Homeless Sweeps Are Expensive, Useless and Cruel, Human Rights Watch Charges

Last week, the research and advocacy nonprofit Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a comprehensive report that examines the structural origins, punitive state responses and associated social injustices that have catalyzed the catastrophic homelessness crisis in Los Angeles, California.

While the report focuses on Los Angeles County, where the crisis is particularly stark, the same patterns are evident across the U.S., particularly on the West Coast. This is not due to some sort of liberal permissiveness or lax enforcement, as right-wing narratives would have it. Instead, homelessness flourishes in direct correlation with the severity of the housing crisis in these regions. From Los Angeles to Seattle — and, to various extents, throughout the nation — unaffordable housing and inadequate shelters leave many with no choice but the streets. There, hundreds of thousands are criminalized, brutalized, scapegoated and further impoverished, locking them into a grim cycle. An especially pointed recent example came in Chicago, where encampments were cleared and unhoused people displaced for the sake of burnishing the city’s image ahead of the Democratic National Convention.

Titled, “‘You Have to Move!’ The Cruel and Ineffective Criminalization of Unhoused People in Los Angeles,” the HRW report condemns what its authors charge is a woefully misguided and inhumane history of municipal enforcement. They argue that city agencies have counterproductively punished suffering, impoverished individuals for a crisis of rent and housing supply — while putting forth interim solutions that have been inadequate at best.

Advocates for the unhoused have welcomed the HRW report, as it supplies yet more evidence validating what they have long asserted: namely, that present policies enact undue cruelties, and that it is the dearth of affordable housing — not laziness, personal pathology or moral failing — that is the real progenitor of homelessness.

The HRW report adds to a growing body of research attesting to the housing-related origins of homelessness, and the harshness and ineffectiveness of sweeps, as well as the promise of housing-first approaches, which prioritize connecting unhoused people with permanent housing, which has been shown to be highly effective, and represents a means of addressing the deeper crisis, rather than punishing its victims. With the housing crisis now finding a prominent place in presidential platforms and at the Democratic National Convention, there are signs that, even if solutions still seem years beyond reach, the necessity of affordable housing has at least entered mainstream discussions.

An Overhead View

Assembled over the course of three years of intensive research, the 337-page report from Human Rights Watch compiles data from municipal agencies and publicly available sources, as well as 148 interviews. Notably, 101 of those subjects were people who have experienced homelessness. The report’s creation also involved real-time oversight of enforcement actions, drawing on testimony from “Human Rights Watch researchers [who] witness[ed] and document[ed] actions by city officials and private actors towards unhoused people in Los Angeles” in the course of sweep operations.

While many of the issues that the report addresses have been well-studied, its comprehensive scope offers valuable perspective on the true extent of the crisis. It analyzes and presents data on all major facets of the issue, from the inflation of housing prices to the deep racial inflection of the crisis (people of color are disproportionately unhoused), to the senselessness of sweeps and carceral and punitive solutions. The analysis also gives a sense of the remarkable scale of homelessness in Los Angeles County: The number of unhoused people has grown by as much as 10 percent in one year, between 2022 and 2023, reaching 75,000. And staggeringly, the authors found that across the county, on average, more than “six unhoused people die every day.”

The number of those who are precariously housed, often only one slip away from losing their residence, is even more far-reaching. Per the report, “Almost 60 percent of renters and 38 percent of homeowners (over 720,000 households) in Los Angeles are ‘cost-burdened,’ meaning they pay over 30 percent of their income for housing, and over half of those are severely cost burdened, paying over 50 percent[.]” The real origin of homelessness is clearly discernible in these realities.

Truthout reached the report’s primary author, John Raphling, to learn more about his research and conclusions, which were reached with the help of data analyst Brian Root and others. “The most significant findings of my research,” Raphling commented by email, “were how pervasive the practice of criminalization has been in Los Angeles over the decades, how completely ineffective and even counterproductive it is as a policy response to mass houselessness, and how incredibly cruel, demeaning and traumatizing it is to the most vulnerable among us.”

A History of Heavy-Handedness

The report documents and criticizes numerous arms of city enforcement. First and foremost, of course, is the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Statistics indicated that, in the 2016-2022 period, “38 percent of all LAPD arrests and citations combined were of unhoused people, including nearly 100 percent of all citations and over 42 percent of all misdemeanor arrests.” In other words, LAPD enforcement of so-called quality of life violations represents a sprawling bureaucratic architecture dedicated almost exclusively to criminalizing and punishing the unhoused.

Those are startling numbers — but, according to LAPD data, unhoused people are indeed given 99 percent of all citations and arrests for infractions like sitting or lying on the sidewalk, drinking in public, leaving behind personal property, violating park regulations, cannabis regulation, open containers, illegal possession of a shopping cart and minor alcohol and tobacco charges. The LAPD has also disproportionately issued many other types of sub-misdemeanor violations — making up 90 percent of arrests and citations for gambling, for instance. All of this is despite the fact that the unhoused constitute just 0.01 percent of L.A.’s population.

The report goes on to assemble evidence that city policies that have been ongoing for decades — a combination of criminalization ordinances, encampment sweeps, incarceration or involuntary commitment, and inadequate, carceral shelters — are not only wildly expensive and cruel; they are also woefully counterproductive, only perpetuating the very malady they purport to address.

One example is Los Angeles’s “Safer Cities Initiative” (SCI), which dates back to 2006. It primarily prescribed intensified policing of even the pettiest of crimes as a response to the unhoused population on Skid Row. “These programs are all based on the logic of coercion and criminalization,” said Raphling. “SCI was an enactment of the ‘broken windows’ approach to policing, flooding the Skid Row neighborhood with police aggressively enforcing against low-level violations of law. It terrorized people living there and did not reduce crime.” SCI’s successor program, RESET, was aimed at “crime suppression and deterrence,” to similar effect, or lack thereof. “Broken-windows” policing ventures are premised on the (wholly discredited) notion that enforcement of city ordinances and statutes against minor infractions deters more significant crimes. In practice, the program’s function was to legitimize the harassment of unhoused people.

Traditional policing and the threat of punishment, though, are not always the primary vector of criminalization. “[D]ifferent from what I expected,” wrote Raphling, “was how the Sanitation department, through their destructive sweeps, have become the most prevalent agency implementing criminalization — though police are always right by their side ready to enforce.” The presence of the L.A. Sanitation Department, or LASAN, indeed looms large in the first-person accounts that HRW researchers collected. Numerous interviewees described the wholesale destruction or theft of their property by city sanitation workers.

“These programs do not help anyone rise above their unhoused situation,” Raphling said. “They cause trauma and, by breaking up the community of the encampments, they disperse people and expose them to greater danger living on their own.”

Valuable and necessary items — court papers, identification, hygiene materials, clothing, medications, personal items like family photographs, and lifesaving Narcan — are senselessly confiscated and made difficult or impossible to reacquire. Naturally, the loss of such items only makes it that much more difficult for someone to escape their circumstances. The disruption of a sweep can traumatize the unhoused person and interrupt their connections with social assistance and service providers. Moreover, sweeps are inordinately expensive; it’s especially galling that resources are diverted to these inhumane and ineffective measures in lieu of housing-based solutions.

Sweeps in Los Angeles often involve the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which ostensibly has the function of helping unhoused individuals. Nevertheless, as Raphling commented, “The services sector, in many ways against their own guiding principles, has been enlisted into the project of criminalization. Their presence at sweeps and the offer of some shelter creates a mythology that the sweeps are helping people into ‘housing’ (usually no more than some temporary, barely habitable, rule-bound shelter), allowing criminalization proponents to disguise their cruelty.”

The agency responded to Truthout’s request for comment with the following statement:

LAHSA knows that homelessness in LA County is a humanitarian crisis and is focused on ending unsheltered homelessness via evidence-based, trauma-informed approaches that move away from criminalization. In partnership with the City and County of Los Angeles, we are already implementing culturally tailored encampment resolution efforts with promising results. We are encouraged by the reduction in unsheltered homelessness of 10.4% in the City and 5.1% in the County, noted in the region’s most recent Homeless Count. Most importantly, these reductions corresponded with increases in sheltered homelessness and a record number of permanent housing placements, indicating that we are on the right track in adhering to a best practice approach.

LAHSA also acknowledges and is committed to addressing the disproportionate representation of Black and Latino Angelenos impacted by homelessness. LAHSA is not involved when enforcement occurs to preserve the relationship-building efforts of the staff, which is a critical step to bringing people inside.

Exclusion Zones

Paul Boden is the executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), a coalition of organizations that seeks to combat city policies that discriminate against the unhoused community. Once an unhoused person himself, he is highly attuned to the humanity of the suffering individuals on the street. Boden spoke to Truthout about how advocates have responded to the HRW report’s findings.

In one section, the report includes a map depicting all the exclusion zones that are aimed at disbarring the mere presence of the unhoused in L.A. Across the map, blue patches indicate a zone where, under L.A. Municipal Code Section 41.18, sitting, lying and sleeping are banned. It also depicts areas delineated by Section 56.11, which forbids keeping property in many public places. As a result, almost every single block of the city map is riddled with blue shapes: it’s a striking visual.

This data visualization, said Boden, was “a validation of what we were thinking was happening. Looking at all the different parts of 41.18 that make it illegal to be within 100 feet of this place, and 500 feet of an ATM, and 500 feet of a school. You start putting together all those pieces of public property, where it’s illegal to be if you’re homeless — and you see the current trend … You plot a course to layer all the different parts of the city where it’s illegal for [unhoused] people to be present, and you end up with what that map shows you.”

Boden said that advocates are perceiving a shift in enforcement, from sweeps and mitigation to outright exclusion from public space — a chilling escalation of anti-unhoused policy. These types of measures are certainly not limited to L.A. “Sacramento has even made [using] camping paraphernalia illegal,” Boden noted. Similar exclusion tactics can be found nationwide. The report’s visualization of L.A. policy, Boden reflected, served to underscore “how insidious the process was, to create what that map shows us. That wasn’t without forethought. When you lay it out like that … that’s the modern-day approach to addressing homelessness.”

Insufficient Solutions

The HRW report also contains a critique of the city’s interim housing programs, like the temporary hotel-room shelter program Project Roomkey and Mayor Karen Bass’s “Inside Safe.” While perhaps well-intended, these efforts have not met with much success, and Raphling contends that the funds would have been better directed elsewhere. As has been well-documented and evidenced by many cases, the solution to homelessness is housing supplied via well-administered and properly funded programs.

“There are numerous examples of how the ‘housing first’ model, especially permanent supportive housing, has worked when properly applied,” Raphling explained. “L.A. County had a pilot program called Project 50 that gave housing and services to about 130 people identified as the most chronically unhoused in the county. That project was extremely successful at keeping people housed, improving their lives, and saving money.” Project 50, initiated in 2007, was poised to expand into a broader program, but the more ambitious plan was voted down by supervisors, who cited cost concerns and the novelty of the program.

Yet save for those rare exceptions, the solutions on offer in Los Angeles have fallen far short of what’s needed. “Project Roomkey and Inside Safe aren’t housing programs. They are shelter programs. They provide temporary rooms, some with habitability problems, with no security of tenure (no actual tenancy) and rules that no adult would willingly submit to,” Raphling said. They do, at least, “provide some security and a chance to come indoors, which is extremely valuable for many people — though not all — as a trade-off for the rules and insecurity.” Most problematically, he says, Inside Safe was used as a way to legitimize sweeps; city officials with the program would tell encampment residents that “they had to give up their tents and, if they did, they would get permanent housing,” as the report notes in its case study of a sweep in Venice, California.

In some cases, these interim programs do end up channeling people toward more permanent shelter. However, their success has been modest at best. The report cites figures from December 2022 to March 2024, during which Inside Safe “had cleared 42 encampments throughout the city, placed 2,482 people into temporary hotel rooms, and moved 440 of those into more permanent housing situations, while 504 had returned to the streets, according to [Mayor Karen Bass’s] office’s data.”

Apart from the low success rate, noted Raphling, “Inside Safe is incredibly expensive. That money won’t last as a temporary shelter, and it could have been used for permanent housing. When the money runs out, where will the shelter residents go? I would recommend spending that money on permanent housing.”

The city took issue with the HRW report’s findings, with Lourdes Castro-Ramirez, the L.A. chief of housing and homelessness and a top aide to Mayor Karen Bass, referring to it as “cynical and disingenuous,” and retorting that the report “relies on citation and enforcement data from 2016-2022, before the mayor took office.”

Raphling responded to the aide’s comments, saying, “Criminalization and sweeps continue every day under Mayor Bass’s administration. If, as she says, she opposes criminalization, she should take steps to end it in Los Angeles. Now is the time for her to show leadership through action and not just words.”

“The data we analyze on citations and sweeps is from before her administration. The report never says or implies otherwise. That is why there is a separate full chapter about what has happened since she has been in office — though I doubt she could credibly deny that the sweeps continue,” Raphling said.

“Her Inside Safe program, which we analyze based on her administration’s own data, is a sweeps-based program that destroys people’s property and moves them into temporary hotel rooms that cost $3,500 a month per person. It is not financially sustainable and has not consistently moved people into permanent housing. More people return to the streets, or simply languish in the hotel rooms,” he said. “There are now only about 1,100 rooms, compared to about 35,000 unsheltered people in the city; even if it was effective and sustainable, it only meets a small percentage of the need, and raises questions about who is getting this scarce resource. What is cynical and disingenuous is claiming that the program is about saving lives when it prioritizes rooms for people in high-profile encampments that they are dismantling, rather than based on need.”

“That said, the report highlights some good things Mayor Bass has done,” Raphling concluded.

Getting the Message

Research like the HRW report is crucial to combating the right’s narratives about the housing crisis, and will help supply a basis for instating humane and effective policy. Paul Boden notes that the report’s analysis is of interest to other researchers, policy planners and city agencies, some of whom have already been in contact about drawing on its research. “As a methodology and an approach for other local communities to be looking at their own policing programs,” he added, “it’s a gold mine.”

WRAP, too, plans to conduct a street survey that will collect first-person testimony from unhoused people. Centering first-person experience of that type is another strength of the HRW report — by placing the voices of the unhoused at the forefront, with its 101 interviews of people who have experienced homelessness, and sharing harrowing first-person reports of violent displacement and dispossession, the report humanizes statistics and underscores the inhumanity of the current approaches.

“Sweeps do not address homelessness,” Boden said bluntly. “It’s local communities saying, ‘We don’t want to see it.’”

But while that reality might be clear to researchers and advocates, information and analyses like the HRW report offer a means of substantiating and communicating that understanding to the public. Boden also pointed out the benefits to activists of being able to cite a reliable source: “We don’t have think tanks writing summaries and talking points.”

“The frustrating part,” Boden continued, “is that the findings are consistently egregious. But the more you know, the better your organizing, and the stronger your messaging is going to be.”

Moreover, while the report’s analysis is largely confined to L.A., the trends and patterns that it identifies apply broadly — especially to elsewhere on the West Coast, but also to the national scale. “I have not studied other places in depth, but everything I have read and heard from others working on this issue is that criminalization happens across the state and country,” Raphling said. “Florida, Georgia and other states have recently passed laws requiring cities and counties to clear encampments. Cities across the country have and enforce laws against existing in public spaces.”

The dysfunction at hand is poised to become more relevant still as a result of the recent Supreme Court decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. Formerly, under the earlier Martin v. Boise decision, cities were required to offer shelter to people before clearing an encampment. Flawed and riddled with loopholes as it was, even that meager protection has now been overturned. “With the Grants Pass decision, which removed a very limited hurdle to full-scale criminalization, I expect to see, and am already seeing, more aggressive criminalization and less pretense of finding shelter for people,” Raphling said. It’s worth noting that the ground was prepared for the Grants Pass ruling by model legislation, pro-criminalization propaganda and an amicus brief produced by the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank.

There are some signs that the direness of the crisis, and the longstanding concerns of advocates, have registered at the highest echelons of power. The Harris-Walz campaign released a policy platform that calls for constructing new housing, reducing corporate acquisitions of housing and stemming algorithmic price-setting in real estate; the latter is a significant contributor to escalating rents. Constructing affordable housing on a massive scale — the plan tosses out a figure of 3 million new homes — would certainly help alleviate some critical shortages.

“I think Harris’s proposals seem good. We need government support for building more affordable housing,” Raphling said. “I would want to see the details of how that is to be done. Is it through incentives to developers or would the government directly pay for construction? The takeover by corporate landlords is a big problem, so I’m glad she [Harris] is thinking about that. Obviously without seeing the specifics of how she would regulate them, I couldn’t comment on how effective I think she will be” as president.

However, as Boden pointed out, the platform’s tax incentives and financing proposals largely offer aid to prospective homebuyers and working renters, rather than the most destitute. “They have no intention of restoring the federal funding that was cut that created [the crisis],” he said. “Since ’94, we’ve destroyed over 518,000 units of public housing and over 360,000 units of Section 8 housing.”

Boden was referring to the long trend of defunding government housing, alongside welfare systems more broadly, which has been accompanied by the active destruction of affordable units in the name of “revitalization.” Demolition and urban renewal projects like the federally funded HOPE VI program have led to a steep decline in the nation’s supply of public housing. Boden went on, “We’re not addressing that … We’re putting people into the private market to address the housing needs of people that have no money.”

The Harris plans are, of course, campaign promises, not concrete policies, and the Democrats’ friendliness with capital might well extinguish these nascent professed sympathies. Still, the fact that the Harris-Walz campaign is citing new housing as the first plank in its platform, and that mayors of major cities called for affordable housing at the Democratic National Convention, attests to both the severity of the crisis and the decades of difficult, often thankless work performed by advocates like those at WRAP and elsewhere, who have fought to garner the issue the national spotlight it deserves. And other recent political efforts — like the affordable housing legislation introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the repeal of the Faircloth Amendment (which limits public housing) proposed by Rep. Ilhan Omar, and the Unhoused Bill of Rights that was furthered by former Rep. Cori Bush — are testaments to its increased visibility.

Tireless organizers have recited the refrain again and again: “Housing is a human right.” Perhaps some of their voices are finally being heard at high levels. Regardless, organizers and unhoused people alike can point to the mounting evidence of the cruelty of current policy, now reinforced by data in the Human Rights Watch report.

Boden agreed that it’s a good sign that the issue has been brought to the national stage. He remarked, “I’ve been doing this for 41 years … We’re still laying the bricks and building the foundation in order to change this. We’re still documenting oppression, as opposed to successes. We need to make sure that the message stays around. [Public awareness] of homelessness comes in spurts. But it doesn’t go away on the street. The sweeps don’t go away.”

NOTE: This article was updated on August 26, 2024, to include a statement from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.