Court Strikes Down Los Angeles Law Banning Living in Vehicles

Here’s what a law passed by the
City of Los Angeles in 1983 says:

No person shall use a vehicle parked or standing upon any City
street, or upon any parking lot owned by the City of Los Angeles
and under the control of the City of Los Angeles or under control
of the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors, as
living quarters either overnight, day-by-day, or otherwise.

While the wording of the law may seem simple (regardless of how
one might feel about it), a trio of circuit judges from the United
States Circuit Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled Thursday
that the description of what behavior violates the law is so
unclear that it was being used by police to (surprise!) harass
homeless people who believed they were actually complying with the
law.

The ruling (readable
here) centers on the behavior of police in Venice Beach, a
place with quite a few homeless people. Following complaints in
2010 about all the homeless folks around, police started cracking
down, using this 1983 law as the tool. But as Judge Harry Pregerson
noted in the ruling, the police were using just the existence of
personal property or food in a vehicle as evidence that the law was
being violated and even threatening homeless people who were
sleeping in their vehicles on private property, like church parking
lots, with the owner’s permission. One homeless plaintiff in the
lawsuit had to resort to sleeping on a public sidewalk (which is
legal) rather than in his car in order to comply with the law. He
nevertheless was arrested and his vehicle impounded when police
found him sitting in his car to avoid the rain. One woman was
pulled over and cited for violating the law while actually
driving her vehicle through Venice.

The judges ruled that the statute is a due process disaster
because it is unconstitutionally vague and fails to provide
adequate notice of the conduct it criminalizes. The ruling
notes:

Plaintiffs are left guessing as to what behavior would subject
them to citation and arrest by an officer. Is it impermissible to
eat food in a vehicle? Is it illegal to keep a sleeping bag? Canned
food? Books? What about speaking on a cell phone? Or staying in the
car to get out of the rain? These are all actions Plaintiffs were
taking when arrested for violation of the ordinance, all of which
were otherwise perfectly legal. And despite Plaintiffs’ repeated
attempts to comply with Section 85.02, there appears to be nothing
they can do to avoid violating the statute short of discarding all
their belongings or their vehicles, or leaving Los Angeles
entirely.

Oh hey, I think the judge stumbled across the real goal of the
statute at the end there. In conclusion, the judge ruled that the
city was using the law specifically to harass homeless people for
engaging in many of the same behaviors in their vehicles undertaken
by many other people in Los Angeles each day, and the law violates
the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The city attorney for Los Angeles told the Associated Press the

city would not be appealing the ruling and will instead craft a
new ordinance “that respects both the rights and needs of homeless
individuals and protects the quality of life in our
neighborhoods.”