Full Coverage: Homeless in L.A.

Just one day after advocates for the homeless filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles, work crews and police were out again Tuesday making arrests and removing homeless encampments along a highly visible stretch of the 101 Freeway downtown.

A federal civil rights lawsuit filed Monday accused the city of Los Angeles of endangering homeless people by seizing and destroying their tents and bedding and then releasing them from jail into the cold without protection.

Escalating their battle to stamp out an unprecedented spread of street encampments, city officials have begun seizing tiny houses from homeless people in South Los Angeles.

On Tuesday, both the county and the city of Los Angeles approved far-reaching and ambitious plans to help homeless people off the streets through a combination of housing, rental subsidies, case management and expanded counseling, therapy and other services.

The luncheon was held just south of downtown, with about 100 in attendance.

As Claudia Chaparro drives her car toward the census tract in East L.A. where we will begin counting homeless people, her sister, Victoria Covarubbias, points to a man sitting on a sidewalk.

The walk began shortly after 9 p.m. at the busy Starbucks in East Los Angeles.

First rule of going out on the homeless count: come back.

My hometown, Portland, Ore., has a serious homelessness problem.

The red tape stretched across the road leading to the concrete riverbed.

The death of Barbara Brown, a 60-year-old homeless woman, from exposure to the cold rain on skid row is just the kind of tragedy officials and advocates feared would occur among the 28,000 homeless people who live without shelter on a typical night in Los Angeles County.

A new report from city budget analysts, released late Thursday, says the city of Los Angeles should spend at least $1.85 billion over the next decade to combat homelessness, including expanded spending on permanent housing.

The mayor of Los Angeles stood with county leaders and called for eliminating homelessness in 10 years.

Los Angeles has struggled for decades to conquer homelessness, only to see the problem grow worse in recent years as tent-and-tarpaulin shantytowns have taken root in neighborhoods from Venice to Boyle Heights.

Michael Salisbury shook uncontrollably as he waited, soaked to the bone, for the Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch Library in Venice to open at noon Tuesday.

The simplest solution to chronic homelessness is also the most daunting: Build more housing or retrofit existing units.

Los Angeles County and its municipalities’ current plans to accommodate the homeless throughout the El Niño season are “unconscionable and grossly inadequate,� according to a report recently released by the county’s Civil Grand Jury.

State senators jumped into California’s homelessness crisis Monday, proposing $2 billion to build or rehabilitate permanent housing for mentally ill people living in the streets.

He was sitting on the apartment steps in her placid West Los Angeles neighborhood, his cottony Santa Claus beard clotted and his clothing unwashed.

Some myths about homelessness get repeated so often that they become accepted as true.

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved $20,000 to keep a Highland Park homeless shelter open during looming El Niño rains, as advocates called on the city to pledge $100 million a year to fund longer-term solutions.

Los Angeles officials have failed to safeguard the city’s growing homeless population as torrential storms approach, and instead are permitting rampant development that is driving more people into the streets, advocates said Friday.

They began trickling into All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Highland Park in the early evening, unfurling sleeping bags along the pews, beneath an abstract crucifix wrought from twisted metal.

Los Angeles leaders on Wednesday allocated $12.4 million for emergency relief to get homeless people off the streets before the anticipated El Niño winter storms bear down on the city.

In recent months, signs have gone up barring the overnight parking of oversized vehicles on residential and commercial streets from the San Fernando Valley to the Westside to South Los Angeles and San Pedro.

No problem has prompted more urgent rhetoric at Los Angeles City Hall this fall than the plight of those who live and sleep unsheltered on L.A.’

For the first time in two years, Glendale is hosting a nightly winter shelter for the homeless, ahead of heavy rains expected to be brought on by El Niño storms.

Advocates for homeless people avoid using the phrase “the homeless� because there is no monolithic tribe of people who lost their housing.

Life on skid row often involves standing in one congested line after another.

I represented my first homeless client in 1983.

Mayor Eric Garcetti on Wednesday ruled out declaring an immediate state of emergency to address Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis, cutting off for now an avenue designed to bring swift relief to thousands of people as El Niño storms are expected to bear down on Southern California beginning in January.

With an estimated 26,000 people calling Los Angeles sidewalks, cars and storm drains home, city officials on Tuesday approved an expanded campaign to help the homeless this winter by opening public buildings as temporary shelters and allowing people to sleep inside vehicles in designated lots.

Evicted four months ago from their Highland Park apartment, Louis Morales and his 18-year-old stepson, Arthur Valenzuela, live half-hidden by brush along the nearby Arroyo Seco riverbed.

Eight weeks ago, Mayor Eric Garcetti and members of the Los Angeles City Council stood on the grounds of City Hall and declared a state of emergency on homelessness.

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday is slated to take up an emergency declaration to attack the city’s homelessness crisis with initiatives that could include opening shelters on public and private land, authorizing parking lots where homeless people can sleep in cars and vans, and developing storage facilities for homeless people’s belongings.

The way to end homelessness is to prevent it in the first place.

In recent years, Los Angeles has invested mightily in its public spaces in efforts to create a “world class city.�

Seven weeks after city leaders announced they would seek a formal declaration to jump on the homeless crisis, there is no state of emergency in Los Angeles.

The two teenagers had a plan: Feed as many homeless people as possible in a single day and capture it all on video.

The nine homeless men living inside a concrete storm drain in Orange County believe they are ready for the floods likely to come raging through if El Niño brings the deluges forecasted to arrive about a month from now.

Leaping around his rocky beach encampment across from the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Sam has it better than many homeless people: sapphire skies, a beach cruiser bicycle and bags of castoffs from his affluent neighbors to give away to friends.

Thousands of people stream out of Los Angeles county jails, foster homes, hospitals and state prisons with no place to go, overwhelming efforts to stem the rise in homelessness, experts said Thursday.

Civil rights lawyers asked the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to change rules that they say illegally and systematically knock mentally ill homeless people off the welfare rolls.

A week after Los Angeles city officials announced a plan to commit $100 million toward addressing homelessness, Los Angeles County supervisors voted Tuesday to add $50 million in funding for the issue as part of their midyear budget update.

A group of former Los Angeles County jail inmates said Monday that a recent legal settlement between the Sheriff’s Department and federal authorities will perpetuate the cycle of people with untreated mental illness bouncing back and forth between jail and skid row.

Question: How do you know when the budget crisis is officially over at Los Angeles City Hall?

Citing rising crime and burgeoning homelessness, Los Angeles City Council members representing the San Fernando Valley on Thursday called public safety a major concern.

When the workers in hazmat suits arrived there wasn’t much left to do.

The Azalea shopping center features a lineup of shops familiar to suburban malls: Forever 21, TGI Friday’s and Michaels.

For more than a decade, the Rev.

Costa Mesa officials say they have no plans to reconsider their decision to remove certain bus stop benches and shelters, a move meant to discourage the homeless and curb vagrancy.

The Los Angeles City Council declared homelessness a local emergency Tuesday, and there’s little question about the accuracy of that assessment.

So how did L.A.’s homeless problem get so bad?

Acknowledging their failure to stem a surge in homelessness, Los Angeles’ elected leaders on Tuesday said they would declare a “state of emergency� and devote up to $100 million to the problem.

A year ago, Mayor Eric Garcetti stood with First Lady Michelle Obama before a crowd of 900 in the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza and pledged to end veteran homelessness in the city by 2016.

Sen.

Mayor Eric Garcetti has backed off his pledge to get every homeless veteran off city streets by the end of this year, his spokeswoman said Monday.

Veterans whose behavior got them kicked out of the military have dramatically higher rates of homelessness than those who left under normal circumstances, according to a new study by researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

About 13,000 people on public assistance tumble into homelessness every month in Los Angeles County, according to a new study that experts say provides the clearest picture yet of extreme poverty in the region.

The running legal and political debate at Los Angeles City Hall over how best to manage street encampments is turning to a new issue: tiny, curbside homes on wheels.

Ken Gabel said Los Angeles police threatened to arrest him last month if he didn’t clear out his skid row camp.

The city of Los Angeles agreed Wednesday to pay $1.1 million to lawyers who successfully challenged a municipal ordinance prohibiting homeless people from sleeping in their vehicles.

Los Angeles City Atty.

It was a balmy night in January when the team of four young professionals struck out from South El Monte City Hall to walk the dark streets of unfamiliar neighborhoods.

A report showing that more than half the $100 million the city of Los Angeles spends each year on homelessness goes to police demonstrates that the city is focused on enforcement rather than getting people off the streets, homeless advocates said Friday.

Ginger Miller served in the U.S.