LOS ANGELES (KNX) — More than one year ago, residents of a homeless encampment in Echo Park reached out to city council members to ask if they could stay in the community they had created, with the caveat that they keep it clean. Despite their requests, they were removed from the park and told the city would work to get them into housing.
Now one year since the camp was removed, a new report finds that just 17 of the 183 people who were removed from the camp and put on Los Angeles’ housing placement list have been put into housing.
Another 48 remain on a waiting list, according to The Los Angeles Times, and at least 15 went back to living on the streets while six died and the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority (LAHSA) lost contact with 82 others.
The “(Dis)placement: The fight for housing and Community after echo park lake,” report was compiled by the After Echo Park Lake research collective and UCLA’s Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and published Wednesday.
Speaking with KTLA, William Sens, a former resident of the Echo Park Lake community, said many promises were made when the city cleaned out the camp, clearing out about 35 tons of trash from the site according to the parks department.
But the numbers unveiled by the new study indicate that the promises weren't kept, or as easy to keep track of as first thought.
“There’s no actual pathway to housing,” Sens, who accepted a temporary spot through Project Roomkey at the Grand Hotel and is still there a year later, told KTLA.
He added that it may help city planners and officials consider the perspectives of the people they intend to move and help, before designing programs for them.
Despite outcry from community members like Sens, and criticism from other groups, many city leaders feel that clearing the park was the right move.
“The situation that existed at Echo Park Lake prior to March 2021 was not safe for anyone – housed or unhoused, many of whom were being victimized themselves,” L.A. City Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell said in a statement shared with the news outlet.
“The claim that the City ‘staged a police invasion’ is untrue. What actually happened was a three-month outreach process that led to a warm handoff to LAHSA and transitional housing placements for nearly 200 people who had been living in a dangerous, deadly environment.”
O’Farrell added that people were living in “squalor and filth” in the community that he said had rampant, open-air drug use, attacks, reported prostitution and trafficking.
Since the removal of the encampment last spring O’Farrell said crime is down significantly in the park and surrounding neighborhood.
In the conclusion of the UCLA report, authors said the crime may be down without the encampment, but that doesn’t mean that the intended programs are working to serve the community members that were displaced.
“No one is more eager to believe in the 'voucher promise,' than our unhoused comrades who have been in carceral isolation in Project Roomkey for a year now. They have spent most days of this year navigating the opaque bureaucracy of homeless services and managing their case manager,” authors wrote.
“Having filled out numerous applications and program enrollment forms, they feel victorious
when they have obtained a voucher. And yet, such a voucher does not guarantee housing. We remember Anthony “Tony” Goodwin, a Black unhoused veteran in Van Nuys, who died on the street with a Section 8 housing voucher in hand.”
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