Any legal resistance to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s order addressing homelessness in Los Angeles will likely land in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California if filed in federal court, according to a local attorney.
The Central District of California is currently overseeing the enforcement of a multimillion-dollar settlement agreement between the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights (LAHR) and the city and county of Los Angeles that aims to care for the homeless of Los Angeles over five years.
“It is highly likely that litigation over encampment reduction efforts and property movement will end up in front of U.S. Central District Judge Carter,” said attorney Matthew Umhofer who is representing LAHR in the federal litigation. “That's part of what's been lacking is a central place for these issues to go.”
Bass declared a state of emergency around homelessness and issued an order on Dec. 16 that accelerates the development of permanent affordable housing and shelters.
“What we're going to see is approvals quicker and groundbreaking quicker,” Umhofer told the Southern California Record. “We had the county come out and express support for the mayor's state of emergency declaration and there is a lot of capital in this team that Karen Bass has brought in and they are clearly using it in specific ways to try to unblock some of the log jams that have plagued our efforts to address homelessness.”
Bass is a former Congresswoman who was representing the 37th District as a Democrat before she was elected the mayor of Los Angeles on Nov. 8.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority determined that some 70,000 people are experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County compared to only 42,000 in the city of Los Angeles.
Under Bass’s order, applications for affordable housing and shelter applications must be reviewed in 60 days rather than six to nine months, according to media reports.
“There's a huge issue on the bureaucratic front with processing applications quickly enough to get people even from a temporary shelter situation into a housing situation and the worst thing that can happen is getting someone into a shelter and then not having housing options for them so they just cycle in and out of the shelter,” Umhofer said.
As previously reported in the LA Times, there are 31 projects currently pending that could move forward now that Bass has put them on a fast track.
“Legal challenges are more likely to come from focused efforts to move people from encampments into shelter or housing and specifically people who are resistant to moving out of an encampment and who don't want to take shelter or housing,” Umhofer added. "There have been several challenges, some of them successful, to the movement or taking of property by the city or the county against a person's will and there are settlements and ongoing conversations about how to handle those situations better."