Editorial: The fair way to handle the homeless and their belongings

The Los Angeles City Council recently unveiled an ambitious plan to help and house the city’s nearly 26,000 homeless people and pledged to set aside millions — billions if it can find that — to fund it. But that’s not the only far-reaching effort the city has made in response to the rise in homelessness. Over the last year, city workers and Los Angeles police have descended on encampments of tents and cardboard and bedding, dismantling hundreds of them and carting away 1,355 tons of material.

A lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court contends that those sweeps violate the rights of homeless people by seizing their valuables, and it asks the court to halt these practices. The city has a right to confiscate belongings that endanger public health and safety. But it’s also under a 2011 injunction that prohibits it from destroying the nonhazardous belongings confiscated from homeless people without first storing them for 90 days for the owners to reclaim.

The lawsuit says the city has not only seized property, it has destroyed much of it — a point the city disputes. The plaintiffs also claim that the city has charged some homeless people with misdemeanor offenses which generally stem from the condition of being homeless. Plaintiff Carl Mitchell, a man living on skid row, allegedly had two shopping carts of belongings “dumped out and then thrown in the back of a truck.” The possessions included his medications. He was then arrested for possession of a stolen shopping cart (a third cart he allegedly told police was not his) and jailed for 18 hours. Another plaintiff in the suit — also arrested for possession of a stolen shopping cart — claims she was given a receipt indicating where her belongings were being stored, but she has struggled to get them back. And city workers clearing property, according to the lawsuit, treat it “as if it is presumptively trash,” using knives to “rip open tents, destroying them in the process.”

It’s difficult for the city to balance the conflicting needs to clear the streets of the blight of encampments and to respect the rights of the desperate people who live there. But the homelessness crisis cannot be fixed by shooing people off the streets and snatching away their belongings. Nor is arresting homeless people for minor violations related to their being homeless — and either starting or lengthening their criminal records — anything but counterproductive to getting them into housing and jobs.

And what happened to the municipal code amendment Councilman Mike Bonin proposed last November that would outlaw the confiscation of belongings that homeless people were attending to if the city could not provide storage facilities nearby? Nothing good. That measure has been sliced and diced and whittled down to a proposal for an airline-baggage-style rule allowing each homeless person to carry a backpack’s worth of goods and store the rest if there is space available within two miles. If there isn’t, a homeless person would be allowed to cart around up to one 60-gallon container’s worth of items. Four months after Bonin’s announcement, the proposal was still winding a tortured route through two council committees.

Now, council members say they will take up the storage measure on Thursday in the Homelessness and Poverty Committee and get it to the full council right away. Bonin and Councilman Gil Cedillo, both of whom sit on the homelessness committee, had already called for the city to locate more storage space around town for homeless people. The city’s new homeless plan incorporates that directive, and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is supposed to be identifying more storage space.

The city should not be confiscating belongings unless it can offer nearby storage facilities to homeless people. The City Council should make that clear — and then line up adequate space. That’s the least the city can do while it figures out how to get people housed.

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