One year after LA evicted the unhoused from a park, few are in stable housing
This is a great recent study of what happened after the "successful" sweep of the Echo Park homeless encampment in 2021. The park was beautiful after the sweep as I witnessed last summer, but my daughter claimed it was too heavy-handed at the end as they forcefully removed stragglers who refused to accept social services help. Unlike other encampments, like Tenderloin in SF, this was a community, but people who lived nearby were afraid to go to the park.
BTW, homelessness is increasing in cities like Austin and Miami, its not just a west coast and NYC problem. In Lima Peru and other big cities in Latin America, there are large communities of residents without title to the land. Many start as shanty towns and then the residents slowly make improvements. IMO, this has worked in places like San Juan de Lorigancho, a million person district outside of Lima where my roomate's family has gone from a plywood house to now a 3-story concrete structure with electricity and running water, with schools and stores all over the place. It wouldn't work in the USA.
>>One year later, however, government records tell a different story: out of 183 unhoused people who were removed from the park and tracked by the county’s homelessness agency, just 17 are confirmed to be in longer-term housing. Nearly 50 are in temporary shelter waiting for stable housing. The rest either returned to the streets or disappeared from the county’s tracking systems.
Their analysis, co-authored by former park residents,
concluded that although some displaced residents were eager to get indoors, the temporary shelters they initially landed in had strict regulations that stripped people of basic freedoms and caused many to leave or be kicked out. People who lasted in the temporary programs said they had been unable to transition to long-term housing as officials had promised, the researchers found. Ultimately, one year after the eviction, many were back on the streets, often living in worse conditions than they did before.<<