For more than a year, one of Councilmember Traci Park’s most sweeping proposals to criminalize homelessness sat untouched in committee. Introduced in May 2025, Council File 20-1376-S5 would push Los Angeles Municipal Code Section 41.18 toward the much broader limits of criminalization permitted by City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the 2024 Supreme Court decision allowing cities to punish people for sleeping outside even when no shelter is available.

Park’s motion would eliminate the requirement that the City Council approve individual enforcement zones around parks, libraries, infrastructure and certain homeless-service facilities. It would add post offices, fire stations and police stations as “sensitive uses,” create 500-foot exclusion zones around fire-hazard severity zones, environmentally sensitive areas and vaguely defined “critical infrastructure,” and ask the City Attorney to explore prohibiting people from camping in the same general location for more than three consecutive days or nights anywhere on public property. Together, these changes would transform 41.18 from a location-by-location enforcement system into something much closer to a standing citywide displacement regime.

The motion, seconded by Councilmembers John Lee and Imelda Padilla, was referred on May 16, 2025, to the Housing and Homelessness Committee, chaired by Councilmember Nithya Raman, and the Public Safety Committee. Several neighborhood councils submitted statements over the following six months, but the motion was never scheduled for a hearing. After November 2025, the file went quiet. Then City Hall reorganized itself. On August 11, 2026, the City Council approved Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s proposal to abolish the combined Housing and Homelessness Committee and replace it with two separate bodies: a three-member Housing Committee and a five-member Homelessness and Health Committee. Raman cast the only opposing vote.

Eight days later, after nearly a year without a new individual public comment, someone identified only as “Mar Vista Resident” submitted a statement supporting Park’s motion. “The goal of 41.18 is not to solve homelessness, it’s to keep the city livable for all residents,” the commenter wrote, arguing that the City needed “a carrot and a stick.” On August 28, the City Clerk rereferred Park’s motion from the now-defunct Housing and Homelessness Committee to the new Homelessness and Health Committee, while leaving the Public Safety referral intact. Two days later, a second anonymous “Mar Vista Resident” claimed that “Mar Vista Recreation Center is again becoming a magnet for homeless people to domicile” and urged the Council to “reinstate 41.18.” But of course, 41.18 has not been repealed—it is extensively enforced by Park on the Westside. And Mar Vista Recreation Center does not contain anything resembling the large encampment the comment suggests. The timing is nevertheless striking. After months of inactivity, two statements carrying the same generic label appeared just as the committee structure that has kept Park’s motion bottled up is being dismantled, supplying a fresh narrative of neighborhood urgency around a proposal that has been gathering dust for almost a year.

The new assignments give that proposal a more plausible path forward. The Homelessness and Health Committee consists of Ysabel Jurado as chair, Tim McOsker as vice chair, and Bob Blumenfield, Imelda Padilla and Nithya Raman. Public Safety consists of John Lee as chair, Curren Price as vice chair, and Traci Park, Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martínez. Park now sits on one of the two committees considering her motion. Lee, one of its seconders, chairs that committee, and Padilla, its other seconder, sits on the other. Most importantly, Raman no longer controls whether the motion receives its first hearing. Both committees also have centrist majorities with long records of supporting 41.18, and most of those members have introduced enforcement zones in their own districts. That does not guarantee support for Park’s far more consequential citywide expansion, but the votes to advance it may exist. Jurado remains a critical obstacle because, as chair of Homelessness and Health, she retains significant control over whether the motion reaches the agenda.

Park’s motion provides a clear illustration of what the new committee structure means. Under the former system, a proposal to criminalize the spaces where unhoused people may exist was assigned to the same committee responsible for affordable housing, rent control, tenant protections, homelessness prevention, shelters and permanent supportive housing. That did not guarantee a humane outcome, but it at least placed enforcement within the full policy continuum including how people lose their homes, what happens while they are unhoused and how they obtain housing again. Now Park’s motion will pass through committees organized around “Homelessness and Health” and “Public Safety” without ever reaching the committee responsible for housing.

This is more than an administrative distinction. Committee structure determines the framework through which policymakers are encouraged to understand a problem. The resolution establishing the new system places homelessness in the same formal jurisdictional category as “mental health, alcoholism, drug abuse, and communicable diseases,” while assigning rent control, tenant rights, affordable-housing financing and Measure ULA to a separate committee. Health care is unquestionably important for unhoused people, who experience extraordinary rates of illness, disability, trauma and premature death. But homelessness is not a disease, and poverty is not a diagnosis. People do not lose their homes because homelessness is a health condition located inside their bodies. They become homeless when they cannot obtain or retain housing.

Even the official division of responsibilities exposes how artificial the split is. Homelessness and Health retains authority over homelessness prevention, housing navigation, time-limited subsidies, rehousing and permanent supportive housing, while Housing controls rent regulation, tenant rights, affordable-housing financing, Measure ULA and oversight of the Housing Department and Housing Authority. But homelessness prevention cannot be separated from tenant protections and rent relief. Rehousing cannot be separated from affordable-housing production. Shelters cannot function without permanent places for people to go, and outreach cannot end homelessness when workers have no housing to offer. Creating separate chairs, agendas and political majorities for these interdependent functions invites delay, fragmentation and blame-shifting. It also allows enforcement proposals to be considered primarily as matters of health and public safety, without weighing them against prevention efforts or the availability of permanent housing.

Park’s motion makes the consequences of that separation concrete. It could advance entirely through committees focused on health and public safety, without review by the committee responsible for affordable housing and tenant protections, expanding the City’s power to criminalize poverty without creating a single home or requiring that shelter be available.