When Los Angeles settled a high-profile lawsuit brought by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights in 2022, it locked itself into a pair of numerical promises: create 12,915 housing or shelter placements by 2027 and resolve 9,800 homeless encampments by 2026. The structure was intended to hold the city accountable, but in practice it created a dangerous quota system that has warped the city’s entire approach to homelessness. With encampment resolution reduced to a tally, the city has come to prioritize the easiest and most visible method of making those numbers go down: sweeps. Rather than focus on housing placements or service engagement, the pressure to hit a target has driven officials to lean on tactics that not only fail to solve homelessness but often make it worse.
Instead of approaching the housing and encampment goals as two sides of the same ledger, city leaders have pursued them as if they exist in separate universes. In fact, the way Los Angeles has been executing its encampment reduction efforts has actively undermined its ability to deliver on the housing side of the deal. Encampment resolution, as defined by the settlement, was never supposed to mean merely removing people from sight. It was supposed to mean helping them exit homelessness through access to shelter or housing. Yet city officials have chosen to meet their encampment targets primarily through CARE+ cleanups, operations in which sanitation workers, often accompanied by LAPD officers, forcibly clear tents, confiscate belongings, and leave unhoused residents with nowhere to go. Offers of shelter are often absent, inadequate, or inaccessible. Still, the city has counted these sweeps toward its 9,800 target.
That strategy has now drawn a sharp rebuke from the courts. In March 2025, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ruled that the city may not count these CARE+ sweeps as encampment reductions under the settlement. He made clear that cleanups are not permanent in nature and do not qualify unless an offer of shelter or housing is made. “Cleaning an area, only to have unhoused individuals move back in without offers of shelter or housing, is not a ‘Resolution,’” Carter wrote. But the city ignored the ruling. In June, the judge found that Los Angeles had willfully disobeyed his order and continued to falsely report progress. His ruling underscored what advocates have said all along: the sweep-heavy approach is not only unlawful, but fundamentally self-defeating.
These sweeps do not move people closer to housing, but push them further away. Research shows that encampment cleanups often destroy essential items like IDs, phones, documents, medications, and housing vouchers. These are not just personal possessions. They are the tools required to access services and permanent housing. Without them, people fall off waiting lists, lose contact with caseworkers, or fail to qualify for placements. Outreach workers who have spent months building trust can no longer find the people they were helping. People become harder to locate and less willing to engage, especially after repeated displacements. A 2020 National Homelessness Law Center report found that encampment sweeps frequently lead to loss of identification and legal documents that are difficult or impossible to replace without an address, effectively resetting people’s progress toward housing.
The psychological toll is just as severe. The constant threat of removal creates anxiety, exhaustion, and hopelessness. For those already struggling with mental illness or trauma, sweeps can make it nearly impossible to stabilize. Over time, this erodes the very trust that housing outreach efforts rely on. A 2019 study published in Health and Social Care in the Community found that forced displacements heighten trauma and make individuals less likely to access services. People subjected to frequent sweeps are more likely to disengage from caseworkers, more likely to lose prescribed medications, and more likely to develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
At the same time, the city is starving the types of interventions that actually work. A recent investigation by LA Public Press revealed that services like mobile toilets, handwashing stations, and trash collection have been defunded, while funding for sweeps has ballooned. Despite repeated demands from service providers and unhoused residents for access to hygiene infrastructure and basic public health protections, the city has continued to treat sanitation as a law enforcement issue. Just 14 public toilets serve the entire city of Los Angeles. Outreach workers report that when CARE+ operations sweep through encampments, these sanitation services are pulled out in their wake, ensuring that nothing of value remains except the certainty of return.
This approach flies in the face of decades of research. Housing First, a model that prioritizes permanent housing without requiring sobriety or service participation as a precondition, has been shown to dramatically reduce chronic homelessness. A landmark federal evaluation of the model in 2016 found that Housing First participants spent 73 percent less time homeless over a 24-month period than those in treatment-first programs. Retention rates in supportive housing under the Housing First model consistently range from 85 to 90 percent. The success of this model is not theoretical. Cities that have embraced it have seen lasting results. In Houston, where local government and nonprofit providers coordinate to house people first and connect them to voluntary services later, homelessness dropped by more than 60 percent over a decade. In Salt Lake City, a Housing First pilot reduced chronic homelessness by over 90 percent at its peak.
Even within Los Angeles County, the Housing for Health initiative has demonstrated how much more effective supportive housing is than enforcement. Administered by the Department of Health Services, the program reduced emergency room visits by 76 percent and inpatient days by 79 percent for its participants. It also reduced county costs by over 40 percent per person, per year. Yet city leaders continue to prioritize short-term removals over long-term housing. They invest in police deployments, legal defenses, fences, and encampment maps while cutting funds for sanitation, shelter, and care.
What is happening in Los Angeles is not simply a misguided response. It is the result of a court-imposed framework that, instead of encouraging comprehensive solutions, incentivized visible, fast, and destructive actions. The city is chasing numbers with tactics that sabotage its own housing goals. It is burning through money, trust, and political capital to produce metrics that mean nothing. Encampments return, people suffer, and the crisis grows.