If a bed in a homeless shelter has been taken, is that bed still “available?”
The plaintiffs in a five-year-old lawsuit alleging the City of Los Angeles failed to address homelessness say the answer is an obvious “no.” But the city begs to differ.
According to the testimony of City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, a bed created by the city remains “on offer” whether someone is sleeping in it or not.
That contention is one of several at the core of a hearing in Los Angeles federal court to determine if the city should be held in contempt for failing to comply with a settlement, signed more than 3½ years ago, that requires it to produce more than 12,000 beds of shelter or housing and remove nearly 10,000 homeless encampments from the street.
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter kicked off the hearing in November with a searing review of the city’s “pattern of defiance of settlement agreement and the deadlines contained within it with performance or performative compliance only resulting in the wake of court hearings.”
Four days of testimony, spread over nearly two months, have produced a striking record of confusion and disagreement over the meaning of basic terms such as “homeless encampment” and “persons served,” leaving the impression of a city that skews definitions when it can’t live up to the common ones.
If an outreach worker tells a person on the street a shelter bed is waiting for them, is that an “offer?” Not by the city’s definition, Szabo testified Monday. An offer occurs only when someone checks into the shelter to occupy a bed.
The distinction matters because the court has required the city to “offer” shelter to anyone whose tent or makeshift shelter is to be removed in pursuit of the settlement. But the city can’t track how often “offers” are made, Szabo acknowledged.
“We elected to use PEH [person experiencing homelessness] served as our best good-faith effort to comply with that requirement,” he said. “It’s a metric that we are reasonably able to verify.”
“PEH served,” he testified, means people who occupy a bed.
The city’s defense is that it’s doing the best it can and making progress on the goals of the May 2022 settlement.
“The good news now is that the city has made extraordinary progress since then,” argued Theane Evangelis, lead attorney for the city’s outside law firm. “It’s served more than 8,000 people, has more than 8,000 beds online, more than 5,000 in progress. Your Honor, these numbers reflect Herculean efforts to combat homelessness, not a pattern of delay or obstruction.”
The 2020 case was filed by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, a group made up primarily of business and property owners who want cleaner streets. The lawsuit also named Los Angeles County, which reached a separate settlement in 2023. Lawyers for the group contend the city is willfully obfuscating to cover up its inadequate efforts to live up to its settlement.
“Our clients, both the housed and unhoused communities at large, were promised more than aspirational rhetoric, Your Honor,” their attorney Elizabeth Mitchell said in her opening statement. “They were promised measurable action, verified by data, overseen by this court. Three years into the settlement, the city still fights oversight harder than it fights homelessness.”
Two advocacy groups — the L.A. Community Action Network and Los Angeles Catholic Worker — are intervening on behalf of homeless people in the case. Representing them, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles attorney Shayla Myers has argued passionately that they need protection from both parties in the litigation.
She’s been especially focused on the city, which she suspects is using the encampment reduction plan “simply to erase the visible evidence of homelessness on our streets and hide the fact that homelessness is not getting better.”
Under intense cross-examination by Myers on Monday, Szabo struggled to defend his testimony that the city was continuing to maintain “largely or almost all” of about 7,000 beds it was required to produce under a previous agreement that expired at the end of June. He clarified that the was referring to physical beds created by the city and acknowledged that more than 2,000 of those beds were leased with temporary subsidies that expire in two years.
“I don’t know how many are still being used today,” he said.
The contempt hearing, a mini-trial within a trial, is the latest drama in a marathon case that has included: a 110-page order— overturned on appeal — that would have required the city to house everyone on Skid Row; an order requiring the city to provide housing for everyone living under a freeway overpass; the 7,000 beds; a further settlement requiring the city to create another 12,915 beds and remove 9,800 encampments; a slow-burning battle over what an encampment is — for purposes of the settlement it is a single tent, vehicle or makeshift shelter; an order for a $3-million audit of the city’s homeless programs; a hearing on whether to place those programs under a receiver; the hiring of a 15-member outside legal team to fight receivership whose billings are $1.8 million and counting; the appointment of a monitor instead of a receiver; and the appeal of that monitor’s appointment, which was not even the last appeal in the case.
The current hearing largely focuses on one paragraph in the 2022 settlement that defines — in retrospect, poorly — seven metrics of progress the city must report to the court quarterly.
Three address beds: “the number of housing or shelter opportunities created or otherwise obtained, the number of beds or opportunities offered, and the number of beds or opportunities currently available in each Council District.”
And four, with the qualifier, “to the extent possible,” address people: “the number of PEH engaged, the number of PEH who have accepted offers of shelter or housing, the number of PEH who have rejected offers of shelter or housing and why offers were rejected, and the number of encampments in each Council District.”
“To the extent possible” became the cornerstone of the city’s explanation of why it had used the number of beds occupied as a catch-all for the city’s interactions with people.
Acknowledging that the city hasn’t reported every item required, Evangelis argued in her opening statement in November that the agreement “specifies that, quote, the city will work with LAHSA to include some of those items, quote, to the extent possible. That’s critical.”
Testimony that followed drew a picture of how hard and time-consuming it would be to gather that information from the homeless database called HMIS — maintained not by the city but by the independent Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority — but little evidence that the city pursued “to the extent possible” with much zeal.
The perpetual-motion nature of the proceeding is wearing the patience of at least one City Council member who initially supported the litigation in principle.
“The infusion of investments mandated by the case played a part in the City reducing unsheltered homelessness for the first time after many years of increases,” Councilmember Nithya Raman wrote in a November post on her website shortly after the contempt proceeding began.
“However, the litigation is now dragging on in ways that feel very removed from the goal of providing shelter and housing to people living on LA’s streets.”
Repeated hearings and data requests are “taxing an already strained system, and adding confusion and significant cost,” she wrote. “In a city with limited funding and capacity, the Court’s demands are now actually taking away from the work of housing as many people as possible.”
Who is responsible for the serial hearings could be debated. That they will continue seems certain. A new one is now on the horizon after a state court judge last week ruled that the City Council illegally considered an element of the settlement — the 9,800 encampment reductions — in a closed session without public participation.
Citing a report in The Times questioning whether the Council even voted on the encampment resolution plan, “a critical and material issue before the Court,” Carter ordered a new hearing, on a date yet to be set, to examine whether the city “willfully and intentionally misrepresented material facts to the Court.”
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