Los Angeles took thousands of homeless people off the streets. Then their nightmare began

Michael Flores had been living in a homeless encampment near a Van Nuys bus station for at least three years when he was offered a place in a high-profile Los Angeles initiative to get people off the streets.

The pitch from Inside Safe, LA mayor Karen Bass’s signature programme, sounded humane enough: if Flores agreed to leave the encampment, he wouldn’t face any punishment, and a hotel room and social supports were ready and waiting. Mayor Bass proclaims this approach, leading with immediate social services over police sweeps, had “shaken up the entire system.”

In September, Flores moved into the Palm Tree Inn, a rundown motel on a stretch of Van Nuys filled with auto body shops and storage facilities. By late November, he was dead of a drug overdose.

The death of "Mike Flo," as he was known to friends, exposed the pitfalls of the mayor’s much-touted effort to end homelessness in Los Angeles. At the Palm Tree Inn, Inside Safe residents weren’t allowed to spend time with each other or have guests, friends of Flores said. They believe if they had been able to check in on him, he might still be alive.

Thousands have found temporary accommodation as part of Inside Safe and the mayor’s larger homelessness agenda, but this achievement has come at great cost, subjecting people to segregation, police harassment and property destruction for little apparent long-term benefit. Flores’s story is one of many.

Carla Orendorff, who lives in an RV and has spent years researching and advocating on behalf of the area’s unhoused, knew Flores well. She told The Independent that his death is indicative of the wider problems with the Inside Safe approach, which often isolates unhoused people from their neighbours, friends, and social service providers.

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“This confirmed some of the worst fears people had,” she said. “You had a policy where we’re not allowed to check on each other. People are going to overdose. People are going to die alone.”

“There’s such a deep disconnect,” she added. “It’s a rule that shouldn’t exist.”

The other residents of the Palm Tree Inn have opinions ranging from appreciation to deep anger about accepting the mayor’s offer of help. Some are grateful for a respite from the streets. Some bristle at the strict rules that they said sometimes come with the temporary rooms. Some fear the city has done little more than shunt them out of sight with little hope of finding permanent housing.

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Since taking office just over a year ago, the mayor has staked her reputation on what she describes as her bold new vision to address homelessness. The city had more than 46,000 unhoused people as of the last count in January 2023 and is home to nearly a quarter of the state’s unsheltered population. The mayor vowed to house at least 17,000 people in her first year in office, and by some measures, has surpassed that goal. But homeless people and activists say the city needs a radical overhaul of policing, housing, and affordability for the mayor’s vision to move beyond political posturing and make lasting change for the city’s unhoused.

On the ground, at the Palm Tree Inn, there are frustrations over what that vision looks like in practice.

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La Donna Harrell, 38, said moving from the streets to the motel has been a “f***ing nightmare.” Her room was filled with bed bugs which harmed her dog and left her with a $200 vet bill. She also said she took issue with the facility’s strict rules, which reminded her of the group homes she cycled through as a youth.

“To have a room you have to have to give up freedom, it’s not fair or right,” she said. “I’m not a criminal.”

“For the first two weeks I was here, I was still sleeping out on the streets because I was afraid to sleep in my room,” she said.

As she spoke with me in the motel’s parking lot, other residents stood nearby talking and drinking beer. Staff members, who had been hovering nearby, rushed in and told the group not to congregate, drink, or speak to reporters on the property. The residents demanded to see the facility’s rules in writing, and the staff members said a supervisor was on her way with the information.

Michael Flores died on 28 November, a little over a month after entering the Inside Safe programme.

Inside Safe facilities, which pair residents with case managers, don’t always offer services like drug treatment or mental health counselling. The mayor has said adding quality, direct social services throughout the programme is a “top, top issue” for 2024.

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Not everyone was critical of the experience. Another Inside Safe participant, Thomas, who only gave his first name, said, “Everything is well done here.”

In recent years, Thomas has seen his economic fate decline, from owning a home, to sharing an apartment, to living on the street when housing with a roommate fell through and he lost his job at a local nonprofit.

Becoming unhoused was “devastating” to his mental health. The chance to stay somewhere secure and get back on his feet was a huge relief, he said.

“The number one thing, my mental state is in a balanced place,” he said. “If I had been in this programme from the beginning, I would no longer need the county’s help.”

He’s now working on a business plan to launch a catering business selling African cuisine.

The Independent has contacted the mayor’s office for comment. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority declined to comment.

The Independent contacted Hope the Mission, a nonprofit which administers the Palm Tree Inn Inside Safe site, for comment.

Data shows the mayor is making some progress.

As of mid-December, her administration had moved 21,694 people out of encampments and into temporary housing in its first year, a 28 per cent increase over the previous administration, according to data from the mayor’s office. Within that population, as of the end of November, nearly 2,000 people had been moved from 33 of the city’s most prominent homeless encampments.

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However, despite these top-line statistics, only about 13 per cent of Inside Safe participants have made it into permanent housing so far. In the wider population of those housed this year, more than a third of people ended up back on the street.

The mayor has won praise for other steps to speed up housing beyond Inside Safe, including fast-tracking the development of thousands of affordable housing units.

Drawing on her past experience as a member of Congress, Ms Bass urged federal officials to exempt local housing providers in LA from a rule requiring documented proof of homelessness before people could move into subsidised apartments. In August, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development agreed to the request.

That same month, the LA city council approved Ms Bass’s plan to buy the 294-room Mayfair Hotel for $83m and convert it into an Inside Safe location with extensive on-site services.

John Maceri, CEO of the People Concern, a large LA-based social service provider which partners with Inside Safe, said the Bass administration has made housing a priority like no other recent administration.

“From day one, she’s said this would be front and centre in her administration. The day she took office, she declared a state of emergency and she’s been laser-focused on this issue,” he said.

Mr Maceri added that while Inside Safe was not a “perfect initiative” – he hopes officials add more services and drastically cut down the time it takes to get from hotels into permanent housing, which currently can run over a year – the programme addressed both the acute need to house those on the street and political pressure to clear encampments.

“We could build half a million housing units, but if there are still encampments on the street, Angelenos are not going to feel the impact,” he said.

When Ms Bass launched Inside Safe a year ago, she took pains to emphasise that the initiative was separate from policing and that outreach workers would lead the way, not officers.

“This is not about cleaning up and clearing out. Of course, that will happen in the context of it, but this is about outreach to people and getting them housed,” the mayor said.

“It’s going to take a while,” she added. “You might need to talk to a person more than once. But we are focused on getting them housed and services, not on law enforcement.”

But unhoused people said despite the new rhetoric, Inside Safe operations blurred with incessant police and sanitation sweeps that often left already vulnerable people with destroyed property, mental trauma, and violent arrests, all of which further hindered their attempts to seek stability. A recent countywide survey found that overall, police were more likely to be an unhoused person’s first contact than an outreach worker and that unhoused people were just as likely to be cited as to be housed.

The LAPD declined to comment on its enforcement operations related to homelessness.

Advocates said Inside Safe operations often arrive at encampments with little notice, forcing unhoused people to make a split-second decision of great consequence for their lives.

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Those who don’t happen to be present at the time can miss out, and those who do accept can be taken to motels across the city from anyone they know, according to Eleanor Batista-Mala, a volunteer with Ktown for All, a grassroots group that works with unhoused people in LA’s Koreatown. Unhoused people typically can bring two garbage bags worth of belongings into an Inside Safe site, and must surrender their tents.

“People aren’t really given a chance to prepare and aren’t given a chance to think about what the decision means,” Ms Batista-Mala said. “They’re just sort of given, to varying degrees of coercion, you either move to this hotel and we take your stuff, or you move somewhere else and we take your stuff. It’s not really a very clear choice.”

During a 12 September Inside Safe operation to move residents of the Aetna Street homeless encampment to the Palm Tree Inn, a group of at least 25 police officers flanked outreach and mayor’s office workers. Residents were required to relinquish property on camera to get an offer of a room.

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The outreach workers also ignored past requests from the encampment residents that they be told in writing where they would be moved to, and that the temporary hotel room offers medical services. Residents of Aetna Street asked the mayor for such conditions during a meeting earlier this year and were denied, they said.

“It is offensive that unhoused people were required to state, often on camera, what they were giving up (their tent, their belongings, etc.) in order to enroll in Inside Safe,” reads an open letter from community members and University of California Los Angeles researchers who witnessed the sweep. “And what is it that they received in return for this sacrifice? It seems that it is temporary placement in a bed bug infested motel, the Palm Tree Inn, one that is notorious for its lack of safety and hygiene.”

Two days later, police returned during a separate sweep and destroyed the belongings of numerous residents, as a mayoral aide looked on, according to the letter and photos of the sweep. Some residents were arrested for trying to retrieve their belongings from a newly taped-off bus station parking lot that bordered Aetna Street.

Giselle “Jelly” Harrell, who lives between Aetna Street and a short-term hotel room she recently acquired through a separate local programme, said she’s had art supplies, money, and her personal ID all destroyed or confiscated as part of encampment sweeps.

“They’re not doing anything but making it worse,” she said. “Being forced to start all over is traumatic…They’re waging war on us for no reason.”

Though city sanitation officials are supposed to store confiscated property in municipal facilities, it often disappears or gets thrown directly in the trash, according to unhoused people. A January sanitation sweep at a different encampment under the 405 freeway involved city officials destroying hundreds of dollars worth of residents’ cold weather gear, which residents said led to cases of life-threatening illness.

“Nobody ever gets their stuff back,” Ms Harrell said. She still doesn’t have an ID.

As of the morning of 14 December, the original site of the Aetna Street encampment remained fenced off with no trespassing signs. The encampment, a tight-knit community that once hosted local gatherings, movie nights, and distributed life-saving medical supplies, is now more disbursed. Only a smattering of tents and makeshift structures remained on the other side of Van Nuys Boulevard, further from public view.

The arrival of a dump truck and several pickups from the city department of sanitation around 9am set the residents into hurried motion. It was time for a so-called “comprehensive” sanitation sweep, a city worker said.

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Every Thursday for months, crews have come to the site to conduct sweeps, ironically strengthened by extra enforcement authorities because the area is within one of the city’s thousands of protected“41.18” zones where all forms of camping are illegal, in this case, because the tents are too near a (largely defunct) homeless shelter.

Often, once a so-called “comprehensive” sanitation sweep begins, residents have about 15 minutes to clear out their property or risk it getting confiscated or destroyed. They can be punished by police for noncompliance.

As the trucks sat parked on a side street bordering auto shops and warehouses, unhoused people swiftly packed up their belongings into shopping carts or hauled them into distant alleyways outside of the public right of way. A man named Ron dismantled his entire dwelling, moving all of his possessions from the sidewalk into a nearby patch of dirt, then moved the V-shaped wood scaffolding he uses to hold up his tarp roof.

Paisley Mares, the partner of Ms Orendorff, the local activist, walked around in work gloves chatting with residents, handing out water, and helping load belongings.

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“It’s a really backward and cruel approach and it doesn’t have to be this way,” he said. “It’s just very punitive, which makes it very miserable and destabilising.”

Over the next few hours, the sanitation crew never appeared to exit their vehicles or do any cleanings, then left.

“You can’t relax,” Mr Mares said. “People, they can’t do anything on these days. You can’t go to work or to go to an appointment or do anything you need to do because technically any time this day, they could come. And if you’re not here, it’s all gone. They’re going to take all your stuff.”

The Independent has contacted the Department of Sanitation for comment.

No matter what one thinks of the mayor’s tenure so far, there’s considerable agreement that Los Angeles, California, and the US at large need to build more affordable housing and offer more wraparound services to those trying to get off the street. Until that takes place, the crisis will continue, experts said.

In Skid Row, one of the historic centres of homelessness in Los Angeles, San Julian Street was still filled with unhoused people, in states ranging from sleeping on the bare ground to living in elaborate tent structures.

From the balcony of The Midnight Mission, a long-time care provider in the area offering housing, drug counselling, free meals, classes, haircuts, fitness facilities, and other essentials to the area’s unhoused population, the contrast was striking.

The skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles towered in the distance, while down below, a few blocks away, the streets were still filled by people with nowhere else to go.

“If you take somebody who is homeless and tuck them into a room, it doesn’t solve any problems,” Midnight Mission’s Georgia Berkovich told me as we toured the facility, a multi-story complex thrumming with activity.

Instead, she said, the region as a whole needs to build a more comprehensive network of care to treat the many causes and varieties of homelessness, ranging from people facing economic insecurity to substance abuse to mental health issues.

“What we’re doing is working, but what we need is more,” she said. “We need more emergency shelters. We need more transitional housing. We need more recovery places.”

Even for those who do transition from the streets to more stable housing, the change can be jarring, even surreal.

On a quiet block near Koreatown, I met a man in the courtyard of his new highly subsidised permanent supportive housing apartment. The individual, who had a sharp sense of humour and a tall knot of dreadlocks, asked to keep his name anonymous for privacy.

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He’d been on the street since 2009, sometimes using so many stimulants that time seemed to blend together into one continuous day. He was eventually approached by Inside Safe earlier this year and, after living in a series of hotels, got housing through the People Concern this October.

“When I got this spot and I was by myself for the first time, I started freaking out, man,” he said. “Completely foreign. It feels like the weirdest sh** ever…I’m not used to it.”

He was keenly aware of how few of his friends from the street were still alive, let alone able to find supportive housing. For years, he thought being housed might be a “pipe dream.”

Since that dream became real, he’s gotten assistance on tasks large and small, like getting ID, pots and pans, and groceries, as well as receiving guidance from a dedicated case worker. He’s starting the process of changing his life, with a goal of eventually getting closer to his children.

Still, some critics argue Mayor Bass, and many of those in charge of housing in California, often speak the language of care without fundamentally changing how homeless people are treated and policed on the street. The man in Koreatown was one of what can seem like only a small handful of success stories.

“They cannot grasp the multi-layered nature of homelessness,” said Theo Henderson, an activist and formerly unhoused Los Angeles resident who rose to prominence via his podcast We the Unhoused. “The exploding rents and the housing costs.”

“We have to finally come to grips that we’ve been directed by a group of people that do not see the unhoused as human beings,” he added.

Across California, cities are fighting to reinstate policies allowing law enforcement to punish people for camping on the street, even when adequate shelter might not be immediately available.

Even the mayors of powerful cities like LA can only do so much, according to Dr Margot Kushel, director of the UC San Francisco Center for Vulnerable Populations and the school’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.

“We need to recognise that there is no magic bullet here,” she told The Independent. “The answer has to be housing. That’s the only way to have people exit homelessness…This isn’t a problem that anyone can optimize their way out of if there simply isn’t enough housing and there’s not enough subsidies for that housing.”

“We just have this asymmetry,” she added. “What poor people make and can possibly make and what housing costs is just so completely disconnected. There’s really no place in this country where desperately poor people can easily afford their housing.”

California is already among the most expensive places in the country to live and with Covid-era protections around rent and evictions gone or phasing out in Los Angeles, soon thousands more could be without a home. In LA, hundreds of thousands of people were reportedly behind on their rent earlier this year, according to census data.

Back at the Palm Tree Inn, Aetna Street residents and Inside Safe participants were in the middle of handing out laminated remembrance cards and planning a memorial gathering for Mike Flo at the motel. His family had already signalled their support.

The service would likely violate the motel’s Inside Safe rules, but those living there and those who knew Mike don’t care. They’re going to take care of each other regardless, like they’ve always done.