the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 2, 2024
Instead of addressing the problem of homelessness, the City of Los Angeles is criminalizing it, citing and arresting homeless people, removing them from visible public spaces, denying them basic services and sanitation, confiscating and destroying their property, and putting them into jail-like shelters.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last June that it’s legal for cities to ban homeless encampments, even if no shelters are available to house them, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered cities to remove them. Then, the Mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, denounced this criminalization, called it “disappointing”, and said it “must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem.”
But this is precisely what the city is doing. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) cited and arrested homeless people for sitting or lying on public sidewalks, drinking alcohol in public, littering, loitering, and violating park regulations. From 2016 through 2022, nearly all LAPD citations went to the homeless. From December 2022 through March 2024, the LAPD destroyed 42 encampments. This is a war waged by the City of Los Angeles against the homeless.
Previously, Bass had touted her Inside Safe program, under which the LAPD, by force, clears homeless camps and temporarily moves the homeless to hotels. The supposed goal is to eventually place the homeless in permanent housing. But this is far from happening.
The city moved only 2,482 homeless into hotels within the last two years. Of those people, just 440 had been placed in permanent housing. Considering that over 75,000 people live on the streets in the county of Los Angeles, what the city is doing is not even a drop in the bucket.
This program is quite expensive, costing the city more than $300 million only in 2023, which included more than $3,500 per month for each hotel room, making business buddies of the city politicians richer than ever.
In sum, such treatment of the homeless by the City of Los Angeles is brutal, besides being very costly. But this cruel treatment temporarily conceals signs of homelessness and extreme poverty in the well-off areas of Los Angeles, making these areas attractive to real estate developers and profitable to businesses.
The root causes of homelessness are the high cost of housing and meager wages, which result from the activities of these very same businesses searching for profits.