the need for expanded tenant protections,” Ares said. Raymound said Measure ULA will allocate enough money to fully fund access to a lawyer for tenants facing eviction; such counsel can greatly increase the chances of people being able to stay in their homes but is not currently mandated in LA the way the right to a public defender in criminal law cases is. Both Soto-Martinez and Ares told Bolts that their offices want to codify a right to counsel for tenants facing eviction this session. 

Jacob Woocher, a tenant lawyer who organizes with the LA Tenants Union, says the council needs to go even farther to support tenants. He pointed to Raman’s touting of a universal just cause ordinance passed in October. “Just cause without rent increase protections—I don’t want to say it’s meaningless, but it’s much weaker,” he said. “If the landlord can’t get you out for any ‘just cause,’ what they can do is give you an $1,000 rent increase, wait 90 days for that to take effect, and then when that takes effect, and you can’t pay your rent—then you’re kind of screwed.”

Woocher said that he wanted to see the new city council members prioritize the needs of rent-burdened tenants and the homeless community over their relationships with their counterparts on council. “I just hope that they are willing to rely on the communities that put them in office and not be afraid to challenge their colleagues—and know that if they do go out on a limb, for tenants and for unhoused people, that the communities and organizations that have been organizing around these issues will have their back.” 

The post New Progressive Bloc on LA Council Wants to Reshape How City Responds to Homelessness appeared first on Bolts.

In November, Sacramento residents will be faced with a weighty decision not usually left up to voters: whether to broadly criminalize homelessness within the city. Measure O, a ballot measure brought by a group called Sacramentans for Safe and Clean Streets and Parks and supported by local business interests, would outlaw camping on public property, and allow individual residents frustrated by encampments to initiate abatement proceedings, effectively forcing the city to act on complaints. The city will also create new shelter spaces, but only a few hundred of them—a small fraction of the number of homeless people who will likely be displaced if the measure goes into effect.

Measure O is merely one of a series of recent efforts to crack down on homelessness in Sacramento. In late August, the city and county passed three separate ordinances to forbid camping in a wide variety of public places, including on sidewalks, in front of businesses, near “infrastructure,” and along the American River Parkway, a wooded riverside area where many unhoused people camp.

By now, it’s a familiar story across the state: cities vacillate between trying to offer unhoused people shelter and criminalizing them for lacking it—and increasingly, they do both at the same time. This push-pull dynamic is a result of cities attempting to comply with the letter of a 2018 appeals court decision holding that municipalities can only enforce anti-camping ordinances if they have shelter beds available—while doing as much as possible to bulldoze over the spirit of it. “The rhetoric is like, oh, it’s not as bad as you think it is. Or we’re gonna apply this in a really humane way, so don’t worry about it,” said Bob Erlenbusch, the founder of Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness. “But that belies the reality on the streets, you know?”

The cyclicality of the homelessness conversation in Sacramento has produced a profound feeling of déjà vu. Advocates decry the futility of trying to enact any policy that’s guided by the demands of housed people rather than the needs of unhoused people, involves criminalization, and lacks longer term solutions—condemning people to an endless cycle between streets, shelters, and jail. They fear that Measure O will only keep the wheel spinning. “The only thing you’re doing is finding ways to shuffle people through the hospital system, through the shelter system, through the prison system—and that shit costs a lot of money. A lot of money,” said Asantewaa Boykin, the co-founder of Mental Health First Sacramento, a civilian crisis response team that aims to get police out of mental health calls and works with many unhoused individuals. “We keep funding police to do Band-Aid work instead of finding solutions. I feel like I’m screaming at a wall.”

To Chris Herring, a professor of sociology at UCLA who has done extensive field research on homelessness in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere, the “shelters vs. criminalization” debate is a false dichotomy between two things that have become fundamentally contingent on one another. This dynamic is on starkest display in San Diego, where Mayor Todd Gloria’s “progressive enforcement” campaign has directed police to arrest anyone who refuses shelter, which has produced an eightfold increase in arrests (the city’s shelter system generally hovers around a 93 percent occupancy rate). But it exists in some form in nearly every municipality across the state.

To fully understand why, you have to look back to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2018 Martin v. City of Boise ruling. The decision, which affected nine western states, should have been a victory for anti-criminalization advocates. Instead, it created a series of perverse incentives for cities trying to manage their homeless population and avoid getting sued. Rather than interpreting the ruling as a moral and practical call for the state to stop penalizing people who sleep on the street if it cannot even temporarily shelter them, many cities instead have conceived of shelter availability as a pretext for criminalization and engaged in legal gymnastics to technically comply with that requirement.

Herring has observed law enforcement setting aside shelter beds—keeping them empty despite the presence of people who are ready and willing to accept them—in order to have enough on hand to make enforcement legally justifiable. In San Francisco, he studied a new crop of shelters that opened throughout the city with the intent to offer lodging with no limits on duration of stay, better conditions, and fewer strings attached; the goal was to get people housed long term. But, as Herring recounts in his research paper “Complaint-oriented ‘services’: shelters as tools for criminalizing homelessness,” Martin v. Boise gave police more control over shelter referrals and ramped up turnover, causing the city to strategically worsen shelter conditions. “As they were tied increasingly to policing after Martin v. Boise, a number of them rolled back those offers,” he told Bolts. “So some of these places that opened up initially offering the ability for people to bring their pets [or] partners can no longer allow that.”  

Municipalities have also seized on a single footnote in Martin v. Boise, which suggests that it may still be constitutional to forbid “the obstruction of public rights of way” regardless of available shelter,” to justify new enforcement methods. In Los Angeles, the city council implemented an ordinance, 41.18, that outlaws camping near schools, parks, and other public spaces, and has since expanded it; City Controller candidate Kenneth Mejia has estimated that the new restrictions make being homeless illegal in a full 20 percent of the city’s terrain. The legality of the recent Sacramento ordinances also hinges on that footnote. “Now they’re defining infrastructure really, really broadly, which includes schools and basically any building that the government owns,” said Erlenbusch.

Just last August, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg was boldly declaring a right to housing and introducing a comprehensive siting plan that would have designated 20 new locations across the city where homeless people could stay, ranging from emergency shelters to motel rooms to safe parking and camping grounds. Now, he’s endorsing Measure O. How did the city get from there to where it is now in just over a year? 

“I think the mayor’s proposal for a comprehensive siting plan was a genuine effort to expand options, especially during a pandemic where it was obvious that congregate shelter was not the way to go,” said Erlenbusch. “Out of the eight city council members, only a handful took him up on it. But in the meantime, homelessness has doubled…Businesses are upset. Residents are upset. Advocates are upset. Homeless people are upset—because nothing’s happened.”

To Erlenbusch, it’s impossible to overstate the role that angry constituents have played in the city council’s flip-flop from housing to criminalization. “They all have had tremendous pushback from business groups, community groups, especially neighborhood associations, and you know, the mantra is almost universal: ‘Well, we’re not against homeless people. But not here,’” he said. “I don’t even call it NIMBY anymore. I call it BANANA: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.”

Katie Valenzuela is a Sacramento city council member who has repeatedly resisted efforts to ramp up enforcement. She described the backlash from constituents that led many of her colleagues to vote against a vehicle camping proposal seen as an early test of Steinberg’s ambitious proposal. Two of the safe camping and parking locations she identified for the siting plan failed, in large part because of community pressure, and she’s since weathered two recall attempts by constituents angry about her approach to homelessness (a third attempt is already underway). “I think some people hate the solutions almost as much as they hate the crisis,” she said, laughing ruefully.

Enter Daniel Conway, the former chief of staff to a previous Sacramento mayor, who approached city hall with an initiative that would have required the city to come up with around 6,400 shelter beds within 60 days of the measure passing. “Immediately when we saw the text, the word bankruptcy flashed across all of our faces because there’s no way we’d be able to do that that quickly,” said Valenzuela. “We don’t have that much land and we definitely don’t have any money.” A flurry of negotiations and modifications ensued. Under the significantly revised version that will be put to voters, the city must only create up to 600 new shelter spaces, and is only required to spend up to $5 million of its own money doing so,  according to reporting by the Sacramento Bee. The enforcement aspect of the measure, however, stands.  

“It’s not even shelter, it’s shelter spaces, which we’re interpreting as tents on a parking lot somewhere,” Erlenbusch told Bolts. “There’s no requirement that the shelter spaces be evenly dispersed throughout the city. So you’re going to see the same thing that we’ve seen: it will be in disenfranchised communities, low-income communities. It’s not going to be in East Sacramento. It’d be like putting shelters in Beverly Hills in LA.” (Conway did not respond to a request for comment for this piece).

The fracas also reveals profound disagreements between Sacramento city and county on homelessness policy. In August, the council amended Measure O to make its enforcement contingent on the completion of an agreement that would clarify each body’s duties and financial responsibility—meaning that if the measure does pass, which seems likely, there’s a high possibility that it won’t go into effect. “The only possible positive outcome, at least from the no side, is that it won’t become effective because the city and the county can’t get it together to come up with any kind of agreement,” said Erlenbusch. 

While the city’s hand may be forced by Conway’s ballot measure, it’s entirely responsible for the recent ordinance that elevates blocking the sidewalk to a misdemeanor. At the last minute, Mayor Steinberg added a companion resolution stipulating that homeless people who violate it will not be jailed or fined “to the fullest extent practical.” 

Boykin told Bolts she was skeptical of how the mayor’s attempt to restrict incarceration or fines to “extraordinary cases” would play out in practice. “Nothing leads me to believe that if someone’s tent is taken, and there’s some paraphernalia found, that the police won’t charge them for that. They might not catch the misdemeanor, but they’ll definitely catch the substance use charges,” she told Bolts. “It just continues to funnel people through systems so that they’re off the street for a minute, which pleases a lot of their constituents.”

Parallel battles around homelessness are happening all over California—and sometimes, it’s the same people writing the playbook. Conway, the architect of Measure O, is on the board of the LA Alliance for Human Rights, which in 2020 brought a lawsuit against Los Angeles County demanding that the county expand shelter and services—and require homeless people to accept them under penalty of criminalization. Groups that work on homelessness in LA are adamant that the alliance doesn’t represent them or their interests. “This settlement may be trumpeted as a win by Skid Row property owners and politicians who are looking no further than the next elections, but it’s the same failed approach the City has been investing in for decades,” the Skid Row community group Los Angeles Community Action Network said in a statement following the lawsuit’s settlement in April 2022.

A number of groups supporting Measure O also oppose stronger tenant protections and affordable housing expansion in Sacramento, which Valenzuela sees as evidence of bad faith. “Our 2,400 shelter beds county wide are full of people, a lot of whom are ready to move on to the next step but can’t find one because we have no housing or permanent supportive housing available for them,” the councilmember said. “I can call any of these shelters and ask any of these residents why they’re still there. And they’re all gonna say the same thing. I got the job at the restaurant or I got all my benefits and I can’t find any place. There’s no room for me.”

But building housing takes time, political will, and a lot of money. Ultimately, for Boykin, the most tragic and rage-inducing thing about the endless, circular homelessness debate is not that that money doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s tied up in the large percentage of the city and county’s budget that goes towards the Sacramento sheriff and police departments. “It’s extortion. I don’t know any other way to put it,” she said. “And then we go, but where are the resources?”

The post Sacramento Ballot Measure Pushes Policing to Address Housing Crisis appeared first on Bolts.

Last summer, a billboard with an unexpected image graced the intersection of Olympic and Crenshaw boulevards in Los Angeles. Near advertisements for personal injury lawyers and recently released television shows hung a bar chart illustrating how the city spends the public’s money. A green rectangle representing police spending under the mayor’s proposed 2021-2022 budget dwarfed the numbers for housing and homelessness, stretching all the way to the right-most side of the frame to represent over $3 billion. The caption asked simply: Is Mayor Garcetti’s Budget Good For You?

The billboard was put up by Kenneth Mejia, the frontrunner in the race for Los Angeles city controller. Mejia has taken a creative and unconventional approach to campaigning for a position that is habitually misunderstood and hardly ever considered exciting. In running for the elected office responsible for audits, financial reporting, and the city’s payroll, he has used public records requests to glean data on everything from LAPD traffic stops to the residence of every LA city employee, presenting the information in easy-to-use online platforms, plastering it on billboards like the one at Olympic and Crenshaw, and promoting it relentlessly on social media. 

Thus far, these efforts have paid off: Mejia won the endorsement of the L.A. Times editorial board, which commended him for using his campaign “to demonstrate the kind of transparency-and-data-driven controller he would be.” In June, in a crowded, seven-person nonpartisan primary, the 31-year-old candidate finished first with 43 percent of the vote, more than 100,000 votes ahead of longtime city council member Paul Koretz. Mejia and Koretz are now set to face off in a November runoff. 

Mejia’s campaign strategy builds on the efforts of groups like the People’s Budget LA, a coalition of organizations led by Black Lives Matter LA that argue that the city’s spending priorities should look very different. His approach—to visualize and publicize the chasm between the city’s current budget and demands for reform coming from the community— follows the logic behind campaigns like the People’s Budget Report, released during the George Floyd uprisings in mid-2020, which polled thousands of residents and juxtaposed their budgetary priorities with Mayor Garcetti’s “Justice Budget” proposal. 

This sort of campaign has deep roots in Los Angeles: In 2003, the nascent Youth Justice Coalition, which is now a member of People’s Budget LA, mounted a “dollar for dollar” campaign with the goal of massively expanding funding for youth centers, intervention workers, and jobs. “That was essentially a youth-led campaign to urge city officials to invest the same amount of dollars they do into law enforcement and criminalization spending into youth development,” said the group’s media coordinator, Emilio Zapién. 

Meijia shares the fundamental goal of these campaigns: to engage voters in the city’s budgetary process, reframing something commonly viewed as abstract and opaque as a willful process of resource allocation—one that affects everything from what neighborhood you can afford to live in to where in the city you’re most likely to get arrested. 

“I’m hoping that we can have a more transparent LA, especially with funding, and that’s what I want to bring as city controller,” Mejia told Bolts. “Like, nothing’s hidden, you can’t hide it. You’re going to show it and you’re going to explain why you did it.”

To those who would dismiss him as just an activist, Mejia has a quick rejoinder: he’s also a certified public accountant, a qualification that few city controllers possess. “In the past, the controller position has been used as a placeholder position for career politicians who just need a job,” Mejia told Bolts. “That’s why a lot of people don’t know where their money’s being spent or if it’s being used effectively or efficiently.”

Francine McKenna, a lecturer in financial accounting at Wharton who also maintains a newsletter about auditing and accounting issues, says it’s much more common for city controller candidates to be politicians looking for a stepping stone than actual financial professionals. “I can’t remember anybody ever running a campaign saying, ‘I’m actually an accountant with a CPA and I know how to do this stuff,’” McKenna told Bolts.

McKenna first found out about Mejia’s campaign on Twitter. In an interview, she praised the candidate’s online engagement and use of public records to inform residents about the city’s payroll, affordable housing, LAPD arrest and homelessness criminalization zones, and more. “He’s using the skills and the background that he brings as a CPA, as someone who’s worked in public accounting and consulting,” she said. “He’s bringing those to the table and saying, here are all the ways that we think citizens should have greater transparency in terms of where the need is—and how that compares with where money is spent.” 

Mejia possesses a somewhat unique background, having worked both as an auditor for the massive accounting firm Ernst & Young and as a tenants rights and housing activist. At 31, he has already run for national office twice, on the Green Party ticket, before deciding to re-register as a Democrat and focus on local electoral politics. “Everything that I cared about—homelessness, housing, policing, the environment, transportation—it was like, ‘oh, this is all on the local level,’” he recalled.

If Mejia’s third bid for office proves successful, he will occupy a strange place in Los Angeles politics. “At its core, the controller has an immense responsibility that’s probably second only to the mayor and the city attorney—but at the same time, it has extremely limited power.” said Rob Quan, an organizer with Unrig LA, which works against the influence of money in politics locally. The controller cannot investigate other elected officials. The office also can’t set its own budget, and can’t in any way compel the rest of the city government to accept its recommendations. The roughly 130-person department is chronically underfunded. According to Jeremy Oberstein, the former chief of staff to current controller Ron Galperin, much of its auditing resources are taken up performing mandatory, time-consuming reports on the Department of Water and Power and the city’s airports and sea port. 

Quan predicted that it might be difficult for Mejia to completely square his big-picture activist mindset with some of the realities of the position. “I think it’s pretty safe to say there’ll be that tension there,” he said. 

But despite these limits, the city controller does have one key arrow in their quiver, Oberstein said: the discretion to perform an audit “at any point.” The vast, sprawling city budget—nearly $12 billion for the upcoming fiscal year—is theirs to examine, sift through, and hold up to the light. And while city controllers don’t have the ability to enact policy, their reports can still influence public discourse and potentially translate into change. 

Ultimately, the job is quasi-journalistic in both its emphasis on investigation and communication, as well as its indirect ability to influence outcomes, McKenna says. “You have to find a way to communicate sometimes difficult information or information that seems technical or seems kind of narrowly focused. You have to find a way to say: this is important.”  

Quan agreed that the credibility and persuasiveness of a city controller’s reports have everything to do with the level of influence the position can wield. “Your audits can just be headlines, or they can translate into real policy change,” he said.

Mejia acknowledges the limitations of the office but says he hopes to use his audits to motivate constituents to speak up for political transformation. “We don’t have any policy-making power—we can’t change anything, pass rent control, we can’t stop evictions,” Mejia said. “Our power as controller is we provide data and the facts and the numbers for people to use. And then they are the ones who push the policymakers to make systemic change.”

One critical element of the job is the ability to reach people where they’re at. Oberstein stressed that Mejia is not the first to creatively visualize data—Galperin’s office has won awards for its work on data transparency. From the perspective of Youth Justice Coalition’s Zapién, however, Mejia has done a better job getting it into the hands of a wide array of people.

“My role as media coordinator is to be able to collect information that is going to be accessible to our folks, and share with them in a way that feels accessible and not intimidating or overwhelming or confusing—because these systems are designed to be complex and confusing, so that our people don’t feel like they have access,” Zapién told Bolts. “Are you sharing things in a way that it’s accessible to the people doing the work on the ground, regardless of whether we agree with you fully politically or not?”

Zapién noted that he often screenshots Mejia’s resources and sends them to colleagues. They’ve proved useful tools for illuminating the budgeting decisions behind young people’s daily experiences: why LAPD harasses them on the way to and from school, or why they only have only one youth center. “When we actually look at the numbers,” he said, there’s a powerful connection between how the city chooses to spend its money and the outcomes for its residents: “Of course, what do we expect to happen when we’re spending all this money on law enforcement and lockups and not in youth development?”

Mejia’s campaign is working on creating more campaign resources to add to those he’s already released. Next up is a database on the most expensive lawsuits the city has paid out, a map of park inequity across LA, and a big report on the LAPD—“so that people can have a one-stop shop on understanding, like, where the hell’s my $3.2 billion going?” the candidate told Bolts.

“At the end of the day, the controller is—by charter—a job that is open to redefinition,” Oberstein said. “The goal of the job, in my mind at least, should be to drive lasting change. And you do that by creating relationships and speaking truth to power.”

On that matter, the two runoff candidates take opposite approaches. Koretz, Mejia’s opponent in November, has campaigned as an insider, touting his close relationships at City Hall. Mejia flips that logic on its head. “As an outsider and a CPA, I can hold people accountable,” he told Bolts. “We don’t owe the establishment anything because we’re not part of it to begin with.”

In recent weeks, the two candidates’ diametrically opposed relationships to the status quo have boiled over into open conflict. Mejia is a sharp critic of the city’s approach to homelessness, which is characterized by widespread criminalization. Koretz, meanwhile, has been an architect and staunch defender of that approach. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Mejia’s website recently posted a map and analysis of the city’s anti-camping policy, 41.18, showing that unhoused people would be banned from sitting, sleeping and storing belongings in about 20 percent of the city under an expanded version of the law. This statistic has pushed  public debate on the issue, quickly becoming a talking point repeated by activists and local media alike. At a city council meeting on Aug. 9 to vote on the matter, members of the Services not Sweeps Coalition, which has a good deal of overlap with People’s Budget LA, disrupted the event, testifying vociferously to the law’s inhumanity. “I just want help,” one unhoused woman sobbed. 

Mejia was there alongside them. “We’re here at City Hall today to support our unhoused neighbors,” he tweeted. (The candidate has downplayed his involvement with the People’s Budget LA, telling Bolts, “our campaign’s relationship is just providing financial information about the city.”) After protestors were forced out of the chamber by police, Koretz blamed his opponent, saying: “Just because Kenneth Mejia and his band of anarchists tried to break up two different meetings, we’re not going to stand for it. We’re going to take the action that we need to take.” The city council ultimately voted 11-3 to go ahead with the expansion.

One of Mejia’s central goals is to audit the city’s sweeps of encampments and other ways officials have criminalized people who sleep on the street. “I think what you’ll find is tens of millions of dollars being spent on these sweeps—and you’ll notice that the performance metrics of getting people housed from the sweeps are terrible,” he told Bolts. “I’m hoping that we can show just how much the city has failed on tackling homelessness.”

The post Auditing the Status Quo in Los Angeles appeared first on Bolts.

At just 32, Eunisses Hernandez already has a long record of organizing wins steeped in abolition. She has worked to remove drug enhancements from the state’s penal code, close a notorious Los Angeles jail and halt the construction of others, and champion a historic Los Angeles County ballot measure reallocating hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to community programs and incarceration alternatives. So it may come as a surprise to learn that for a long time, Hernandez wanted to become a cop.

Growing up in the predominantly Latinx neighborhood Highland Park, Hernandez saw that her family and friends’ relationship to police was mostly fearful and antagonistic. People in distress didn’t call 911 because they dreaded immigration enforcement more than the immediate threat. Police profiled her cousin so often that when he was eventually arrested, prosecutors accused him of being in a gang. Hernandez’s adolescence coincided with the Great Recession, and her family did anything they could to stay afloat and hold onto their home. They rented out rooms in their house, and one day, there was a fight between the couple that lived there. Hernandez felt helpless. She called 911, but when the police came, they only talked to her through the window of their squad car before speeding off, saying they had more important things to attend to. Maybe, she thought, she could do a better job than the cops who profiled her cousin, or the ones who didn’t even get out of their car when she called for their help.

For Hernandez, becoming an abolitionist was a long journey: one shaped by the complex experiences of her childhood and college years, and a policy and organizing career that moved her steadily towards prioritizing local action. Now, she is looking to bring this perspective into public office with a run for the Los Angeles City Council, where she hopes  to represent a district that includes Highland Park, Chinatown, and the heavily Central American neighborhood of Westlake. 

The area has recently seen the displacement of longtime residents, skyrocketing rent and housing prices, and the criminalization that has both accelerated those changes and followed in their wake. Hernandez accuses Los Angeles officials, including the councilmember she is challenging, Gil Cedillo, of failing to defend a community that has been targeted for gentrification. 

“I know this is very personal for her to be running in this district,” said Lex Steppling, the national director of campaign and organizing at Dignity and Power Now (DPN), a Los Angeles-based organization that organizes for the rights of incarcerated people. (Steppling supports Hernandez’s candidacy in his personal capacity.) “I’ve never seen a neighborhood flip that fast. And Eunisses has managed to stay there.”

Her bid to transform the priorities of local government comes in a decisive election year for Los Angeles, whose city government could go in any number of directions depending on the outcome of races like this one. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s likely departure as Ambassador to India has left a wide open election for City Hall, and the race to succeed him has already become a referendum on homelessness policy in Los Angeles. The city controller and the city attorney’s positions are both open as well. And there are eight seats up for grabs on the 15-member city council.  

In recent years, abolitionist organizers have achieved a series of previously unthinkable victories across Los Angeles County. Amidst this power vacuum at City Hall, the next test will be whether they can elect one of their own. 

Hernandez says her first real shift in political consciousness came during college, when she studied criminal justice at California State University, Long Beach. Most of the professors were former law enforcement officers, and the major felt like a crash course in the day-to-day of policing. But one instructor, Dina Perrone, taught classes on criminology and the War on Drugs, which Hernandez experienced as a revelation. She finally had a set of tools to interpret the experiences of her youth: the friends arrested for smoking weed, the mental health crises treated as crimes. And in learning about how other countries deal with issues of addiction and incarceration, Hernandez realized that another way was possible. 

After college, Hernandez worked at the Drug Policy Alliance for four years, helping pass Senate Bill 180, which ended drug enhancements that added up to 12 years to people’s sentences for past convictions, and implement Proposition 64, which legalized marijuana in California. There, she felt frustrated by “carve-outs”—policy concessions that exclude certain groups in order to get a law passed. “From what I’ve seen in policy development, we don’t go back for people we’ve left behind,” she told Bolts. 

In 2018, wanting to organize on a more local level, Hernandez moved to JustLeadershipUSA, where she became the Los Angeles campaign coordinator for JusticeLA, a large coalition of racial justice and civil rights organizations. Since its inception in 2017, Justice LA has chipped away at the infrastructure of mass incarceration in Los Angeles County. In February 2019, the coalition successfully pushed to cancel plans for a new women’s jail. That August, it also helped sink plans for a new mental health-focused jail, advocating instead for community-based, non-custodial treatment centers. “We won shit they said we couldn’t win,” said Steppling (DPN is a member of the coalition’s executive committee). “A lot of people point to [the coalition’s victories] as an example of what organizing is capable of,” he said, and Hernandez “played a really central role.” 

Though Justice LA comprises reformist organizations as well, the coalition is guided by abolitionist principles. Hernandez told Bolts: “Some basic questions that we ask ourselves in doing this work: will this policy decision leave anybody behind? Will this policy decision build something we’ll have to destroy in the future? Will this policy decision give more money and more power to the systems that are harming us? If it’s yes to any of those questions, then we have to go back to the drawing board.”

In early 2019, Justice LA successfully petitioned the Board of Supervisors to establish an Alternatives to Incarceration working group, which Hernandez was appointed to as a community stakeholder. The ATI working group would go on to produce a report, “Care First, Jails Last,” that laid out a roadmap for overhauling the county’s existing system of policing and punishment. Working from the findings of that report, the coalition fought for a ballot measure to redirect 10 percent of LA County’s general funds to incarceration alternatives like community programs, which passed in November 2020 with 57 percent of the vote. 

Implementation has been bogged down by bureaucratic delays, though the measure remains one of the most politically significant and financially impactful criminal justice reforms to emerge from the 2020 uprising. Jody Armour, a law professor at USC who supported Measure J, says the ballot measure centered on abolitionist themes rather than shying away from them. “#DefundThePolice part of Measure J was plainly communicated and ‘resonated powerfully’ with many voters,” Armour wrote on Twitter.

Along with Ivette Alé, a fellow Justice LA organizer, Hernandez also co-founded LA Defensa, a  women- and femme-led group that focuses on the judiciary as an understudied lever for carceral power (one early project was a website allowing residents to weigh in on their experiences with Los Angeles County judges). Hernandez still works at LA Defensa, but told Bolts she’ll step away soon to focus more fully on campaigning, calling the race a continuation of her community organizing. “We’re trying to take this—the wins, the experiences, the coalition—to City Hall, because right now, they’re not coming through for the people,” she said. 

Cedillo, Hernandez’s opponent and the incumbent District 1 councilmember, was a vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run and received Sanders’s endorsement in February 2021, more than a year before the primary or Hernandez’s entrance into the race. The early endorsement angered many left organizers in Los Angeles, who have criticized Cedillo for voting to criminalize homeless encampments, ordering homeless sweeps in Westlake’s MacArthur Park, and failing to use his position as chair of the council’s housing committee to forestall gentrification and displacement in his district. Hernandez saw an opportunity. “That motivated other people to step up,” she told Bolts. 

Cedillo’s office did not respond to Bolts’s questions about his record and platform.

Hernandez says she wants to prioritize alternative crisis responses, such as sending trained mental health workers to some 911 calls instead of police. She supports the People’s Budget LA coalition, which has demanded a vast reallocation of funds from the LAPD to community care programs. “My goal is to build our work locally,” she said. “I want to be part of the budget committee.” 

She also wants to fight criminalization of homelessness. Hernandez told Bolts that she rejects Cedillo’s support for encampment sweeps and that she opposes a recent municipal ordinance Cedillo backed, 41.18, which restricts where unhoused people can sit, sleep, and store belongings. She also hopes to implement a Universal Just Cause ordinance to strengthen eviction protections for tenants and ensure access to counsel during the eviction process. 

If elected, Hernandez would join a city council that has long been unfriendly to progressive priorities. A small, two-person progressive coalition has emerged in the last two years, resulting in a number of 13-2 votes—notably on 41.18. But the bloc may soon vanish. First-term councilmember Nithya Raman saw her district distorted by the 2021 rezoning process, in what some believed was a ploy to reduce progressive voter power, and Mike Bonin, who has long been the council’s staunchest left voice, recently announced his retirement for mental health reasons, after a campaign targeting his work on homelessness came very close to triggering a rare recall vote. 

Still, Dahlia Ferlito of White People 4 Black Lives, a Justice LA coalition member, said they thought it was important for people with Hernandez’s convictions and movement background to seek office: “If it didn’t matter, then our opposition wouldn’t be doing everything humanly possible to ensure that we do not have a voice in the electoral sphere.” Besides Hernandez, there are a number of other left-wing candidates running for council this election season.

Hernandez will have the discretion to do more within her district, where council members have long enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy. Right now, homelessness policy in Los Angeles is especially balkanized: laws are passed by the full council, but each member can interpret them somewhat differently in their own district. 

In one council meeting in January, Cedillo successfully got 28 locations in his district designated as enforcement zones under the homeless criminalization ordinance 41.18. Hernandez told Bolts she would decline to propose 41.18 locations in her district. (This is what Bonin, the progressive councilmember, has done in his district.) 

On one particular issue, she may get a chance to finish what she started with Justice LA. In 2019, the Board of Supervisors vowed to close Men’s Central Jail, an infamous and decrepit Los Angeles County penitentiary that Hernandez described as a “dungeon.” It’s a long road to closure, and then there’s the question of what comes after. “Men’s Central Jail now sits in my district,” she told Bolts. “I’m going to be a part of the plan to shut it down—and the community engagement that happens to inform what gets built on that land.”

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