Homelessness-A lawsuit pushes L.A. City and County together to provide shelter and services

Civil Rights

Umhofer, Mitchell & King, LLP

Until recently, advocates for the homeless would file lawsuits demanding that local governments don't do something: don't take people's property, for instance, or don't ask them to move.

"Those lawsuits were very effective, but we believe they're part of the problem," said Matthew Umhofer, who with partner Elizabeth Mitchell sued both the city and the county of Los Angeles over homelessness.

Instead, litigation they filed says, "Government, you are, by not acting, failing at a constitutional level. Government, do these things in order to address this crisis on the streets," Umhofer said. "Harder case to prove, harder case to even articulate. But we decided that given the nature of the crisis, it was worth doing." LA Alliance for Human Rights v. City and County of Los Angeles, 2:20-cv-02291 (C.D. Cal., filed March 10, 2020).

At this point, the approach seems to be working. After more than four years of highly unusual litigation, hundreds of conferences and settlement negotiations, injunctions and an appeal, the city has committed more than $3 billion toward housing and the county has promised more than a billion toward services for unhoused people. "We're looking at over $4 billion worth of court-enforced commitments by the city and the county," he said.

The litigation began with a "series of meetings of what was really just a group of angry and frustrated people" who wanted some way to take on the homelessness issue, Mitchell said. This diverse group of businesspeople, community groups and others formed the LA Alliance for Human Rights and then sued.

The next step was to get the right judge. That was U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who was overseeing a different lawsuit on homelessness in Orange County. Having Carter on the case would be akin to "bringing in a dragon on a leash," someone told Mitchell. They filed suit on March 10 and filed a notice of related case on March 11. Carter accepted the case on March 13 and on March 16 ordered a status conference for March 19.

It was a wild hearing in a courtroom crowded with lawyers and politicians from across the state, Mitchell said. The parties spent much of the next year in further status conferences trying to figure out how to solve homelessness in Los Angeles.

Early on, Carter issued an injunction ordering the city and county to find alternate shelter for all the homeless camping too near freeways and the related pollution. "It caused such a big eruption that the city and county very quickly got together and ... reached this sort of intermediate settlement ... to jointly fund and operate 6,700 shelter beds," Mitchell said.

After that, further settlement talks dragged on for months until finally in April 2021, the Alliance moved for a preliminary injunction "asking for every single person in Skid Row to be sheltered and provided services," she said. Eight days later, "Judge Carter issued an order for exactly what we asked for. But times 10."

The 9th Circuit reversed but essentially gave the plaintiffs "a roadmap on how to move forward," she said.

Settlement talks continued and continued. Mitchell said the biggest roadblock has been getting the city and county to work together. Someone told her it was "like one side has a car and the other side has the gas, and the two won't make eye contact."

Finally, overarching settlements were achieved this September. Carter has ordered audits.

"We're looking forward to seeing what the results of the city and the county's agreements will be," she said. "We're hopeful both the city and the county can succeed under the agreement, but we're going to be watching."

"We're going to take on climate change next," Umhofer quipped.

--Don DeBenedictis