To avoid a possible federal contempt ruling, the Los Angeles City Council has agreed to extend by two years the city’s commitment to maintain thousands of beds for homeless people and to shift its focus from removing street encampments to getting people indoors.
The agreement, signed by all parties to the landmark case that is now in its sixth year, drops a requirement that the city remove 9,800 homeless encampments by next June.
Instead, the city would have to place 19,600 homeless people into shelter or housing. That number would include several thousand placements the city has already made under a 2022 settlement agreement.
The city’s obligation under the settlement to create 12,915 shelter or permanent housing beds by next June would be increased to 14,000, and the city would then have to maintain at least 12,915 through June of 2029.
After months of negotiation, the City Council approved the agreement in closed session Tuesday. It was posted on the court’s website Wednesday. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter scheduled a hearing Friday to review it.
If Carter accepts the agreement, it would resolve three appeals the city has filed in the case, end a proceeding on whether to hold the city in contempt and lay to rest a dispute over how the city was counting encampment reductions.
The L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, a group made up primarily of business and property owners who want cleaner streets, alleged in the 2020 lawsuit that the city had failed in its duty to address homelessness. The lawsuit also named Los Angeles County, which reached a separate settlement in 2023.
The advocacy group Los Angeles Community Action Network and the Los Angeles Catholic Workers intervened in the case, representing the interests of homeless people.
Last year, the L.A. Alliance sought a contempt order contending that the city was willfully obfuscating to cover up inadequate efforts to live up to its settlement.
Lawyers for the group contended that the city was obfuscating to cover up its inadequate efforts to comply with its settlement.
Following a months-long hearing on the contempt, Carter in February urged the parties to settle their differences through negotiation. Several more months of behind-the-scenes talks led to an overhaul of the 2022 settlement.
The shift from removing tents and personal belongings to sheltering people resolves a fight over the city’s committment to “resolve” thousands of encampments.
On behalf of the intervenors, Shayla Myers argued that the encampment removal goal, approved by the City Council in a closed session, became a defacto quota system for sanitation workers to discard homeless people’s belongings.
Last year, Carter ruled that the city could not document that it has offered shelter or housing to anyone whose encampment had been “resolved,” throwing the city’s capacity to meet the goal into doubt.
“That plan, as the city argued it was, makes the homeless crisis worse in Los Angeles,” Myers said in an interview Thursday. “Instead this plan actually counts the number of people coming inside which is the only way we are going to solve thls homelessness crisis.”
The agreement also settles two other disputes that have bogged down the case with appeals.
The city, which appealed a court order granting attorneys’ of $1.6 million to the L.A. Alliance and just over $210,000 to the intervenors’ law firm, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. The city has now agreed to pay attorneys’ fees of $1.9 million to the plaintiffs and $300,000 to the intervenors’, covering additional time spent in negotiation.
The city has paid an outside law firm, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, about $7.5 million to defend it against the accusations that it was not complying with the settlement.
The agreement also drops a court-appointed monitor the city objected to and provides two alternatives and limited the fees to no more than $150,000 per year.
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