As a teenager in the late 1970s, Steve Richardson was sweeping and stocking shelves at a toy store on the edge of L.A.’s Skid Row when he noticed the first signs of a monumental change in the city. Day after day, workers, hired from the surrounding streets to unload trucks full of toys, would take the empty boxes and transform them into makeshift shelters where they would spend the night.
“They were called cardboard condos,” said Richardson, a Skid Row leader now known as General Dogon. “They went on block after block.”
At the same time, Los Angeles Times columnist Art Seidenbaum wrote about the shock he experienced when, for the first time, he saw a man scavenging for food out of a garbage can on a downtown sidewalk. L.A., he concluded, had a problem with “winos — or, more politely, homeless men.”
Until then, the term “homeless” most often referred to people who had lost their homes in natural disasters or wars. But things were beginning to change in the 1970s, when a sequence of seemingly unrelated events conspired to drive people into the streets.
Today, homelessness feels as inevitable a part of the urban landscape as traffic jams and strip malls. Los Angeles has more people living on the streets than any other city in the United States, which almost certainly makes it the homelessness capital of the developed world.
There are 15 counties in California whose total populations are smaller than the homeless population of L.A. County, which exceeded 75,000 people in 2023. If you filled Dodger Stadium with all the county’s homeless people, you’d have enough left over to fill Crypto.com Arena downtown.
But homelessness is not innate to Los Angeles like earthquakes or Santa Ana winds. It is the predictable result of public policy.
A Times examination of the city’s history shows that, before the late 1970s, wide-scale street homelessness was seen only briefly, at the height of the Great Depression and during the severe housing crunch that came during and after World War II. Then, as now, a scarcity of affordable housing — not mental illness, not substance abuse — was the crux of the problem.
While mental illness, poor medical care, substance abuse, growing income inequality, job loss, racism or another social ill might have been the most visible trigger that put any one person on the street, the housing problem is why they had nowhere else to land.
And it was decisions by policymakers, judges, law enforcement and industrial leaders that caused the shortage.
“It’s a human-created problem,” said Bobby Shriver, former mayor of Santa Monica, who has helped lead the fight for homeless veteran housing at Veteran Affairs’ West L.A. campus.
Every city in the U.S. has people who are poor, who are drug-addicted, who have severe mental illness.
What those cities don’t have: this many people without homes.
Going back to the 1800s, the city kept people off the streets by locking them up in jail or sending them to work at the county poor farm. This left officials flat-footed when the numbers began to surge.
The first seeds of the current crisis were sowed in the early 1950s, at the height of the nation’s anti-communist panic, when Los Angeles halted the construction of public housing because it was “socialistic.”
Then, roughly 15,000 units of single-room occupancy hotels on Skid Row were demolished as part of a national “urban renewal” movement, severely restricting shelter options for the poorest of the poor. The loss coincided with the razing of more than 7,000 low-income units in Bunker Hill’s aging Victorian homes.
Beginning in the 1970s, a slow-growth movement spread across California that led to planners slashing L.A.’s land use capacity — in other words, the city’s maximum functional size — from 10 million to 4 million people.
This came as well-paying manufacturing jobs began to move overseas, replaced by low-wage jobs in apparel, furniture and electronics assembly. From the mid-1970s into the ‘80s, L.A. lost at least 75,000 jobs in car and tire factories. Black and Latino workers in South L.A. were hit especially hard.
In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that criminal vagrancy laws, which allowed police to jail people for lingering on the streets, were unconstitutional.
During this period, the state of California closed its large mental institutions, fulfilling a long-standing, bipartisan goal. Gov. Ronald Reagan then slashed funding that had been intended to provide community-based mental healthcare as an alternative to the big hospitals. A state legislative committee complained that the change was dumping mental patients onto the streets, but the state did nothing to change course.
In 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, radically cutting property taxes for those who already owned a home or business. While this kept some people on fixed incomes from losing their homes, it gave the state less money to address rising homelessness.
Finally, and crucially, housing prices doubled in Los Angeles from 1975 to 1979 — an extraordinary escalation driven in part by a growing population, inflation and real estate speculation. Prices would double several more times in the coming years as the average cost of a home rose from $25,000 in the early 1970s to more than $1 million today. Even adjusting for inflation, a house in Los Angeles today costs roughly six times what it did then and is no longer within reach for the average working-class Angeleno.
Rents followed suit, rising more than 50% from 1980 to 1990, then exploding after the Great Recession. Today, the median rent in L.A. is $2,800; in 1970, it was $107, or about $900 in today’s dollars.
Once Reagan became president in 1981, he slashed social services and housing funds that were helping the destitute, even as the nation plunged into recession, throwing more people out of work — and, in some cases, out of their homes.
Clients of a Westlake eviction defense center at the time could no longer find even slum housing, and the numbers on Skid Row sidewalks “just exploded,” said attorney Gary Blasi, who ran the center and is now a professor emeritus at UCLA law school and a leading homelessness legal researcher. In May 1984, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that L.A. had the largest homeless population in the country, just ahead of New York.
And as bad as things were, they would only get worse. Much worse.
This is the story of how Los Angeles came to have more people sleeping on the streets, by a vast margin, than any city in the country.
PART I: Law enforcement: From sweeping up the ‘winos’ and ‘vagrants’ to arrests at homeless tent camps
From the roof of the King Edward Hotel on 5th and Los Angeles streets, all of Skid Row spreads below. The rough edges are smoothed out from this height and you can envision its origins around the turn of the century, with transient laborers pouring into Los Angeles in search of seasonal agricultural labor. L.A. was a farm town, with vineyards in what is now downtown, and walnut, orange and lemon groves radiating outward, along with fields of tomatoes, celery, cauliflower, lettuce and lima beans. The new arrivals were often broke or close to it, and instantly found themselves in a crowded warren of streets that catered to their basest needs.
“They’d all come through where Union Station is now and they’d see the prostitutes leaning out of cribs, and that was their welcome to Los Angeles,” said Kim Cooper, a local historian, taking in the view. “And then they’d pull in and, you know, you’d either go to [a brothel] or you’d go to one of the hotels.”
L.A. fretted obsessively about “vagrants,” “vags,” “derelicts,” “drunkards,” “hobos,” “tramps” and “bums.” The city and county jails were constantly being rebuilt or enlarged to hold their expanding numbers.
On Jan. 18, 1888, the Los Angeles Evening Express reported that “39 tramps, known to the constables as ‘hobos,’” had been arrested and found guilty of vagrancy. Two paid fines, but the remainder “will be fed by the county until the expirations of their sentences.”
The city jail was overflowing, the Express noted, with as many as eight men crammed into cells built for four. The previous day, constables had arrested 53 “tramps.”
“The city is infested with this class to such a degree that unless they are arrested there is no telling what depredations will be committed by them,” the newspaper declared.
On the same page, a short article noted that “a limited number of choice lots” in the San Gabriel Valley were being given away to anyone who agreed to build a house on them.
These were the dynamics of early Los Angeles: abundant land for cheap housing, along with abundant social problems that were left to the police and jails to sort out. Eventually, the city would run out of vacant land, but not poverty and despair.
From the 1870s until around 1910, legions of “tramps” roamed the country via the fledgling freight railroad network.
This was the Gilded Age, when the United States had entered a new era of industrialization that created an unprecedented class of millionaires — and left many people on the sidelines. An army of the unemployed took to the rails, chasing seasonal work and, in many cases, eschewing social conventions such as marriage and sobriety. The promise of starting a whole new life — in a whole new place, with winter sunshine and wide-open space — lured many to Los Angeles.
L.A. was a tumbleweed boomtown whose population had doubled in one decade and quintupled in the next, morphing from village to metropolis in a generation. And every winter, when agriculture went dormant in much of the country, the city swelled with seasonal workers.
Their homes, in some instances, barely sheltered them from the elements: Some people slept in converted chicken coops; others erected crude tin-roofed shanties in the usually dry bed of the Los Angeles River, only to see them swept away when it rained.
The 1880s and 1890s had seen the emergence of magnets for transients that sprang up around a Southern Pacific Railroad terminal just east of downtown and the Santa Fe station on East 2nd Street along the L.A. River, eventually fed by Union Station and the Greyhound terminal, and ultimately consolidating into Skid Row.
It was a rough place, filled with saloons, bordellos and flophouses.
A few days before Christmas of 1894, the Herald reported: “A visit to the police courts, day after day, will convince the most skeptical that the tramp problem is one of the most difficult to solve that ever confronted the city. To see the large number of tramps, vagrants and beggars crowded together in the dock, like cattle in a corral, is enough to awaken the sympathy of the most hard-hearted person.”
But civic leaders were divided on whether helping them would ease the problem or just draw more of the same type of people from out of town.
Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, the famously combative owner of the Los Angeles Times, published an editorial in 1882 warning: “Don’t feed the worthless chaps. It only encourages them in their idleness and viciousness.” That typified The Times’ approach to the down-and-out well into the 20th century.
Los Angeles County was concerned enough to create a 152-acre “poor farm” in Downey, housing some 150 people who were put to work growing citrus, alfalfa, potatoes and onions, and raising hogs, chickens and dairy cows. Contemporary accounts describe an idyllic place of manicured lawns, a gurgling fountain and decent food and lodging.
But it barely touched the problem.
In 1896, the city authorized the construction of a new jail designed to hold 88 inmates, double the capacity of the old jail. By the turn of the century, it was routinely holding 300 prisoners during the winter months when migrants sought refuge from colder climates and jobs were more scarce, and yet another new jail was soon built, as well as a “tramp stockade” near Elysian Park, which served as a base for men sentenced to hard labor on chain gangs.
Forced labor was the fate of most “tramps.” Clamped into an “Oregon boot,” a heavy lead or iron band wrapped around an inmate’s ankle, and further hobbled with a ball and chain, they would spend their days at such chores as paving streets, or doing the bidding of private “employers.”
By the early 1900s, fully 70% of all arrests by the Los Angeles Police Department were for drunkenness, vagrancy or disorderly conduct, according to Kelly Lytle Hernández, a professor of history at UCLA and author of “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965.”
This was the through line that defines the history of homelessness in Los Angeles: From the 19th century until the present, the branch of government saddled with managing what has become the city’s most stubborn social and economic problem has been the Police Department.
LAPD headquarters even became a makeshift homeless shelter during the Great Depression, when some 600 homeless men asked to sleep there during a cold snap. The police agreed but had room for only a third of them.
By this time, the gritty east side of downtown — east of Main Street, radiating north and south from 5th Street — was beginning to be known as Skid Row.
The name came from Seattle’s Skid Road, where, starting in the 1850s, logs “skidded” down a steep path to a waterfront sawmill. The area drew a scruffy mix of loggers and dockhands, and Skid Row eventually became shorthand for any part of a city where drunks and vagabonds gathered. To be “on the skids” was to be destitute.
In L.A.’s Skid Row, the hotels and brothels fell into disrepair, many becoming single-room occupancy, or SRO, apartments that were the bottom rung of the city’s housing stock.
By the 1950s, the nation was entering an era of urban renewal and slum clearance subsidized by the federal government. L.A.’s Skid Row came under pressure from growing development of the flower, seafood and garment districts that surround the area today. The city ordered earthquake retrofitting and other upgrades; many property owners opted instead for demolitions, pushing people into the streets.
An LAPD drunk truck regularly trolled Skid Row, throwing inebriated people into a Veterans Administration’s lockup on Crocker Street to sober up. In 1968, the City Council adopted an anti-camping ordinance mandating that “no person shall sit, lie or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk or other public way.”
The law was aimed at hippies. But as one of the most restrictive municipal laws governing public space in the country, it gave the LAPD carte blanche to arrest any homeless person not in a hotel or shelter. In essence, it was a vagrancy ordinance by another name.
The LAPD only periodically mustered the resources — or the political will — for mass arrests of homeless people. But police have used the threat of them to move homeless people along and seize their belongings.
By 1975, as loitering and vagrancy laws fell to constitutional challenges, public drunkenness became the single most common cause of arrests in Los Angeles.
The demographics of Skid Row were changing. For most of its history, it was home to an almost exclusively white population consisting mainly of older alcoholic, disabled and unemployable men. But as homelessness exploded in the 1980s, the streets filled with a younger population, including many Black and Latino men. (Women were still relatively rare.)
Many other cities by this point had razed their neighborhoods where transients and derelicts stayed. But under Mayor Tom Bradley, the city turned down a business proposal called the Silver Book Plan to clear Skid Row and make way for upscale development. Instead, the city adopted the Blue Book Plan in 1976, which consolidated services, shelters and missions in a 50-block area where homeless people could be “contained” and presumably helped while the rest of downtown redeveloped.
Politicians also wanted to keep homeless people out of their districts. Police and social service providers routinely sent homeless people from throughout the city and county to the squalid downtown neighborhood.
The 1980s was also the period when street drugs, especially crack cocaine, came into heavy use.
Police Chief Daryl Gates sent armored cars to raid so-called crack houses and conduct massive weekend sweeps. Hundreds of young Black men would typically be arrested, their cars impounded and often ransacked by the time they were released from jail — without charges — on Monday morning.
Many others were charged, convicted and sentenced under new crime laws — including a crack cocaine differential that carried shockingly stiff mandatory prison terms, even as affluent cocaine users faced far lighter sentences on the rare occasions when they were arrested. Crack users and other convicted felons left prison for Skid Row with criminal records that robbed them of the ability to make a living, or qualify for welfare or subsidized housing. This contributed to the area’s sudden transformation into a strongly Black enclave.
Susan Burton, founder of A New Way of Life Reentry Program and a national leader in criminal justice reform, said former inmates would step off the bus at the Greyhound station on 7th Street with nothing but a few dollars in their pockets and a list of Skid Row shelters.
Latino people were also overrepresented in the prison population, but were less likely to fall into homelessness after release. When they did, they were more likely to find some form of shelter in their old neighborhood rather than wind up on Skid Row.
Miguel Santana, the former city and county administrator who heads the California Community Foundation, remembered illegal garage conversions in his childhood neighborhood of Bell Gardens packed with immigrants; the homeless shelter where he worked in Whittier 30 years ago was 40% Latino.
“Skid Row was the last stop, a signal your disease or situation had worsened,” he said, adding that the recent jump in Latinos’ share in the county homeless population is a sign of the catastrophic level to which L.A.’s housing crisis has sunk.
In the early 2000s, downtown’s half-empty commercial buildings began to be made over as lofts, high-end apartments and bistros, and Skid Row came under enormous pressure from the powerful real estate and business elites of the Central City Assn., and the smaller Central City East Business Improvement District’s commercial property owners, which saw homeless people as a roadblock to redevelopment.
But James K. Hahn, who served as Los Angeles city attorney from 1985 to 2001, refused to prosecute homeless people for the sole crime of sleeping in public unless the city provided them with an alternative to the streets.
After becoming mayor in 2001, he joined with other local leaders to create Bring LA Home, an initiative whose aim was to end homelessness by the end of the decade. But by the time that Hahn ran for reelection in 2005, Bring LA Home hadn’t even developed its plan for how it would do so.
Despite Hahn’s prior efforts at leniency, police sweeps and arrests during the daytime continued during his tenure as mayor, and by 2002, a federal court later found, “as a result of the … extreme lack of available shelter in Los Angeles, and the large homeless population, thousands of people violate the Los Angeles ordinance every day and night, and many are arrested, losing what few possessions they may have.”
Hahn’s choice as police chief, William J. Bratton, brought his “broken windows” enforcement approach from New York City to L.A., and focused it on Skid Row in the Safer Cities Initiative. On the theory that strict policing of quality-of-life offenses such as public urination could turn around a blighted neighborhood, 50 extra officers were assigned to enforce a zero-tolerance policy on Skid Row. The LAPD cleared the streets by harassing, citing and arresting more than 9,000 people, often for violations as minor as jaywalking or tossing cigarette butts. When those ticketed didn’t show up in court, arrest warrants were issued.
“I saw a woman cross the street with a Cup Noodles, and they handcuffed her,” said Shannon Murray of Lamp Community, a Skid Row agency for homeless people with mental health issues.
LAPD brass and patrol officers argued that arrests would give homeless people a push to enter shelters and begin changing their lives. There was little evidence to support this.
Orlando Ward, then an executive at the Midnight Mission on Skid Row, said he told Hahn’s successor, Antonio Villaraigosa, that framing Skid Row as a public safety problem, as the business community insisted, would doom Safer Cities to failure. “People were dying on the street; they need to get what they need to be healthy,” Ward said. But the city had nowhere to put them.
“They didn’t have the housing,” Ward said.
Months before the Safer Cities Initiative launched in 2006, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that in the absence of sufficient shelter beds, arrests for resting or sleeping on the sidewalks constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.” Almost immediately, tents mushroomed on the streets of L.A.
A police census of Skid Row before that decision (Jones vs. City of Los Angeles) found 187 tents; within three months, that number had nearly tripled to 539 and just kept climbing. Homeless people bought tents at Goodwill, and do-gooders occasionally dropped off truckloads of sleeping bags and tarps, Ward said.
Instead of appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, the city settled the Jones case in October 2007 by agreeing to let homeless people on Skid Row sleep overnight on public streets and sidewalks from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. After that, they had to get up and break camp.
Homeless people had always put up scattered tents, tarps and pallets in riverbeds, out-of-the-way spots and occasionally on Skid Row. But streets that resembled linear campgrounds — that was something new.
“It’s your own little space,” said Panama, a homeless woman interviewed by The Times in late 2006. “Some people make it really homey. They got the radio, the portable TV, everything.”
At first, the LAPD ran a dawn patrol with loudspeakers ordering the tents to be taken down for the day.
Back in 2006, you could have traced the future by listening to Estela Lopez, head of the Central City East Assn.
“The tipping point has not only been reached, it has been breached,” she said.
Business improvement districts, special zones established by the city and funded by local property owners, dispatched their own security teams on bikes and patrol vehicles, equipped with handcuffs and guns, pushing homeless people off sidewalks. On Skid Row, they called in garbage trucks to dispose of people’s belongings — a practice that would be barred in 2012 by the 9th Circuit’s Lavan vs. City of Los Angeles ruling.
Many of these actions were challenged in court. The Central City Assn. argued that a court order against destroying homeless people’s property impeded enforcement and fostered disorder and disease, including a typhus outbreak.
The group’s longtime leader, Carol Schatz, told the City Council at a public hearing that the city was mortgaging its future in a “misguided attempt to buy temporary peace with activists.”
Despite the Jones settlement and ending Safer Cities, arrests continued unabated. From 2008 to 2014, a homeless woman on Skid Row named Annie Moody was arrested 59 times — more than anyone else in the city — largely for refusing to take down her tent in the morning. She was tried 18 times, convicted 14 times and jailed for 15 months, costing taxpayers at least a quarter of a million dollars, according to court and law enforcement records.
“We’re human beings, not to be pushed around like cattle,” Moody said.
Citywide arrests of unhoused people rose 31% from 2011 to 2016. The rise came as LAPD arrests overall went down 15%. Two-thirds of those arrested were Black or Latino, and the top five charges were for nonviolent or minor offenses.
In 2016, 1 in 6 arrests citywide was of a homeless person.
By the mid-2010s, L.A. officials, including Police Chief Charlie Beck and Mayor Eric Garcetti, were declaring they could not “arrest their way out of homelessness,” but ticketing and arrests continued. L.A. County Superior Court computers were spitting out 8,000 bench warrants a week for failure-to-appear charges, a 2014 state Supreme Court opinion said.
The 9th Circuit ruled in Martin vs. Boise in 2018 that cities could not enforce anti-camping ordinances if there were not enough shelter beds available to homeless people, in effect becoming the law in most of the West when the Supreme Court declined to take the case the next year.
As the encampments grew beyond the central city, the City Council passed an ordinance banning them near schools, parks and day-care centers on pain of ticketing. To date, the 15 members have added 270 sites to the encampment-free zones.
A study released by Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia in 2023 found the LAPD had arrested more than 36,000 unsheltered people since 2012 for violating the anti-camping restrictions. Other violations, including public drunkenness, were enforced almost exclusively against homeless people.
“Policing of houseless people is becoming a larger share of what the LAPD does,” said Hernández, the UCLA professor.
Reed Segovia, a homeless artist who sold his work on the Venice boardwalk, was cited as many as a dozen times for such crimes as sleeping, smoking and letting his artwork spill out of his boardwalk vendor space, his lawyer said in 2018.
“What was accomplished?” Segovia asked at the time. “Nothing.”
Bob Harrison, former police chief of Vacaville, Calif., and a Rand researcher, said managing homelessness falls to police because their job is to protect the public, including homeless people, 24 hours a day, and they can summon emergency services. But officers are ill-equipped to bear the burden that has been placed on them.
“Cops are not trained as mental health specialists or in dual diagnosis,” he said. “They are going to go where no one else can or will.”
But a backlash was brewing as encampments exploded. More than 50 jurisdictions in the West asked the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify whether cities can bar homeless encampments on sidewalks when there is nowhere else to go. The high court answered in June 2024: Laws penalizing homeless people for sleeping or pitching tents in public spaces do not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The ruling in effect overturned the 9th Circuit’s Martin vs. Boise decision six years before. That meant cities could clear homeless encampments from parks, sidewalks and other areas even when they lack sufficient shelter beds.
For Los Angeles and many other cities, the ruling did nothing to answer the question of where to place homeless people. What it did do: Reinforce the LAPD’s role as the city’s front-line agency for carrying out homeless policies.
PART II: Did closing psychiatric hospitals lead to the crisis? The role of mental health and substance abuse
In the fall of 1956, state Sen. Alan Short (D-Stockton) opened legislative hearings into allegations of a “reign of terror” at Modesto State Hospital, one of 14 hospitals in California treating — and mistreating — the mentally ill and developmentally disabled.
Senators learned of “the woodshed,” a room near the hospital laundry where women were taken to be whipped. They heard about “gauze knuckles” worn by employees, presumably to protect their hands during beatings. They were told about a patient who died after being forced to eat Epsom salts and wash them down with toilet water, and others who were punished with toilet plungers (it’s unclear how).
State Atty. Gen. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, the future governor, announced that he was investigating eight — later nine — suspicious deaths at the hospital.
Those hearings set in motion the events that would eventually close California’s big mental hospitals.
California’s mental hospital system is nearly as old as the state. The first hospital was opened in Stockton in 1852, within two years of statehood and two years before the state’s first permanent prison, San Quentin. Its initial caseload was 124 patients, and it was quickly overcrowded. Thirteen more hospitals would eventually be built, some of them massive. Camarillo State Hospital was built to house 7,000 patients, with a staff of 700, making it the largest mental hospital in the world when it opened in 1936.
In their heyday, the hospitals were seen as models of progressive care. But some of the treatments considered cutting edge at the time, including forced sterilizations and lobotomies, came to be viewed as profoundly inhumane.
By the time of the Modesto revelations, the hospitals were increasingly seen as relics of a less enlightened past. A new approach to dealing with the mentally ill was being embraced nationwide: smaller, community-based mental health clinics. In the wake of the hearings, in July 1957, Republican Gov. Goodwin Knight signed the Short-Doyle Act, providing $850,000 to create the clinics to divert patients from institutionalization.
At that point, the hospitals housed 36,319 patients statewide.
At the end of October 1963, President Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, which helped lead to significant deinstitutionalization nationally. It was the last piece of legislation he would ever sign; he was assassinated three weeks later.
The Mental Health Act proved to be a model for what would happen in California after Reagan became governor in 1967.
Reagan, a Republican, has been widely disparaged by Democrats for his role in closing the mental hospitals, which undoubtedly contributed to the homeless crisis. The fact is so-called deinstitutionalization was very much a bipartisan national goal.
Not long after Reagan’s election, the state passed the California Mental Health Act of 1967, better known as the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act after its authors, Republican Frank Lanterman and Democrats Nicholas Petris and Alan Short. The act decreed, among other things, that authorities could take people into custody only for 72-hour psychiatric holds. (That was laid out in Section 5150 of the act, a number that has since become law enforcement shorthand for someone in mental crisis in California.)
The act ended long-term hospital commitments in California, with the exception of people convicted of a crime.
The community clinics, some of which had already been built under Democratic Gov. Brown, were now expected to provide more progressive and humane care. But Reagan began slashing funding for mental health overall in the name of cost-cutting, and most of them would never be built.
By 1974, a state Senate committee reported, with alarm, that the release of mental patients was leaving many on the streets. “In its pell-mell rush to discharge patients, we are losing sight of them,” Short said.
More than a decade later, another of the authors of the act would lament how their plans unraveled.
“Although Reagan signed the bill, much to his credit, he really emasculated it,” Petris said in a 1988 oral history. “He cut something like $20 million or $30 million out of it the first year. … It emptied out the hospitals, but there was no follow-up treatment. That’s what contributed to the current homeless problem, as a matter of fact.”
There is no doubt it did contribute. But was it the main cause?
The debate over what caused the rise of homelessness in Los Angeles — and all of America — has largely broken down along political lines. Those on the right tend to blame mental illness and substance abuse or basic character flaws. It was President Reagan who once said that the country had always had a problem, “even in the best of times,” with “the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.”
Those on the left tend to blame poverty and housing availability.
Certainly, the county’s fight since the mid-1980s — aided by the state Legislature — to freeze general relief payments for the most destitute at $221 a month was no help. Decades later, this pittance remains the only cash aid for 155,000 of the poorest residents, more than three-quarters of whom are homeless, UCLA law school researcher Blasi said.
But one 1986 study by the county Department of Mental Health offered some insight into the complexity of the scourge.
Based on interviews with 379 homeless people in the Skid Row area, it found that 28% were seriously or chronically mentally ill; 34% were chronic substance abusers without mental illness; and 12% suffered from both mental illness and substance abuse. About a third had neither a major mental illness nor a substance abuse problem.
This study called the mentally ill homeless “the legacy of a movement which released thousands of psychiatric hospital residents to their communities without having set into place the mechanisms which would allow their communities to care for them.”
But crucially, the report also found that only about 15% had spent time in a state mental hospital — upending the notion that the closure of the hospitals led directly to the homelessness crisis. The data “do not support the simplistic notion that the homeless are largely comprised of ex-state hospital residents,” it said.
And it made an important distinction, one that helped explain why so many unhoused people had serious drug and alcohol problems: “For many individuals with major mental illness … alcohol and drug use may reflect self-medication — a specific attempt to alleviate troublesome symptoms or a more general coping strategy for dealing with a harsh existence.”
This is the chicken-and-egg question: Did people become homeless because they were mentally ill, or did they become mentally ill because of the “harsh existence” of being homeless?
In 2002, a homeless man named Demetrious Williams — a career burglar who found himself on the streets after his release from Chino State Prison — offered one answer as he described his fellow residents of Skid Row: “They lose faith in something good happening to them and resort to drinking and using drugs just to function from day to day. It ruins reality for them, and they wind up staying down here. Some stay to the point of going insane.”
Even today, it isn’t clear how many homeless people have underlying mental illness or substance abuse issues.
In one of the most well–documented studies, the California Policy Lab in 2022 linked Department of Mental Health records to homeless outreach data for 45,000 people and found 10% had a diagnosis for a psychotic spectrum disorder — such as schizophrenia — and an additional 7% for different serious mental illnesses.
However, an ambitious 2023 statewide study by UC San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative found more than a quarter of the unhoused people surveyed had been hospitalized for mental illness, more than half of them before they landed in the streets.
A follow-up report in February 2025 found that only 37% of unsheltered people used illicit drugs regularly, and 25% reported never using them. But homeless people use drugs far more often than in the general population. Just over 65% reported having regularly used at some point in their lives, and 27% had started after becoming homeless.
Medical problems and physical disabilities also contribute to homelessness — both preexisting and developed under the harrowing conditions of life on the street. It is not unheard of to see homeless people in camps with open sores from untreated diabetes, or badly displaced bones from breaks that were not set.
The AIDS epidemic set off a homelessness surge in the 1980s. HIV infection rates are now in free fall, but people living with the virus continue to rank high in local homeless counts.
In the same decade, a massive wave of Vietnam veterans fell into homelessness, often due to the same factors as non-vets — a shortage of low-skilled jobs and affordable housing.
Many of the enlisted men were poor, uneducated and on the margins before the war and came back to the same circumstances. But a subset of vets also returned with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress and substance abuse disorders that made them particularly vulnerable.
The VA had been housing sick and destitute veterans on 387 acres of rolling greens on the border of West Los Angeles and Brentwood since 1888. At its peak during the Korean War, 5,000 men were living and being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, then known as shell shock.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, the VA turned to medical research and care, and the West L.A. campus stopped taking in residents. The barracks and other buildings fell into disrepair. The VA Medical Center opened in 1977, and the VA leased parts of the land to a hotel laundry, a dog park, a parrot sanctuary, UCLA’s baseball stadium and the elite Brentwood School for its athletic courts.
By the 1980s, thousands of veterans were living in encampments on Skid Row and in the bushes outside the VA property.
In the 2000s, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began appearing in local shelters. Facing a lawsuit, the VA agreed a decade ago to build 1,200 veteran apartments on the site, but was sued again for not coming close to fulfilling its promise.
The 9th Circuit is reviewing the government’s appeal of a 2024 judgment by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter that requires the VA to build up to 750 units of temporary housing on the campus and plan for an additional 1,800 units of permanent housing.
With the vets and non-vets alike, medical problems, mental illness and drug addiction have always pushed individuals to the margins. But until the last 50 years, those margins were mostly under a roof.
The Rev. Andy Bales, who left his longtime position as director of the Union Rescue Mission in 2023, preaches sobriety and is strongly opposed to any solution to homelessness that doesn’t prohibit substance abuse. But even he isn’t sure whether drugs and alcohol cause homelessness or exacerbate it.
“They’re part of it, whether the alcohol and drugs drive people here, or whether people who are homeless eventually turn to alcohol and drugs to escape the hell on earth that they’re experiencing,” he said. “But they definitely are a factor.”
“It’s not merely a housing crisis,” Bales insisted in an interview before leaving the mission. “And it’s not merely a mental health crisis and it’s not merely an addiction crisis. But when you leave people on the streets long enough, you will add to the mental health situation. I can’t stay for more than one night on the streets. I’d be a wreck.”
And to him, and many advocates, it’s not really important which came first — the homelessness or the substance abuse. What’s important is that when people get clean, as in Bales’ view, they are more likely to stay housed.
It’s a position that has put him at odds with the prevailing “housing first” approach to homelessness, which holds that people need a place to live first and foremost, without preconditions. Once they’re housed, they can work on their substance abuse or mental illness, ideally with on-site counseling, case management and other services.
The housing-first concept was originally developed by Los Angeles homeless services pioneer Tanya Tull for families, she said. It has been embraced by presidential administrations back to that of George W. Bush, and studies have found it is more likely than sobriety programs to keep people indoors. Its advocates pushed to shift spending to permanent housing, contending that shelters don’t provide a way out of homelessness.
But as the housing-first approach became established in policy, detractors took note of its limitations, leading to intense policy debates over how to use scarce resources. The high cost of new housing and long delays in getting it built meant that there would never be enough to absorb the growing number of people landing on the streets. A triaging system meant to house the most needy forced housing providers to deal with more burdensome tenants.
Housing providers and tenants have stories of formerly homeless people who “bring the streets” and drugs into their apartments, disrupting programs and eventually losing their housing.
The problem of substance abuse surged in the last decade. Where once alcohol reigned supreme on Skid Row, now it competes with fentanyl, OxyContin, heroin, marijuana, crack cocaine and, most critically, methamphetamine.
Overdose deaths among people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County increased 515% from 2016 to 2022, a period that saw both a substance abuse epidemic and the influx of fentanyl, often blended with meth. Fatal overdoses plateaued in 2023 but were still the leading cause of death — so much so that a homeless person was 46 times more likely to die of one than a member of the general population, according to the county Department of Public Health. Fentanyl was detected in 70% of these deaths.
The department reported in June 2025 that overdose deaths in the general population dropped 22% last year; officials are still analyzing the numbers among homeless people. Even with the drop, twice as many people died of overdoses in 2024 than did in 2018.
So it would be foolhardy to say that substance abuse doesn’t play a significant role in homelessness, or to deny it makes moving people out of homelessness more difficult.
But just as poor sober people are more likely to become homeless than wealthier ones, so it is with the poor struggling with addiction or mental illness. Substance abuse isn’t limited to the poor, yet very few affluent people end up on the streets. They can afford higher-quality rehab and mental health treatment — and rent and food and medical care — to stay in their homes.
PART III: Los Angeles has lost the ability to provide abundant, affordable housing
Few cities in human history have created housing at the scale and speed of Los Angeles. When it was incorporated as a city in 1850, L.A. had a population of 1,650. The village grew slowly until the transcontinental railroad arrived in 1876.
The population quintupled between 1880 and 1890, doubled to 100,000 by 1900 and quintupled again by 1920, when it topped half a million, making it the 10th-largest city in the country. And that doesn’t count the dozens of satellite cities that popped up around it — Santa Monica, Pasadena, Beverly Hills, Inglewood, Compton, Long Beach and ultimately 81 more in Los Angeles County alone.
“POOR MISS LOS ANGELES HAS OUTGROWN ALL HER CLOTHES,” The Times bemoaned in a headline in 1921. Housing was being built at a scorching pace, with more than 25,000 building permits issued in the first nine months of that year. The city’s infrastructure was straining to keep up.
It must have been disorienting, living in a city that doubled in size every 10 years. An orange grove one month became a housing tract the next. Vast fortunes were made in real estate. And unlike denser Eastern cities, the most common form of housing was the single-family house. Suburbs sprouted like poppies after a spring rain, all connected by 1,100 miles of trolley car tracks.
Housing was affordable for pretty much anyone with a full-time job. In the San Fernando Valley, somewhere around modern-day Studio City, half-acre lots were going for $575 in 1923 — roughly the equivalent of $10,000 today. In East L.A., a cottage could be had for $200 down and $25 a month — well within the means of the average worker, who made around $125 a month.
By 1930, the city’s population had reached 1.2 million. This time, growth would finally slow as the country plunged into the Great Depression, set in motion by the Wall Street crash of 1929.
Unemployment and homelessness soared during the Depression, the first time the city had seen people living in tent encampments on a vast scale.
The Depression also saw the beginnings of a change in the racial makeup of those without secure housing.
Facing terror in the Jim Crow South and the promise of good jobs in the West, African Americans streamed into Los Angeles from Texas, Louisiana and points farther east. The Black population of the city doubled each decade after 1900.
Real estate agents used racially restrictive covenants to box out Black residents from all but a few neighborhoods in L.A. Rents around South Central Avenue, one of the only places Black people could live, predictably soared and many Black people had scant options for housing.
By late 1931, the city reported that requests for assistance from unhoused people had doubled over the previous year. The vast majority were out-of-staters. The Times, in an editorial, warned of “an army of floaters and drifters and plain hobos now headed to Southern California from all parts of the United States.”
The next year about 50 families pitched tents or built other structures on a local church’s property at Firestone Boulevard and Alameda Street. They called it Hoover Town — a variation of Hooverville, the title given to many such homeless camps around the nation in sardonic tribute to President Hoover. Soon such camps were popping up all over the county.
By 1937, the LAPD estimated that there were 300,000 to 600,000 transients in Southern California, many from out of state, raising tensions over available jobs and food in such hard times. No welcome wagon greeted them. That summer, L.A. County sheriff’s deputies burned down the tin-roofed shanties that housed more than 100 hobos along the banks of the Los Angeles River and the Rio Hondo Wash. Three years later, the city of Los Angeles ordered any remaining Hoovervilles destroyed.
Homelessness during the Great Depression dwarfed anything seen ever since, not just in L.A. but nationally. In 1933, a homeless census in 48 of California’s 58 counties found 101,174 homeless people in a state with a population of 5.7 million. By comparison, a federal report in 2022 concluded that California had 171,521 homeless people — far more than in 1933, but not when you consider that the overall population now is about seven times larger. (That same report said California was now home to about half of the “unsheltered” homeless people in the country.)
The outbreak of World War II finally ended the Great Depression and would transform Los Angeles — creating a new housing crisis.
Once the United States entered the conflict in December 1941, the city became a hub for military manufacturing, especially aviation, and a magnet once again for workers from around the country. The city’s population would swell by 31% over the course of the decade.
The war rebuilt the region’s economy, setting it up for decades of defense-driven prosperity. But with the entire nation on a war footing, housing construction slowed dramatically, leaving many of the new war workers with nowhere to live.
Things were especially tough for newly arrived Black migrants, whose population tripled in the 1940s. They were squeezed on one side by the racial covenants, which denied them access to 95% of wartime housing, and on the other by redlining, the federal government’s designation of Black neighborhoods as especially risky for lenders. Many people doubled up with relatives or hometown acquaintances, or rented rooms from strangers.
As soldiers returned home to Los Angeles from World War II, they were met with a severe housing crisis.
By the time the war ended in 1945, it was estimated that 162,000 families in Los Angeles, including 50,000 veterans, were living in tents, garages, vehicles and other substandard accommodations, according to a 2021 report by UCLA’s Luskin Center for History and Policy.
Sweeping national policies would quickly relieve the situation. But they set into motion the type of sprawling single-family home building mind-set that, combined with Red Scare tactics to demonize public housing, contributed to the conditions that led to today’s housing and homeless crisis.
The GI Bill and massive federal defense spending were helping to drive an economic boom in Southern California, opening the floodgates for developers to buy vast swaths of farmland and build sprawling tracts of homes across much of the L.A. Basin and valley floors.
Low-cost veterans loans primed an army of young buyers eager to build new lives after the war. More than a half-million dwelling units were built in the L.A. metro area from 1940 to 1950, according to the U.S. census, most of them after the war. More than 850,000 more were built during the 1950s.
By 1960, the city had added more homes than there were people in any other California city. It had added nearly as many homes as there were people in L.A. in 1940. Aerospace firms, auto and tire plants, oil refineries, and home builders offered hundreds of thousands of blue-collar and middle-class jobs. Homelessness had all but disappeared. Overnight, L.A. — now home to 2.5 million people — had been reborn.
For white Angelenos, the 1960s were a golden age. Housing was plentiful and cheap. The supply was constantly expanding to meet the need. More than ever, jobs offered a ticket to the middle class. Public schools were among the best in the country.
The city’s Black residents, however, were hemmed in and held down. Working-class Black people crossing the color line were met with mob violence, arson attacks, bombings and burning crosses. A Fontana family was burned to death in their house.
As historian Richard Rothstein detailed in his book “Color of Law,” developers who secured generous federal financial assistance were barred from building racially integrated housing by the Jim Crow federal lending policies of the day. Of the 125,000 units built with Federal Housing Authority loans in Los Angeles County between 1950 and 1954, fewer than 3% were open to people of color.
Black residents may have faced the most vicious racism, but Asian Americans, Native Americans and Latinos certainly did not escape it. Freeway construction projects opposed by business owners and affluent communities were rerouted to low-income districts of color, destroying big swaths of affordable housing. In 1944, Boyle Heights lost 200 residential buildings to the Golden State Freeway. The Simi Valley Freeway sliced 200 housing units out of Pacoima, and the Foothill Freeway in the 1960s destroyed 900 housing units in Pasadena’s Black area, displacing about 2,600 to 2,700 people.
“Take me to a strange city where I’ve never been before and point out the areas in which Negroes live, and I will lay you some neat odds that I can point out the route of the city’s next freeway,” civil rights lawyer Loren Miller said in 1961 in the California Eagle, a Black newspaper he owned.
In 1963, California’s Rumford Act ushered in sweeping legal protections for people of color to buy homes. The next year, California voters overturned the law by a 2-1 margin. Although the courts later reinstated it, mortgage discrimination and redlining by banks lived on. Real estate agents simply refused to show certain homes to nonwhites. (Just two years ago, City National Bank paid a $31-million settlement over what was essentially mortgage discrimination and redlining in majority Black and Latino neighborhoods from 2017 through at least 2020.)
Significantly, the postwar housing boom included the construction of government-run public housing — until that was brought to a screeching halt.
The federal government had begun building public housing during the New Deal, but it largely took off in Los Angeles as wartime housing. The projects included Avalon Gardens (1941), Pico Aliso (1942), Estrada Courts (1942-43) and Jordan Downs (1944).
By the end of the war, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles was managing five permanent and 22 temporary housing projects built by the federal government, and 10 city projects, all housing some 50,000 residents. In the next three years, several more projects were completed, so that by 1948, HACLA managed 13,500 dwelling units.
Nickerson Gardens, the city’s largest project, would open in 1955. But by then, the decision had been made to stop the construction of additional public housing. This was the height of the Cold War, and anything that smacked of communism was taboo, especially in Los Angeles, whose politics were dominated by anti-communist conservatives.
In 1952, L.A. voters had rejected a measure to build an additional 10,000 units of public housing. The president of the Los Angeles Realty Board praised voters for “their opposition to this costly and Socialistic scheme administered by uncontrolled bureaucrats.”
The following year, the mayoral race between incumbent Fletcher Bowron and challenger Norris Poulson was fought primarily over public housing, which the former supported and the latter opposed. Poulson, with enthusiastic support from The Times, won.
“We have a duty to see to it that no one starves, that no one goes roofless and cold,” The Times wrote in an editorial. “But what has that got to do with the Los Angeles low-rent public housing program? It has nothing to do with it at all.”
The editorial went on to note that plans called for 10,000 units of public housing designed to house 45,000 people. “Can anybody show that there are or are likely to be in Los Angeles 45,000 cold, hungry and homeless persons?”
The most prominent of those proposed projects was at Chavez Ravine, where a semirural Mexican American village was nestled in the hills just north of downtown. The city had hired renowned architect Richard Neutra to design it, although he was less than fully enthusiastic about razing a community that exuded “a certain human warmth and pleasantness, a certain contact with nature” that was rare in a big city. Nevertheless, Neutra designed the project — a small city within the city, featuring 24 13-story towers and 163 two-story buildings. In all, they would house 3,364 families, more than double the existing population.
Poulson made sure it never happened.
By the time he took office, two things had taken place. The city had moved most of the 1,800 families of Chavez Ravine out of their houses to make way for the public housing project, and the City Council had voted to cancel its contract with the Housing Authority to build it. There had been pressure from both sides — from residents who wanted to save the community, and from conservatives who rallied around an organization whose name told its story: Citizens Against Socialist Housing, or CASH.
Soon after taking office, the mayor outlined plans for a Major League Baseball stadium in Chavez Ravine, hoping to lure a team west.
Poulson’s vision would eventually be realized when the Dodgers moved to L.A. and the remaining few residents were forcibly removed from Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium.
Homelessness still wasn’t much of a problem at this point. By the late 1960s, there would be rising concern over “runaways,” young people who made their way to Hollywood in search of freedom, along with sex, drugs and rock ‘n‘ roll. But that was a highly specific problem, more cultural than economic.
The first cracks began to appear in the foundation of L.A.’s housing supply for the poor in the mid-1950s, when cheap hotels were being demolished on Skid Row. The city had begun to step up enforcement of building code violations, and the owners found it cheaper to raze the hotels than to repair them, according to Donald Spivack, former deputy chief of operations and policy at the city’s now-defunct Community Redevelopment Agency.
“As a result, we went from roughly 15,000 units here in the mid-1960’s to about 7,500 units in the area by the early 1970’s,” Spivack wrote in a brief history of Skid Row.
But as late as 1971, when a Times writer spent a week living in an SRO hotel room on 5th Street in Skid Row, rooms were still available for $2.50 a night, and for those who couldn’t afford it, there were all-night movie theaters where people could doze through old B-movies for 75 cents. For those with nothing, there were the religious-based missions. There was no mention of anyone living on the street.
The city, which had just displaced thousands of low-income residents by redeveloping Bunker Hill, on the other side of downtown, made the decision in the early ‘70s to stabilize Skid Row and “contain” it. It created a zone bounded roughly by 3rd Street on the north, 7th Street on the south, Alameda Street on the east and Main Street on the west, where the city’s homeless population would be concentrated, along with all the services they need. In effect, the city created a ghetto.
Around the same time, there were other developments that began the process of putting housing out of the reach of low-income people.
One was the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, which sent the price of fuel soaring. That in turn inflated the price of just about everything.
And there was a transformation in the real estate industry, as investors using financial tools such as real estate investment trusts, or REITs, turned homes into assets to squeeze value from. This financialization of property led to a wave of speculation, evictions and displacements citywide as developers and landlords began to realize they could get more profit from their holdings. Stories began to appear in local newspapers expressing alarm at the rising home prices and declining inventory.
The slow-growth movement of the 1970s exacerbated the problem, putting the brakes on plans for future growth to protect “quality of life.” Where the zoning code had envisioned a city of 10 million people — more than New York — ordinances and ballot measures scaled down that number to 4.1 million by the 1980s. The movement dovetailed with the environmental movement, creating a new set of hurdles for housing developers in the form of environmental impact reports and other restrictions intended to protect public health. Under the banner “No Manhattanization,” powerful homeowner groups used zoning and permitting processes, and eventually stretched the California Environmental Quality Act beyond its intended purpose, to resist apartments in single-family neighborhoods and cordon off open space from development. (At the end of June, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a measure that would relax CEQA’s housing regulations.)
And L.A. was becoming a city of renters, whose housing costs are not fixed like those of homeowners. In the late ‘60s, the percentage of Angelenos living in homes they owned dipped below 50%, and it has continued to drop ever since. (Homeowners now account for about 30% of the city’s population, which has nearly reached that 4.1 million target.)
Scores of impoverished newcomers began arriving from Mexico and Central America in the 1970s, and unlike most previous eras of mass immigration, there wasn’t enough housing for them. Arrivals packed themselves a half-dozen or more into studio apartments. Children slept in shifts. School days were shortened because of overflowing classrooms.
In 1970, L.A. wasn’t among the 10 large counties nationwide with the most crowded housing, according to a Times analysis of U.S. census data. In 1980, it soared to No. 3 on the list, then, in 1990, to No. 1, where it has remained ever since.
In 1987, The Times reported that some 200,000 people in Los Angeles County were living in garages, many without plumbing, heating or windows. “People are falling out of the bottom of the housing market,” said James T. Minuto, who supervised housing studies for the Southern California Assn. of Governments.
One such garage dweller, Irma Portillo, had been living in a two-car garage in Pacoima for five years with her three children, her late brother’s two children and her mother — seven people in all. Portillo, a Salvadoran immigrant who earned $570 a month as a nurse’s aide, was spending more than half of it on rent for the garage.
“I know garages like this are illegal to live in,” she said. “I know it is terrible, terrible in here. But where else can I go?”
Census data cited in the Luskin report show that in Compton, Florence-Graham, East Los Angeles, and other Black and Latino communities, the number of nonrelatives per household quadrupled between 1970 and 1990.
It was a sign that people couldn’t buy or rent a home of their own and needed to double up with friends or strangers — and that those who already had homes needed the added income of a lodger to afford their mortgage or rent. It pointed to the collapse of decent factory jobs, which hit Black workers harder than anyone.
As female workers entered the workforce in record numbers, the growing pool of low-skill workers faced increasing competition for jobs, most of which were now nonunion, low-wage and often part-time or temporary. The percentage of full-time workers living in poverty nearly doubled from 1969 to 1987, according to a 1989 report by UCLA’s Research Group on the Los Angeles Economy.
Not long before, a single wage earner could support a family. Now many two-earner families were struggling to afford housing.
In 1980, the average price of a house in Los Angeles hit $100,000, four times what it was a decade before. (In today’s dollars, this would be about $380,000, less than 40% of what the average home costs now.) The percentage of renters who could afford to buy a home dropped to 16%, down from 54% a decade earlier.
By 1981-82, the U.S. economy plunged into recession, as the new Reagan administration was cutting social services, including Medicaid, food stamps, Aid for Families with Dependent Children and other programs. In L.A. County, 38,000 welfare recipients were dropped from AFDC rolls, an additional 48,000 saw benefit reductions, and 7,800 lost their food stamp eligibility.
The Times was soon writing about a new breed of homeless in L.A.: economic castaways who had lost jobs in the recession. In 1982, the county estimated that there were 30,000 homeless on the streets, including 10,000 in Skid Row. The Midnight Mission reported that it was now serving 36,000 hot meals a month, up from 10,000 five years earlier.
“We’re seeing carpenters, cement workers, painters,” Lois Myers of Burbank Temporary Aid Services told The Times back then. “These people say they would work at anything, clean up yards, whatever.”
Among the new unhoused was a 32-year-old man named William Crocker, who had been an Army sergeant in Vietnam and most recently worked in a tire shop in Beverly Hills. “Every morning I wake up [and] I don’t have a job, it just makes the whole day bad,” he said. “So I’m constantly going down and down and down.”
By the end of 1982, a new term had entered the local lexicon: “freeway troll,” a disparaging reference to the homeless men and women who live in “concrete caves” formed by freeway overpasses.
And the demographics of those living on the streets were changing. A 1986 study by the county Department of Mental Health found that Black people were overtaking whites and Latinos among homeless people. They accounted for 39% of those surveyed, compared with 27% who were white and 25% who were Latino.
A common belief at the time — and perhaps still today — is that L.A., with its mild climate, was a magnet for homeless people from around the country. There’s certainly some truth to that. The county study found that two-thirds of those surveyed had lived in Los Angeles for more than a year, and 43% for over five years, which means a majority had come from elsewhere. However, the study said that the L.A. sample appeared to be no more transient than those studied in other cities.
A Times editorial in 1985 called on the city and county to “pull all the players together in one room and lock the door” until they figured out a solution to homelessness.
They didn’t.
Over the next decade, as the crack cocaine epidemic took hold, conditions only grew worse. From 1998 to 2005, roughly 20,000 affordable units were added in Los Angeles. Not a lot for a city of nearly 4 million people — even less considering that more than 9,000 rent-controlled apartments were demolished or converted to condominiums. “For every two steps forward in affordable housing, L.A. took one step backwards,” Greg Morrow, UC Berkeley associate professor of architecture practice, wrote in his 2013 dissertation.
The urban revival in downtown L.A. produced 12,000 new homes but most were high-end apartments or lofts, and SRO hotel units continued to decline.
As building cranes loomed over the skyline, billionaire developer Geoffrey Palmer, whose company controls more than 15,000 apartments in 23 Southern California complexes, won a court ruling in 2007 striking down a city policy mandating that 15% of rental units be priced for low-income residents. Ten years later, a state law superseded the ruling, but only after Palmer’s faux-Italianate buildings lined the north and west edges of downtown, instead of the affordable housing that so many needed.
Since 1986, the primary federal financing to build affordable housing has come from the low-income housing tax credit, an indirect and remarkably inefficient program that gives tax breaks to banks and other institutions to back such projects. Affordable housing developers in Los Angeles often have to assemble stacks of five, six and even seven other financing sources — and to pay for green construction, higher wages and delays that private developers can ignore.
As of 2008, Los Angeles had far fewer tax-credit financed units than New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia, cities with huge advantages in public housing. New York City, with more than 178,000 public housing units to L.A.’s 7,000, had added 51,000 tax-credit-backed homes, to L.A.’s 20,000. Also unlike those cities, Los Angeles had no municipal homeless shelters, instead offering subsidies to privately run, often religious, shelters.
During the Great Recession, 2007-09, foreclosed properties were snapped up by financial institutions including Invitation Homes, a unit of the private equity firm Blackstone. Invitation raised rents substantially.
Renita Barbee, a Blackstone tenant, showed Times columnist Steve Lopez in 2018 a note from her landlord that the monthly rent on her house, $1,850 four years earlier, was going from the current $2,120 to more than $3,000 in December. After Lopez’s column came out, the company said $3,000 was a “mistake,” but her rent was still hiked 10%.
“If this keeps happening,” Barbee said, “we’re all going to end up on the street.”
Apartments became targets for investors too. After the recession, private equity firms snatched up buildings and packaged them into big funds that institutional investors such as pension managers and insurance companies would pump billions into in ensuing years. The need for high payouts kept the upward pressure on rents.
The primary relief for low-income tenants remains the Section 8 voucher program. Launched in 1974, originally to reward landlords for building new affordable units, it now provides subsidies for renters in privately owned apartments.
But in 1986, the waiting list for local Section 8 housing was closed, having grown too long. It was reopened in 1989, with a telephone number for prospective renters to call; within four days, it had received 180,000 calls and the list was closed again.
“We handled it like you do in an earthquake, when everybody is trying to dial at once,” Pacific Bell spokeswoman Kathleen Flynn said. “We let about 60% of the calls go through, but another 71,405 calls did not go through.”
The demand for housing had grown increasingly desperate. By 2016, some landlords were refusing to rent to tenants with vouchers.
Los Angeles city voters that year approved Proposition HHH, a $1.2-billion bond measure that promised to build 10,000 units of affordable housing, much of it categorized as “permanent supportive housing” that would offer on-site social services, including treatment for addiction and mental illness.
The next year, L.A. County voters approved Measure H, a quarter-cent sales tax that promised to all but end homelessness within five years.
Measure H was expected to raise over $3.5 billion over 10 years, with the money going to a variety of anti-homelessness strategies. It was expected to lift 45,000 families and individuals out of homelessness in five years and prevent an additional 30,000 people from becoming homeless in the first place. At the time, there were an estimated 47,000 homeless people in the county.
That was nearly eight years ago. A casual glance around L.A. would suggest that both were abject failures, which isn’t quite true. By the end of 2021, there were 8,000 HHH-supported units in some stage of development — very close to the 10,000 promised, with more on the way. Measure H and complementary programs had created 91,126 permanent housing placements and almost 109,000 interim housing placements. (A placement can be an individual or a family.)
True, many voters have been outraged by development costs for permanent supportive housing under Proposition HHH — as much as $837,000 a unit in 2022, though the bulk of that price tag is financed. (The high costs are attributed to many factors: builders requirements to meet prevailing wage, disability access, and green construction standards that private developers do not have to meet, as well as rising construction material prices, consultant and legal fees, and the cost of carrying financing before rents come in.)
Nevertheless, the massive outpouring of spending by both city and county is creating thousands of new, affordable places to live.
Local government is using state Homekey money to master-lease apartment buildings and convert motel and hotel rooms to permanent units — 2,145 units in the city and 2,053 in the county. The average cost is $129,000 a unit — a big drop from $600,000 for an HHH unit.
So why are there still so many homeless people in L.A.? To begin with, many of those people who were housed wound up back on the streets — an indicator of the complexity of the problem. Some homeless people have a hard time adjusting to life indoors.
Too much of the new housing has been temporary, mostly shelters and does not lead to lasting change. Fewer than 20% of the homeless people the city placed in shelters, hotel and motel rooms and tiny homes from 2019 to 2023 ended up in permanent housing, according to a report in 2024 from City Controller Mejia.
L.A.’s efforts to turn the remaining Skid Row SROs into supportive housing have been under threat. The neighborhood’s largest nonprofit landlord collapsed in 2023 amid financial pressures, poor decision-making and an inability to handle a tenant population that was growing sicker. It took an emergency infusion of tens of millions in public dollars to keep its 2,000 units afloat. Those and other SROs remain at risk.
The poverty, lack of support system, childhood trauma, domestic abuse, financial and legal problems that sent people into homelessness in the first place won’t just vanish in new housing. But it removes the chaos of living on the street.
“I told my people, the best you can hope for is to make another poor person,” said the late Mike Neely, a pioneer in homeless outreach service and a former commissioner at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a joint powers authority created in the 1990s to settle a dispute between the city and county over homeless services.
It is noteworthy that virtually all the cities in the country with high rates of homelessness — San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston — have high housing costs. Those with lower homeless rates — think Houston, Chicago, Milwaukee — tend to have much lower rents.
The problem has proved to be too big for the city of L.A., too big for the county and too big for the state. Even a welcome infusion of new housing, albeit temporary, in the form of unused hotels and motels during the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t enough to get most people off the streets.
Newsom declared homelessness to be his No. 1 priority, and the issue dominated the 2022 L.A. mayoral election. Mayor Karen Bass, who won that contest, began her first day in office by declaring a state of emergency to tackle the crisis.
“We must bring people indoors faster, and we will,” she said. “We must build housing faster, and we will. We must coordinate shelter and services, and we will. We must have coordination among the city officials and the city departments and we will, because we are doing things differently.”
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Agency reported that homelessness had risen 10% in the city and 9% countywide over the course of 2022. The unhoused population, the agency said, was now more than 75,000 in the county and 46,000 in the city, the highest figures since the formal count began in 2007.
To fight homelessness, L.A. County voters last year passed a half-cent sales tax to replace the quarter-cent one they passed in 2017. More than $2.4 billion of local taxpayer money has been aimed at the problem since 2017, through programs such as rental subsidies, interim and permanent housing, outreach, and mental health and addiction services.
The homeless numbers leveled off during 2023. This March, the homeless services agency released projections that the unhoused population decreased by 5% to 10% countywide in its January 2025 count.
This could be a sign that the region is finally making some headway in its fight to end homelessness. But the decline has come at a time of relative economic prosperity, and at least 67,000 people remain on the street or in shelters, mostly in the city of Los Angeles.
END OF STORY
Staff writers Doug Smith, Andrew Khouri and Liam Dillon contributed to this report.
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