Park ran for office on a promise to remove Westside homeless encampments and says her strategies — bringing homelessness nonprofits together, expanding interim housing through master-leased hotels and using anti-encampment laws to clean up streets — are working.
“We have drastically turned around the circumstances on the ground,” she said.
Park supports the the mayor’s Inside Safe program, which moves homeless Angelenos out of encampments and into temporary housing in hotel and motel rooms. She said the program has “enabled the city to drastically increase its inventory of interim housing” and credits Inside Safe with progress on homelessness in her district and across the city.
Park also supports the city’s anti-encampment law, known as Municipal Code 41.18, to clear encampments near schools and other protected places. When a zone is designated as 41.18, the city puts up signs banning encampments from the area. She has proposed expanding the law to include areas of critical infrastructure, environmentally sensitive areas and high fire severity zones, though that hasn’t passed.
Malik acknowledged Bass committed resources to housing the homeless but said Inside Safe needs more “accountability and transparency.”
“What we know is people are cycling in and out of Inside Safe. If people don’t have services and permanent housing exits, then it’s just a cycle,” she said.
Malik said 41.18 is “not a policy that solves homelessness,” but instead shuffles homeless people from street to street and district to district.
Signs banning encampments “is not how we get our neighbors off the streets and into housing,” she said.
