Governor Newsom’s Executive Order & the Impact on the Homeless

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gary Blasi:

That’s one of the problems that public policy has in dealing with homelessness is that it’s too easy to frame homelessness as a static problem, but the problem is that we have a huge number of people entering the homeless population every month, and so unless you can get more people into housing that are falling out of housing, you’re going to lose.

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Welcome to the award-winning podcast, Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J.Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You are listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:

Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams coming to you from this time, the East coast that in Harwich, Massachusetts, I write a blog named May it Please the court have three books out titled How To Get Sued the Sled in my newest book. How would You Decide 10 famous Trials That Changed History? You can find all three on Amazon. In addition, our new podcast miniseries in Dispute, 10 famous trials that changed history is currently featured here on the Legal Talk Network and on your favorite podcasting app. Please listen and subscribe. Well. On July 25th, 2024, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing state officials to start removing homeless encampments across the state as follows, last month’s SCOTUS ruling in City of Grants Pass versus Johnson, where the high court ruled that they will allow cities to enforce bans on sleeping outside in public spaces even if there are no shelter beds available.

According to a 2023 homelessness assessment report to Congress from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, California has the largest homeless population in the nation with more than 180,000 people out on the streets. In a statement, governor Newsom said this executive order directs state agencies to move urgently to address dangerous encampments while supporting and assisting individuals living in them and provides guidance for cities and counties to do the same. There are simply no more excuses. It’s time for everyone to do their part. So today on Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we will discuss Governor Newsom’s executive order for removal of homelessness encampments in California, discuss that order, the recent SCOTUS decision in City of Grants Pass versus Johnson, and the potential impact that this could have on the homeless community. And to help us better understand today’s topic, we’re joined by returning guest Gary Blasi. He’s the professor of Law Emeritus at UCLA School of Law. In addition to his legal and scholarly work related to homelessness, Gary has for 40 years held leadership positions in nonprofit organizations addressing homelessness and extreme poverty. Most recently, professor Blasey co-authored a research brief Basic Income to Homelessness in Los Angeles, published by the Homeless Policy Research Institute at USC. Welcome back, Gary.

Gary Blasi:

Good to be here.

J. Craig Williams:

So Gary, it’s great to have you back. Tell us about your role at UCLA law and how you got involved with the homelessness.

Gary Blasi:

Well, I was a legal aid lawyer before I was recruited to go to UCLA law school and when I was a legal aid lawyer, I represented unhoused people for a number of years and I took that interest with me to UCLA, both for research and later on working with students in a capacity as lawyers for unhoused people and low income tenants and in clinical courses where students were actually working on real world issues.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, let’s start by discussing the Grants Pass SCOTUS ruling and how it shaped Governor Newsom’s order that we’re talking about today. Tell me your perspective about the ruling.

Gary Blasi:

Well, it wasn’t expected ruling from the Supreme Court. I think advocates in the Ninth Circuit had been worrying about this issue getting to the Supreme Court for some time as the composition of the Supreme Court changed, so certainly was not as surprise, nor were the arguments raised and decided there a surprise. What was somewhat surprising was the number of nominally liberal people who filed amicus briefs in support of the conservative effort in the ninth Circuit to overturn the decision that had restricted the ability to some extent of localities, to punish people for being homeless or engaging in activities that every human being has to engage in, including sleeping. As I say, it wasn’t a surprise and it builds on arguments that have been percolating in the ninth Circuit for a number of years. Starting in 2006 it ended where I think people could have predicted it would’ve ended.

J. Craig Williams:

Are you disappointed?

Gary Blasi:

I’m not disappointed because it was expected. I’m disappointed in Governor Newsom and some of the other politicians, and I would say not including either the city or county leadership of Los Angeles who have said that they will absolutely not follow the opening given to them by the US Supreme Court and will continue to try to house people rather than use the police to move them around. I think Governor Newsom’s order it’s phrased as an executive order at least that homeless encampment should be cleared is purely a political act on his part and he knows better local jurisdictions don’t need any authority that they didn’t have before Grants Pass in order to restrict encampments. And he is basically just positioning himself a little further to the right in anticipation of what I presume is the rest of his legal and political career.

J. Craig Williams:

Let’s take a look at the differences between what Mayor Bass has done in Los Angeles and what Governor Newsom has done. As I understand it, mayor Bass has undertaken a program to house the unhoused and has been fairly successful in clearing Venice and some of the other encampments that have occurred. Of course they reoccur, but it seems as though she’s been largely successful.

Gary Blasi:

Yes, she’s approached the problem in a common sense way, which is if all you do is have the police harass people, they will just move somewhere else. Her program, which she calls inside safe moves entire encampments into motels that have been master leased and that has a lot of advantages. It’s expensive, but it has a lot of advantages that those people don’t go back to the streets, at least to the great majority of them don’t, and they’re provided housing and they’re no longer homeless and they’re not in anybody’s neighborhood in an outdoor capacity there.

J. Craig Williams:

Her program mirrors some other programs in Europe, isn’t that right?

Gary Blasi:

Yes. The not surprisingly sort of rational approach in many countries around the world has been to deal with the problem by offering people housing and there’s overwhelming empirical evidence that if you offer people something better than what they have, they’ll take it. Even people who have significant impairments, mental or otherwise. That’s also been the case in some places in the United States. The city that’s had the most success, perhaps surprisingly to some is Houston, Texas, where a mayor who had a lot of authority in an environment where there were essentially no zoning rules solved their homeless problem by building a large number of small units that were specifically designed for people who would otherwise be on the street. And Houston now has the lowest percentage of unhoused homeless people of probably any jurisdiction in America, and it is comparable to what’s been accomplished in Europe.

J. Craig Williams:

What are the consequences of a program like Houston’s and California? I mean Los Angeles is, you said that Mayor Bass’s program is expensive. Is Houston’s program likewise expensive?

Gary Blasi:

I think the Houston program is less expensive because it’s Houston and there are no laws requiring that union labor be required to build everything, and the mayor has the ability to tell the departments in the city of Houston basically to anything. It’s almost a sort of a military municipal government. So the efficiency with which these housing units have gone up is remarkably lower. The efficiencies remarkably higher than in Los Angeles and at lower cost. It is true that people can’t live in motels forever, and we’ve seen this play out in New York City over the past several years that unless you have a program and a policy and the ability to produce actual housing, then people will get stuck in motels and what are generally called interim housing. And the interim housing is actually more expensive than an apartment in Los Angeles. The city is paying hotel owners sometimes close to $3,000 a month for a motel room. When a one room apartment, the average rate rental is about 1800, but we need those other units in order to make room for people to leave motels and get into just ordinary housing and resume their lives.

J. Craig Williams:

How do you balance the cost of housing, the unhoused as you’ve just described it, against the cost of society to have unhoused people and the crime and the drugs and everything else that rolls around with that?

Gary Blasi:

Well, interestingly, the largest provider of housing to unhoused people in Los Angeles is the Los Angeles County Health Department, which houses about 5,000 people. And the reason they do that is that a very smart executive came in and had his people find out how much they were spending in treating unhoused people over and over and over again. And it turned out they were spending a huge amount of money doing that, much less than they would spend if they housed people. And they found that when they got people into housing, the healthcare costs that were being absorbed by the county were reduced dramatically and in fact, more than enough to pay for the housing. So leaving aside all the other costs, the primary cost to the public in a place that has a public healthcare system is healthcare. And if you can reduce homelessness, you can reduce the rate at which people need emergency rooms, for example, dramatically. So it is not cheaper to use the police. It’s actually a lot more expensive to use the police than it is to use people who can actually help unhoused people get into a better situation. Police officers are very expensive on an hourly basis and in some cases they’re paid overtime just to harass in some jurisdictions to harass homeless people. So they’re a lot more expensive than outreach workers and they’re more expensive than providing basic housing.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Gary, at this time, we’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m joined by Gary Blasi, professor of Law Emeritus at the UCLA School of Law. We’ve been talking about the unhoused, but Gary, there’s a recent RAND Corporation Center on Housing and Homelessness study that found that Mayor Bass’s clearing of encampments just really works for about two or three months, and then people are back on the street and in fact, more people are back on the street. I think the population percentage doubled according to that study.

Gary Blasi:

It has doubled in a couple of areas and it does tend to go back up. The important point here is that those are not the same people. The people who are newly populating Hollywood or Venice or Skid Row are not people who left motels and went back to the street. They’re new people, and that’s one of the problems that public policy has in dealing with homelessness is that it’s too easy to frame homelessness as a static problem. But the problem is that we have a huge number of people entering the homeless population every month. And so unless you can get more people into housing that are falling out of housing, you’re going to lose. And so that’s what we’re seeing and that’s the phenomenon I think that the RAN Corporation study found was the case. They’re going back to the same areas because those areas were places where it was possible to survive on the streets, whereas people could not go to certain other areas because they would be aroused immediately.

J. Craig Williams:

Once a person has fallen into homelessness, what does it take to get out of it?

Gary Blasi:

It takes a lot to get out of it, and the longer you’re homeless, the more difficult it becomes. Being homeless is a lot, first of all, it’s a lot of work and people wonder about why people don’t have jobs, and in fact, a lot of homeless people have part-time jobs, but it’s exhausting and it’s demoralizing and it’s traumatic. And people who didn’t have any really serious mental disabilities or mental health issues before they became homeless often develop them and people who didn’t have an addiction disease develop addictions when they get on the street. One of the reasons that methamphetamine is a big problem among the homeless population is that when you first become homeless, one of the things you worry about the most in my talking to people is you’re going to lose everything you have. If you go to sleep, someone’s going to take it.

And so people take what my generation called uppers in order to stay awake, and then they get addicted to meth and everything goes downhill from there. It’s hard. That’s why people need a hand out to help them transition. Sometimes a lot of people don’t. A lot of people move directly into housing, but a lot of people do need some additional supports for at least a little while in order to increase their chances that they’ll be able to stay housed and rejoin society and get an income, hopefully enough to pay rent and put homelessness in their rear view mirror.

J. Craig Williams:

You recently wrote a paper on basic income. What role does basic income play in homelessness?

Gary Blasi:

The primary cause of homelessness, this is true everywhere in the United States, but especially in the Ninth Circuit and in the West Coast and in Los Angeles in particular is extreme poverty. A lot of people think that the cause of homelessness is addiction or mental health problems, but more than 95% of people with those conditions are housed. It’s only when you combine those problems with extreme poverty, do you see that the rates of homelessness go up dramatically. And just to give you an example, in Los Angeles County, if you have no other income, no other means to survive, then there’s a social safety net program. So-called that will give you $221 a month, and that $221 amount has not changed in 40 years. Meanwhile, the cost of an apartment during that 40 years has gone up by 456%. So it’s not surprising that a lot of really poor people fall into homelessness. And in fact, of the people who receive that $221 of which there are about a hundred thousand, 70,000 of them are homeless by the standards that are generally used to define that.

J. Craig Williams:

Where does the money come from to fund basic income? And what is an amount of, if $221 isn’t enough, obviously it’s not enough hardly to deal with anything. How much money is needed for basic income and where does it come from?

Gary Blasi:

Well, we’re finding that enough income isn’t around or available to pay for standard market housing, but most really poor people don’t live in standard departments. They live in what’s called informal housing. When the University of San Francisco did a statewide survey, they found that the average person right before they became homeless was paying an average of $450 a month to someone who had housing in order to get a space in that housing. And that’s called the informal housing. And experiments have been done in a number of cities that are now going on in Los Angeles and San Francisco to see how much is enough. And that appears that about $750 a month in San Francisco or Los Angeles is enough. A thousand dollars a month is really sufficient, and the cost may be lower. I think it’s been lower in Denver where the same sort of experiment has taken place.

So that’s the kinds of amounts of money that you’re talking about. And when people add that up, they say, that’s a lot of money, but the response is as compared to what, because not only do we have all these economic costs, direct economic costs, healthcare and so on, but we have the costs associated with just sort of the degrading of public life, which is as much hated by people who live on the streets as people who are most troubled by having to look at people living on the streets. It’s the kind of very minimal safety net that prevents homelessness from being such a huge problem in Europe and one that is much more easily and cheaply implemented without the huge bureaucracy that usually goes with efforts to house homeless people. So I think it’s promising. In fact, there’s a countywide meeting on the subject tomorrow and on Friday the authors of that piece and I are meeting with a member of the Board of Supervisors to talk about a very large experiment in Los Angeles County that we’re hopeful about.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, good luck with that, Gary. Right now it’s time for us to take another quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We will be right back and welcome back to lawyer, lawyer. I’m back with Gary Blasi. We’ve been discussing the problem of homelessness and the unhoused shelters fill up. There’s a long wait list for beds. People that are homeless have no solution. People without cars really have no solution. When you have this meeting tomorrow, Gary, what is the solution? What are you going to propose that’s going to solve this problem?

Gary Blasi:

Well, for about half the population in Los Angeles, the only problem that people really have is they just don’t have enough money to obtain housing. And so for that half of the problem, the answer is pretty straightforward, and that is we find enough money to get people housed, and then we also connect them as best we can to ongoing sources of income. There’s a lot of people who could work if they had a stable place to be when they’re off work, and there are people who are eligible for disability benefits who can’t really apply for them while they’re on the street because they have to have correspondence with social security and so on. So for that group, just money is really the problem. Now, there is another roughly half or maybe a third of the population that needs more than that. They need both the housing and then some additional supports to stay in that housing. But even there, those programs are more expensive because of the services required, but they’re still less expensive than the alternative, which is to leave people on the street and then deal with them with the police and ambulances and emergency rooms, courthouses and jails, and an alternative that really isn’t suitable for a civilized society.

J. Craig Williams:

You earlier in the program said that Governor Newsom’s order is really just going to move people around. Is that all it does? Is it going to do more than that? Isn’t it going to help solve the problem?

Gary Blasi:

There is no evidence anywhere in America that displacing people from encampments or anything that a police officer can do that moves anyone from homelessness into a non-homeless state or a housed state. It moves them from one place to another. And what we’re going to see, not so much in the city of Los Angeles or in the unincorporated areas of the county of Los Angeles here, but there are 86 other cities in Los Angeles, and they’re already beginning as kind of an arms race to see how hostile they can be to homeless people in the hope that they will move to the jurisdiction next door. And that is just both inhumane and just ignorant. If you sort of step back from the overall taxpayer’s point of view, I haven’t really accomplished anything. You’ve just moved the problem from one place to another, and that’s all that displacement has ever been able to do. And this is not just a view of relatively liberal academics like me, it’s the view of police officers themselves. They know that when they bust up an encampment that that doesn’t mean that they won’t see that person again in another place or maybe even the same place a few months from now

J. Craig Williams:

Based on the current political climate. Would it be surprising to you that we ultimately get to a point where we round up unhoused homeless people and put them in encampments somewhere out in the countryside where nobody can see them?

Gary Blasi:

Well, that’s already happening to a degree. The northern most city in Los Angeles counties, the city of Lancaster, and the reaction of the mayor of Lancaster to the Grants Pass decision was, I’m warming up the bulldozers. And in fact, I know from having worked done in Lancaster with students that that’s already happened in Lancaster. When the sheriffs come to an encampment, they tell people, if you go north of G Street, you’ll never see us again. But if you stay here, you’re going to see us every day. And G Street is the northern boundary between Lancaster and the Open Mojave Desert, which has no water, no shade, no nothing. And the last time I drove by that area just a month or two ago, there were hundreds of people living out in the desert in tents or in beat up old RVs or in cars that were five miles from the closest water just trying to survive in ways that remind you of a Mad Max movie or something like that. It’s just, it boggles the mind to think that this is happening in the wealthiest country on earth.

J. Craig Williams:

How do those people survive?

Gary Blasi:

They survive through angels. There’s one remarkable woman out there who bought a truck and she gets donations and she gets water, and she visits those encampments every day and distributes water and whatever food she’s managed to gather from donations. And it’s not by virtue of anything the government is doing. It’s just a really good person and her friends and colleagues who are keeping people alive out there to the extent that they are staying alive. There have been some deaths from the heat and so on. As you can imagine now, the heat out in that area has gotten close to 120. It’s a deadly situation.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, with that, Gary, on that sad note, it looks like we’ve just about reached the end of our program, so I’d like to invite you to share your final thoughts and provide your contact information and let people know what they can do to help this situation.

Gary Blasi:

Well, people who want to get in touch with me can reach me through the UCLA website, which is easy to find in terms of what people can do. I think people can inform themselves about what the situation is in the local area, where they are and what’s being done by their people that they’re voting for, and see whether that’s actually the kinds of policies that they want to promote. It’s not all politicians are the same. There’s a big spread in terms of how people on the Los Angeles City Council, for example, are dealing with this. It’s somewhat heartening that the people who are taking a more humane perspective are tending to get elected in Los Angeles. That’s probably not the case in Oklahoma City or some other places that I’ve lived, but that’s really the bad answer to everything, which is get the facts and vote.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. That’s so true. And Gary, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure to have you on the show today. We appreciate it.

Gary Blasi:

I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, Craig.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, here are a few of my thoughts about today’s topic. Certainly homelessness is a problem and it seems like moving around, moving people around from one encampment to another or one place to another is not necessarily the solution. As proposed by Professor Blasi, providing people a basic income, providing people a place to live, and then helping them move into permanent housing, getting them jobs and getting them the help they need seems to be the best way to eliminate the problem rather than move it from one city to another, or in this case, right into the desert, which seems to me to be heartless. Well, that’s it for Craig’s Ran on today’s topic. Let me know what you think, and if you like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit us at legaltalknetwork.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember, when you want legal, think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

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