Jones v. City of Los Angeles

• Citation: 444 F.3d 1118
• Decision Date: 14 April 2006
• Docket Number: No. 04-55324.,04-55324.
• Parties: Edward JONES; Patricia Vinson; George Vinson; Thomas Cash; Stanley Barger; Robert Lee Purrie, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF LOS ANGELES; William Bratton, Chief; Charles Beck, Captain, in their official capacity, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (9th Circuit)

444 F.3d 1118

Edward JONES; Patricia Vinson; George Vinson; Thomas Cash; Stanley Barger; Robert Lee Purrie, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF LOS ANGELES; William Bratton, Chief; Charles Beck, Captain, in their official capacity, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 04-55324.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted December 6, 2005.

Filed April 14, 2006.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Ben Wizner, Peter Eliasberg, and Mark D. Rosenbaum, ACLU Foundation of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA; Carol A. Sobel, Law Offices of Carol A. Sobel, Santa Monica, CA; and Adam B. Wolf, ACLU Drug Law Reform Project, Santa Cruz, CA, for Plaintiffs-Appellants.

Amy Jo Field, Deputy City Attorney, Los Angeles, CA, for Defendants-Appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California; Edward Rafeedie, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-03-01142-ER.

Before RYMER and WARDLAW, Circuit Judges, and REED,^* District Judge.

Opinion by Judge Wardlaw; Dissent by Judge Rymer

WARDLAW, Circuit Judge.

Six homeless individuals, unable to obtain shelter on the night each was cited or arrested, filed this Eighth Amendment challenge to the enforcement of a City of Los Angeles ordinance that criminalizes sitting, lying, or sleeping on public streets and sidewalks at all times and in all places within Los Angeles's city limits. Appellants seek limited injunctive relief from enforcement of the ordinance during nighttime hours, i.e., between 9:00 p.m. and 6:30 a.m., or at any time against the temporarily infirm or permanently disabled. We must decide whether the Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment prohibits enforcement of that law as applied to homeless individuals involuntarily sitting, lying, or sleeping on the street due to the unavailability of shelter in Los Angeles.

I. Facts and Procedural Background

The facts underlying this appeal are largely undisputed. Edward Jones, Patricia Vinson, George Vinson, Thomas Cash, Stanley Barger, and Robert Lee Purrie ("Appellants") are homeless individuals who live on the streets of Los Angeles's Skid Row district. Appellees are the City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Police Department ("L.A.P.D.") Chief William Bratton, and Captain Charles Beck ("Appellees" or "the City"). Federal law defines the term "homeless individual" to include

(1) an individual who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence; and

(2) an individual who has a primary nighttime residence that is—

(A) a supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designed to provide temporary living accommodations (including welfare hotels, congregate shelters, and transitional housing for the mentally ill);

(B) an institution that provides a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized; or

(C) a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings.

Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 § 103(a), 42 U.S.C. § 11302(a) (2000). Appellants are six of the more than 80,000 homeless individuals in Los Angeles County on any given night. See L.A. Homeless Servs. Auth., Los Angeles Continuum of Care, Exhibit 1 Narrative, at 2-17 (2001); see also Patrick Burns et al., Econ. Roundtable, Homeless in LA: A Working Paper for the 10-Year Plan To End Homelessness in Los Angeles County (2003) (estimating that more than 253,000 individuals were homeless in Los Angeles County at some point during 2002).

The term "Skid Row" derives from the lumber industry practice of building a road or track made of logs laid crosswise over which other logs were slid. Christine Ammer, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms 382 (paperback ed.2003). By the 1930s, the term was used to describe the area of town frequented by loggers and densely populated with bars and brothels. Id. Beginning around the end of the nineteenth century, the area now known as Los Angeles's Skid Row became home to a transient population of seasonal laborers as residential hotels began to develop. See Mayor's Citizens' Task Force on Cent. City East, To Build a Community 5 (1988). For decades Skid Row has been home for "the down and out, the drifters, the unemployed, and the chronic alcoholic[s]" of Los Angeles. Id. Covering fifty city blocks immediately east of downtown Los Angeles, Skid Row is bordered by Third Street to the north, Seventh Street to the south, Alameda Street to the east, and Main Street to the west.

Los Angeles's Skid Row has the highest concentration of homeless individuals in the United States. Charlie LeDuff, In Los Angeles, Skid Row Resists an Upgrade, N.Y. Times, July 15, 2003, at A1. According to the declaration of Michael Alvidrez, a manager of single-room-occupancy ("SRO") hotels in Skid Row owned by the Skid Row Housing Trust, since the mid-1970s Los Angeles has chosen to centralize homeless services in Skid Row. See also Edward G. Goetz, Land Use and Homeless Policy in Los Angeles, 16 Int'l. J. Urb. & Regional Res. 540, 543 (1992) (discussing the City's long-standing "policy of concentrating and containing the homeless in the Skid Row area"). The area is now largely comprised of SRO hotels (multi-unit housing for very low income persons typically consisting of a single room with shared bathroom), shelters, and other facilities for the homeless.

Skid Row is a place of desperate poverty, drug use, and crime, where Porta-Potties serve as sleeping quarters and houses of prostitution. Steve Lopez, A Corner Where L.A. Hits Rock Bottom, L.A. Times, Oct. 17, 2005, at A1. Recently, it has been reported that local hospitals and law enforcement agencies from nearby suburban areas have been caught "dumping" homeless individuals in Skid Row upon their release. Cara Mia DiMassa & Richard Winton, Dumping of Homeless Suspected Downtown, L.A. Times, Sept. 23, 2005, at A1. This led Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to order an investigation into the phenomenon in September 2005. Cara Mia DiMassa & Richard Fausset, Mayor Orders Probe of Skid Row Dumping, L.A. Times, Sept. 27, 2005, at B1. L.A.P.D. Chief William Bratton, insisting that the Department does not target the homeless but only people who violate city ordinances (presumably including the ordinance at issue), has stated:

"If the behavior is aberrant, in the sense that it breaks the law, then there are city ordinances. . . . You arrest them, prosecute them. Put them in jail. And if they do it again, you arrest them, prosecute them, and put them in jail. It's that simple."

Cara Mia DiMassa & Stuart Pfeifer, 2 Strategies on Policing Homeless, L.A. Times, Oct. 6, 2005, at A1 [hereinafter DiMassa, Policing Homeless] (omission in original) (quoting Chief Bratton). This has not always been City policy. The ordinance at issue was adopted in 1968. See L.A., Cal., Ordinance 137,269 (Sept. 11, 1968). In the late 1980s, James K. Hahn, who served as Los Angeles City Attorney from 1985 to 2001 and subsequently as Mayor, refused to prosecute the homeless for sleeping in public unless the City provided them with an alternative to the streets. Frederick M. Muir, No Place Like Home: A Year After Camp Was Closed, Despair Still Reigns on Skid Row, L.A. Times, Sept. 25, 1988, § 2 (Metro), at 1.

For the approximately 11,000-12,000 homeless individuals in Skid Row, space is available in SRO hotels, shelters, and other temporary or transitional housing for only 9000 to 10,000, leaving more than 1000 people unable to find shelter each night. See Mayor's Citizens' Task Force, supra, at 5. In the County as a whole, there are almost 50,000 more homeless people than available beds. See L.A. Homeless Servs. Auth., supra, at 2-14. In 1999, the fair market rent for an SRO room in Los Angeles was $379 per month. L.A. Housing Crisis Task Force, In Short Supply 6 (2000). Yet the monthly welfare stipend for single adults in Los Angeles County is only $221. See L.A. Homeless Servs. Auth., supra, at 2-10. Wait-lists for public housing and for housing assistance vouchers in Los Angeles are three-to ten-years long. See The U.S. Conference of Mayors, A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America's Cities 101, 105 (2002) [hereinafter Homelessness Report];¹ L.A. Housing Crisis Task Force, supra, at 7.

The result, in City officials' own words, is that "`[t]he gap between the homeless population needing a shelter bed and the inventory of shelter beds is severely large.'" Homelessness Report, supra, at 80. As Los Angeles's homeless population has grown, see id. at 109 (estimating annualized growth of ten percent in Los Angeles's homeless population in the years up to and including 2003), the availability of low-income housing in Skid Row has shrunk, according to the declaration of Alice Callaghan, director of a Skid Row community center and board member of the Skid Row Housing Trust. According to Callaghan's declaration, at night in Skid Row, SRO hotels, shelters, and other temporary or transitional housing are the only alternatives to sleeping on the street; during the day, two small parks are open to the public. Thus, for many in Skid Row without the resources or luck to obtain shelter, sidewalks are the only place to be.

As will be discussed below, Appellants' declarations demonstrate that they are not on the streets of Skid Row by informed choice. In addition, the Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty reports that homelessness results from mental illness, substance abuse, domestic violence, low-paying jobs, and, most significantly, the chronic lack of affordable housing. Inst. for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty, "Who Is Homeless in Los Angeles?" 3 (2000). It also reports that between 33% and 50% of the homeless in Los Angeles are mentally ill, and 76% percent of homeless adults in 1990 had been employed for some or all of the two years prior to becoming homeless. Id. at 2; see also Grace R. Dyrness et al., Crisis on the...