Today, Explained - The Echo Park eviction

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

The recent police crackdown on a tent camp in Los Angeles has left the city divided. One thing everyone agrees on is the dire need for lasting solutions to the growing homelessness crisis in the United States. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. If you've never been to Echo Park in Los Angeles, you actually probably have. Like you've probably seen it in movies or TV shows or commercials because it's a very popular filming location. Okay, pal, let's have us a big smile. To be truly effective, a good narcotics agent must know and love narcotics. In fact, a good narcotics agent should have narcotics in his blood. It has this very scenic view of the downtown skyline and this large 14-acre lake, very picturesque,

has this gorgeous fountain protruding from the middle. Often people are on little swan boats making their way around the lake. I wonder how the potato prints would feel about us walking together around a moonlit lake. And it really provides a vital role in the neighborhood itself.

This is a neighborhood where a lot of people live in apartments. This is their only green space. It has walking paths, playgrounds, exercise equipment. The park's part of the eponymous neighborhood of Echo Park. Echo Park is one of these neighborhoods in the city, just like a lot of places in L.A., that was redlined. So you do have this moment where the federal government decided that it wasn't worth investing in or that people shouldn't be moving there if they weren't of a certain class or race, which was white people. And so you had this another influx of residents, mostly Latino, working class Latino community

that really made Echo Park what it is today. And you'll never guess what happens next. And then what we have after that is this moment where a lot more whiter, wealthier people decided to move back into a lot of these neighborhoods. Wow.

When did Echo Park become so hip and happening? The only time you moved here. Ouch. And moving into a lot of the housing stock, which hadn't really been increased during this time. You know, over the last few years, we just haven't built enough housing in many parts of Los Angeles, which means that there was a lot of displacement, a lot of gentrification, and a lot of neighborhood change that maybe didn't take into consideration the people that lived there.

And really, it really has also become emblematic of how a lot of neighborhoods are changing in LA in a way that might not include who has been there the longest. Alyssa Walker is the West Coast correspondent for Curbed, and we asked her to tell us about Echo Park because this corner of Los Angeles recently became a low-key war zone over the issue of homelessness. Homelessness in the United States grew for the fourth consecutive year in 2020. Something like half a million people are unhoused in this country, and no state has a larger number of unhoused people than California. Something like 70,000 people in Los Angeles alone. And in Los Angeles, people without homes have been taking up residence in some of the city's prized public spaces, including Echo Park. There were always people that were, you know, sleeping in the park, staying in the park. And then the pandemic hits, right?

So then we have more people who are facing job losses, evictions, even though they're not supposed to happen. And the number of tents at the lake just started to increase as every month of the pandemic went on. And I would say even doubled again, particularly over the last three months of earlier this year, just because I think the situation is becoming so dire. Especially we had some of these emergency shelters and winter shelters were starting to close, and there's no permanent place for people to go. About a year ago, I started talking to some of the people who lived at this far north corner of the park where there were kind of a cluster of tents. What this community of people were saying was the park where there were kind of a cluster of tents. What this community of people were saying was the park was the only place that they had ever felt safe. My name is David Bush Lilly. You could identify me as a longtime LA homeless activist who found himself at Echo Park in the last year. Well, about 40 years ago, I was a bus mechanic for the city of Los Angeles. I did finally find myself homeless. About last August, I started traveling around to various little areas of Southern California, looking at

other homeless encampments, and I kept circling back to Echo Park. And for the last 20 years, I had been sleeping on sidewalks, either in a tent or a lot of times just with my sleeping bag on a doorstep. But Echo Park to me was actually after 20 years, the first time I was ever to find a place as a homeless person to pitch a tent, sleep, and find some peace and quiet off the sidewalk. Echo Park was a piece of paradise for everybody who came there. You had a community that we called Echo Park Rise Up, where we had actually banded together, created our own showers, created a community kitchen, had an employment program even going, and a beautiful community garden. To some people who would look at it and see disorder, there were just as many people who looked at it and saw life, and saw saw community and saw people in a common struggle for

us all to make a way forward in this world. And it was a beautiful setting. It just made it healing for everybody. And it's all illegal. Well, depending on who you ask, because if you think about it, we were using the parks and rec centers as temporary housing, as emergency housing for homeless residents for months. You know, I'm not trying to make it seem like it was a completely safe or, you know, utopian situation. There were people who had problems that were there. There were people who died in the park. There was violence. There was people who were, you know, told to leave because they were hurting other people. All this continues to make those who bought houses nearby like Riley Montgomery frustrated and fearful. Now, everyone I've talked to, they're afraid to go. They're afraid to go

there. We're talking there's assaults, there's crime. Okay, so you've got this tent city in this crown jewel park in Los Angeles, a bunch of locals who aren't happy about it. How does this come to a head? There started to be these rumors floating around. People who lived in the camp, homeless service providers, a large group of advocates who had been among the groups that had been supplying food and water and different services to people who live in the park. And the rumor was it was going to happen on Thursday of the following week and that everyone was going to be cleared out of the park

and that a fence was going to go up around the perimeter of a 16-acre space. And when the city council member, his name is Michio Farrell, was asked about this plan, he gave a few details, but he really wouldn't tell exactly what was going to happen or when. The cleanup of Echo Park is a project by City Councilman Mitch O'Farrell, who says the park is now in need of half a million dollars of repairs after being used as a makeshift tent city for months. It is one of the crown jewels of the Los Angeles park system, and we're going to return it to that standard. So on Wednesday, March 24th, which is the morning of the raid, the residents of the lake got together and they held a press conference. We have nowhere else to

go. Activists and the homeless marched from the park to council member Mitch O'Farrell's office, shutting down Sunset Boulevard for a short time. They say homelessness is a complex crisis, and so far city officials have only offered Band-Aid type solutions. So Wednesday evening, there is all of a sudden this police presence that descends upon the lake. These trucks filled with fencing start driving to all four corners of the lake. And I would say easily 400 cops show up and almost immediately start putting on riot gear. Yeah, Mark, this is a very active scene, very tense scene, as you can see live behind me here. You can see all the activists and protesters in a face-off with a line of police officers here on Glendale Boulevard. We're at Glendale and Santa Ynez. This is just one of at least two skirmish lines we know of here along the scene. You can see how many officers we're talking about here at Santa Ynez. They stretch all the way across the street. They also fill...

What we realized later, you know, as we're all watching this happen, is that this is so the Parks Department can start installing a giant fence on the far corner of the other side of the park, which starts to go up in the cover of night. And that night ended kind of abruptly when the police department just decided to leave, and the announcement that was made was that the fence was going to go up, and if you were in the park that night, you could stay in the park that night, but you would be fenced in, and you would not be allowed to go in or out.

And when you woke up in the morning, you had to leave. So Thursday morning, the people who wake up in the park, many of them were greeted by outreach workers from our local homelessness services agency. And that process was going really well. I think people were making connections. There were people being loaded onto vehicles that were being taken to shelters or hotels as part of these temporary living situations. So all the streets around the park are closed and closed off by police who are patrolling the neighborhood. They opted to have a vigil right outside of that blockade, just where they could sit and quietly, you know, remember where they had lived in the mentioned, we are now 30 minutes away from the city imposed deadline for all homeless individuals to leave Echo Park here. That order at 10 30 p.m. Let me step out, give you a live look at the scene right here. LAPD having a massive presence here at the intersection of Glendale and Park. They've been staging here all night long and it appears they're preparing for something here in the next 30 minutes or so. And that's the night that I think a lot of people who were paying attention at the

national level saw 180 people arrested, at least a dozen journalists detained, which is very rare for a situation like this, that journalists would be detained, journalists who are very clearly marked. Wait, I'm like Spectrum News 1. They have my name. Wait, I have to stay with my crew. They have their... Okay, you'll be fine. I have to stay with my crew. And a lot of people who got hurt that night

were just people who lived in the neighborhood. One woman was tackled by police officers. I think a lot of people, again, were just really taken aback by the decision to deploy a very militaristic response to what was honestly at that by that time that morning, there were probably only a dozen people that were still in the park. Where did the people who were in the park go? The city released some statements that over 200 people had been placed into housing. Today, city leaders called it a success.

Gratified. I'm gratified that we've housed nearly 200 people since January. One of the programs is Project Roomkey. The city pays motels to house homeless for weeks or months at a time. This is the largest housing transition of an encampment ever in the city's history. And we got a report about a week later from the Homeless Services Agency that they had placed 153 people. But what we started to find out

was that people were given offers that maybe expired a few days later, like some of the winter shelters were actually closed. Some people were taken to motels that were very far away from Echo Park, and people have jobs that they needed to get to, and they, you know, would have to find a way to come back and work nearby. And some people, once they got to a place, especially for Project Roomkey, learned about rules that the hotels have. But you're actually not allowed to leave after seven o'clock at night. You can't bring your pets. If you want to take an offer to get a bed or a bathroom or go inside, you have to agree

to what they say. And that just doesn't work for everybody in every situation. In a minute, whether putting people without homes in hotels could solve this crisis. Thank you. software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained.

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. All right, so the issue of homelessness in Los Angeles got so bad that people started setting up tent cities and parks. Then the city council, the mayor, were all like, this will not stand and kicked them out.

They put a bunch of them in motels and hotels, a program called Project Roomkey. We wanted to hear more about that program and what programs like it can do to alleviate homelessness across the country. To find out, we got in touch with Ananya Roy. She's the director of UCLA's Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. So hotels as housing is an interesting idea. It's a convergence of many different crises and opportunities. Because precisely at this current moment, there are thousands of vacant hotel rooms. Many of these hotel chains are not going to be able to make a comeback. And so the idea is to use this kind of property as housing. But also, interestingly, it turns out that during a public health emergency, local government and state governments have the power to commandeer property like hotels for the public good, especially for the protection of life.

And indeed, that power has gone unused by LA and other city and state governments, but it also allows us then to think about what I call a public stake in property. Wall Street entities like Blackstone are already on a shopping spree for these hotel chains. So wouldn't it be a good idea to think about how this kind of property can in fact be repurposed for the public good of housing, which we need in large quantities? Was that tried during the pandemic in Los Angeles? So the state of California has had an innovative program called Project Room Key, initiated by Governor Newsom. During the pandemic, remember that number, 70,000 people homeless in LA County?

Well, the city said, we're going to mobilize 15,000 hotel rooms to house people. Well, at last count, that number is 1,716 rooms. So Project Roomkey has not met its numbers. The LA Times broke a story that showed that the city of LA never even applied for the FEMA reimbursements that are promised Project Roomkey. Why is that? Why were only a thousand some odd rooms acquired? And why didn't the city of Los Angeles apply for the FEMA funding that was committed? That's literally a multi-million dollar question because it means the city has left millions of dollars on the table. And really, the Biden administration has said that FEMA reimbursements

will be 100% retroactive, and that paperwork has not been submitted. And in some ways, I think what the Echo Park Lake displacement has shown is that a program like Project Roomkey can be weaponized, by which I mean that people were placed in Project Roomkey rooms as a way to justify the displacement, Project Roomkey will expire. So when we advocate for hotels as housing, we mean really thinking about this at a much larger scale and then thinking about what cities like Vancouver have been doing, which is to really think about the conversion of these publicly acquired hotels into permanent housing so that people are not shuffled through these many forms of temporary and interim shelter. You mentioned Vancouver. Has this been tried elsewhere with success,

or have there been failures when this was tried elsewhere? How's this gone outside of California? So the idea of hotels as housing has been tried in various European cities as a form of housing primarily for asylum seekers and those who are designated as refugee populations. I think there are important lessons to be drawn there, that it cannot be temporary. It cannot feel like a hotel room, that it's very possible to convert these into small apartments where people, for example, can cook their own meal, where they feel that they can have a home life. In Vancouver, what is underway is, in fact, a massive public acquisition of hotels to turn these into permanent social housing. And I think that is a model to watch for sure.

And if they could scale up something like Project Room Key, I wonder how far would that go to creating long-term solutions to the housing crisis in this country and to the crisis of unhoused people that we have in this country? So the crisis of housing in the United States is one that can be solved. We have the resources to do so. It might be a matter of political will, but it is also a matter of thinking about housing in broad terms.

So the first, given the looming eviction crisis in LA and across the country, so just in LA, the institute I direct has been estimating that half a million renter households are at risk of eviction when the eviction courts reopen later this year. If we think things are bad now, they're going to get a lot worse. So the first thing that needs to happen is to keep people in their homes through policies of rent relief and rent debt cancellation. If we think that is expensive, it is much more expensive to rehouse people once they're unhoused. The second is that the corporate and Wall Street acquisition of residential property has to be regulated. Wall Street went on a buying spree

after having caused the subprime crisis and deepened its grip on residential property, including those used by low-income tenants. These Wall Street entities now are going to become the country's largest landlords. That has to be regulated. The third is that we need a mass expansion of low-income housing stock. And whether that is about through building new housing, or it is about converting existing property into housing, all of that needs to be on the table in order to meet the housing need that exists. Well, it's nice to hear you say you think this problem, which seems as old as time, can be solved. Well, I don't know if it's as old as time. I think that we need to think about how homelessness has vastly expanded since the 1980s. It's not to say

homelessness didn't exist, right? Housing precarity existed. But in many of our cities, such as Los Angeles, New York, there were forms of housing that allowed people to survive. Some of them were single-room occupancy hotels, SROs. Some of them were different kinds of communal living, right? Those have been wiped out as our cities have gentrified since the 1980s. And so, in fact, there has been a quite deliberate set of policy decisions that have expanded homelessness. And I think the research is very clear on this, that this is about a systematic unhousing of people rather than a problem that has always existed. So this is not to say that housing precarity will not exist, but it does not

need to exist at this scale and scope. My name is Jessica Mendez, but I would love to be known as the queen. That's what everybody knows me as and calls me, the queen. I've been in Echo Park since 1990. I immigrated from Mexico, so I'm a proud Mexican. My mother sold corn on the corner of Sunset and Logan for 16 years. My father sold shoes and playlist shoes. So that park has been what I've seen as my backyard for all my life, for my whole life. I was working up in San Jose as an electrician, but I have six daughters that I come and see here. And they didn't want to move out there. So what I would do is every two weeks, I would come down. Five hours before I'm due to go back to San Jose,

a car runs me over. A car runs me over and I find myself in the hospital for two months and having to have three different surgeries, skin grafts, spine taps. Like I got Bell's palsy. And through that, like the bills didn't stop And through that, the bills didn't stop. The bills didn't stop.

I lost my home up in San Jose. And you don't have money and you're not working and you can't pay the bills. And one thing led to another. And so that was a consequence. I never expected to be without a home after having three cars and having this property and having a good career. I never imagined I would ever have that. home after having three cars and having this property and having, you know, a good career. I never imagined I would ever have that. Things are going to get a lot, lot worse in the United States in the next few years. At the moment,

we continue to have a CDC-mandated moratorium on evictions. That will end this summer. When the eviction courts reopen, and we're already seeing a ramping up of evictions, millions of American households will lose their housing and a significant proportion of those millions will become homeless. We think encampments in parks right now are an issue. The Great Depression saw encampments all through cities. Central Park, if you can imagine it, was filled with what we would call squatter settlements. They were called Hoovervilles after the then President Hoover, who didn't do much about any of this.

We're going to see so many Garcettivilles and Bidenvilles across the country. That, I think, should wake the country up because all of that is avoidable. All of it can be changed if the right policies are put into place at the right time. Ananya Roy is a professor of urban planning, social welfare, and geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Police Department is currently investigating how it handled the clearing of the Echo Park encampment

as well as the protests that ensued. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. This is Today Explained. The show is made by Cecilia Lay, Will Reed, Muj Zaydi, Miles Bryan, Victoria Chamberlain, and Halima Shah. Afim Shapiro is our engineer, and we had some clutch engineering help this week from Paul Mouncey. Laura Bullard's our fact checker, music by Breakmaster Cylinder, and Noam Hassenfeld.

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