LOS ANGELES—Nearly a year after LA’s top cop Sheriff Alex Villanueva deployed his deputy homeless outreach team on the Venice Beach Boardwalk, Villanueva is eyeing Hollywood as the next location to clear out homeless encampments.
“It’s going to be a collaborative effort, we’re gonna make sure that place is spotless and suitable for people to be a tourist destination like it’s supposed to be,” Villanueva said during a Facebook Live on April 6.
The planning of the cleanup is in its early stages, according to Homeless Outreach and Services Team (HOST) Lt. Geoff Deedrick, who leads the homeless outreach. But Villanueva was prompted by “unsafe” conditions during a ride on the Metro Los Angeles Light Rail system from Union Station LA to Hollywood Boulevard last week, in addition to hearing from business leaders on Hollywood Boulevard who say the homeless have impacted their business.
Research on how the cleanup will be conducted includes meeting with several homeless providers, stakeholders, and other partners, he said. But it will differ from how the cleanup and outreach in Venice Beach was conducted last summer, which placed pressure on LA City Councilmember Mike Bonin to send his own outreach team to the Boardwalk to offer drug rehabilitation resources and housing to the homeless simultaneously.
Venice has the most homeless people in LA after Skid Row, with roughly 2,000 people living on the streets. As LA rolled back city codes during the COVID-19 pandemic that prohibited camping and sleeping in public places to allow homeless people to have somewhere to shelter-in-place, those laws were not put back in place in Bonin’s district.
But people in LA are eager to for a solution. According to a Los Angeles Business Council poll, residents consider homelessness to be a “very serious” problem heading into the November election.
“I have a lot of people reaching out to me right now to help, and I haven’t even gotten to a lot of them. We’re calling them one by one,” Deedrick said.
“Once that’s over, then we'll identify areas of need, and then those will be the beginning locations,” he said.
Deedrick said the sheriff has said many times that it’s important to “maintain the public spaces for not only the public but for tourism and the economy.”
The area Villanueva wants to deploy the HOST team is under the Los Angeles Police Department’s jurisdiction, but he has reached out to offer them help with the cleanup. It’s unclear how LAPD and the LA Sheriff’s Department will work together.
Los Angeles has currently 66,000 homeless people countywide and 41,000 in the city alone, according to the latest data from the last homeless count in 2020.
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