Yesterday, as I was driving down Balboa Boulevard to pick up my kids from school, I saw crews from the city’s Sanitation Department sweeping up belongings and shuffling unhoused residents from the sidewalk. When I was driving back up the street for the next morning’s drop off, the familiar tents were right back where they’d been. During the sweep, many people had simply packed what they could in shopping carts and walked to a nearby alley, waited out the cleanup, then once again set up tents on a main stretch of Council District 12, where homelessness has continued to explode.
The district’s homeless population has jumped by a whopping 84% over the last seven years, and 45% since 2020, according to LAHSA’s latest figures — a higher percentage than the Council District where Skid Row is located, and higher than 10 other Council Districts.
Why has CD12 experienced such a staggering increase in homeless numbers? We are where we are because of a rudderless approach that only relies on distraction and doing as little as possible.
There are many possible tools we can employ to address homelessness, but in this district, current political leaders seem to primarily rely on one: the law against street camping. Municipal Code 41.18 bans sitting, lying, sleeping, or storing personal property near sensitive areas, including driveways or schools, and can come with a $2,500 fine and up to six weeks of jail time. But after that six weeks (or less), those arrested often go right back to the same sidewalks and streets.
According to a City Controller report, from 2021 to 2023, half of all 41.18 arrests in Los Angeles occurred in CD12, even as homelessness continued to balloon throughout the entire city. In CD12, police officers and city staff spent more time than those in any other district arresting and citing homeless people, most of whom would return to Balboa Boulevard and other streets throughout the district the very next day.
While crime in the Northwest San Fernando Valley has increased, focusing primarily on catch-and-release arrests of the homeless has proved to be not only a waste of precious police resources, but also a waste of money.
Voters have been calling for more change ever since we passed Proposition HHH in 2016. Yet, our calls have fallen on deaf ears. After the Los Angeles City Council approved funding for a Prop HHH-funded 63-unit homeless housing project in Chatsworth, the local council office in 2019 attempted to revoke that funding — funding that is dwindling.
The HHH account now has about half left of its $1.2 billion bond and just one of the 117 HHH-funded projects exists here in CD12 [source]. Put another way, only 1% of money that has been made available for getting homeless people off the streets has been used in CD12, an abysmally small amount despite this district featuring one of the highest percentage jumps citywide.
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Blame slow-growth policies for California’s housing and homeless crises
While the 41.18 anti-camping ordinance has a role to play, it is far from the only tool in the toolbox, as clearly evidenced by the track record in neighboring districts, which have far higher numbers of sheltered homelessness than CD12 does. Meanwhile, any attempt to proactively plan and add housing has been far short of the need.
We need to do more, not less, which means working with a broad coalition of neighbors, faith-based groups, advocacy organizations, shelters, mental health care providers, addiction counselors, affordable housing development, grants and other sources of funding, and legislators at the city, state, and federal level, to advance our collective mission of housing the homeless and repairing our communities. In short, we need to use every tool in the toolbox, and not only the hammer of criminal penalties.
The current middling approach of arresting and citing people, while housing a nominal number compared to other districts, created the current conditions in CD12, and anyone who has driven to Balboa and Devonshire can see it is not working. The local council district continues to kick the can down the road. We’ve run out of road. It’s clear that it’s time for a change.
Serena Oberstein is a candidate for Los Angeles City Council.