Letters of April 14
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Fighting LA’s racist housing crisis
On March 25, I attended a rally in support of homeless residents who were being “swept” and displaced from Echo Park, located in Los Angeles. The sweeps were conducted by city workers, backed up by a massive Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) presence. Hundreds of people, including neighborhood residents, protested and marched for hours to demand a stop to the sweeps and permanent housing for everyone. The LAPD penned in and arrested 182 people after they sat down in the street. Two news reporters were also charged and National Lawyers’ Guild legal observers were detained, before being released.
There are hundreds of homeless encampments across the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. The 2020 official Point in Time Count for LA County (likely an undercount) was 66,436. Recently, the Los Angeles Times newspaper even compared LA to the encampments described in Grapes of Wrath, the John Steinbeck novel about the great migration from the “Dust Bowl” to California in the 1930s.
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