How a Century of Decisions Wrought L.A.’s Homeless Crisis

As a teenager in the late 1970s, Steve Richardson was sweeping and stocking shelves at a toy store on the edge of L.A.’s Skid Row when he noticed the first signs of a monumental change in the city. Day after day, workers, hired from the surrounding streets to unload trucks full of toys, would take the empty boxes and transform them into makeshift shelters where they would spend the night.

“They were called cardboard condos,” said Richardson, a Skid Row leader now known as General Dogon. “They went on block after block.”

At the same time, Los Angeles Times columnist Art Seidenbaum wrote about the shock he experienced when, for the first time, he saw a man scavenging for food out of a garbage can on a downtown sidewalk. L.A., he concluded, had a problem with “winos — or, more politely, homeless men.”

Homeless people sleep in boxes along storefronts in Los Angeles in 1987.

(Penni Gladstone / Los Angeles Times)

Until then, the term “homeless” most often referred to people who had lost their homes in natural disasters or wars. But things were beginning to change in the 1970s, when a sequence of seemingly unrelated events conspired to drive people into the streets.

Today, homelessness feels as inevitable a part of the urban landscape as traffic jams and strip malls. Los Angeles has more people living on the streets than any other city in the United States, which almost certainly makes it the homelessness capital of the developed world.

There are 15 counties in California whose total populations are smaller than the homeless population of L.A. County, which exceeded 75,000 people in 2023. If you filled Dodger Stadium with all the county’s homeless people, you’d have enough left over to fill Crypto.com Arena downtown.

Going back to the 1800s, the city kept people off the streets by locking them up in jail or sending them to work at the county poor farm. This left officials flat-footed when the numbers began to surge.

The first seeds of the current crisis were sowed in the early 1950s, at the height of the nation’s anti-communist panic, when Los Angeles halted the construction of public housing because it was “socialistic.”

Then, roughly 15,000 units of single-room occupancy hotels on Skid Row were demolished as part of a national “urban renewal” movement, severely restricting shelter options for the poorest of the poor. The loss coincided with the razing of more than 7,000 low-income units in Bunker Hill’s aging Victorian homes.

Law Enforcement: From Sweeping Up the ‘Winos’ and ‘Vagrants’ to Arrests at Homeless Tent Camps

From the roof of the King Edward Hotel on 5th and Los Angeles streets, all of Skid Row spreads below. The rough edges are smoothed out from this height and you can envision its origins around the turn of the century, with transient laborers pouring into Los Angeles in search of seasonal agricultural labor. L.A. was a farm town, with vineyards in what is now downtown, and walnut, orange and lemon groves radiating outward, along with fields of tomatoes, celery, cauliflower, lettuce and lima beans. The new arrivals were often broke or close to it, and instantly found themselves in a crowded warren of streets that catered to their basest needs.

Men and one woman wait to register with the Los Angeles County Bureau of Employment Stabilization, which was hiring day laborers for construction projects around the county in 1933.

(Los Angeles Times)

“They’d all come through where Union Station is now and they’d see the prostitutes leaning out of cribs, and that was their welcome to Los Angeles,” said Kim Cooper, a local historian, taking in the view. “And then they’d pull in and, you know, you’d either go to [a brothel] or you’d go to one of the hotels.”

L.A. fretted obsessively about “vagrants,” “vags,” “derelicts,” “drunkards,” “hobos,” “tramps” and “bums.” The city and county jails were constantly being rebuilt or enlarged to hold their expanding numbers.

Framing for the new county jail takes shape.

(Los Angeles Times)

On Jan. 18, 1888, the Los Angeles Evening Express reported that “39 tramps, known to the constables as ‘hobos,’” had been arrested and found guilty of vagrancy. Two paid fines, but the remainder “will be fed by the county until the expirations of their sentences.”

The city jail was overflowing, the Express noted, with as many as eight men crammed into cells built for four. The previous day, constables had arrested 53 “tramps.”

“The city is infested with this class to such a degree that unless they are arrested there is no telling what depredations will be committed by them,” the newspaper declared.

On the same page, a short article noted that “a limited number of choice lots” in the San Gabriel Valley were being given away to anyone who agreed to build a house on them.

These were the dynamics of early Los Angeles: abundant land for cheap housing, along with abundant social problems that were left to the police and jails to sort out. Eventually, the city would run out of vacant land, but not poverty and despair.

Did Closing Psychiatric Hospitals Lead to the Crisis? The Role of Mental Health and Substance Abuse

In the fall of 1956, state Sen. Alan Short (D-Stockton) opened legislative hearings into allegations of a “reign of terror” at Modesto State Hospital, one of 14 hospitals in California treating — and mistreating — the mentally ill and developmentally disabled.

Senators learned of “the woodshed,” a room near the hospital laundry where women were taken to be whipped. They heard about “gauze knuckles” worn by employees, presumably to protect their hands during beatings. They were told about a patient who died after being forced to eat Epsom salts and wash them down with toilet water, and others who were punished with toilet plungers (it’s unclear how).

State Atty. Gen. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, the future governor, announced that he was investigating eight — later nine — suspicious deaths at the hospital.

Those hearings set in motion the events that would eventually close California’s big mental hospitals.

California’s mental hospital system is nearly as old as the state. The first hospital was opened in Stockton in 1852, within two years of statehood and two years before the state’s first permanent prison, San Quentin. Its initial caseload was 124 patients, and it was quickly overcrowded. Thirteen more hospitals would eventually be built, some of them massive. Camarillo State Hospital was built to house 7,000 patients, with a staff of 700, making it the largest mental hospital in the world when it opened in 1936.

In their heyday, the hospitals were seen as models of progressive care. But some of the treatments considered cutting edge at the time, including forced sterilizations and lobotomies, came to be viewed as profoundly inhumane.

Los Angeles Has Lost the Ability to Provide Abundant, Affordable Housing

Few cities in human history have created housing at the scale and speed of Los Angeles. When it was incorporated as a city in 1850, L.A. had a population of 1,650. The village grew slowly until the transcontinental railroad arrived in 1876.

The population quintupled between 1880 and 1890, doubled to 100,000 by 1900 and quintupled again by 1920, when it topped half a million, making it the 10th-largest city in the country. And that doesn’t count the dozens of satellite cities that popped up around it — Santa Monica, Pasadena, Beverly Hills, Inglewood, Compton, Long Beach and ultimately 81 more in Los Angeles County alone.

“POOR MISS LOS ANGELES HAS OUTGROWN ALL HER CLOTHES,” The Times bemoaned in a headline in 1921. Housing was being built at a scorching pace, with more than 25,000 building permits issued in the first nine months of that year. The city’s infrastructure was straining to keep up.

It must have been disorienting, living in a city that doubled in size every 10 years. An orange grove one month became a housing tract the next. Vast fortunes were made in real estate. And unlike denser Eastern cities, the most common form of housing was the single-family house. Suburbs sprouted like poppies after a spring rain, all connected by 1,100 miles of trolley car tracks.

Housing was affordable for pretty much anyone with a full-time job. In the San Fernando Valley, somewhere around modern-day Studio City, half-acre lots were going for $575 in 1923 — roughly the equivalent of $10,000 today. In East L.A