“No Defense of the Indefensible”: L.A. Judge Makes Landmark Homelessness Ruling

> By this logic, you could tie just about any danger back to the state with a similar degree of proximity.

Um, if you actually read the detailed recitation of relevant fact findings in the decision, I don’t think you can trace most dangers back to the state with similar proximity.

> Take someone hit by a drunk driver, for example. The government repealed Prohibition, regulates and licenses alcohol production and sale, and is fully aware of the risks of drivers abusing alcohol (DUI laws, PSAs, etc). That sure sounds like an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions of the danger.

That’s not nearly the specificity of the harms to particular persons that is established with the skid row containment policy.

> Obviously the US can afford housing the homeless. I just don’t understand how a judge can just decide to spend a billion dollars.

The judge didn’t decide to spend a billion dollars. The judge ordered the city to put $1 billion dollars the mayor had pledged to the cause of homelessness in escrow. The actions ordered by the court may cost more or less than $1 billion.

The courts have broad authority to order government or other parties to take action to remediate (or cease exacerbating) unlawful harms they have caused; and $1 billion isn’t anywhere near the maximum that it has cost the subject of such an order to comply.

In the case of school integration, the prior ruling under Brown was not being followed. That failure to follow that ruling then lead to a second judgement giving judges specific powers to force the correct implementation of Brown if the school districts had not done it themselves.

It's very odd to jump directly to writing detailed policy on a first judgment. Usually it's only that a specific policy is not allowed or general issue must be corrected. Usually it takes a failure of valid corrective policy to be implement for the courts to force a specific policy which they have devised.

> Read through and it seems to be a crazy plan for me.

There’s no as actual plan, just “you will put the money you promised to spend on this in escrow so as to not put the plaintiff’s in a worse situation than you have already announced the intent to, and then you will make certain explanations and achieve certain goals by set times”. A plan would specify how those results will be met.

> It is also laughable to think a judge has a grand plan to solve a societal issue.

This is not a plan nor is it aiming to solve a societal issue.

> So a judge appointed himself to be the supreme planner of the city?

No, the appointment was by the President of the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate, and the position is judge of the adherence of parties brought before his court with federal law, with the broad power to order behavior changes where there are breaches in that adherence with harms to other parties.

> The idea that a judge thinks himself can solve the homeless problem with a big plan is by itself pathetic.

The particular identified Constitutional breaches involved in the city of LA creating Skid Row and then actively choosing a containment polcy to trap people there and prolong the harms deliverately inflicted is not equivalent to the broader “homeless problem”, and the order here isn’t a solution to either the former or the latter but a direction to cease and mitigate the active and ongoing harm LA is doing to the subjects of the former. A solution (or at least, compensatory remedy) for the former, narrower, problem would likely be a component of the final judgement if (as seems likely) LA loses the case, this is merely a preliminary injunction to avoid irreparable harm during the pendency of thr trial, not a remedy for past harm or permanent solution.

Yes, it would be crazy if the judge was doing what you describe, but the judge is doing something much narrower.

> While I agree that Skid Row is a disaster. If I were a Californian, I don't think I'd be comfortable with this degree of legislating from the bench.

As a Californian, I’m not comfortable with the degree of active racial and other unlawful discrimination and actively seeking to preserve the harms of that discrimination carried out by the City of Los Angeles with no impediment from the State of California.

As an American, I’m not at all unhappy with the federal courts stepping in this way when a state, or a subdivision thereof, violates the rights secured to the people under the Constitution.