Every week, Los Angeles Police Department and LA Sanitation sweep large areas of Skid Row, displacing homeless people, and often confiscating their belongings, making it harder for people to survive homelessness.
Homeless encampment sweeps are a means to forcibly remove people experiencing homelessness from public spaces under the guise of street cleaning. Homeless sweeps fracture communities and damage physical and mental health. They regularly result in the loss of life-preserving shelter and medication, trauma for those being removed, and tickets, citations, and/or convictions that act as additional barriers to housing stability. These sweeps are conducted by governments with no plan to house or adequately shelter displaced residents and sweeps siphon public funds away from effective, long-term solutions to homelessness.
Taxpayers pay over $70 million each year for the Los Angeles Police Department and LA Sanitation to displace homeless people under the guise of street cleaning. We all want clean streets, yet homeless sweeps only make homelessness worse! The only way to keep streets clean is to solve homelessness; however, LA’s politicians continue to invest more in pushing homeless people out of sight than helping them. Homeless sweeps do nothing to help people, and they make homelessness worse.
If you live in Los Angeles, here is a link for the City Council contact information broken down by district. Please reach out to your legislators to demand they stop the sweeps.
Nationally, please support Housing Not Handcuffs
We all must advocate for more housing and support services and stop homeless sweeps at the local level. At the same time, we must continue to pressure state and federal legislators. Your voice can help end homelessness. If we do not fix the affordable housing crisis, homelessness will worsen.
Click here to tweet, email, call, or Facebook your federal and state legislators to tell them ending homelessness and creating more affordable housing is a priority to you.
More stories on LA’s Homeless Sweeps:
WATCH the Horrible Reality of LA’s Homeless Sweeps
Woman Loses Everything in Los Angeles Homeless Sweep
Playlist of our anti-sweep videos: https://invisiblepeople.tv/stopsweeps
