As Homeless Line Up for Food, Los Angeles Weighs Restrictions

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

A security guard from the Business Improvement District keeping an eye on a food truck operated by the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition.

LOS ANGELES — They began showing up at dusk last week, wandering the streets, slumped in wheelchairs and sitting on sidewalks, paper plates perched on their knees. By 6:30 p.m., more than 100 homeless people had lined up at a barren corner in Hollywood, drawn by free meals handed out from the back of a truck every night by volunteers.

But these days, 27 years after the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition began feeding people in a county that has one of the worst homeless problems in the nation, the charity is under fire, a flashpoint in the national debate over the homeless and the programs that serve them.

Facing an uproar from homeowners, two members of the Los Angeles City Council have called for the city to follow the lead of dozens of other communities and ban the feeding of homeless people in public spaces.

"If you give out free food on the street with no other services to deal with the collateral damage, you get hundreds of people beginning to squat," said Alexander Polinsky, an actor who lives two blocks from the bread line. "They are living in my bushes and they are living in my next door neighbor's crawl spaces. We have a neighborhood which now seems like a mental ward."

Should Los Angeles enact such an ordinance, it would join a roster of more than 30 cities, including Philadelphia, Raleigh, N.C., Seattle and Orlando, Fla., that have adopted or debated some form of legislation intended to restrict the public feeding of the homeless, according to the National Coalition of the Homeless.

"Dozens of cities in recent years," said Jerry Jones, the coalition's executive director. "It's a common but misguided tactic to drive homeless people out of downtown areas."

"This is an attempt to make difficult problems disappear," he said, adding, "It's both callous and ineffective."

The notion that Los Angeles might join this roster is striking given the breadth of the problem here. Encampments of homeless can be found from downtown to West Hollywood, from the streets of Brentwood to the beaches of Venice. The situation that has stirred no small amount of frustration and embarrassment among civic leaders, now amplified by fears of the hungry and mostly homeless people, who have come to count on these meals.

"They are helping human beings," said Debra Morris, seated in a wheelchair as she ate the evening's offering of pasta with tomato sauce. "I can barely pay my own rent."

There are now about 53,800 homeless people in Los Angeles County, according to the 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development last week, a 27 percent increase over last year. Only New York had a higher homeless population.

The problem is particularly severe here because of the temperate climate that makes it easier to live outdoors, cuts in federal spending on the homeless, and a court-ordered effort by California to shrink its prison population, said Mike Arnold, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, an agency created by the city and county in 1993.

All told, about $82 million in government funds is spent each year on helping homeless here, Mr. Arnold said.

Tom LaBonge, one of the two City Council members who introduced the resolution (the other, also a Democrat, was Mitch O'Farrell), said food lines should be moved indoors, out of consideration to the homeless and neighborhoods. "There are well-intentioned people on both sides," Mr. LaBonge said.

But, he added: "This has overwhelmed what is a residential neighborhood. When dinner is served, everybody comes and it's kind of a free-for-all."

Ted Landreth, the founder of the food coalition, said his group had fought back community opposition before — it moved to this corner after being ordered out of Plummer Park in West Hollywood in 1990 because of similar complaints — and would do so again.

"The people who want to get rid of us see dollar signs, property values, ahead of pretty much everything else," he said.

"We have stood our ground," he added. "We are not breaking any law."

Communities that have sought to implement feeding restriction laws have faced strong resistance. In Philadelphia, advocates for the homeless won an injunction in federal court blocking a law there that would have banned food lines in public parks. Even before the court action, religious groups had moved in and began setting up indoor food lines.

In many ways the agonies of the national battle over dealing with homelessness are etched into this four-block-square section of Hollywood, where industrial buildings, including the Cemex cement factory, film production facilities and the stately former headquarters of Howard Hughes's enterprises, sit two blocks up North Sycamore Avenue away from a middle-class neighborhood of Spanish Mission homes. Construction in the area is bustling, reflecting the gentrification that is taking place across this city.

The coalition's truck, a Grumman Kurbmaster, arrives every night at 6:15, drawing as many as 200 people from across the region.

Matt Hamilton contributed reporting.

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