LA City Council votes 13-2 to resume cleanups at local homeless encampments
On Dec. 1, the Los Angeles City Council voted 13-2 to resume CARE+ cleanups at three specific homeless encampments. Councilmembers Mike Bonin and David E. Ryu opposed the motion.
Councilmember Joe Buscaino proposed the motion, which allows the city to resume cleanups at South Beacon Street and Gulch Road in San Pedro, and two sites in Harbor City. One is at W. 253rd Street and McCoy Avenue, the other is at Figueroa Avenue and W. East Street.
The purpose of these cleanups is to improve public health, and ensure the encampments leave at least 36 inches of sidewalk for the pedestrians to use. Procedure calls for the posting of signs announcing the cleanup and giving people at least 24 hours to move their belongings. Anyone remaining in the encampment is forced to take only what they can carry in 60-gallon bins — city employees throw the rest of their items away.
CARE+ cleanups were suspended by the city council in March due to the pandemic. They resumed in July — in another motion introduced by City Councilman Joe Buscaino — but only in special cleaning zones surrounding Bridge Homes, which are city-run homeless shelters.
Gabriela Medina, district director for Buscaino, told the Dec. 1 meeting of the Council District 15 working group on homelessness that resumption of the cleanups was a big win for his boss.
“The same way that councilmember Joe Buscaino is supportive of solutions, he’s also very supportive of rules and orders on our street,” Medina said.
Medina said opponents of CARE+ based their arguments on assumptions and lies.
Medina said that Buscaino’s office contacted LA Sanitation, the Los Angeles Fire Department and other city entities to make sure the cleanups were done responsibly.
“We just can’t afford any mistakes,” Medina said. “There’s so much … attention on this topic alone, and by so many individuals in the City of Los Angeles, that we want to make sure that we prove them wrong, and show them that these cleanups come from a compassionate side, and are meant to bring a healthy balance between those that are unsheltered and those that are sheltered.”
Amber Sheikh, who heads the Council District 15 Working Group on Homelessness, said she was divided on whether or not this was a positive thing.
“Right now we are in a public health crisis,” Sheikh said. “Everyone is in a public health crisis. Our housed and our unhoused. And we do need to resume some kind of cleanup, I think, at our encampments. I don’t know if it needs to be to the level of what people refer to as sweeps.”
Sheikh pointed out that the cleanups also come with services, such as showers, bathrooms and service providers. In addition, homeless encampments are often used as a dumping ground by people who are not homeless, and said trash needs to be cleaned from time to time.
Some members of the public saw the motion differently.
“Sweeps are violent,” said Stevie, a member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union. “We need house keys, not handcuffs. It is absolutely unconscionable to take the most vulnerable among us in the middle of a raging pandemic that Los Angeles has done nothing to get under control, and do exactly the opposite of what the CDC says we need to be doing.”
Stevie said that not only do the sweeps put homeless people at risk of catching COVID-19, they steal their stuff. She invited the council
members to actually attend one of the cleanups.
“Joe [Buscaino] is nothing more than a cop,” Stevie said. “[He] wants to hide Los Angeles’ failures. We have 67,000 people experiencing homelessness. That’s not because 67,000 people are irresponsible, that’s because our city is a failure.”
Community member Stacy Dawson Stearns argued that CARE+ teams were actually the opposite of their name.
“Once again we have an example of a heinous thing being packaged for the public as something good, but it’s not,” she said. “Sweeps are citysanctioned acts of extreme violence against our most vulnerable Angelenos.”
She also said that there was no logic in resuming cleanups now—as COVID-19 infection rates are higher now than when the cleanups initially stopped.
On Nov. 24, only a week before the motion was passed, the city council referred back to committee a motion that would allow the city to police where homeless people can sit or sleep. The motion would prevent homeless people from staying within 500 feet of freeway overpasses, underpasses, ramps, tunnels, or pedestrian subways. In addition, the motion would ban homeless people from sitting or sleeping within 500 feet of a homeless shelter or safe parking area.
However, in San Pedro alone, there are 575 homeless people, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s 2020 homeless count, while there are only 140 beds available in shelters. 100 are in the city’s bridge home temporary shelter, and the other 40 are in the county’s temporary shelter, and all are occupied. However, there are other options available, such as Project Roomkey, which allows for temporary shelter in hotel rooms, which will eventually become Project Homekey, a long-term version of the same program.
Sheikh said there’s a lack of understanding and education around the codes that the motion covers, and how it will be implemented.
“There’s a lot of kind of blanket language around anti-camping laws,” Sheikh said. “But truly it’s very, very specific to be ... within 500 feet of a shelter or freeways, and it still leaves, you know, something like 10,000 miles of sidewalk in LA available.”
Unfortunately, the San Pedro Bridge Home shelter will be reduced to 90 beds, as the Department of Public Health advised them to reduce the amount of people to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Medina said. The 10 people that leave will be referred to Project Roomkey, or other housing. The county shelter lost four beds for the same reason, and the six remaining people were also referred to Project Roomkey.