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- In 2020, at least 66,436 people experienced homelessness in Los Angeles County.
- The number of people sleeping outside has increased as housing has become less affordable.
- Cities with more poverty – but cheaper housing – have far fewer unsheltered people.
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I met Dave at a bus stop in Glendale right before the pandemic hit. A stocky white man in his 50s with a crew cut and clear-framed eyeglasses, he had just been kicked out of a Starbucks, he told me, after another customer had ascertained he was homeless and called police.
The cops said he could stay – it's not a crime to sit for an hour or two at a cafe, even if you have nowhere else to go – but he didn't feel comfortable anymore. The harassment worked.
All around Los Angeles County, people are resorting to law enforcement to push away the poor and undesirable. In July, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti signed an ordinance that criminalizes sitting or sleeping in much of the city, despite the fact that there is not enough shelter space to provide a majority of the city's 41,0000-plus unhoused people an alternative.
Garcetti – who once pledged to eliminate veteran homelessness, but failed to deliver – was responding to what are legitimate complaints. Sympathy for those suffering extreme deprivation does not require romanticizing the condition. In Los Angeles, that condition is encampments in just about every nook and cranny, with only a few enjoying access to running water or legitimate bathrooms. The median cost of a home in LA is now upwards of $750,000, property owners don't much care for their hefty investments being surrounded by people sleeping in cars and tents.
They pay taxes, the chorus goes. And not for this.
My friend from the bus stop was one of them too, before. He'd been a truck driver, he said, until about two years earlier, when he was diagnosed with sleep apnea. It did not get better, and soon he was no longer able to pay his mortgage. It's easy to live slightly beyond one's means - in housing markets like LA, maybe even a requirement. He's tried to find work as a dishwasher, he said, but employers prefer the applicants who have a permanent address.
Affordable housing helps those living in poverty stay indoors
Mental health and substance abuse: these are the fallback explanations for why people don't live in homes.
But when I moved back to Philadelphia this year, I was shocked by what I didn't see in what is by some measures the poorest city in the country: people sleeping in tents and cars, everywhere.
It's not because deprivation is unknown here - that there aren't people struggling with addiction and trauma. But it is far more affordable to live here.
"The cost of housing is just so much lower," Laura Weinbaum, vice president for strategy at Project HOME, a group that provides services and social housing in Philadelphia, explained in an interview. "Yes, we have plenty of poverty," she said, "but you can still buy a house, in a relatively safe neighborhood, for $150,000."
Encampments exist in Philadelphia, but not under every bridge as it can seem in Los Angeles. Where they do, as in Kensington, the city's inclination is to clear them out, too - with the support of many in the area, which is infamous for its open-air drug dealing. Those critical of razing tent cities usually just object to the fact no tenable alternatives have been made available for the displaced.
Philly has a smaller population than Los Angeles (1.5 million in 2019 vs. nearly 4 million in the same year). However, the chronic, year-round unsheltered population in Philly is believed to be in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands as seen in LA - 950, per the city's Office of Homeless Services, "the lowest number of street homeless per capita of any of the largest cities in the US."
The less hospitable weather is a factor but it's not necessarily the most important one: As the Urban Institute noted in a 2019 report, all else aside, it is "a lack of affordable housing [that] correlates with higher rates of overall homelessness."
According to the 2020 Census, LA has gained more than 100,000 people since 2010 but built far too few new units of housing.
That Philadelphia is better in this regard is, in part, a product of the city's 20th-century decline. For decades, people moved away from it, its population only starting to grow again in the mid-2000s, and is still well below its historic peak. That - a byproduct of stagnation, not progressive foresight - has helped keep housing costs down.
It's not even that situation is even "good," per se. It's just not as atrocious as it could be. As a research study by Pew noted, "Philadelphia is affordable for a big city but about average for one with a high poverty rate. For renters, it is relatively affordable for a big city but expensive for one with a high poverty rate."
In dollar terms: a good deal on a one-bedroom apartment in Center City Philadelphia - what the Department of Housing and Urban Development terms "fair market rent" - is just over $1,000, compared to more than $1,600 in downtown Los Angeles.
The city of brotherly love is less a model for how to combat homelessness than a lesson that, while a variety of social ills contribute to the most extreme form of poverty, the simplest way to reduce homelessness may well be the most obvious: provide more housing that more people can afford.
"It's an economic thing at the end of the day," Weinbaum said.
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