The shelter storm
Brace yourself, Los Angeles. A storm has been building for four years over a controversial city ordinance on day laborers that has infuriated conservatives nationwide, and it's about to break -- perhaps as early as this week.
The ordinance, which was approved last week by the City Council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee and will soon appear before the full council, requires home-improvement chains seeking to build new big-box stores or renovate existing ones to submit "day laborer operating standards" to the city. These standards don't require the stores to build shelters for the workers, but if day laborers become a nuisance, that is the main remedy outlined in the ordinance. It also directs that the shelters be covered and include amenities such as drinking water, restrooms, places to sit and trash cans.
As anyone who has ever shopped at a warehouse-sized hardware store like Home Depot knows, they tend to be magnets for day laborers, most of whom are probably undocumented immigrants. Proponents of the ordinance argue that these workers constitute a public nuisance, one that the stores themselves are obliged to eliminate by providing shelters where the workers can gather without blocking traffic, littering the streets or urinating on sidewalks. But anti-illegal-immigrant activists see ordinances like Los Angeles' as something else: an attempt by municipal governments to coddle lawbreakers and even encourage illegal immigration.
When the city of Burbank ordered Home Depot to build a shelter as a condition of opening a new store in 2006, it touched off protest as far away as Washington. As Congress weighed a comprehensive immigration reform bill, amendments forbidding cities from demanding such shelters were attached to both the House and Senate versions. The immigration bills failed, and so did the amendments. That set the stage for the return of L.A.'s ordinance, which was first proposed by Councilman Bernard C. Parks in 2004 but has been in limbo as city officials negotiated with representatives of Home Depot. Though the ordinance would apply to other big-box chains, such as Lowe's and Orchard Supply Hardware, those stores seldom attract sizable populations of day laborers and could avoid building shelters if the city deems that they don't present a problem.
