Last week, the research and advocacy nonprofit Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a comprehensive report that examines the structural origins, punitive state responses and associated social injustices that have catalyzed the catastrophic homelessness crisis in Los Angeles, California.

While the report focuses on Los Angeles County, where the crisis is particularly stark, the same patterns are evident across the U.S., particularly on the West Coast. This is not due to some sort of liberal permissiveness or lax enforcement, as right-wing narratives would have it. Instead, homelessness flourishes in direct correlation with the severity of the housing crisis in these regions. From Los Angeles to Seattle — and, to various extents, throughout the nation — unaffordable housing and inadequate shelters leave many with no choice but the streets. There, hundreds of thousands are criminalized, brutalized, scapegoated and further impoverished, locking them into a grim cycle. An especially pointed recent example came in Chicago, where encampments were cleared and unhoused people displaced for the sake of burnishing the city’s image ahead of the Democratic National Convention.

Titled, “‘You Have to Move!’ The Cruel and Ineffective Criminalization of Unhoused People in Los Angeles,” the HRW report condemns what its authors charge is a woefully misguided and inhumane history of municipal enforcement. They argue that city agencies have counterproductively punished suffering, impoverished individuals for a crisis of rent and housing supply — while putting forth interim solutions that have been inadequate at best.

Advocates for the unhoused have welcomed the HRW report, as it supplies yet more evidence validating what they have long asserted: namely, that present policies enact undue cruelties, and that it is the dearth of affordable housing — not laziness, personal pathology or moral failing — that is the real progenitor of homelessness.

The HRW report adds to a growing body of research attesting to the housing-related origins of homelessness, and the harshness and ineffectiveness of sweeps, as well as the promise of housing-first approaches, which prioritize connecting unhoused people with permanent housing, which has been shown to be highly effective, and represents a means of addressing the deeper crisis, rather than punishing its victims. With the housing crisis now finding a prominent place in presidential platforms and at the Democratic National Convention, there are signs that, even if solutions still seem years beyond reach, the necessity of affordable housing has at least entered mainstream discussions.

Assembled over the course of three years of intensive research, the 337-page report from Human Rights Watch compiles data from municipal agencies and publicly available sources, as well as 148 interviews. Notably, 101 of those subjects were people who have experienced homelessness. The report’s creation also involved real-time oversight of enforcement actions, drawing on testimony from “Human Rights Watch researchers [who] witness[ed] and document[ed] actions by city officials and private actors towards unhoused people in Los Angeles” in the course of sweep operations.

While many of the issues that the report addresses have been well-studied, its comprehensive scope offers valuable perspective on the true extent of the crisis. It analyzes and presents data on all major facets of the issue, from the inflation of housing prices to the deep racial inflection of the crisis (people of color are disproportionately unhoused), to the senselessness of sweeps and carceral and punitive solutions. The analysis also gives a sense of the remarkable scale of homelessness in Los Angeles County: The number of unhoused people has grown by as much as 10 percent in one year, between 2022 and 2023, reaching 75,000. And staggeringly, the authors found that across the county, on average, more than “six unhoused people die every day.”

The number of those who are precariously housed, often only one slip away from losing their residence, is even more far-reaching. Per the report, “Almost 60 percent of renters and 38 percent of homeowners (over 720,000 households) in Los Angeles are ‘cost-burdened,’ meaning they pay over 30 percent of their income for housing, and over half of those are severely cost burdened, paying over 50 percent[.]” The real origin of homelessness is clearly discernible in these realities.

Truthout reached the report’s primary author, John Raphling, to learn more about his research and conclusions, which were reached with the help of data analyst Brian Root and others. “The most significant findings of my research,” Raphling commented by email, “were how pervasive the practice of criminalization has been in Los Angeles over the decades, how completely ineffective and even counterproductive it is as a policy response to mass houselessness, and how incredibly cruel, demeaning and traumatizing it is to the most vulnerable among us.”

The report documents and criticizes numerous arms of city enforcement. First and foremost, of course, is the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Statistics indicated that, in the 2016-2022 period, “38 percent of all LAPD arrests and citations combined were of unhoused people, including nearly 100 percent of all citations and over 42 percent of all misdemeanor arrests.” In other words, LAPD enforcement of so-called quality of life violations represents a sprawling bureaucratic architecture dedicated almost exclusively to criminalizing and punishing the unhoused.

Those are startling numbers — but, according to LAPD data, unhoused people are indeed given 99 percent of all citations and arrests for infractions like sitting or lying on the sidewalk, drinking in public, leaving behind personal property, violating park regulations, cannabis regulation, open containers, illegal possession of a shopping cart and minor alcohol and tobacco charges. The LAPD has also disproportionately........

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