Despite concluding that the city had not complied with the provisions of a three-year-old settlement agreement aimed at resolving the humanitarian problem, a federal judge on Tuesday refused to place Los Angeles’ homelessness services under receivership.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter stated in a 62-page decision that now is not the time to give a court-appointed third party authority over the city’s over $1 billion in homelessness initiatives. According to him, courts would normally consider such a step as a last resort, following the exhaustion of all less invasive measures.
Carter also discovered that the city had violated the terms of a deal with the organization LA Alliance for Human Rights, which stipulates that 12,915 beds for the homeless or other housing options must be created by June 2027. He claimed that the city missed quarterly housing targets set forth in the agreement and did not offer a strategy for accomplishing that goal.
According to the judge, the city disregarded a court order pertaining to its plan to reduce homeless encampments and neglected its duty to furnish the court with correct and thorough data.
He added that although the Court does not currently believe the City has violated the Settlement Agreement in its entirety, the City has not fulfilled important internal requirements under the Agreement.
Carter ordered the hiring of a third-party monitor to examine and validate the city’s data on its homeless housing and encampments goals in order to rectify those deficiencies. Carter also hinted that he would probably mandate that the city cover the legal costs of the alliance and homeless advocacy organizations, LA CAN and the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, that have gotten involved in the lawsuit.
California
A federal judge is considering a request from a group of residents, business owners, and property owners to place the city of Los Angeles’ billion-dollar homelessness programs under receivership following seven days of testimony.
Alliance lawyer Matthew Umhofer praised the decision, stating that the judge will continue to hold the city accountable and that the decision had imposed serious repercussions on the city’s officials.
According to Umhofer, it’s just not quite a receivership. It will necessitate that the city have someone with complete access to its data review it. Because we discovered that the city’s data is incredibly faulty and unreliable.
The city’s attorneys also applauded the decision. A representative for City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto stated in a statement that the judge was right to deny the alliance’s extreme request to designate an unelected and unaccountable receiver.
According to the spokesman, the City of Los Angeles has effectively assisted thousands of Angelenos in finding housing and services during the past three years. For the first time in years, homelessness is declining in Los Angeles, and thousands of new housing units have been constructed.
Carter dismissed the alliance’s claim that the city’s use of almost 2,000 hotel and motel rooms for temporary homeless shelter shouldn’t be included in the settlement commitments. Additionally, he refused to conclude that the city had violated a second settlement agreement, referred to as the roadmap, stating that further discussion of the matter would merely divert funds from housing initiatives that were desperately needed.
The legal firm Gibson Dunn was hired by city officials to oppose the receivership motion in Carter’s courtroom. A important decision that supported rules prohibiting homeless encampments in public areas was obtained by that firm, which recently argued the Grants Pass case before the Supreme Court.
The Gibson Dunn team contended in the alliance lawsuit that putting the city in receivership would be a significant overreach and that governments should have a lot of discretion in deciding how to handle homelessness.
Following an eight-day hearing on whether to appoint a receiver to oversee L.A.’s homelessness initiatives, such as congregate shelters, small house villages, and Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program, which has assisted thousands of individuals in relocating from encampments to hotels and motels, Carter made his judgment.
Alliance attorneys charged the city with routinely failing to meet its commitments to build new beds for the homeless and to cut the number of homeless encampments by 9,800 over a four-year period. They contended that a third party is required to effectively oversee the city’s homeless initiatives because of how badly it is addressing the situation.
The city’s legal team resisted, stating that the city is totally dedicated to fulfilling its end of the bargain.
The Gibson Dunn team contended that the alliance had broken the agreement by neglecting to halt it while the city dealt with the Palisades fire, a serious emergency that started in January.
California
The Los Angeles Homeless programs Authority and Los Angeles’ homeless programs were found to be fragmented and devoid of proper data systems and financial controls after an audit.
Shayla Myers, speaking on behalf of LA CAN and other homeless groups, also presented reasons before Carter. She opposed the idea that the city should be forced to dismantle a certain number of encampments, claiming that this would be an unlawful quota system that infringes on the property rights of homeless Angelenos.
Myers stated in a recent filing that the settlement agreement does not contain a legally binding clause requiring the evacuation of 9,800 encampments—a number that was negotiated in private two years after the deal was signed.
Since the alliance sued the city and county in 2020, claiming that little action was being taken to solve the homelessness epidemic, especially on Skid Row, which has the highest number of homeless people in Southern California, the case has remained in Carter’s docket. The city signed two settlement agreements in the ensuing years: one with the alliance and another with Los Angeles County, which offers healthcare, mental health, and other social services to the homeless population in the area.
The alliance requested that Carter slap $6.4 million in financial penalties on the city in 2024, claiming that it had not built enough beds and had impeded efforts to establish important compliance milestones. In response, the judge hired a private company to evaluate the city’s initiatives for the homeless.
According to that firm, the city’s homeless programs are susceptible to fraud and waste since there are insufficient financial controls in place.
