Los Angeles County and city will spend billions of dollars on its homelessness crisis thanks to a lawsuit settlement reached this month.

Together, the county and city agreed to provide tens of thousands more shelter beds by the end of 2026 for residents with mental health and substance abuse issues.

The settlements end a 2020 lawsuit from the LA Alliance for Human Rights, a coalition that includes businesses, residents, landlords, homeless people, and others, who claimed the city and county failed to address the homelessness issue and caused dangerous conditions.

Los Angeles County settled its part of the lawsuit this month, and it was approved Thursday by a federal judge. The city previously reached its settlement agreement earlier this year.

The county agreed to provide 3,000 new mental health and substance use treatment beds.

Meanwhile, the city agreed to nearly 20,000 new beds of either interim or permanent housing and has said it will spend around $3 billion over five years to construct the housing.

“This is an extraordinary step forward,” U.S. District Judge David Carter said. “It’s going to save a lot of lives.”

Los Angeles has a huge homelessness population, with more than 69,100 homeless people in Los Angeles County and about 42,000 in Los Angeles itself as of February.

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California has started to take a more direct approach to its homelessness crisis, which is rapidly worsening.

California’s new court-ordered treatment program goes into effect next week, a significant attempt by the state to get a handle on homelessness, as well as the addiction and mental illness issues that come with it.

The Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Act program allows families of adults suffering from a serious untreated psychotic disorder to file a petition in civil court for court-ordered treatment. Clinicians, first responders, and others can also file a petition. If the petition is approved, a judge can order a year-long care plan, which can be renewed for a second year.

While the program is technically voluntary, judges do have leverage. The court cannot force people to take medication or lock them up, but if a person is not successful in CARE Court, that can be used later to put a patient in a mental institution or conservatorship.

California has about 170,000 homeless people, the biggest homeless population in the country, according to a report last year from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Nearly a third of the country’s homeless people live in California, according to a June statewide study from a research group at the University of California, San Francisco.

Other California cities have particularly dire homelessness problems as well, and have struggled to find long-term solutions to curb the problem.

San Francisco has been in the throes of a homelessness crisis for years now, and it has only gotten worse since before the pandemic. About 38,000 people are homeless in the Bay Area on a given night, up 35% since 2019.

Last week, Sacramento’s top prosecutor sued the city over its homeless encampments, accusing city officials of allowing the homeless population to become a public nuisance.

On Friday, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an Iowa school district’s policy forcing students to “respect” their class-mates’ so-called “gender identity” or risk discipline was a violation of the First Amendment.

In 2022, Parents Defend Education sued Linn-Mar School District on behalf of a group of unnamed parents over its aforementioned policy, arguing that the rules were opaque and constituted compelled speech. The Eighth Circuit agreed with PDE and remanded the case with instruction to block enforcement of the school district’s handbook on the matter.

“We are gratified that the Eighth Circuit upheld the rights of families and students in Linn-Mar,” PDE said in a statement sent to The Daily Wire. “It is never acceptable to prohibit speech with vague terms that allow arbitrary enforcement, especially when compelled student speech is at stake, and this sends a clear message to other districts across the country with similar bullying and harassment policies on the books.”

Some of the parents in the case argued that Linn-Mar’s policies would block the “open exchange of ideas” by “chilling speech” such as the idea that “biological sex is immutable” or that “that a biological male who identifies as female should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports,” The Des Moines Register noted. Voicing opinions that could run contrary to radical gender idoelogy could have resulted in students being punished.

The judges agreed with those arguments and ruled, “The policy broadly prohibits a refusal to ‘respect a student’s gender identity.’ The policy does not define ‘respect,’ and the expression of opinions like those held by parent G’s child arguably would violate the policy,” the decision said.

When PDE first sued Linn-Mar, Iowa had yet to pass a law banning school districts from ignoring or excluding parents’ say as it relates to their children’s preferred pronouns and gender identity. Linn-Mar had previously created a policy stating that schools must prioritize the wishes of students over their parents. Since then, Iowa has banned such practices. The court noted that such a policy is illegal in Iowa.

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“The Eighth Circuit also made clear that Linn-Mar’s parental exclusion policies are now unlawful throughout the State of Iowa,” PDE added. Yet these policies remain on the books in far too many districts across the country. Parental exclusion policies are a loser in the court of public opinion — and I have no doubt that they will eventually be struck down in the court of law as well.”