Along the concrete bed of the San Gabriel River in southeastern Los Angeles, Sean Diaz recalled one of his worst nights in his many years of homelessness.
He’d found an abandoned building to sleep in and didn’t realize another person had already claimed the spot. Diaz said he awoke to a baseball bat bashing his head, causing wounds that required 10 stitches to heal. Had there been space in a shelter that night, Diaz said, he might not have gotten hurt.
That’s why Diaz was astonished to learn that Norwalk, the city where he was born and raised, had banned new homeless shelters and supportive housing developments.
“You’d think they’d want to open more,” said Diaz, 36, on a recent afternoon as he walked past riverbed encampments under the 105 Freeway. “That would keep us off the streets.”
In August, the Norwalk City Council approved one of California’s most drastic anti-homeless laws in recent memory. The law not only prohibits the construction of shelters and homeless housing, but also blocks new laundromats, liquor stores, payday lenders and other businesses that predominantly serve the poor.
Soon after, Gov. Gavin Newsom accused Norwalk of violating housing state laws, the latest in a succession of communities in the governor’s crosshairs in recent years. But Norwalk stands out from the places like Beverly Hills, Coronado, Huntington Beach and La Cañada Flintridge that Newsom has said have failed to do their part to address California’s housing problems.
Norwalk is not a white, wealthy enclave, but rather a Latino-majority, working- and middle-class community. Elected leaders in the city of 100,000 said they feel like Norwalk has been treated as a dumping ground, forcing officials to dig deep in the budget to deal with an influx of homeless residents and broken promises from other agencies.
“Why is always Norwalk the pinpoint for these programs?” asked Councilmember Rick Ramirez. “Where’s the assistance from the other surrounding cities? We’ve decided to stand up for ourselves.”
Norwalk’s law, which places a moratorium on new homeless shelters and the targeted businesses until at least August 2025, has already had an impact. County officials canceled a hotel leasing effort that aimed to shelter 80 people living along the 105 Freeway and elsewhere on city streets. Newsom’s administration revoked state approval for the city’s housing development blueprint, making Norwalk ineligible for some affordable housing dollars.
A lawsuit against Norwalk is forthcoming, the governor warned.
“It’s beyond cruel that Norwalk would ban the building of shelters while people are living on the city’s streets,” Newsom said in a statement. “This crisis is urgent, and we can’t afford to stand by as communities turn their backs on those in need.”
Norwalk is one of what’s known as the Gateway Cities, inner ring suburbs on the southeastern L.A.-Orange County border that rapidly turned from white working class to majority Latino in the 1980s as the region’s overall demographics shifted. Some communities, such as Bell Gardens and Maywood, became some of the poorest and overcrowded in the nation.
But others, including Norwalk, maintained high rates of homeownership and relative affluence even as its demographics changed. Today, nearly three-quarters of Norwalk’s homes are owner-occupied and its median household income, though far below Beverly Hills’, is higher than the county average.
While Norwalk looks different than the other communities that have bucked the state on housing, it shares a similar outlook, Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC, argued.
“The more assimilated spaces often resemble the rest of suburban America, with fights confined to issues of protecting one’s own turf against encroachment — in short, a Latino version of the NIMBY agenda,” Pastor wrote in a 2013 piece on the Gateway Cities.
Norwalk leaders say they’ve done far more than neighboring communities to address homelessness.
Rare among cities of its size, Norwalk has its own social services department. Miguel Ochoa, a city caseworker, estimated that about 70% of his time is spent assisting homeless people. He’s helped clients replace lost identification cards, provided transportation to doctor’s appointments and filled out applications for benefits to get them back on their feet.
“We’re a launching pad for people,” Ochoa said.
Early next year, a 60-unit development for homeless and low-income veterans and their families is expected to open on city-owned land. The project, in the works for more than four years, was grandfathered in so the ban doesn’t apply.
The city’s complaints center on homeless projects over which it’s had less control.
A mix of county, state and federal dollars has gone toward leasing and purchasing motels to use as shelters and supportive housing since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first one in Norwalk, a conversion of a 210-room hotel occurring within weeks of Newsom’s spring 2020 stay-at-home pandemic order, caused numerous problems, city leaders said. Police calls were up and so were resident complaints about panhandling. More than 300 people were unaccounted for by service providers when the site closed 16 months later, city officials said, which they believed caused Norwalk’s homeless population to almost double.
The county planned to renew shelter operations on the property until Norwalk’s law scuttled the decision.
A second site, a Motel 6 turned into a 56-room shelter, also had problems, adjacent business owners said. Jason Perez, who operates a diner, Mr. Rosewood Family Restaurant, next door to the motel, said circumstances were “a disaster scene every day from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.”
“We’ve seen a lot of hanging out, a lot of loitering, a lot of stuff that people don’t need to see when they’re going to go eat with their families,” Perez told the city council at a meeting last month.
The county closed shelter operations after the pandemic and is converting the site to permanent housing, another project that will be grandfathered in under the law.
Some of Norwalk’s concerns were validated in court. While Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James Chalfant ruled in January 2021 that the county could operate the hotel conversion program in Norwalk, he blasted the county’s lack of regard for the city’s troubles at the 210-room site. Chalfant called the project “a public nuisance” and criticized the county for not spreading locations for the program, known as Project Roomkey, equitably across the region.
“The county has concentrated most of the Project Roomkey facilities in working class, minority communities like Norwalk,” Chalfant wrote.
L.A. County officials referred questions about operations at the hotel site to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a joint city-county agency that hires outreach workers and oversees nonprofit operators. An agency spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Norwalk leaders have exaggerated the city’s lack of support from other governments and problems caused by the homeless population.
In September, city officials said in a statement that Norwalk had not received any funding from a county program that pays for homeless services. County officials responded that the city had gotten $90,000 to develop a homelessness strategy and $180,000 annually for housing navigation services in addition to money distributed to the city through regional efforts. A Norwalk spokesperson later conceded the city had received county dollars.
Two years ago, Ramirez, the Norwalk councilmember, told the Whittier Daily News that homeless people were “assaulting people in their homes, in businesses and out while walking.”
Asked by the Times to validate the claim, Ramirez ticked off a list of incidents he said occurred at stores but did not name any at houses.
“Did I say homes? Businesses I meant,” Ramirez said.
Violent crime has decreased in Norwalk compared to before the shelter program began, even though it is up countywide over the same period, according to California Department of Justice statistics. Property crime increased in Norwalk during that time to roughly the same rate it was in 2018.
Some residents believe the city’s actions and rhetoric sow fear and hurt Norwalk’s reputation. Jesse Flores leads an advocacy organization called Norwalk Unides, which cooks and distributes meals to homeless residents. The city could be doing far more to help people on the streets, Flores said, adding that he believed it was offensive for the city to equate supportive housing with payday lending.
“Growing up, it was seen as successful to be leaving Norwalk,” said Flores, 29. “We’re trying to change that narrative. All this that has come up with the governor and us losing funding and being against homelessness, it’s not going to help.”
The dispute over Norwalk’s anti-shelter ordinance is not the only homelessness issue under negotiation with state leaders.
Last month, Newsom signed a law allowing for the use of seven abandoned buildings on the campus of Metropolitan State Hospital, a public psychiatric care facility in Norwalk. The plan is to house homeless residents with severe mental health needs there.
Norwalk Mayor Margarita Rios said she supports homeless facilities on this site, which is surrounded by a fence and has dedicated hospital police. She said it was an example of Norwalk’s willingness to do more.
“We are the best partner the county and state could have if they could bring us on instead of telling us what is going to happen,” Rios said. “We want to make sure Norwalk is given the respect and attention it deserves.”
In addition to blocking the proposed hotel-to-shelter conversion, Rios said the city law has been successful for another reason: The city’s complaints were no longer falling on deaf ears.
The Newsom administration rejected the notion that the anti-shelter law has helped the city. Instead, Tara Gallegos, a Newsom spokesperson, said in a statement that the law “sends a chilling message” that the city doesn’t tolerate homeless housing.
“The state is happy to meet with Norwalk to discuss how they can comply with the state law — but we will not schedule a meeting to discuss how they can best violate it,” Gallegos said.
Back at the San Gabriel riverbed, Diaz said living on the streets was getting harder as he aged.
“People look down on us,” Diaz said. “They’re allowed that opinion. But regardless of what I might have done to put myself here, put yourself in this situation. It’s not pleasant.”
Diaz looked up at the cloudy sky and said he heard it might rain later. Nightfall was hours away and he didn’t know where he was going to sleep.
Times staff writers Ben Poston and Doug Smith contributed to this story.
