Herding the Homeless Is an Unjust Answer : Downtown L.A: A fenced camp won’t alleviate the problem or make business climate ‘friendlier.’

The homeless of Los Angeles had some good and bad news recently. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development offered a $20-million package to the city and county for homeless assistance programs. Shelter Partnership, a local advocacy group, and the City/County Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority devised a sensitive response emphasizing prevention, emergency response, transitional living arrangements and permanent support programs.

So far, so good. Now the bad news.

The mayor’s office used these ideas to float a plan to spend 20% of the $20 million on a drop-in center to be located in Skid Row. The Times described this center as a fenced-in urban campground “where up to 800 people could take showers and sleep on a lawn.”

This is the worst idea to surface in Los Angeles since the city’s previous ill-fated experiment with urban campgrounds in 1987. First of all, it’s too big. The center would at best act as a holding tank; at worse, an outdoor detention camp. Very few people would actually be helped.

The center would become a flash point for criminal behavior, acting as a magnet for homeless people from communities where existing services have been closed or scaled down. It would inevitably be a prelude to crackdowns on street-dwellers outside the fences of the drop-in center. And no one in Central City East (the proposed location) would want it for a neighbor.

The impetus for the proposal appears to derive from Mayor Riordan’s desire to make Downtown Los Angeles “friendlier to business.” Well, we have news for the mayor. Downtown business won’t pick up until California fights its way out of the recession, until procedures for permits and regulation are streamlined and until much-needed infrastructure improvements are completed (for instance, the Alameda rail corridor). The Downtown business climate has absolutely nothing to do with homeless people.

Instead of working to materially improve Downtown’s business environment, the mayor wants to join other governments in Southern California in their attempts to criminalize the behavior of homeless people. In Los Angeles, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and elsewhere, there is a mounting tidal wave of local ordinances against panhandling, feeding programs and public sleeping.

The mayor’s office reportedly got the idea for the drop-in center from a similar experiment in San Diego. It’s not clear why this trip was necessary, since we have lots of excellent home-grown ideas ready and waiting. Last year, the Community Redevelopment Agency spent several million dollars working out a new strategic plan for Downtown Los Angeles. This included sections on homelessness and social services. As part of the consultant team, we hammered out a detailed compromise between the interests of the homeless and other residents and businesses of Central City East. A large-scale urban encampment was not part of our agreed-upon solution.

What matters most in any plan to help the homeless are the following:

* Small-scale human services hubs located in the communities of origin of homeless people (especially, for example, South-Central Los Angeles) to prevent the further drift of the homeless to Downtown’s Skid Row.

* Effective, street-level outreach to put the newly homeless immediately in touch with helping agencies.

* Small-scale, self-governing outdoor living facilities in protected sites, where between 25 and 40 hard-to-reach homeless people can build self-help networks to assist them to return to the mainstream.

After the City Council voted unanimously to move ahead with the encampment, Deputy Mayor Rae James sought to assuage anxieties about the mayor’s plan. But she did not back off the idea of a large-scale encampment, or look beyond Downtown for solutions to the crisis.

The Homeless Service Authority speaks of the need for a new “social contract” between government and homeless. But since the days of Hobbes, Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, social contracts have always involved a bilateral agreement between interested parties. A policy for herding the homeless into a massive campground can hardly be construed as the basis for a mutually respectful agreement. There will never be peace until there is justice in the rules governing debates about homelessness in Los Angeles.