Judge David O. Carter, in his native element, trailed by the media
Federal District Judge David O. Carter has made himself the center of attention in the ongoing lawsuit by a group called the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights involving the City and County of L.A.’s homeless policies. He consistently finds ways to put himself in front of the cameras, whether it’s early morning visits to illegal homeless encampments or declarations from the bench in which he dramatically summons various officials to hearings in his courtroom, during which he is prone to long-winded diatribes.
Carter’s harangues and orders have resulted in a lot of talk and declarations by officials, even as very little on the ground has changed. To wit, when the L.A. Alliance filed its lawsuit more than five years ago, in March 2019, there were 35,550 homeless people in the City of Los Angeles and 56,275 in the County. This year, the numbers were 45,252 and 75,312, representing 27% and 26% increases respectively.
Last week Judge Carter outdid himself. On Wednesday he ordered the UCLA Bruins baseball stadium, which has operated on a small section of the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration campus for decades, locked down. Carter is an alumnus of UCLA undergrad and law school. He also put Brentwood School, which likewise occupies part of the V.A. campus with a baseball diamond, parking lot, and swimming pool, on notice that it may face a similar outcome. The grounds for the order is that both institutions have been operating their facilities under leases that violate the West L.A. VA property’s deed, which requires that the entire property be used exclusively for the benefit of homeless and disabled veterans. Carter’s order is the latest of several going back decades that were intended to hold the VA to its legal obligations. Unsurprisingly, each one was hailed as a “game changer.” For example, nearly a decade ago, in January 2015, after the VA settled a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti pledge to house every homeless veteran in L.A. by the end of the year. How’d that work out?
Now it’s Carter’s turn. The judge, a Vietnam veteran who served in the Marine Corps, is engaging in the judicial equivalent of carpet bombing. The UCLA baseball players, coaches, trainers, are collateral damage who have nothing to do with the issues at hand. So are the groundskeepers, maintenance staff, and technicians who may be out of their jobs, at least for a time. Over the years I’ve taken my dogs for walks near and around the stadium. Even in the offseason it bustles with activity. If Carter makes his order permanent the entire UCLA baseball program could be thrown into disarray. What did those kids do to deserve that?
His order isn’t just punitive, it punishes the wrong people. It’s not as if there’s a plan ready for immediate execution for the facility to provide homeless veterans with services or shelter, much less housing. Not a single person is going to be helped as a result of his lockout order. Preventing athletes from getting in their reps, preventing those workers from going to work, none of it will result in a single hot meal being served, a single person receiving addiction treatment, a single life turned around, or a single neighborhood spared the ravages of an illegal encampment. It will, however, grab a bunch more headlines.
It’s the latest example of Carter’s grandstanding, an unfortunate tendency that goes back years. In 2019 the presiding judge in his courthouse reassigned a lawsuit similar to the Alliance case involving cities in Orange County to a different courtroom. Officials from the cities involved accused him of dividing them against each other. The presiding judge found that “in view of the combination of circumstances, a reasonable observer would conclude based on appearances that the District Judge is not unbiased.”
In 2021, the 9th Circuit reversed a particularly grandiose order in the L.A. Alliance case, that the City of L.A. provide permanent housing to every person living on Skid Row within six months, regardless of whether they just rolled up on a Greyhound from another city or state last week, while holding $1 billion in escrow funds meant for shelter and services. The appellate court held, in part, that Carter had injected his own legal theories into his order, arguments that none of the parties had actually made. Ninth Circuit Judge Jacqueline H. Nguyen wrote that Carter “impermissibly resorted to independent research and extra-record evidence.”
Those are two of the cardinal sins a judge can commit, giving the appearance of bias and inserting their own arguments into orders. You would think those outcomes would have given him some pause, perhaps even left him a big chagrined. But no. Google “David O. Carter” and you’ll find dozens of stories in the news, along with scores of pictures of the judge himself. Personally I cannot recall a case in which the judge played such a prominent, even dominant public role. I clerked for a federal district judge in Seattle, and he always kept the focus where it belonged, on the parties, witnesses, and facts.
Carter is prone to issuing orders that exceed 100 pages and holding hearings that drag on for six, eight, even ten or more hours. For comparison, the average United States Supreme Court opinion is around 15-20 pages, and hearings in the high court last one hour. Carter’s grandiloquence has consequences, causing the case to drag on. In the 110 page order the Ninth Circuit reversed he spent some 55 pages dissecting the history of racial discrimination and how it contributed to the modern homeless crisis L.A.. While that history is relevant it had precisely nothing to do with the case, facts, and arguments before him. He wasted his own time, his clerks’ time, the parties’ time, the lawyers’ time, and the Ninth Circuit’s time, all without meaningfully bringing about change on the streets. It’s maddening.
At various points Carter threatened to “bulldoze” the 22 acre section of the Brentwood campus that occupies VA property, and to fill the school’s swimming pool with sand. In August, he told lawyers and officials from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) “You’re not working on your time frame now. You’re working on mine.” Typically, judges say “You’re working on the Court’s time.” But it’s all about David.
If his orders had accomplished anything meaningful on the ground, if he had forced the City and County to turn a new chapter, his performances would be more tolerable. But again, his focus is on more of the same failed policies. To extent his orders have accomplished anything, it amounts to tinkering at the edges of the crisis. In September 2023 he approved a settlement between the Alliance and the County that will provide a total of $1.53 billion to fund 3,000 new mental health and substance abuse treatment beds and 6,700 beds specifically for homeless people living under freeway overpasses, while “expanding street-based outreach and wraparound services.” The rest of the order requires the County to “work to ensure” this or that outcome. We’ve been to this dance many, many times before.
Previously he approved a partial settlement between the plaintiffs and the City in which the City committed to building 13,000 new permanent and interim housing units. Anyone who thinks these settlements will make a lick of difference in the crisis hasn’t been paying much attention. At this point Carter is a card-carrying member of the Homeless Industrial Complex. The lawyers are making money, the outside auditors are making money, and the usual cabal of developers, nonprofits, and consultants are circling like the jackals they are.
The City and County of L.A., like the rest of California, have spent 15 years and tens of billions of dollars on “permanent supportive housing” and “wraparound services.” It’s been a colossal failure. The more we spend, the more we build, the more we fund profiteering nonprofits, the more people end up on our streets. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the words “permanent” and “homeless” should never be uttered in the same breath. Unless and until we break the myths of homelessness — the most insidious of which is that vagrants literally shitting on our city are our “unhoused neighbors” — we will continue to fail, and people who actually need and deserve help will continue to die.
I wish Judge Carter would read the series of exposes I wrote with my partner Jamie Paige in the Westside Current about the realities of Project Homekey, California’s latest flagship homeless housing program. Governor Gavin Newsom has called it the “gold standard.” We exposed that the City and County of L.A. together spent some $1.4 billion on 4,907 units of “permanent supportive housing” in 70 buildings. Three years later, 55% of those units are vacant, including 70% of the ones the County purchased. That’s on top of a temporary shelter system that is, in LAHSA’s own words, “broken.” The settlements with the City and County will do little more than double down on these failures. Judge Carter apparently is oblivious to these realities.
I hope I’m wrong. I don’t think I am, but I hope that Judge Carter’s bombast ultimately will result in progress. I say all this as someone who initially had great hopes for the Alliance case, and to some extent still do. In fact, I played a very minor role in the drafting of the original complaint. I introduced one of the plaintiffs to the Alliance’s legal team and provided input on the the factual background and causes of action. That’s part of the source of my frustrations with Carter. I wish he’d bring fresh thinking to the crisis. I wish he would force the City and County to finally accept that the one-size-fits-all “permanent supportive housing” approach has failed, and to develop solutions that address different cohorts of homeless people differently. I wish he’d order them to treat the Afghanistan War vet from California who’s suffering from severe PTSD and CTE differently than the vagrant who just arrived on a Greyhound from East Armpit, Tennessee with nothing to his name but a bag of meth, a sense of entitlement, and criminal intentions.
Most of all, I just wish he’d stick to the damn facts and get something meaningful accomplished.
the all aspect report 