By Human Rights Watch

Adequate housing is an internationally protected human right. But the United States, which has been treating housing primarily as a commodity, is failing to protect this right for large numbers of people, with houselessness a pervasive problem. In the US city of Los Angeles, California, where the monetary value of property has risen to extreme heights while wages at the lower end of the economic spectrum have stagnated for decades, houselessness has exploded into public view. Policymakers addressing the issue publicly acknowledge the necessity of increased housing to solve houselessness, but their primary response on the ground has been criminalization of those without it. The criminalization of houselessness means treating people who live on the streets as criminals and directing resources towards arresting and citing them, institutionalizing them, removing them from visible public spaces, denying them basic services and sanitation, confiscating and destroying their property, and pressuring them into substandard shelter situations that share some characteristics with jails. Criminalization is expensive, but temporarily removes signs of houselessness and extreme poverty from the view of the housed public. Criminalization is ineffective because it punishes people for living in poverty while ignoring and even reaffirming the causes of that poverty embedded in the economic system and the incentives that drive housing development and underdevelopment. Criminalization is cruel. Criminalization effectively destroys lives and property based on race and economic class. It is a set of policies that prioritizes the needs and values of the wealthy, property owners, and business elites, at the expense of the rights of people living in poverty to an adequate standard of living. As a consequence of historical and present policies and practices that discriminate against Black and other BIPOC people, these groups receive the brunt of criminalization. Arrests and citations as the direct mode of criminalization have decreased substantially over the past several years in Los Angeles. But authorities use the threat of arrest to support the relentless taking and destruction of unhoused people’s property through sanitation “sweeps” and people’s removal from certain public spaces. Criminalization has simply taken a different primary form, though punitive criminal enforcement always looms.

Criminalization responds in destructive and ineffective ways to legitimize concerns about the impact of houselessness on individuals and their communities. Rather than improving conditions and leading towards a solution, criminalization diverts vast public resources into moving people from one place to another without addressing the underlying problem. In contrast to criminalization, housing solves houselessness. Policies that have proven effective include the development of affordable housing—with services for those who need them—preserving existing tenancies and providing government subsidies that help people maintain their housing. This report takes an in-depth look at houselessness in Los Angeles and at city policies towards unhoused people in recent years, with reference to historical practices. It looks at criminalization enforced by police and the sanitation department and explores how homeless services agencies and the interim housing and shelter systems sometimes support and cover for that criminalization. The report features the perspectives of people with lived experience on the streets and have directly experienced criminalization in all its forms. Human Rights Watch spoke to over 100 unhoused or formerly unhoused people, whose stories and insights inform every aspect of this report. The report features analysis of data obtained from various city agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Los Angeles Department of Sanitation (LASAN), Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), and the Mayor’s office, that exposes the extent and futility of policies of criminalization. The report looks at the underlying causes of Los Angeles’ large scale houselessness, primarily the lack of affordable housing. It explains how racist policies over the decades have created a houselessness crisis in the Black community. The report also discusses the proven effectiveness of preserving and providing housing as a solution to houselessness, including examples of people who faced criminalization on the streets and whose lives have dramatically improved once housed. Finally, the report makes recommendations for policies that end criminalization and that move towards solving the crisis and realizing the international human right to housing in Los Angeles.

New York; HRW, 2024. 344p.