Lessons learned from the clearing of the Echo Park Lake homeless encampment

Defining success in public policy is a tricky business. One problem is that politicians achieve success in their careers by evading definitions.

Here’s an example. “We must solve the problem of homelessness.”

Yes, everyone will agree with that. Now the hard part.

Define “the problem.” Many people define the problem as the proliferation of tent encampments, public drug use, untreated mental illness, filth and garbage on sidewalks, streets, freeway embankments, and public spaces including parks. Other people define the problem as an insufficient number of free apartments with wrap-around supportive services.

Now define “solve.” Some people might define “solve” as “to rapidly provide emergency shelters and enforce city ordinances against camping on sidewalks, streets and other public spaces.” Other people would define “solve” as “to construct a sufficient number of free apartments with wrap-around supportive services.”

So even though everybody’s nodding in agreement when a politician declares that we must solve the problem of homelessness, we’re not getting anywhere.

Consider the example of the Echo Park Lake homeless encampment that was cleared last March over the objections of activists and university professors. The encampment in the public park had become something like a massive commune occupied by more than a hundred people. It had kitchens and showers, and according to neighboring residents, “a lot of fighting and a lot of drugs.”

However, a new report from the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy describes what was “built and sustained at Echo Park Lake” as “the infrastructures of community envisioned by unhoused organizers.”

After the City of Los Angeles cleared the Echo Park encampment last year, a process the UCLA report calls “the violent eviction of the unhoused community,” sanitation crews removed an accumulated 35.7 tons of solid waste, including 723.5 pounds of biological waste and 300 pounds of hazardous waste. Before it be could be reopened to the public, the park – which had been refurbished just eight years before at a cost of $45 million – needed an estimated $600,000 in such repairs as “restroom improvements,” “replacing five drinking fountains,” “improving light poles,” replacing “handrails and planks” on the lake bridge, “refurbishing the park’s turf” and “improving the park’s irrigation.”

It almost sounds as if “the infrastructures of community” were built by tapping into the park’s electricity and water lines and ripping pieces of wood off anything available.

Once the city took action to close the park for repairs, the residents of the encampment were offered a place to stay. Many of the placements were made to Project Roomkey hotels and motels, where residents were given a hotel room, three meals a day, laundry service, round-the-clock security, and on-site services from social workers and nurses.

This enraged a coalition of faculty members from UCLA, USC, UC Irvine and Occidental College, who wrote to the mayor to complain that some of these hotels were in locations “as distant as Palmdale.”

Define success. If people living in a tent encampment are instead housed in a hotel and provided with meals and services, is that a success? Not according to the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.  Project Roomkey is “carceral isolation,” the new report says.

The report’s authors analyzed data provided by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) and found that of the 183 Echo Park residents who were on the official list of people seeking placements, only 17 have been placed “in what we classify to be housing,” and four of them found it through their own means. Four others were placed in Project Homekey apartments, converted from hotel rooms. Four were in subsidized rentals, and five were in permanent supportive housing. Fifteen returned to homelessness somewhere else, and LAHSA completely lost touch with 82 people.

But last May, Echo Park Lake was reopened to the public, cleaned and repaired, with a new playground surface for children. The LAPD said violent crime reports had dropped by half since the park’s closure.

Define success.

In 2016, 77% of voters in the city of Los Angeles agreed to pay $1.2 billion plus interest for bonds to build housing for the homeless. The average per-unit cost in 2021 was nearly $600,000, with some units costing up to $830,000.

Define failure.

Write Susan at Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley.