Knock LA

As we approach the November 3rd Los Angeles mayoral election, contenders Karen Bass and Nithya Raman are pushing for their names to be trusted and tied to a clear vision for LA’s future. The key issue defining their campaigns is how both candidates plan to address the city’s historic housing crisis. Right now, more than 43,000 people are unhoused in Los Angeles despite about $1 billion in annual city spending in recent years. 

A range of candidate proposals were released in the lead-up to the June primary, with some calling for more temporary shelters and others seeking to shift funding toward addressing the issues of drug use. Most decisively, well-funded lobbying groups use money, relationships, and media access to shape what politicians present as “realistic.” Lobbying groups bankroll research, craft talking points, and reward candidates who adopt their framing, narrowing the debate before voters can weigh in. A review of this framing helps to break down the most common talking points that recurrently show up in housing and homelessness discourse.

Homelessness as a public health issue

In Los Angeles, a deeply rooted stigma toward unhoused people and much of the media coverage of homelessness relies on negative stereotypes and hostility. Headlines frequently link homelessness to crime, drug use, and mental illness. Policies shaped by these narratives often address the issue through policing and displacement. Clearing out unhoused people out of neighborhoods only scratches the surface rather than addressing the core issues that leave people unhoused.

Most recently, SB 569 was introduced in the California Senate, which would direct additional state resources to Caltrans in order to clear encampment sites throughout California.

The language used to justify these removals often centers around sanitation, describing these encampment sweeps as “clean-ups” intended to remove “eye-sores” and reduce overcrowding on city streets. Just the term “clean-ups” implies that unhoused people living in these conditions are themselves hazards. 

What is being removed, however, is not simply waste but rather the material basis of an individual’s livelihood. Recent Knock LA reporting documented the harrowing experiences of people affected by these displacements, revealing how individuals are torn away from their belongings and social networks. As a result, sweep survivors are often pushed into more unstable and dangerous conditions. Those displaced during encampment removals have reported losing medical documents, proof of benefits paperwork, and other essential belongings during rapid sweeps, leaving them stranded.

Acknowledging the racial implications embedded in “clean-up” rhetoric is particularly crucial. In Los Angeles and across California, Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color are disproportionately driven into housing instability by discriminatory eviction practices, persistent wage and wealth gaps, over-policing, and the enduring effects of redlining and disinvestment. Framing encampment sweeps as “sanitation” recasts racialized inequality as a nuisance to be removed. This framing entrenches disparities while displacing poor and disproportionately nonwhite residents from public space instead of investing in housing and care.

Despite these concerns, SB 569 is heavily supported by the California Police Chiefs Association. Their support reflects the significant role that pro-cop institutions play in expanding the legal authority and operational mandate for encampment displacements. When police endorse a “public health” framing, it can function as a moral cover for coercion, which can turn a crisis of housing and care into a problem of “compliance” that can be solved through citations, arrests, and displacement. In practice, these anti-camping ordinances push people into a cycle of criminalization and disenfranchisement, the dynamics of which fall disproportionately on Black and brown communities already subject to heightened policing.

Treatment first over housing first policies

This leads to another prominent framing in California’s homelessness debate: “treatment not tents.” This slogan is associated with Gov Newsom’s Proposition 1, a $6.4 billion bond measure intended to fund mental health and substance use treatment facilities while expanding supportive housing and integrated services  for people with serious behavioral health needs. 

In principle, these investments could address the overlapping challenges faced by unhoused people and those that are at risk of housing instability. However, the stories shared by folks put into these temporary housing interim service sites paint a different picture. For one, the state expected ten projects to be completed by 2025, yet none had been completed by that deadline. Nine were delayed and one cancelled. 

These implementation failures further harm to the populations they’re meant to serve. According to an audit done by LA City Controller Kenneth Meijia, less than 20 percent of people in interim housing secured permanent housing, while more than 50 percent of people who exited interim housing returned to homelessness or left for unknown destinations. 

Even when mental or behavioral health services are available, the demand for shelter beds exceeds capacity. Conditions at these shelters raise alarming concerns, due to deplorable conditions. A 2025 investigative report from CalMatters also shows that increasing the number of shelter beds didn’t necessarily translate into more permanent housing for unhoused folks. Instead, they found that shelters often kick out far more people than they place in stable housing. This is due to many shelter systems operating less like supportive networks and more like compliance regimes, with strict curfews, intrusive surveillance, and rule enforcement backed by security and prison-style discipline. 

Claims by shelter residents describe rigid rules that push people back outside: a missed bus after a late shift can mean missing curfew, relapse met with expulsion instead of support, and mental health crises handled by undertrained staff with hostility rather than care. When survival is treated as misconduct, shelters can cycle people back onto the street and away from the stability needed to recover.

This constant displacement can create the impression that services aren’t working. In reality, the system that privileges compliance and control over dignity is failing. This is why framing matters when discussing “treatment not tents.” The phrase suggests that the primary issue is individual pathology and an inability to comply with existing systems, rather than prompting a serious examination of how those systems are failing the people they are intended to serve.

Protecting landlords over affordable housing

Homelessness in LA is also inherently tied to housing affordability. Most unhoused residents lived in the county before losing housing. Homeownership has fallen to 45 percent — a 50-year low — and three in four households are rent-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities.

As corporate landlords and speculative investors tighten their grip on the housing market, more households are forced to spend unsustainable portions of their income simply to remain housed, leaving little cushion for emergencies, job loss, or medical bills. The result is a surge in displacement, overcrowding, and evictions, where a single missed paycheck can push someone from stability into crisis.

Tenant organizers have pushed for policies to address rising rents, such as the LA City Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) which limits annual rent increases but applies only to certain multi-family rental units built before October 1978. AB 1157, also known as the Affordable Rent Act, was introduced in the State Assembly and would have strengthened rent control by limiting annual rent increases and expanding protections to single-family homes. However, the bill failed to secure enough votes to pass the Assembly, leaving many renters vulnerable without those additional protections.

The bill faced strong opposition from powerful realtor groups and property owners, who argued that stricter rent regulations would shrink the housing supply and push small property owners out of the market. This opposition is not an isolated incident. Organizations including The California Housing Association, the California Association of Realtors, and the California Apartment Association are notorious antagonists in the affordability fight and spend millions of dollars to influence policy makers through campaign contributions to state and local elected officials. 

These groups, tracked by the ACLU, have repeatedly opposed tenant protections throughout the state with the main focus of protecting “free market” control over housing. They treat land and housing as commodities to be bought and sold and optimized for profit. A home becomes a revenue stream that must keep rising in value, even if it drives rents up, displaces residents, and deepens insecurity. The moral frame shifts from meeting needs to protecting returns, so stable-housing policies are cast as “interference,” while extraction and speculation are normalized as responsible market behavior.

That is how this free-market “protection” narrative frames these policy decisions. It treats rising rents like a neutral fact of life then recasts the people who cannot keep up as the problem. It becomes an argument against the very tools that could curb rent hikes and stabilize lives, including stronger rent caps, tighter limits on exemptions, eviction protections, and large-scale public investment in affordable and social housing.

It also concentrates housing access among a limited few. In LA City, 58 percent of white households own homes, while only 34 percent of Black households and 39 percent of Latino households own homes. These gaps are not accidental. They are the legacy of decades of redlining and discriminatory lending. When policymakers treat housing like an investment vehicle and leave rents to rise unchecked, those historic disparities deepen: white and wealthier households are more likely to benefit from appreciation, while Black and Latino renters are more likely to face rent burden, eviction risk, and forced displacement. 

Where do we go from here? 

So when the mainstream narrative asks us to view our unhoused neighbors as public-safety threats to be criminalized and removed while treating affordable rent as an unfair burden on landlords, what are we left with? We are left with a city where record-breaking numbers of families cannot afford a decent place to call home, where intergenerational poverty deepens as the wealth gap widens, and where housing is increasingly hoarded by greedy investors. We are left with a politics of scarcity. Real safety and stability requires investment in what keeps people alive and housed. 

Instead of nonfunctional temporary shelters, we need holistic, voluntary services that address mental health without punishment and pair permanent housing with voluntary, community-based psychiatric care, substance use treatment, and ongoing social support so people can heal and remain healthy over time. It also means ending encampment sweeps and bringing care directly to people through humanitarian aid, on-site counseling, street medicine, and harm-reduction, trauma-informed support that treats survival with dignity rather than suspicion.

Everyone deserves a stable place to live, and no one should be pushed out so someone else can profit. The housing crisis is not inevitable; it is manufactured through corporate speculation and interest-group messaging that narrows what feels “reasonable” and turns punishment into policy. It also reflects the racial realities of displacement and homelessness, in which Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color bear the heaviest costs of an economic and political system built on exclusion. A different future is possible, but only if we act to expand tenant protections, build permanently affordable housing, raise wages, and invest in care over control.