Fighting Back
How L.A.'s Homeless are Struggling to be Heard
Nina Travis had been couchsurfing before a short stay in Skid Row. Earlier this year, she moved to Poinsettia Park in Los Angeles hoping to find safety and acceptance. She and her boyfriend pitched their tent near a city power station on the east side of the park, which shares a border with West Hollywood, and began getting to know their new neighbors.
But it soon became clear to Travis that Poinsettia Park was beset by some of the same troubles she'd fled from on Skid Row. Police often showed up in response to calls from area residents about theft, drug abuse and prostitution. Travis was concerned that the conduct of some was criminalizing all homeless in the area. This time, instead of leaving, she decided to help.
Travis enlisted the aid of her "sister" who lived in the park to walk around and check in with those living there every couple of hours "like we're security." Law enforcement soon got word of Travis' "security walks" and approached her. She agreed to help the police keep the park safe.
By March, Travis had gotten to know some of the residents living nearby and had started working with a street watch team to help the park's homeless people organize and advocate for themselves. "I was helping the people at the park, and it was going good for a while," Travis says.
But pressure on civic leaders was mounting to clear the encampment out of the park.
In early July, L.A. Sanitation trucks arrived two days in a row for unannounced bulky-items pickups. A day later, a scheduled encampment sweep cleared out the last of the camp. Travis' tent was the only one remaining. Her tent-dwelling neighbors were gone, along with her efforts to organize them to fight for their right to stay.
Travis' experience is not unique. Across Los Angeles County, homeless people are working to make their voices heard in the political sphere. The notion of homeless people advocating for themselves may seem like a novel concept. But, according to interviews with over a dozen homeless residents, community advocates, law enforcement, and city officials, homeless people in L.A. vote, volunteer at polls, conduct community outreach, educate each other about legal rights, attend town halls and partner with local police forces to combat crime.
"L.A.'s homeless people are motivated," said Henriëtte Brouwers, the Associate Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department for nearly two decades. "They want to be heard." She added that the homeless mobilize by "creating a caring, empathetic, and understanding community." The homeless leaders of these efforts are successful because they have "been there through it all."
Los Angeles is not the only city where homeless people are mobilizing. Homeless communities throughout the nation are fighting to be heard. In New York, a team of homeless youth is advocating for legislation that would increase the maximum age of access to youth homeless shelters from 21 to 24. A grassroots homeless organization has initiated campaigns in Colorado and Oregon to pass a Homeless Bill of Rights. A project run by Yale and Wesleyan Universities in New Haven, Connecticut offers four months of self-advocacy classes to homeless citizens to empower them to participate in civic life. Describing the importance of these classes, Charles Barker of Wesleyan and Michael Rowe of Yale said, "The people we worked with needed to see themselves—and be seen—as full members of their neighborhoods and communities. They needed, in other words, to be citizens."
In 2016, Wes White, a homeless man in Salinas, California, tried to run for city council but was barred because he entered the race too late. However, in reviewing the decision to keep White off the ballot, a county judge noted that the city's laws presented a "formidable impediment to the exercise of the homeless' right to seek public office." White is now running for Mayor.
Here in Los Angeles, the voices of homeless people remain on the fringes of governmental policy and action despite their civic engagement. Unstable living conditions impede sustained community organizing and make voting difficult. A lack of access to technological and economic resources hinders communication efforts and cuts off channels to policymakers.
Traditional attempts to abate the homeless crisis using law enforcement, sanitation sweeps or temporary shelters oftentimes disrupt efforts by people like Nina Travis already underway within homeless communities. According to advocates and activists, the only way the city can solve this crisis is by amplifying and trusting homeless voices; they are experts in their own experience.
Mounting pressure on civic officials
Two weeks before the sweeps, Councilman Paul Koretz declared: "Solving the problem of the criminal homeless in the Poinsettia Park area is my top priority. And there isn't even a second priority. This is what has to get handled first."
On the night of July 8, encampment sweep notices were stapled on telephone poles notifying its residents of a scheduled sweep on July 11. Poinsettia's homeless residents went to sleep, anticipating they would have two full days to pack their possessions. The next morning, on July 9, Los Angeles Sanitation trucks pulled up alongside the encampment. According to Travis, only four people were present to watch as their belongings were thrown into the trucks. The city had initiated a "bulky items" pickup.
Both encampment sweeps and bulky-items removals require the city to provide 60-gallon bags for homeless people to store their possessions in. The city then stores these items for 90 days to allow individuals to retrieve their property. But while an encampment sweep requires the city to give three days' prior notice, a bulky-items pickup requires no such declaration.
"They were just rolling down the street, tossing everybody's tent inside a dumpster, cutting their tents, raking their tents. They really didn't look and see if anything was important, you know?" said Travis, describing the events of that fateful day. A second bulky-items pickup was carried out the next morning. Having lost many of their valuables in the two cleanups, nearly all the homeless residents had already left before July 11, the scheduled day of the encampment sweep. The scheduled sweep was carried out as planned, on a sidewalk that was nearly empty.
The sweeps broke up Travis' community. Her tent was the only one left on the sidewalk. According to Travis, the rest of her community was too afraid of the daily police presence to stay. The sweeps also ended her partnership with law enforcement.
"Homelessness isn't a crime. This wasn't about criminalizing the homeless. It was about the criminal element and activity...in the transient encampment here. There's a clear distinction of what went on and a sense of how the community felt about it," said Peter Nichols. Nichols heads the Melrose Action Neighborhood Watch, a community-based crime-watch group. Like Nichols, many in the neighborhood see July's sweeps as a success.
Around four or five months back, Koretz said that he started receiving calls and emails from community members concerned about the encampment. In August, Poinsettia Park hosted the National Night Out Against Crime, an annual event to celebrate community-police relations. At the event Koretz said, "I know this area has faced real challenges lately. There is a little ongoing homeless encampment that you know about. I think it really took a toll on this community."
The impact on people living in homes near the park is evident from public records of 311 service requests. These requests are used to access non-emergency municipal services including road and drainage repair and rodent control. Residents can also submit requests for bulky-items pickups and homeless encampment sweeps.
The data shows that requests marked "homeless encampment" or "bulky items" for 936 N Poinsettia Pl. — the address for the encampment's adjoining property — saw a sharp spike from February to July 2018. There were 50 requests in the month of March, more than 12 times the number of requests for the same month the previous year. Following July's sweeps, the number of requests has already declined markedly.
The graphic illustrates the pressure Koretz was under from the local community to evict the homeless residents from the park.
At the National Night Out, Koretz said that after he heard of complaints of criminal activity in the encampment, he demanded "a zero-tolerance policy" towards crimes: "We shouldn't let 'em off the hook, we shouldn't just coddle them. When things get as bad as they are in this area, I want to enforce every single law that we are making, and I wanna get criminals off the street. I think you saw the result here."
"We can't arrest ourselves out of this problem," said Timothy Estevez, Senior Lead Officer of the Los Angeles Police Deparment. As a community officer, it is Estevez's job to act as liaison between the community and the local police division.
"We weren't coming out here with a heavy-handed approach. It wasn't a 'zero tolerance policy' like the councilman said earlier. There's a humanitarian aspect to it. We understand the plight that they're in, we understand the conditions that they're in, whether it's a mental illness, whether it's a drug dependency... Obviously some people are down on their luck," Estevez added.
Poinsettia Park, under L.A. City's jurisdiction, lies right along the boundary between the 5th District of Los Angeles and the city of West Hollywood. In addition to the Los Angeles residents, people from the adjoining city of West Hollywood were also troubled by the homeless populace at their doorstep. Councilmember Lauren Meister of West Hollywood, for instance, remembers attending a neighborhood meeting about Poinsettia's encampment only to find several of her own constituents also in attendance.
While Meister's constituents were complaining about crime in the area, there was little her office could do because West Hollywood does not have jurisdiction over Poinsettia Park. Meister reached out to Koretz to offer her city's services. "There's no border when you're talking about how people move around; it doesn't matter whether it's L.A. or West Hollywood. That's the issue here," she said.
Homeless residents who attended the joint-city meetings reported feeling like outcasts. "I feel like I'm some type of infection or something. You know that TV show The Walking Dead? I feel like we're the living-walking dead because that's the way they treat us over here," said Otis Hubbard Jr, who had been a resident of the encampment for a few months before he moved to another spot sometime just before the sweep because he could not bear the constant police presence.
"A couple [of] squad cars sit out here every night and watch us do nothing. It makes you feel like you're quarantined or something, like we're not citizens," he said. Travis echoed this sentiment: "They called the homeless zombies...The people around here. They said that we're nothing but a bunch of walking dead zombies."
From the streets to the polls
The apathy of politicians towards the homeless populace can be explained in part by the fact that there is a general perception that people without homes do not vote. In 2016, for example, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said, "I think in the crass political world, these were people who quote-unquote 'didn't vote,' and therefore they didn't matter to some people...And I think that's sick, but I think that's real."
De Blasio is correct in asserting that individuals who do not exercise their voting rights are still entitled to the same rights and services as those who do. It is also true that voting rates are low in low-income populations and they drop further among the homeless. But de Blasio's statement wrongly assumes that most (if not all) among the homeless do not care about politics.
"I've always liked politics because I believe that if you want a change, you could make a change," Alexander Cortez Herrera said. Cortez lives on Skid Row at the Hotel Regal, part of an SRO Housing initiative. A few years back, he had two surgeries on his spine. After the second surgery he was unable to work for some time and became depressed. He could not afford the rent and two years ago started living on the streets of Skid Row. He eventually found a social services program that took him in.
Cortez said he appreciates the social services programs that the city and state have implemented for the homeless community. It was one such program that helped him get his surgeries done. Even when he was without a permanent address, voting, according to Cortez, has always been a top priority. "I went to volunteer at the Culver City [polling location] to help [gubernatorial candidate] Gavin Newsom," Cortez said. "I wanted to vote for him so that's why I did it."
"I did it just to let people know that our word is out there too, you know?" he said. Cortez also plans to volunteer and vote in the mid-term elections in November. At the same time, however, he believes that politicians don't really care about the homeless.
"Politics here basically, from what I've learned, is that they are all looking out for each other...We don't have no one for us," he said. "I've never seen any politician, to tell you the truth...Especially in downtown. It's funny 'cause we have City Hall and we have the courts but we never see them. If they have meetings or something, we don't hear about it too much," Cortez added.
He is not alone in sharing the sentiment.
"All the politicians, what they say at election time ain't promises they're gonna keep when they're in office. They're gonna turn around and go against their plan and do something else. I don't vote for them no more," said Steve Richardson. "They're nothing but a bunch of promises and lies, and I ain't gonna do nothing but want my vote back, so I don't vote at all...I just don't believe in the system," he added.
Richardson, or General Dogon, as he prefers to be called, is a veteran of Skid Row. In the 2008 presidential election, Dogon voted for Barack Obama. "That was the last time I voted, and I will never vote again. Not in America. Not unless this system is changed over. Turned over. There's a new government, new structure, [then] I'll vote again. Other than that, I'm not voting," he said.
Voting while homeless is a difficult task. Despite the United States Supreme Court having ruled in 1966 that voting is a fundamental right, there is no federal legislation protecting the right to vote for people who are homeless. None of the 50 states requires voters to live in traditional residences, but many require a mailing address. Most homeless persons however do not have a static location due to local laws that criminalize sleeping or camping in public spaces.
In California, courts have held that denying a citizen the right to vote on grounds of their residential status is unconstitutional. At present, California state law supports the right of homeless citizens to register to vote. Thea Brodkin, a member of the League of Women Voters of California, however feels that, despite the legal ruling, the situation is far more complex in practice.
"I personally have registered homeless individuals. It isn't that simple because they need a mailing address where they can receive information and a mail-in ballot. They often can get permission to receive mail at a charitable organization. Homeless folks can register at a street location and the Registrar will know which precinct they belong in, but they would not be able to get election information or notification on where their polling place is located unless they provide an address where they can receive mail," Brodkin said.
Mickael Renaud's designated permanent address is a church from where he collects his mail once a month. He also uses this address to register to vote. Currently living in an RV on Hope Street near the USC/Jefferson metro station, Renaud has been in Los Angeles for around five years. He had a shared apartment in Hollywood from which he was evicted when he lost his job and could not afford to pay the rent anymore. "I had nowhere to go, but I had too much pride to tell my parents," he said.
Renaud has been registered to vote since he was 18 and has voted in every presidential election. He followed his father and grew up a Democrat. He voted for Barack Obama both times because he believed in what Obama was saying. But in 2016, like his father, Renaud voted for Donald Trump. "I am now more Republican," he said, adding that the "candidate we have now is making change that we see."
According to Renaud, "the parties in California and in Los Angeles...they're dragging their feet with a lot of the policies they are pushing...I just feel like things need to get done and you can't wait till tomorrow to get something done. It's not gonna help or benefit the citizens."
While he likes Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, Renaud wonders whether Garcetti is the right person to tackle homelessness. "Jailing homeless people isn't really fixing the problem, and that's all they're doing," he said. Renaud is not the only homeless individual who thinks that his community is criminalized. Growing up, Cortez had looked up to officers of the LAPD as his idols. Today, he thinks otherwise.
"They [the police] took us as a joke, you know? We're basically a joke to them. Our lives have been...we've gone down the road, so we have no rights, you know? So...why is our word gonna matter? That's what their mentality is when I called them, when I approached them...That's what I felt from them," Cortez said.
"We're creating a culture of resistance"
The anger over what many homeless individuals see as the criminalization of L.A.'s entire homeless community is felt most intensely in Skid Row. The community is pushing for the establishment of their own Neighborhood Council. Neighborhood councils are composed of residents and business and property owners who advise city government on issues not limited to crime, infrastructure and economic development. Although the council's formation was defeated in a March 2017 election, an unincorporated Skid Row Neighborhood Council argues that the election was corrupted and is now appealing in court.
The central hub of the neighborhood's political organizing is located at Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), a community-driven organization working to combat what many see as the exclusion of low-income residents in public decision-making processes. After serving 11 years for substance abuse, Dogon joined LA CAN and currently heads the network's Civil Rights Movement. Dogon has been on the front lines of mobilizing Skid Row's homeless since 2005, the year he created the Community Watch program. He built a small team, self-trained in law codes and civil rights, to patrol Skid Row's streets and document neighborhood conditions and alleged police misconduct.
"We go around and organize the community to fight back. [We're] creating a culture of resistance," Dogon said. The team also educates Skid Row residents through "Know Your Rights" training sessions.
Community Watch has expanded across L.A. County, with Dogon leading trainings to empower other groups to build watch teams in their own neighborhoods. The Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has partnered with LA CAN to form what they call Street Watch teams. Dogon trained these teams to monitor and film encampment sweeps and operate a phone line homeless residents can call into to request assistance.
Hitting roadblocks
Kirsten Lynch, a member of DSA Street Watch, was helping Poinsettia's homeless residents organize and advocate for themselves when July's bulky-items pickup was carried out. According to Lynch, beginning in March there was an increase both in scheduled encampment sweeps as well as impromptu bulky-items pickups. Lynch said these unexpected pickups make sustained community organizing difficult.
One afternoon in early August, Lynch sat across from the sidewalk where the encampment used to be. Now only Travis' tent remained. Suddenly a sanitation truck pulled up. Travis, out running errands, was not there to protest.
Lynch ran across the street, signaled to the sanitation worker to roll down his window and asked, "These are my friend's belongings. Are you going to take them?" The sanitation workers, who said they were sent following a call from the neighboring Department of Water and Power, relented. "If I wasn't here, Nina would have come back to nothing," she said.
According to John Motter of DSA Street Watch, empowering individuals in homeless encampments to advocate for themselves is difficult due to the diasporic consequences of encampment sweeps. "Once an encampment is broken up I never hear from those people again unless I happen to run in to them by chance," Motter explained.
"We have organized, but it's hard," Travis said. When the pick-up started early July 9, Travis said her community "knew nothing about sweeps at all" so "no one was [at Poinsettia Park] to claim their property." Travis said that the few individuals present at the encampment attempted unsuccessfully to save others' important and sentimental possessions.
"When Poinsettia was packed, I had a pretty good influence on a lot of the people there," Travis said. "I got another one of my sisters and...every hour or two one of us would do a circle, like we're security, and we would walk and go to the bathrooms and make sure no one's in there smoking, make sure they clean up after themselves, and make sure there's no one in there doing something they're not supposed to do."
Despite difficult experiences with her neighbors, Travis is averse to dichotomies of right and wrong or 'us' versus 'them'. She told the story of a community member who brought trays of food almost daily to the encampment, until one day she confronted Travis with the news that her daughter's bike had been stolen.
"We know it was someone from Poinsettia," Travis said. Noting that the woman has not been back since, Travis explained that it is hard for her to put the responsibility to help on residents of homes around the park when those that do help get their property stolen by the very people they are helping. Experiences like these have convinced Travis that a more nuanced approach is required.
While sharing her story, an officer drove by and waved to Travis and the two exchanged greetings. "She's one of the cops that I was helping. She's a good cop too; she's cool," Travis said. Referencing the June 30 stabbing of a woman on nearby Waring Avenue, Travis explained that she had "been trying to help the cops figure out what happened because they were blaming Poinsettia for it." Even though Travis has a criminal record and is out on parole, she had developed working relationships with law enforcement to protect her community.
For Travis, it was important to make sure her neighbors near Poinsettia Park knew that the individual responsible for the crime was not a part of her community. She worked with police to ensure individual criminal acts did not result in the criminalization of the entire Poinsettia encampment.
"Not everybody is bad, or a trouble maker"
Government officials and residents in nearby homes frame the Poinsettia Park encampment as a cleanliness and public safety problem. This story, like the story of other homeless communities across Los Angeles, is also about who has a voice and a stake in the community and how the homeless who have now been displaced are fighting to be heard.
For Travis, the solution to the growing tension is simple: "Get to know everyone as a person. It works for me. You'll see that not everybody is bad, or a trouble maker, or a thief or a conniving person." She recommends that all follow this model.
Travis recognizes people are busy but urges them to "make time so that they can have an understanding for themselves." This method of outreach, forming a human-to-human connection, "probably would have helped a lot of us," she said. Travis also understands the desire of some of her neighbors to disband the encampment for good.
"They live in a nice building, the birds are chirping, and then you look down the street and you see nothing but trash and garbage and dirt, and it's all gloomy and scary — nobody wants to live by something like that. I understand them," she said. "But at the same time, those same people need to understand us." According to Travis, both housed and unhoused residents have a right to call a neighborhood their own and to have their voices heard.
Like Travis, many of the residents of the encampment were transgender women of color, forcing them to contend with multiple intersecting marginalizations — race, gender and class — that are inextricably linked to structural forms of oppression and violence. Unequal access to job opportunities and healthcare combined with heightened risks of violence leaves transgender people, and transgender women of color in particular, especially vulnerable to homelessness.
In West Hollywood, Councilmember Lauren Meister's office works to understand the demographics of the city's homeless population. "We tend to have a larger LGBT homeless community. We have a higher proportion of transgender homeless too," she said, adding that "West Hollywood is a place where there is acceptance."
While Poinsettia Park may be on the other side of West Hollywood's geographic border, the city's LGBTQ-affirming culture has spread to surrounding neighborhoods. However, when it comes to the transgender community residing at Poinsettia Park, West Hollywood can only offer guidance and services, but L.A. City makes the final call.
"I feel safe here, and I have just as much right as you do here. Just because you have walls, doesn't mean that you have more of a right than me," Travis said.
As city and community lines were blurred, the Poinsettia encampment became even more vulnerable to disbandment.
Travis ponders whether her neighborhood's history bestows upon its residents a unique responsibility to care for an encampment that was home to many transgender women of color — after all, according to her, many of the neighborhood residents who wanted the encampment removed also belong to the LGBTQ community.
In the 1980s, West Hollywood became a refuge for dispossessed minorities, especially members of the LGBTQ community, who flocked to the area to escape the routine persecution they faced at the hands of the LAPD and other administrative departments in Los Angeles. When it was incorporated as a city in 1984, West Hollywood was declared by activists as "America's first gay city." The City Council was the first in the nation with a gay majority and was led by Valerie Terrigno, the first openly lesbian mayor of an American municipality. Today, West Hollywood takes pride in its inclusivity. According to a recent community study, 47% of the city's residents identify as belonging to the LGBTQ community.
Travis believes that her neighbors, both in West Hollywood and L.A., have forgotten about their history.
"People forgot about Stonewall and stuff like that...That stuff is buried! They don't care about that. They don't remember," she said. Often viewed as the birth of the gay rights movements, the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, were a series of violent confrontations between police and LGBTQ individuals outside the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich, New York. The riots were sparked by Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender woman of color, who threw a brick that shattered the bar's window.
A week after we met Nina Travis, the Los Angeles Department of Health and Sanitation received two anonymous 311 service requests on August 3 and 5 for "homeless encampments" at 936 N Poinsettia Pl. Five days later, the department acted. The items taken, logged in the details for the request, were three pieces of bedding, two shopping carts, and one tarp. The community had spoken: Nina's tent was no more.