What is going on in Echo Park

On Wednesday, March 24th, a crowd gathered to protest the removal of unhoused people from Echo Park Lake. It was known that there was a plan by the city to do this but there was no official timeline known to the public or the residents of the park until just days before. The city intends to remove the people living in the park and place them in temporary shelters or housing, then fence the park and renovate it, which is surprising as they renovated the park recently in 2019 with similar circumstances. It would appear good that the city is making an effort to get people into housing, but the situation is much more complicated than that. Temporary housing programs that place people in shelters or hotels impose strict rules like curfews that can be nearly impossible for people to stick to and make people feel demeaned and infantilized. Shelters also often have only a short period of time in which one is permitted to stay. Each of these options is likely to find someone once again without a safe place to stay. Even if this option was better for unhoused people, there are only a limited number of rooms available via Project Roomkey, a program designed to give unhoused people exposed to Covid a place to stay to isolate. This is clearly not the long term solution that anyone is looking for. The Echo Park Lake encampment served as sort of a safe haven for unhoused people in LA. The people there have formed a community where they protect and provide for each other. The community has their own set of rules and regulations to keep their space safe and clean. LA Times says the park has “evolv[ed] into a commune-like society with a shared pantry, a garden, a veneer of self-policing and a tenuous grasp on basic sanitation.” Displacing the people who have made their homes here is not going to help them unless they are offered long term housing and support, which appears to barely be in the scope of Councilmember O’Farrell’s plan. There is power and safety in number and this is what the people living at Echo Park have found. Unless a permanent solution can be offered, the Echo Park Lake encampment is one of the safest places for an unhoused person in LA to be and it is dangerous inhumane to displace so many people without a long-lasting way to help them.

There is so much more to this that what was mentioned here, other things one might consider looking into are the history of Echo Park, Project Roomkey, Project Housekey, the tiny homes being built, how shelters operate, homelessness and covid, among many many other things. Like all issues, it is an interconnected web of many intersecting things and this must be taken into account when researching and searching for solutions.

Annika Near-Ansari, for LA Youth Climate Activism @la.yca