park She ran for office on a promise to dismantle Westside homeless camps and says her strategies — bringing together homeless nonprofits, expanding interim housing through master-leased hotels and using anti-camping laws to clean up streets — are working.
“We have changed the situation on the ground to a great extent,” he said.
The park supports the Mayor’s Inside Safe program, which moves homeless Angelenos out of camps and into temporary housing in hotel and motel rooms. He said the program “has enabled the city to drastically increase its inventory of interim housing” and credited Inside Safe with progress on homelessness in his district and across the city.
Parks also supports the city’s anti-camping law, known as Municipal Code 41.18, to clear camps near schools and other protected areas. When an area is designated as 41.18, the city posts signs banning camping in that area. He has proposed expanding the law to include critical infrastructure, environmentally sensitive areas, and areas of high fire severity, although this has not passed.
Malik Bass acknowledged the commitment of resources to housing the homeless, but said Inside Safe needed more “accountability and transparency.”
“What we know is that people are cycling in and out of Inside Safe. If people don’t have services and permanent housing exits, it’s just a cycle,” she said.
Malik said that 41.18 is “not a policy that solves the problem of homelessness”, but instead moves homeless people from street to street and district to district.
The signs banning encampments “are not the way we get our neighbors off the streets and into housing,” he said.
