https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5829-9736
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ABSTRACT
A new architecture that provides essential services (like property storage and vehicle parking) to unhoused people now exists in cities like Los Angeles, where thousands of people live on streets and sidewalks. This paper shows how homeless storage spaces are historically linked to mandatory “homeless sweeps” and laws that restrict the amount of personal property an unhoused person can legally keep. Similarly, the paper highlights how officially designated parking lots for people who live in their cars and vans paradoxically attempt to provide secure parking for unhoused people in a city that prohibits vehicle dwelling in other, safer parts of the city. Together, these insights help establish new homeless storage and parking spaces as products of institutional mechanisms that criminalize homelessness. Awareness of this history is critical to developing compassionate homeless policy without punitive undertones and creating built environments that preserve human dignity and reduce the stigma of homelessness.
Acknowledgements
I thank Michael Holland, City Archivist at the City of Los Angeles, for graciously fulfilling my endless requests for scanned documents during the COVID-19 lockdown when most archives remained closed to the public. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and guidance which informed revisions to this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Skid Row is a part of LA’s downtown area with the highest concentration of unhoused people in LA County. Total sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in Los Angeles County is 69,144 (LAHSA, Citation2022b) while the total sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in Skid Row, LA is 4,402 (LAHSA, Citation2022c).
2 A “Skid Row strain” of tuberculosis was reported in the media in 2013 (Gorman & Blankstein, Citation2013). Deshonay Dozier argues that the fabrication of a health scare in Skid Row was a part of a concerted strategy involving the city, CCEA (a BID), and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to highlight the health and safety risks associated with unhoused people’s belongings (Citation2019, pp. 188–189). In 2018, a typhus outbreak with over 100 cases was reported in the city. The city responded with a plan to keep the streets clean of trash and waste by designating a region in the downtown area the “Typhus Zone”; the boundaries of this zone were nearly identical to the Skid Row area (Tinoco, Citation2018; Karlamangla, Citation2018).
3 The Bin, Safer Parking LA, and Navigation Centers are operated by non-profit service providers in partnership with the city.
4 Mayor of Los Angeles at the inauguration of the Homeless Navigation Center, 8th District (South Los Angeles) (Garcetti, Citation2021).
5 Lavan v. City of Los Angeles, 2012.
6 Lavan v. City of Los Angeles, 2012.
7 For instance, 56.11 in LAMC (1936) was enforced in a central downtown area demarcated by Ordinance No. 49014 (approved June 18, 1924), which established fire districts in the City of Los Angeles. The code refers to “boxes, barrels, and other receptacles for merchandise [that] may be unpacked and their contents removed … such boxes, barrels and other receptacles are removed immediately thereafter.”
8 City of Los Angeles Municipal Ordinance No. 183,762 (2015).
9 Amended by City of Los Angeles Municipal Ordinance No. 184,182 (Citation2016). A Council member who voted for this ordinance considered it a less draconian alternative to the policy of prohibiting personal storage on sidewalks (Holland, Citation2016).
10 The Mayor of LA had previously returned the City Council-approved Los Angeles Municipal Ordinance No. 183,762 (2015) without signature because he didn’t think that the proposed ordinance adequately balanced the need to maintain the “sidewalks with the right so people who have no other choice to live on them” (Communication from the Mayor of Los Angeles, Citation2015).
11 The law also specifies that in places where there are homeless storage facilities, a ban could be placed on the storage of any property in public areas that exceeds the essential personal property (the size of a backpack).
12 The standard allotment of bins for each dwelling unit in Los Angeles is one 60 gallon container for refuse.
13 Description of the training given to the officers in the Venice Homelessness Task Force formed to cite and arrest homeless people living in their vehicles (Desertrain v. City of Los Angeles, 4–5).
14 Number of vehicles (cars, vans, campers/rvs) used as dwellings = 12,875; Estimated persons in cars, vans, campers/rvs in Los Angeles = 19,402 (LAHSA, Citation2022a). Total sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in Los Angeles = 69,144. (LAHSA, Citation2022b).
15 The number of 13 million excludes 5.5 million private home driveways and dedicated covered spaces (Chester et al., Citation2015).
16 Project Room Key was established in the early 2020 to house LA’s medically vulnerable unhoused people (at risk of contracting COVID-19 and developing medical complications) in hotel and motel rooms that were sitting vacant during the pandemic. Since the early 2021, several Tiny Home Villages have been built in LA to provide emergency shelter and services to unhoused people in a 8 ft × 8 ft prefabricated shed. Two people share each tiny home, which comes with a single bed, shelf, windows, door, and an air conditioner.