By Susan Shelley
Hurry up and wait.
That’s the latest on the lawsuit by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights against the city and county of Los Angeles.
After spending years hectoring city and county officials to pick up the pace of their efforts to house the homeless in the Skid Row area, U.S. District Judge David Carter has delayed approval of a settlement between the L.A. Alliance and the city of Los Angeles that calls for the city to spend up to $3 billion on beds for 16,000 people over five years.
Last Friday’s “final settlement conference” turned out not to be. Carter asked for more briefings from attorneys in the case and set a June 9 date for another hearing.
The L.A. Alliance, a coalition of downtown business owners and residents both housed and homeless, filed suit in March 2020 seeking to force the city and county to provide shelter to people living on the streets and to protect the public health and safety. The lawsuit accused the city and county of wasting public funds, violating environmental laws, reducing property value without compensation, breaking laws intended to protect people with disabilities and failing to abate a nuisance.
Judge Carter was assigned to the case because he had overseen a similar case in Orange County. He quickly called for an emergency status conference because of the particular risks of people living on the street during a pandemic, and he demanded that high-ranking city and county officials attend.
Thus began two years of hearings and orders and more hearings and more orders.
Judge Carter likes to push the envelope, but the federal courts don’t have unlimited power. As James Madison described it in the Federalist Papers (No. 45), “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce….The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.”
During the 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court used the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment to protect the long-denied rights of Black people, and this led to a number of landmark cases that created precedents for the federal courts to step in and override what ordinarily would be powers reserved to the states when racial discrimination was involved.
Judge Carter tried to do this with the L.A. Alliance lawsuit. In April 2021, Carter cited the history of systemic racism as the source of his authority to order local officials to find housing for the homeless residents of Skid Row — by an Oct. 18 deadline — and to put $1 billion in budgeted city homelessness funds into an escrow account that he personally would oversee.
But then in September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the order, saying it far exceeded anything Judge Carter had the power to do in the case, particularly because the plaintiffs had not argued that systemic racism was involved and none of the plaintiffs were Black.
Carter turned away motions to dismiss the case and ordered settlement negotiations. In March, the city reached a settlement with the L.A. Alliance that called for housing 60 percent of the homeless population, but not the people who were suffering from severe mental illness or addiction, saying seriously ill people are the county’s responsibility. The City Council voted 12-3 to approve the settlement.
Now it’s on hold while the judge considers whether to approve the settlement or send the case to trial. The county, which has not settled, could also go to trial.
A trial will take us back to the original issues raised in the lawsuit: have the city and county wasted public funds, violated environmental laws, reduced property value without compensation, broken laws intended to protect people with disabilities and failed to abate a nuisance?
Of course they have. They could lose at trial, leading to a court order, and then what?
Then we’re right back where we started.
Not all problems can be ordered to go away.
Write to Susan at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley.
This column was originally published by the Southern California News Group.