On March 24, I watched as the Los Angeles Police Department ordered a citywide tactical alert after hundreds of protesters and officers faced off at Echo Park Lake over the city’s plan to close the park and remove the homeless encampment that had been growing there for months. This comes as Los Angeles County reaches the milestone of 23,000 COVID-19 deaths and both the city and county continue to grapple with the dual crises.
I received the LAPD press release that explained that they had issued a dispersal order calling the demonstration in support of the homeless campers an “unlawful assembly,” but did not explain why a “citywide tactical alert” was needed.
Council District 13 Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, who represents this area of Los Angeles, used the “rehabilitation of the park” as a thin excuse to evict the unsheltered residents, which brought out defenders of the homeless from various community groups. By the end of the next day, after a long standoff, Echo Park Lake was fenced off and some 182 protestors and a few journalists were arrested, detained and cited. This is just one of the latest incidents in the battle over homelessness in neighborhoods all over Los Angeles.
Various media outlets reported that over a dozen journalists were arrested in this action to oust the homeless encampment. The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild are up in arms over these arrests.
“Taking militarized police action to displace people who are already displaced is cruel and does nothing to bolster public safety,” the ACLU stated. “Mass arrests of protesters, legal observers and journalists will not keep the city’s brutal, ill-conceived actions from being known. The city leaders who approved this approach should be held accountable.”
CD15 Councilman Joe Buscaino criticized activists who urged people to “fight back” against police. Meanwhile, Councilman Mike Bonin of the 11th District questioned the use of police resources and called for an accounting of the cost for this operation.
Genesis of a Crisis
Those who attended the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council meeting on Oct. 20, 2020, were witness to the presentation on homeless housing by Alison Becker, one of Buscaino’s deputies. It was the shortened version of what was presented to the CD 15 homeless working group, but it did answer some questions regarding what the council office has been up to within the prior three years. The last item, Becker explained (to my surprise), was the “pallet housing” project on Figueroa Street for 75 tiny homes next to Los Angeles Harbor College. This is significant — somewhat of a vindication for the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council and a point of departure for Buscaino, who is now running for mayor and up until a couple of years ago was opposed to most homeless solutions except removal by force from public spaces.
What many people don’t remember is the significance of the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council’s influence in motivating the entire city to act on the homeless issue before there was any plan except to tolerate, ignore or enforce vagrancy laws. More than five years ago, when I was president of the CeSPNC, we had a very active homeless committee; in fact it was the first neighborhood council in the entire city to actually have such a committee, and for well over a year we lobbied Buscaino’s office to do more than arrest and harass the unsheltered neighbors. Our committee was the first to start calling them “unsheltered,” a term more common today.
At that time, the CeSPNC was very united and supportive of addressing the homeless issue; we could see it had grown and had become more obviously a public health problem that was now visibly impacting the business district and residential areas. We pushed for services, sanitation and shelter, not for more enforcement.
Buscaino continued to respond with police enforcement that solved little and only made it harder for people without shelter to actually receive services because of outstanding warrants for failure to appear on misdemeanor charges and loss of their personal belongings.
After months of trying to work with the council office, CeSPNC was approached by a young man by the name of Elvis Summers, who had built a small portable “tiny home” that would allow some modest shelter, a bit of privacy and a place to store belongings off the public right-of-way. He did this on his own, with his own labor, donations and only wanted our consent or approval. He was not asking for any financial support and none was offered.
The motion to support tiny homes was passed unanimously and the project moved ahead. However, within weeks a small group of people who had never been to our council meetings or shown up to hardly any public meetings started complaining about the homeless getting tiny shelters. They started to attack CeSPNC on social media and they followed up by creating a Facebook page called Saving San Pedro, which was actually usurped from another group fighting the Rancho LPG facility on North Gaffey Street.
What started out as an uprising over homelessness escalated into attacks against our neighborhood council and against me personally as president. It was a vile, nasty and belligerent attack that was based upon little understanding and great ignorance of the complexity of causes of homelessness. However, their attacks and our defense made the news countywide — radio, TV and newspaper reporters were now all covering the tiny homes battle in San Pedro, just as they did today’s Echo Park demonstration. And for the first time, it focused the attention of every elected politician in Los Angeles on the long-ignored problem of homelessness. Up until this point I don’t think that either the county or the city had an accurate count of homeless persons. Only then was it called a “crisis.”
Buscaino was in deep denial but realized he couldn’t let a neighborhood council lead on this issue — particularly not with me as the spokesman. He quickly formed the Homeless Advisory Task Force and appointed people who wouldn’t criticize his lack of vision or leadership. Needless to say, no one from CeSPNC was appointed to this task force, which met regularly in private for more than 18 months and came up with a short list of “recommendations” acceptable to Buscaino. But this task force never issued a public report. Buscaino wandered the streets still looking for avenues to enforce the vagrancy laws.
In the meantime, the Saving San Pedro vigilantes came to every one of our meetings for months. They disrupted the meetings, yelled and screamed at our council and attempted to have me removed as president. They failed. However, as a result, the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment instituted a “code of civility.” This uprising was a precursor to Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, which was fueled by the same instincts of hate. And for a short moment they even took over CeSPNC, only to have their leadership implode.
Since then, both the city and county have passed bond measures to build affordable assisted housing, most of which will take years to build and cost more than $600,000 per unit. Then the city pivoted. Led by Mayor Eric Garcetti came a proposal to build Bridge Home shelters at a cost of a few million dollars each and more budgeted for operations and services. Only then did Buscaino get onboard with the idea of shelters.
In the late fall of 2019, Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn opened the first shelter in San Pedro at the corner of 8th and Beacon streets, right where the tiny homes uprising started, at a fraction of the cost of the Bridge Home — using an existing county building, much to the chagrin of Buscaino. Six months later, Buscaino’s Bridge Home shelter was opened 10 blocks north on the same street. Even with all this, the homeless count for 2020 rose by 12%, and then the pandemic hit.
Shari Weaver, the homeless outreach point person for Harbor Interfaith Services recently confirmed that as of the most recent count, a year ago, there were some 651 homeless people just in San Pedro — and 491 of those were living on the streets. However, because of COVID-19, the two San Pedro shelters can only operate at 40% capacity and Project Room Key, which uses vacant hotel rooms, is now temporarily using 100 rooms. Weaver fears what will come after the moratorium on evictions ends in June, saying, “I don’t really know what will happen then.”
A curious twist to this story is that after more than five years of searching for solutions to the homeless crisis, after Judge David O. Carter has held the Los Angeles City Council’s feet to the fire to provide shelter before enforcement, Buscaino is now supporting the very tiny homes solution that he once opposed at a fraction of the cost of all the other options.
Seventy-five such tiny homes, capable of sheltering two people each, will make their debut this May using city owned property and yet this still will not cure the problem locally. Even if all the shelters in San Pedro were open to capacity, which they are not because of the pandemic, and even if the 100 Project Room Key hotel rooms continued to be occupied, San Pedro would still have some 250 unsheltered residents. It would take more than three tiny home villages in San Pedro to finally take the known population off the streets.
For the price of just a couple permanent supportive housing developments the city could build tiny homes in every neighborhood council district across the city and shelter some 15,000 of our most desperately poor and homeless neighbors. That’s close to 23% of the last homeless count and could be built now rather than later and can be used while permanent housing is designed and built. Yet, it is doubtful that Buscaino in his aspirations to run for mayor of Los Angeles has that much of a bold vision or that every neighborhood council would embrace this much of a shared responsibility to cure this citywide crisis.
As the end of the pandemic nears one can only imagine what the future of the homeless crisis holds as the moratorium on evictions are lifted and more Echo Park like encampments emerge because the city of Los Angeles has not built enough permanent housing.