Los Angeles lawmakers over the past few years have allowed the homeless to overtake a city-owned historic town square that has been a tourist destination for a century.
When Sheriff Alex Villanueva discovered that famed Olvera Street was becoming a ghost town as merchants and restaurant owners fled the homeless encampment, he took it personally. Villanueva used to visit the city’s oldest still-functioning plaza, El Pueblo, and its adjoining Olvera Street on field trips as a child.
So he set his sights on restoring the area to its former purpose after successfully cleaning up the Veterans Row homeless encampment bordering a Veterans Affairs medical center.
VETERANS ROW HOMELESS ENCAMPMENT AT THE VA FINALLY CLEARED OUT
The Olvera Street encampment grew after September 2018, when the city placed several trailers on a nearby parking lot and dedicated them as housing for the homeless.
“[Mayor Eric] Garcetti abandoned Olvera Street. Literally,” Villanueva told the Washington Examiner. “He decided to set up a homeless shelter in the middle of the parking lot? What kind of loud message is that to convert the birthplace of Los Angeles into a homeless shelter?”
Villanueva blamed city politicians and Gov. Gavin Newsom for the homelessness crisis, saying they pandered to that population at the expense of law-abiding residents. The county has 80,000 homeless people, Villanueva said, with the population having grown by 16,000 since 2020.
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Olvera Street’s centerpiece, La Goldondrina Cafe, shut down last year after being continuously operated by one family since 1924, Villanueva said.
“The abandonment [of Olvera Street] has been going on for the last few years. No one was paying attention,” he said. “Merchants have been boarding up, and I’ve spoken to them myself. The homeless are harassing the tourists, children, frightening parents, and assaulting some of the shopkeepers. It’s untenable. It’s sad.”
The encampment surrounded the area, making the journey hazardous. After more than 50 years of field trips, schools from Southern California had stopped going there.
After Villanueva’s visit in October, he decided to clean up the street and partnered with Councilmember Kevin de Leon to place approximately 100 people in shelters and temporary homes.
De Leon was elected last year and already identified the area as a problem before the sheriff called and offered a team approach.
“The councilmember is committed to ensuring that El Pueblo, which is the birthplace of the city of Los Angeles, has clean streets and people aren’t living on them,” de Leon’s spokesman Pete Brown said. “It’s not mutually exclusive — we can have clean streets, house people appropriately, and support our businesses.”
Brown denied that merchants closed down due to homelessness, saying it was the yearlong state COVID-19 shutdown that drove them out of business. He said de Leon waived the rent for the businesses at El Pueblo Plaza and Olvera Street during the shutdown.
The sheriff’s homeless outreach team and city officials visited the encampment several times a week during the past two months to earn the trust of the residents there so they could be relocated. Two-thirds of the homeless were men, one was a veteran, and several people had pets, which were able to go with their owners to shelters.
“You couldn’t even walk into it. The whole thing was covered in tents,” Villanueva said of the area.
Brown said the remaining homeless should be gone by mid-January. The city will ensure that no one moves back on to the street because it’s been deemed a sensitive location like a school that does not allow encampments.
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“We are leading with housing solutions, and there should be no need for people to establish an encampment there again,” he said.
