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Los Angeles experienced its first wide-scale homelessness during two periods of national upheaval — the Great Depression and the housing crunch after World War II. In both cases, the crises abated. In the 1970s, though, economic events and public policy decisions conspired to drive people onto the streets again — and, ever since, Los Angeles has suffered chronic homelessness, with more unsheltered people than any other city in the United States.
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1800s: Jails too small
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Going back to the 1800s, the city keeps “tramps,” “hobos,” “vagrants” and “winos” off the streets by locking them up in jail or sending them to work at the county “poor farm.” In 1896, the city builds a new jail with double the capacity of the old one. Read about how policing has contributed to homelessness.
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1900-1920: City booms
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The population of Los Angeles quintuples in two decades. In the first months of 1921, more than 25,000 building permits are issued.
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1930s: Skid Row emerges
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The area on the eastern side of downtown Los Angeles whose cheap residential hotels, bars, liquor stores and missions made it a magnet for transients becomes widely known as Skid Row.
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1933: Widespread homelessness during Great Depression
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A homeless census in 48 of California’s 58 counties finds 101,174 homeless people in a state with a population of 5.7 million. (In 2022, the state had 171,521 homeless people — far more than in 1933, but not per capita, when you consider that the overall population now is about seven times larger.)
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1945: Housing crisis after World War II
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It is estimated that 162,000 families in Los Angeles, including 50,000 veterans, are living in tents, garages, vehicles and other substandard accommodations, according to a 2021 report by UCLA’s Luskin Center for History and Policy. Read about how housing policies exacerbated homelessness in Los Angeles:
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1945-1960: Suburbs explode
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More than a half-million dwelling units are built from 1940 to 1950 in the L.A. metro area, most of them after the war. More than 850,000 more are built during the 1950s. The construction boom, fueled by the GI Bill, quickly ends the epidemic in homelessness.
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1953: Public housing plans dashed
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Authorities had pushed out most of the 1,800 families who lived in the Mexican American neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine to build a public housing project called Elysian Park Heights to house 17,000 people. But at the height of anti-communist hysteria, real estate interests, seeing their profits threatened by public housing, launch a successful campaign against it, financing opposition groups that call it “socialist housing.” The project is scratched, and Mayor Norris Poulson promises that no new ones will be approved.
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1960s: The urban renewal movement
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Some 15,000 single-room occupancy units are demolished in Skid Row and 7,000 low-income Victorian homes are razed on Bunker Hill as civic leaders move to modernize downtown.
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1967: Lanterman-Petris-Short Act ends era of state psychiatric hospitals
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The act decrees, among other things, that authorities can take people into custody only for 72-hour psychiatric holds, ending long-term commitments in the state’s 10 psychiatric hospitals. But with few community clinics for patients to seek treatment, many end up on the street. Read more.
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1980: Housing costs soar
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The average price of a house in Los Angeles hits $100,000, four times what it was in 1970 (about $380,000 in today’s dollars, or less than 40% of what the average home costs now).
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1981-1982: President Reagan slashes social services as U.S. plunges into a recession
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The county estimates that there are 30,000 homeless people on the streets, including 10,000 in Skid Row. By 1984, the Department of Housing and Urban Development finds that L.A.’s homeless numbers surpass New York’s. Read how cuts in social services contributed to the homeless crisis:
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1980s: Crack epidemic
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As crack cocaine tears through neighborhoods, legislators respond by passing shockingly stiff mandatory prison terms for the drug, even as more affluent cocaine users face far lighter sentences on the rare occasions when they are arrested. Crack users and other felons leave prison for Skid Row with criminal records that rob them of the ability to make a living, qualify for welfare or subsidized housing, contributing to the area’s sudden transformation into a strongly Black enclave.
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2006: Police cannot tear down encampments on Skid Row
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The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules in April 2006 that in the absence of sufficient shelter beds, arrests for resting or sleeping on the sidewalks constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” Almost immediately, tents mushroom on the streets of L.A.
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2012: Lavan vs. City of Los Angeles ruling
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The 9th Circuit’s Lavan vs. City of Los Angeles ruling bars property owners from calling in garbage trucks to dispose of people’s belongings in Skid Row.
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2016-2023: Fentanyl deaths on rise
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Overdose deaths among people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County increase 515% from 2016 to 2022, as fentanyl flooded the illegal drug market. By 2023, fentanyl would be detected in 70% of such deaths.
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2015-2025: Home costs skyrocket
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The average single-family home hits $563,721 in April 2015. Ten years later, it is $1,060,048, according to Zillow.
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2018: Martin vs. Boise
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The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances if there are not enough shelter beds available to the homeless, in effect becoming the law in most of the West when the U.S. Supreme Court declines to take the case in 2019.
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2024: City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson
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After a backlash against encampments in many Western cities, the Supreme Court rules in City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson that local governments’ use of civil and criminal penalties for illegally camping on public land does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people.
The post A timeline of homelessness in Los Angeles appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
