Over the last couple of years, RVs in Los Angeles turned from a vehicle for camping to shelter for the unhoused. That's led to multiple complaints — and deaths.
Over the last couple of years, RVs in Los Angeles turned from a vehicle for camping to shelter for people who are unhoused. That’s led to multiple complaints — and deaths.
Today, we examine how L.A. got to this point. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times columnist Erika D. Smith
More reading:
The real and complicated reasons why Los Angeles still has so many RV encampments
Q&A: L.A. Mayor Karen Bass: ‘The city is demanding the tents go away’
Los Angeles lifts moratorium on towing RVs, pledges to move problem campers
Gustavo: As homeless encampments spread across Los Angeles over the past decade, one type of shelter in particular has proven increasingly controversial: RVs.
Fox11 clip: 425 of these RVs lie within a six-mile radius, and 10% of them are on L.A. city land. The other 90% fall within unincorporated L.A. County, which makes solving this crisis even more challenging.
Gustavo: Although they're more stable than a tent or a tarp, homeowners accuse RV owners of taking up parking spaces. Environmental activists accuse them of polluting the environment. City workers ticket them for not moving. All while some residents push politicians and cops to enforce laws that would eliminate these RV encampments altogether.
L.A. City Council: Me and my, all my community want swift removal of the RVs from the wetlands. We've waited, we've waited and the same number of vehicles are there.
Gustavo: One of the main issues is that living in an RV can be especially dangerous to the people who live in them. However, despite the many conversations around RV encampments, the people who actually live in them find RVs to be reliable shelters and embrace encampments as a community of their own.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to “The Times: Essential News From the L.A. Times.” It's Wednesday, March 29th, 2023. Today, how RVs became part of L.A.'s housing landscape, and why they're unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Covering all this is L.A. Times columnist Erika D. Smith. Erika, welcome as always to “The Times.”
Erika: Thanks for having me back.
Gustavo: So RV encampments are all around Los Angeles, but you recently wrote a column about a specific one, about people living on a stretch of Jefferson Boulevard near the Ballona Wetlands, which are near LAX. What made you write about this particular area?
Erika: Well, this is a area that I've noticed because it's not too far from where I live, and this is probably my third or fourth time writing about it. I've been tracking what's going on there since the pandemic started. And, you know, more recently I noticed there was a fire that happened over there. I woke up one morning to helicopters overhead and police sirens and ambulance sirens. And then I came to find out that there was a fire over there. An RV had caught fire, a man had died, uh, one Woody Akiedis. And I didn't know him, but I knew a number of his friends, including Wendy Locket, who I talked to several times before. And I also talked to his girlfriend, Melissa Grady.
Gustavo: What were they saying about who he was, what happened, what had been going on?
Erika: Yeah. So, Wendy and Melissa were the people that I talked to the most, and they knew him really well. They said he was a Hot Wheels collector. I guess he had something like hundreds of Hot Wheels in his RV. But he originally was from somewhere in the Valley and he'd been out there for a couple of years. He was actually one of the longest running tenants of that encampment. And he was apparently a nice guy.
Wendy Lockett: He was basically like the, if you want to say mayor of this place, I kind of like, I'm the sheriff, and he was the mayor, I guess, for lack of better terminology. Um, he, he was very diplomatic and knew how to handle stuff. He's was always a voice of reason
Erika: And basically one night, or one morning, they woke up to flames. Melissa ran outside. Woody ran outside with her. For some reason he went back in and, you know, Wendy and several others tried to get to him and they just couldn't.
Melissa: I went to go yell for a fire extinguisher and he turned right around and went back in. I was like screaming for my boyfriend, and like waking myself up from a dream. Yeah. I thought I was going to wake up and they'd be like, dude, I had the craziest dream.
Erika: They felt like he was a loss to that community.
Gustavo: Yeah, anytime you have a death that's always going to get a lot of attention, but it also brought a lot of focus to the issue overall of, on RV encampments in Los Angeles, and most of the attention has been negative. So what are the issues around it?
Erika: Yeah, I think that the biggest issue is how unsafe they are, I think both to the tenants of those encampments and to the neighborhoods around there. I mean, reality is, most of the RVs are mostly uninhabitable. They're dilapidated. Sometimes they're leaking oil, fluid. A lot of times they're not moving. And, they just can be dangerous, and a lot of people set fires in them to keep warm or to cook. There's all sorts of problems that can go wrong with encampments. And so, you know, we've had a buildup of them. the pandemic where we had a number of people who parked RVs on street corners and under, uh, highway underpasses.
And another concern over on the Westside here is the Ballona Wetlands. I mean, this is an RV encampment that's been parked alongside, you know, what many consider to be an environmental treasure. It took a long time to restore this stretch of green space, and it's been a home for bird watchers, it's a byway for a number of birds that come through here every year. And, you know, the encampment alongside it, there's been RVs that have been leaking different types of fluids. There's been people camping, actually in the wetlands. There's been people cutting down trees, people using the area as a toilet and some other, very other nasty things like that.
And this fire is just one more thing, i mean this fire happened right before the rainstorms we had, so a lot of the debris and a lot of the nastiness washed right into the wetlands before the city could tow the RV away. So it's just one of many, many concerns that is added to the issues over RV encampments.
Gustavo: So that's what homeowners say. That's what city officials say. That's what environmentalists say. But what do the people who actually live in the RV encampment say about their situation?
Erika: Well to them, at this point it's become a community, and you’ve got to remember these RVs have been sitting there for years. In some cases, the same people, in the same vehicles, in the same spot, they've gotten to know each other. They consider these areas their neighborhood, their neighbors, you know, part of their community. And this is definitely true on Jefferson Boulevard.
Wendy Lockett: What people don't understand is it's not easy to live exposed. It really isn't. I mean, your life is on display and you're ridiculed constantly. We get people that drive by her honking and yelling and screaming. We've had poo thrown, flung at us. Someone threw a rock and hit my dog in the ear. So, I mean, we get accosted quite a bit and for the most part it's simply because we have less than others.
Erika: They consider themselves members of an RV encampment. They're temporarily housed. They live on Jefferson Boulevard. They're not homeless in the way that I think probably most housed people think that they're homeless. And I don't think they don't look at themselves in the way that say, people who live in tent encampments under a highway do either. They don't look at themselves as that transient. And so, you know, when a fire, for example, like this happens, with Woody Akiedis, when he dies, I mean, people mourn him like you would a neighbor.
Wendy Lockett: There’s a bad apple in every crowd, but there’s a bad apple in every crowd when you live behind walls too. We’re just exposed, and that makes it hard. There are people here and in every homeless encampment that, you know, unfortunately give us all a bad name. But that's not all of us, you know? This guy that passed away was a really good guy. He was like a brother to me.
Erika: And so, they of course want to be in permanent housing. I just don't believe that most of them believe that it's even possible. And they're really not willing to go and take a temporary situation like a motel room or hotel room. They want permanent housing because they feel like they're already in an equivalent of temporary housing.
Gustavo: How did we even get to a place where RV encampments are all across Los Angeles?
Erika: Well, a lot of this started, you know, during the pandemic. We had obviously, everybody was on lockdown. It's hard to remember now; it was three years ago at this point. There was a fear that by moving unhoused people around, forcing them into congregate shelters, that we'd basically be exacerbating the spread of COVID-19.
And so the idea was to let people shelter in place, um, not, jostle them around too much. And so one of the things that came out of that was allowing people who lived in RVs and vehicles to kind of park in one spot. And so that, as we saw as the pandemic moved on, poverty skyrocketed despite, you know, some of the, you know, initiatives in federal funding that was out there, we saw an increase in homelessness to an extent.
And, we had people living in RVs, we had people living in vehicles, and they stayed there. And so now, people came back outside after a year, year and a half of being in their houses, and they noticed that there were RVs parked on their block, or there were vehicles parked on their block.
Gustavo: Another big issue that folks in RV’s have to deal with are these so-called street sweeps or cleanups. What exactly are those?
Erika: Well, there's a couple different versions of it, but, in the most general terms, it's basically when outreach workers, city officials go out and they basically clean up all the trash, all the debris around an encampment. A lot of times they will, sometimes trash tents and other belongings, depending — you know. If you ask advocates, they'll say they do that all the time — but basically try to clear an encampment and get people away. You know, move them away, put them in hotels, move them another block. But there's different versions of them, but that generally is the most accepted probably definition.
There's been a series of them over the last couple of years, but they've kind of intensified in the last year since Councilwoman Traci Park took office, uh, replacing Mike Bonin. So, um, you know, she says there's really no real consistency from it. Sometimes they come out and they say, OK, everybody has to be gone in a week. Other times they come out and they don't give a deadline.
Gustavo: Coming up after the break. Mayor Bass's Inside Safe initiative.
Gustavo: So these RV encampments and the focus on them is happening as L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is still rolling out her plan that she promised on the campaign to get unhoused people into permanent housing. So what's the latest there?
Erika: So, um, just recently the mayor announced that she expects to get about 4,000 people into housing in their first a hundred days in office, which is approaching rapidly. Only about a thousand of those are under her Inside Safe initiative, which is the thing that she's talked so much about since taking office.
Mayor Karen Bass: My inside Safe executive directive and initiative, represents a citywide, proactive housing-led strategy to bring people inside from tents and encampments for good and to prevent encampments from returning.
Erika: But still, 1,000 is a big number. It's a bigger number than it seems like we feel like we’ve had in the last few years. But, you know one of the sticking points is RVs. You know, she admitted to reporters that, you know, they're still working on a strategy to, to deal with clearing RVs. They've, most of their focus has really been on tent encampments, getting those folks into motel rooms and hotel rooms.
Gustavo: Erika, is Mayor Bass’ Inside Safe Initiative going to be effective with people who live at RV encampments like the one on Jefferson?
Erika: Well, it was interesting when I spoke to the mayor, before writing this column, she actually confessed that they had looked at Jefferson Boulevard as one of what was hoping to be the initial site of inside Safe to get people in. But then they ran into a number of problems, among them finding places to put the RVs. They thought they had identified a lot near LAX, which is only a few miles from the encampment, but found out that it was going to cost hundreds of thousands or close to a million dollars to store these RVs, which is an astronomical figure. And so their question really became, do we spend this money on parking RVs for people, or do we use that money and get people in tent encampments off the street and into motels?
And they chose to do that. And that in some ways, that money was what was put towards Venice and clearing one of the earliest encampments back in January. It’s, you know, I think the hope eventually is that Inside Safe will address RV encampments, but right now it's not really approaching that issue. And the city, there was a lot of pressure for the city to lift a moratorium on towing these vehicles. And they finally did that last year. But then it became a problem of where do we tow these vehicles? And do we have enough, heavy duty trucks to tow RVs?
And the answer became they didn't have enough of either, and so they've been sitting in this limbo for more or less a year, with the moratorium being lifted, but not having much movement on what to do with RVs. And then there are also just laws around property. I think that's one of the things that the mayor mentioned to me and others in the city have mentioned is that they've, once they started talking to people and living in these RVs, they found that a lot of people aren't, don't own the RVs, they're actually renting them from other people.
And so when they go to tow them, there's a legal hurdle. If you can't find the owner of the vehicle, can you really tow it? Does that open you up to lawsuits and other legal litigation? So those are all these questions that haven't been answered.
Gustavo: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Also, what are the ramifications of towing a vehicle if people inside are there? And then also what's the ramifications then of trying to evict someone from a vehicle? I think these are questions that people really never really thought of until this happened.
Erika: No, I think there's a lot of unanswered questions, and I think the city is probably trying to find their way through it in a way that would not draw as many lawsuits as possible. But I think some of this is uncharted waters legally. Obviously there's some case law when it comes to clearing street encampments, about what you can and cannot do with people's property, what kind of notice you have to give people. But I think one area that’s become more clear is that they can tow RVs if they are considered hazardous. So if they're dumping hazardous material in the street, that sort of thing, then there is some legal recourse for being able to remove these RVs.
That said, the issue of the vehicles to actually tow these RVs and actually where to put them is still an issue. So I think a lot of times we have vehicles that probably do need to be towed and probably can need to be towed because they're leaking some sort of hazardous material, but they haven't been towed. Like even the RV that Woody died in, it took them at least four or five days to tow it away from my count, looking over there.
Gustavo: Wow. More after the break..
Gustavo: Erika, these RV encampments, they consider themselves communities. And city officials, yeah, they know that you can't have RV encampments like this, but they also don't want the negative optics of just breaking them up like that. So have city officials tried any way to at least ameliorate the situation, maybe put nearby public restrooms? You mentioned earlier parking lots, but what other efforts have they done?
Erika: Yes, I mean, at the Jefferson Encampment, for example, there's been a porta-potty out there for quite some time, and they put a dumpster out there probably about a year and a half ago. And so that, that, I think, in some ways has helped. But you know, then you have a porta-potty and you have to empty it. Then you have a dumpster and you have to empty it. And most of the time, you know, that dumpster is overflowing, the porta-potty I wouldn't get anywhere near it if I had to. So, I mean, I think there's ways to mitigate, it and I think it's better that there's a dumpster there and it's better that there's a porta-potty there than not, but, you know, there's been some attempts, and I know that's the case at other RV encampments around the city too, particularly some of the larger ones. Um, you know, and there’s some ideas about helping people get out of them. There's been some programs that have been successful up in the San Fernando Valley, paying people to give up their RVs so they can go into motels as opposed to having to pay to store them. There's been some partnerships with some nonprofits to provide parking lots for some RVs. Um, there's been some things that have worked here and there. I don't think there's one silver bullet, but I think there's been some efforts that are working in small ways.
Gustavo: This is what interests me so much about the issue, and you've seen this with other sort of homeless encampments: When you are together for years, it's no longer about the idea that you need housing; you also want to be with the people who you've been with through so much. So how have the residents, at least at the Jefferson encampment, reacted to the offers to go into motels, to go into more permanent housing.
Erika: Well, you know, I did talk to Wendy and who, between the time, the first time I talked to her and the time that I've talked to her more recently, she apparently did get temporary housing up near LAX. She seemed like she liked it, but she told me she got kicked out because she painted on the walls. So, I think that kind of soured her on accepting temporary housing. There’s a fear that they'll lose it, right? And then if you give up your RV and you take your temporary housing at a motel, or if you take your permanent housing to the city and it doesn't work out for one reason or another, then you're back on the streets, and you're potentially even in a worse situation than you were to begin with, because you're in a tent versus an RV.
So I think that there's that fear, and I think there's also just a reluctance, like as you said, this is a community at this point. People want to go together. And so I think there's a couple of different challenges in getting people to get off the streets. But I would say that all of them, I think, want permanent housing. I don't think anybody out there is going to turn down an apartment to stay in an RV across the street, on Jefferson Boulevard.
Gustavo: Finally, Erika, we've been talking about all this mostly objectively, but we're both columnists, we're allowed to give opinions. All these attempts to get residents to move out of these RV encampments and shut them down: Is that the right move?
Erika: I think it's the right move, but I think we need to have a plan in place. I think we can't just shove people away, out of their RVs, and just put them someplace in some motel up in the San Fernando Valley, and, you know, wash our hands and forget about them. I think we really need a thoughtful, intentional plan to get people back on their feet, in a way that's sustainable.
And I think that, from what I've seen in the mayor's office, it seems like they're trying to do that, so that gives me hope. But I think that we have to be really thoughtful about this. Otherwise, we're just going to perpetuate the problem, as we saw with Wendy, who got into temporary housing, and now she's back on Jefferson Boulevard in an RV.
Gustavo: Erika, thank you so much for this conversation.
Erika: Thanks for having me on.
Gustavo: And that’s it for this episode of “The Times: Essential News From the L.A. Times.“
Ashlea Brown and Denise Guerra were the jefas on this episode. It was edited by Heba Elorbany and Mike Heflin, mixed and mastered it.
Our show is produced by Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez. Our fellow is Helen Li. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
Special thanks to Fox11 for allowing us to use their clip.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Friday with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.