When the city quickly surrounded Echo Park and pulled people out of a large camp that had taken root along its scenic lake, it was an extraordinary change in a city full of homeless camps.
Night teams rushed to erect a metal fence wrapped in green fabric around the park. The police went down and expelled angry protesters. Community workers were sent to offer hotel rooms and other shelters to the homeless before the deadline for vacating the park that will soon be closed.
Even some of the dwindling numbers of people who stayed at the camp this week were taken by surprise by the unique effort focused on Echo Park, as hundreds of homeless camps remain in other neighborhoods and parks. If the city claimed to be helping people, Isabel Castro asked, why were they focusing so much on this camp?
“Go for a walk at MacArthur Park,” Castro said this week outside his tent. “See if you really care about people.”
Work teams examine belongings left behind in the homeless camp during a cleanup at Echo Park on Friday.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
The uprooting of the Echo Park camp drew protests and condemnation from the American Civil Liberties Union and even criticism from some within the City Hall. On Thursday night, police arrested 182 protesters and briefly detained journalists, including a reporter for the LA Times.
But in some corners of the city, residents were jealous, wanting to know why the same changes had not been made in their neighborhoods. Progressive activists, for their part, fear that Echo Park’s aggressive approach could become a manual.
At a news conference on Friday, Mayor Eric Garcetti called the effort a success, calling it “the biggest housing transition in a camp in the history of the city.” He suggested that, in some cases, it could be replicated.
“Nobody dreamed that we could house more than 200 people when they started,” said the mayor.
Belongings left behind by homeless residents sit on a bench before cleaning up at Echo Park on Friday.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Councilor Joe Buscaino, who represents a district extending from Watts to San Pedro, also praised Echo Park’s effort, saying in a written statement that the “intensive outreach approach followed by a ‘chosen date’ should become the standard if we are to bring the people who live on our streets to a better situation. “
“We no longer have the luxury of waiting until people are ready,” said Buscaino.
In Venice, Brian Averill and his newly formed group are pressing city councilman Mike Bonin to make a similar effort to remove a seaside camp that has grown to more than 200 tents. “Venice is a powder keg now,” said Averill. “We need to see the city take a few steps to show that they are serious now. We didn’t see that. ”
The Venice Boardwalk Action Committee is proposing a four-week program to conduct widespread outreach involving Los Angeles city sanitation, county mental health and the Los Angeles Police Department to find housing for 250 people and thus keep the beach free of tents. Averill said the closure of Echo Park could be a model, but said he hoped that “we learn from the mistakes that councilman (Mitch) O’Farrell made there with the presence of the police”.
A member of the work team is standing on syringes and other items left behind at Echo Park camp on Friday.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Venice resident Brian Lindner, who regularly goes to the boardwalk to cycle and swim, said he was involved in such efforts after his daughter was approached by a drunk homeless man. The closure of Echo Park gave him some hope, he said, although he wondered if it would also push more homeless people into Venice.
For the Venice Beach boardwalk, “can something like this happen, to put it back in useful condition?” he asked.
Echo Park Lake is hardly the first place where LA sought to clean up a homeless camp, but it has become a hot spot for many reasons. Homeless activists defined the camp as a community and mobilized others – including residents of Echo Park who are not homeless – to join their cause. Angelenos disturbed by the camp, for their part, were emotionally invested in a beloved park that underwent tens of millions of dollars in renovations years ago.
“I’m not sure how many privileged Nextdoor residents desperately want to recover an alley in southern LA,” said Bill Przylucki, executive director of the progressive group Ground Game LA. “Giving in to that pressure is part of how we got the response we saw.”
Work crews pull a sofa out of a tent left by a homeless resident during a cleanup in Echo Park on Friday.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Another factor is who leads the municipality: O’Farrell, who represents the area, directed the decision to temporarily close the park, arguing that it had become a chaotic and dangerous place where aggressions and other criminal activities occurred. The closure would allow for repairs, he said.
“This situation was never designed to last indefinitely,” he said of the park’s camp. With the offer of hotel rooms and beds in shelters, he said, “it is past time to move on. And that is exactly what we are doing ”.
Other board members criticized the move. “The sudden closure of the park, the massive presence of the LAPD, the use of force against protesters, the confinement of homeless people who were in the process of being placed in hotel shelters … none of this needed to happen,” said councilwoman Nithya Raman , who visited Echo Park in the midst of the furor.
Meanwhile, some residents of his district said they were frustrated that Raman had not taken similar steps to eliminate a camp along Hollywood’s Berendo Street, which has led to complaints about illegal activities.
“She has time to show up for a photo shoot at Echo Park, but she can’t go down and meet neighbors who have been asking for months to meet her face to face,” said Charlie Collins, who said he was part of a committee. concerned about camps in Los Feliz and Hollywood.
LAPD officer Adrian Gonzalez, left, and sergeant. Matt Jacobs examines the belongings left behind during a cleaning in Echo Park on Friday.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
A spokesman for Raman said his team has been meeting regularly with Berendo residents and that the councilwoman visited the camp and agreed to a Zoom meeting with neighbors.
In Boyle Heights, Veta Gashgai said he would welcome the city by doing in Hollenbeck Park what he had done in Echo Park. A homeless camp has persisted there for years and has disabled the park’s toilets, said Gashgai.
“We want help for them, but they can’t just take control of the park,” said Gashgai, who works with a group called Organized Blocks of Boyle Heights. She argued that all residents should be offered housing and that “if they decide not to go, they should be forced to leave.”
Some homeless people in other parts of the city said they were jealous of the way the protesters gathered behind the Echo Park Lake camp. “When they kicked us out, there weren’t many people here,” said Tammy Vindiola, who said she was kicked out of a street in southern Los Angeles. “There was the police.”
Work teams remove belongings left by homeless residents in Echo Park on Friday.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Although Garcetti praised the efforts at Echo Park, he specified that such an approach would work “when we need to make improvements to public works or restore parks”. However, “in most places, we will not have this situation,” he said.
Shayla Myers, a senior lawyer at the Legal Aid Foundation in Los Angeles, said she was concerned that “this is not an isolated strategy”. Choosing specific camps, flooding them with “interim resources” to temporarily shelter people, and then barring people with fences, signs or policing is “incredibly dangerous,” she argued.
Hotel rooms offered through Project Roomkey, for example, are “an incredibly scarce resource and the city is implementing this resource at the whim of board members – not for the most vulnerable residents,” said Myers. “It is a strategy to deal with visible evidence of homelessness, but it does nothing to resolve the crisis.”
Valerie Zeller’s wedding plaque is in a trash can ready to be removed during cleaning in Echo Park on Friday. Zeller, a homeless person, recently married Henry in the park.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
More than a day after the city surrounded Echo Park, the last remaining residents – Ayman Ahmed and David Busch-Lilly – were arrested on Friday morning, after spending one last night along the lake.
Along Sunset Boulevard, the chaos of the past few days seemed to have dissipated. Just steps from where the police surrounded and arrested protesters along with journalists, the backyard of Stories Books and Cafe was packed with customers.
A few buildings ahead, outside the back entrance of O’Farrell’s district office, former park resident Valerie Zeller argued with her new husband, Henry, as he tried to persuade her to separate the few belongings she had obtained from the park. . The couple got married in the park last weekend.
“If you don’t decide what to store, we’ll have to load it,” said Henry.
The couple, who had slept in an alley on Thursday, were later allocated a room for the night. Outside the fenced-in park, the police were preventing former camp residents from returning to collect their valuables. A woman screamed that she needed to get in to find her birth certificate.
In addition to the police tape, dozens of sanitation workers in white suits divided the park into zones and mapped the tents before separating them – a complicated process of categorizing what is personal belongings and what is hazardous waste or garbage. Things that were considered personal items went to garbage bags, which then went to storage boxes, going to a facility in the city center, where they could be retrieved.
The teams expected to finish work on Friday and brought spotlights so they could work late into the night. In one of his big yellow dumpsters, there was a poster that said: “Welcome to our wedding. Valerie & Henry. March 20, 2021. ”
The team writer, Dakota Smith, contributed to this report.