Metropolitan State Hospital occupies 162 acres in Norwalk, roughly the same size as Disneyland. Many of the Metropolitan's structures have been vacant for decades. Coyotes roam freely around the sprawling grounds, passing by Tudor-style office buildings.
It is one of the few remaining state psychiatric hospitals in California, once part of a much larger network intended to treat patients with psychiatric illnesses. Today, more than 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 patients treated at the five sites at any given time — about 700 of them at Metropolitan — are in some way involved with the criminal justice system. Some are mentally incompetent to stand trial and will receive only the care necessary to be able to return to court and face charges. Others have been found not guilty by reason of insanity or have some other connection to the justice system.
Most of the rest, who before the decades of “deinstitutionalization” that began in the 1960s would have been treated in state psychiatric hospitals, now live with their families, in private care facilities, in jail or on the streets.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn and State Sen. Bob Archuleta (D-Pico Rivera) want to use a portion of the metro area for supportive housing for people who are currently homeless and in need of psychiatric or substance abuse treatment. Their efforts are laudable. This type of housing and treatment is sorely needed.
Last week, the Legislature passed Archuleta's Senate Bill 1336, which would allow the state to negotiate with the county to lease some buildings for temporary supportive housing. We look forward to the governor signing it into law.
But it's frustrating that state and county officials are still thinking too narrowly about how to put vacant and underused public facilities to better use.
For example, Los Angeles County supervisors are giving up on the decrepit men's central jail near downtown because they supposedly have no alternative place to house and treat people accused of crimes. But the deal being discussed to use Metropolitan Hospital would exclude patients with any connection to the criminal justice system, even though that is exactly what the operational part of the hospital is already used for.
This kind of thinking makes us wonder: Are state and county officials serious about treating psychiatric illnesses and housing homeless people or not?
The new plan for the sprawling Norwalk campus is the lowest of the plans. Its many vacant acres of state property have an obvious historical link to mental health treatment, at a time when counties are at a loss for where to house or treat people — and Gov. Gavin Newsom is chiding them for not doing enough.
It is surprising that the state and county did not develop this land for mental health housing long ago, and that instead the state is able to use much of the property for a Highway Patrol office.
There are some eerie parallels between this land and the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles, where for decades officials rented space for commercial purposes. It took a lawsuit to force federal officials to house veterans on the property.
The problem for county supervisors is that neighbors generally don't want people with mental illness living nearby, and certainly not those who have been charged with crimes, even on properties that historically housed such people and did well before communities were built around them.
For example, when the pandemic hit, the county temporarily closed Camp Scott, a probation camp in Santa Clarita. The city sued to stop the county from reopening it to house violent juvenile offenders. A settlement reached this year will likely prevent the county from ever housing people in the justice system there again, whether violent or not.
Meanwhile, supervisors are begging residents to accept supportive housing for formerly homeless people in many places around the county. They rarely get it. They could go ahead anyway, but they don't want to get sued and, most of all, they don't want to lose an election.
So they are drawn to so-called solutions that experience and evidence should tell them will fail. For example, the recently resurrected idea of a large psychiatric care facility for people accused of crimes, built on the site of the Men’s Central Jail in the county sheriff’s jail complex near downtown, would do little to break patients out of the cycle of illness, arrest, incarceration, release and rearrest. Law enforcement’s strategies for mental patients undermine their recovery.
But Men's Central's only neighbors are bail bond companies and jails, which unlike the landlords have no problem with another jail being built next door. So that bad alternative becomes politically attractive.
Supervisors continue to look for the simplest way to house and treat the mentally ill, and that’s fine up to a point. Building on land already in county or state hands, away from neighbors who might object, is a good place to start. Some examples include the Hilda L. Solis Care First Village, where the county had planned to build a new jail but, at Supervisor Solis’ insistence, built an interim housing and care complex instead in coordination with the Weingart Foundation. And similar projects are being led by Solis at the county’s former general hospital, Supervisor Kathryn Barger at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar and Supervisor Holly Mitchell at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
Or the project that could be carried out at the state hospital in Norwalk.
But supervisors also have to reach much further. They have to build lots of small facilities on private and public lots, and confront cities and communities that prefer to lock up their most troublesome residents in far-flung places. Supervisors have to fend off lawsuits and not worry so much about elections.
They need to remember — and tell their constituents — that saying no to care facilities in their “backyards” will mean having to deal more and more with homeless neighbors, addicts, the mentally ill and sometimes lawbreakers in their front yards. Those even thornier problems won’t win any elections either.
