By Owen Mar
The following piece is part of Progressive City’s “Keeping the ‘Public’ in Public Space” series, which asks authors to address the way public spaces are governed, restricted and/or policed, in addition to the role of planning in both enabling and contesting the enclosure of public space. Of special concern are policies, designs and practices that limit the use of public spaces, formally or informally, based on the race, gender, sexuality, disability and national origin of people. More information about this series can be found here.
In 2019, the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count recorded that there were 58,936 people experiencing homelessness residing within Los Angeles County. In 2020, this number jumped to 66,436—a 12.7% increase from the year before. The City of Los Angeles itself saw a 16.1% rise.
This percentage increase was significant. The Los Angeles Homeless Authority (LAHSA), the joint City-County agency responsible for the Homeless Count, boasted of deep investment in housing programs to address homelessness in the same report: over 700 new permanent supportive housing units opened in 2019, with a total construction pipeline of over 10,000. In the three years leading up to 2020, the City doubled the number of homeless people placed into housing.
Despite the Authority’s efforts to address homelessness, its programs did not make enough of a dent. Perhaps the scale of the problem was simply too great.
Among those homeless in Los Angeles County in 2020, 48,041 were unsheltered. In the City itself, this number was 28,852. Those sheltered represented 28% of the County’s homeless population and 30% of the City’s—a far cry from New York City’s robust shelter system, which provides shelter for nearly 95% of homeless New Yorkers on any given night.
With 70% of homeless Angelenos experiencing life without shelter, it was perhaps unsurprising that people turned to each other to practice dignified ways of living in public. If the City wouldn’t provide them with dignified living conditions, they would—housing or not. Nowhere else was this more clear than Echo Park Lake.
In November 2019, a few homeless residents pitched tents around the lake in Echo Park. By 2020, there were about one hundred. The local City Councilmember, Mitch O’Farrell, believed that many of these individuals had chosen homelessness. In reality, many had become homeless because of their material realities: getting fired from a job; unable to pay rent. Many had been harassed out of other parts of LA and had heard about the encampment as a place of refuge. Many were people of color; many were fleeing gendered violence. With public restrooms and clean, running water, the park provided access to basic human needs that other parts of the city did not.
In the months leading up to the pandemic, the population of the park grew significantly, giving way to the prospect of true community on its grounds. With growth came visibility. This meant police sweeps and dispersal orders. Police would consistently harass the tenants of the lake through unlawful arrests on charges that were quickly dismissed and sweeps used to separate tenants from their belongings over and over again (p. 133).
In January 2020, when yet another sweep began, residents were ready. Housed residents came out to support those of the encampment. The community successfully defended itself against displacement. And then they did it again and again—at least four times.
On March 13th, 2020, Los Angeles shut down. Following the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the City paused its sweeps. As noted in UCLA Luskin’s excellent report, (Dis)Placement: The Fight for Housing and Community After Echo Park Lake, without the threat of persistent displacement, residents of the park were able to build “some of the most sophisticated infrastructure and programming ever constructed in an unauthorized settlement in Los Angeles.”
The unhoused tenants of the encampment were able to exercise ways of being together they had not previously been afforded. Taking ownership over their own lives, they became the stewards of the park. Without reliance on the City and County—and incited by the City and County’s failure to meet their basic needs—the encampment residents built their own self-governed and democratically controlled community within the Park consisting of a set of rules, a group of regulators who enforced compliance, a mutual aid program, a jobs program, a shower program, a community garden, and a community kitchen.
The encampment did not exist in a vacuum—its reactions to the rhythms of repression strengthened its autonomy. As described on Echo Park Rise Up’s GoFundMe page, when the Mayor cut funding for showers during the pandemic, the community built their own. When the City cut the community’s water supply, they organized to secure gallons of water from their supporters. Over time, as the City repeatedly refused to provide utilities to the community, the tenants of the encampment, in partnership with their allies, figured out how to provide their own.
As one of the organizers of the encampment contended: “[LA has] no actual plan [for homelessness]. This—this is a plan….Homelessness isn’t going anywhere in the next decade. Why can’t we make outside living just as nice as Hilton living?”
The encampment was not just concerned with defense against the City’s criminalization of its existence. The motivating principle of the community underscoring its own survival was that everyone deserved care. One resident describes exactly this, recounting the moment that they decided to become sober:
“ I came to just lay in the park one day, I was kind of high, you know, I was coming down and some people came and talked to me and they were like you know, why don’t you get yourself off that stuff…they told me some stories about…people…overdosing and dying in their tents and…[I’ve been sober] so far for almost a week now.”
Put simply, they continue: “people here…care like, just for no reason, too. Just because you’re in the same situation…they’ll just come up and talk to you.”
The Echo Park Rise Up GoFundMe page describes this breakdown of individualism: “Amidst all the drama of L.A.P.D and city harassment we’ve been able to come together as one community; both ‘unhoused’ and ‘housed.’ What we’ve discovered is that there really is nothing but love. Separation is an illusion.”
Encampment residents demonstrated that it was possible to live in ways that prioritized people over profit and community over property. Though this may seem utopian, the community maintained a healthy dose of realism too. They still needed money. Thanks to the organizer of the GoFundMe, a former homeless services worker who quit to organize with the encampment residents when her morals diverged from those of the City, the community was able to secure almost $60,000 in funding.
One of the first initiatives that the residents of the lake created was an official jobs program. The first members of the jobs program also made up an unhoused Board of Directors, whose role was to “meet, discuss, and vote on issues that arose in the encampment, such as how to spend funds and delegate work.” The initial phase of this program employed 10 unhoused residents and paid each of them $10 an hour to conduct tasks like cooking, cleaning up trash, and other maintenance. The employment ecosystem was fully run and worked by the unhoused members who sustained it.
The Board of Directors also served as the authority on removing members of the park if they broke its rules too many times. The rules themselves were simple: don’t steal from each other, and if you do any drugs—do them in your tent. Rather than criminalize poverty through sweeps or evictions, the rules prioritized safety and harm reduction, grounded in the lived experience of those who created them.
Despite its impermanence, the experiment of Echo Park offered a glimpse of what the world could look like outside of commercial real estate and financialization. The tenants of Echo Park Lake were the planners of their community, free from the constraints of a market that dictates what can go where and the need to generate wealth. They received financing from their neighbors who had access to capital, and distributed these resources to maintain a self-sustaining economy built off of care and exchange rather than profit. This environment broke down the lines that typically separate the housed and unhoused to form a cohesive, non-hierarchical program that privileged human life over financial returns. Unbeholden to the preservation of property values, the community’s presence challenged the foundation of real estate built off perpetual appreciation.
I moved to Los Angeles in early 2021 during a semester off from college. Unlike in the northeast where I’m from, homelessness in LA is always visible. After hearing about the Echo Park encampment two months into my move, I decided to get involved with Street Watch LA, a sub-group of the Democratic Socialists of America. The group organized around homelessness and tenant rights through eviction defense and mutual aid. Members of this group would distribute food, clothing, phone chargers, and Narcan to residents of the encampment.
In March of 2021, approximately 200 hundred people were living around the lake. On March 24, hundreds of LAPD officers surrounded the park to initiate the permanent eviction of its residents. Some even faced eviction at gunpoint. One resident described helicopters and smoke bombs—a mirror image of war. Amid the manufactured terror of displacement and disorientation, city contractors constructed a fence around the perimeter of the park. The next morning, on March 25, those who had successfully refused eviction were trapped.
The same day, I received a text from Street Watch LA to gather at Echo Park Lake for a vigil to “seek citywide cooperation and support in coming days to stop the shutdown of LA’s largest self-run homeless haven.”
I remember arriving at the park’s outskirts and seeing the fence. Three LAPD helicopters were concentrated above us and the park. I had shown up, along with my neighbors, to defend the homeless community’s right to stay put. There were about two hundred of us. In front of us, about one hundred police. White people were instructed to move to the front of the group to put our bodies between the blockade of officers and protesters of color. Upfront I got a better look at the scale of the operation. The fence seemed to go almost the entire length of the park, but my view was mostly blocked by the officers in front of me. They held batons and riot shields and their methods were violent. They broke at least one protestor’s arm.
At one point, the police instructed us to disperse, stating that the protest was unlawful. Some of us ran away and escaped. Most of us retreated slowly backwards with our arms interlinked. Unfortunately for us, we could not successfully exit. Almost as soon as the protest had been declared unlawful, about two hundred more officers appeared behind us, effectively blocking us from leaving (this practice is called kettling, a controversial crowd control tactic that police have used against numerous protest movements).
After we realized there was no choice but to stay, the police announced that we were all under arrest. Slowly and methodically, they zip-tied almost 200 of us and we all went to jail, with most released some hours after arrest. Our crime, as I understood it, was that our support for the encampment was in direct opposition to the City’s intended use for public space. The park was for recreation, not for living. For being maintained as an asset. Never mind the people who did not have homes. Never mind those that turned to the park to build a home together instead of waiting around for shelter that never came. Of course the charges were dropped, as they were not based on legality.
As stated by a member of the community during their eviction: “What was so terrifying about a hundred people living in the park that the city needed a military operation to get rid of us?” (p. 140).
After the eviction, the park was returned to its original function and its value to the housed residents of the neighborhood was restored. One might think that some of this value would have been recaptured and directed toward programs addressing homelessness. The data one year after eviction tells a different story: while most of the encampment residents had been offered housing, only 17 were confirmed to be living in long-term housing, with the LAHSA losing track of almost one hundred other residents that it had been monitoring. These statistics beg the question: who was the eviction intended to benefit? Unmet promises of housing reveal that the operation was no more than a tactic to preserve the neighborhood’s financial value. The fence walling off the park from visitors was kept up for two years after the community’s eviction to prevent their return.
In 2020, one homeowner living in Echo Park expressed worry that the encampment would have a negative impact on his mortgage, where the majority of his wealth was held. Through the eviction, the city made sure that this homeowner’s worries did not come true. Though many of us might find it difficult to sympathize with this neighbor, the reality is that a significant number of Americans own their homes—and for many of them, this is where most of their wealth lies. If one’s livelihood is tied directly to the appreciation of the value of their home, how can we expect home, shelter, and community to be understood as anything more than an asset? Until we effectively decouple property from wealth, private and public institutions will do everything in their power to ensure that moments like the Echo Park encampment are no more than temporary loss of cash flow on a spreadsheet.
We cannot wait around for housing to be decommodified. The emergence of alternative housing ownership structures around the globe shows us that an entire world exists outside of policy and real estate, among the everyday lives of the homeless and housing insecure—born out of necessity by those whom urban development has failed.
Home is home, not an asset. This is what the community that sprouted on the lake’s shores reminds us.
Note: as defined by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonard Vilchis, I use tenant in this piece to denote anyone who does not own their home.
owen mar is an artist and spatial practitioner working across urban planning, writing, and visual media. His work explores and proposes emergent conditions within and outside of sanctioned life. By day, he works as an urban planner for the State of New York, overseeing the development of affordable housing.