A federal judge Tuesday was considering whether to hold Los Angeles in contempt for what the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights contends is the city’s apparent delay in meeting its obligations under a settlement agreement in a lawsuit over the region’s homelessness crisis.
U.S. District Judge David Carter has been holding evidentiary hearings since last month in the lawsuit filed in March 2020 by the L.A. Alliance, which alleges the city and Los Angeles County have not done enough to address homelessness.
The judge signed off on a settlement in September 2023 in which the county agreed to supply an additional 3,000 beds for mental and substance abuse treatment by the end of next year and subsidies for 450 new board-and-care beds. The L.A. Alliance settled with the city in 2022, but later filed papers alleging the city was not meeting its obligations.
The agreement requires the city to produce 12,915 shelter beds by June 2027.
An independent assessment made public in March was unable to verify the number of homeless shelter beds the city claims to have created so far.
Carter has written that the city has shown “a consistent lack of cooperation and responsiveness — an unwillingness to provide documentation unless compelled by court order or media scrutiny.”
The judge so far has stopped short of finding that the city breached the settlement agreement on the whole, but is apparently considering a contempt of court ruling.
According to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, chair of the city’s Housing and Homeless Committee, litigation in the case “is now dragging on in ways that feel very removed from the goal of providing shelter and housing to people living on LA’s streets,” she wrote in a letter posted Monday on her website.
Raman says Carter’s “repeated evidentiary hearings and resource-intensive data requests go far beyond our reporting obligations in the original settlement agreement. They are taxing an already strained system, and adding confusion and significant cost. In a city with limited funding and capacity, the court’s demands are now actually taking away from the work of housing as many people as possible.”
The city must comply with the terms of the L.A. Alliance settlement agreement, Raman wrote, “but increasingly, I have felt that the transparent and fiscally responsible oversight that Angelenos deserve for our homelessness system will not be found in Judge Carter’s courtroom.”
Contempt proceedings are expected to continue Thursday.