The homeless always show the need for mental health assistance. In this case, instead of taking advantage of temporary housing, shelters and long term recovery, they prefer trash cans for their encampments. Instead of getting help.
“Historic Filipinotown residents delivered a letter to Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez on Wednesday demanding regular trash pick-ups and more help to find local housing after at least two recent city sweeps at their encampment led to valuable belongings getting taken or trashed.
Rickie Norris, a 77-year-old lifelong LA resident, said that hundreds of dollars worth of battery packs, cat food, a 10- by 10-foot tent, and a set of tools that he lent out to others at the encampment were taken at a CARE+ operation on April 29.
“What’s wrong with people taking care of each other?” Norris said. “The city has more fun stealing from us, and harassing us.”
Note he says nothing about getting help for himself or others. At the same time Los Angeles can not account for over $2 billion in spending on the homeless. It is time we mandate the homeless get off the street and get assistance. Actually, it would be cheaper than giving money to Homeless Industrial Complex that makes some rich off the poor homeless.
Unhoused residents demand LA Councilmember Hernandez provide trash cans instead of sweeps
People living in a Historic Filipinotown encampment said they’ve undergone at least two recent sweeps where people lost belongings like tents, tools, and pet food.
by Elizabeth Chou, LA Public Press, 05/29/2025 https://lapublicpress.org/2025/05/homelessness-la-hernandez-sweeps/
Historic Filipinotown residents delivered a letter to Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez on Wednesday demanding regular trash pick-ups and more help to find local housing after at least two recent city sweeps at their encampment led to valuable belongings getting taken or trashed.
Rickie Norris, a 77-year-old lifelong LA resident, said that hundreds of dollars worth of battery packs, cat food, a 10- by 10-foot tent, and a set of tools that he lent out to others at the encampment were taken at a CARE+ operation on April 29.
“What’s wrong with people taking care of each other?” Norris said. “The city has more fun stealing from us, and harassing us.”
A log of CARE+ operations provided to LA Public Press by the city indicates there were CARE+ operations at the encampment on April 29 and March 25.
The letter was signed by 23 people who said they want “a safe space to exist until we have housing.” But LA Sanitation’s CARE+ “comprehensive” cleanings “do not actually clean our community. They just destroy our belongings,” the letter said.
The residents are demanding that Councilmember Hernandez provide port-a-potties that are accessible “around the clock,” trash cans that are emptied regularly, brooms and other cleaning supplies, and a way to dispose of needles. They’re also asking that housing offered to them be located in their community, instead of out of the area, since many of them have local “work, medical needs, and support networks.”
Residents are also asking for a sit down meeting with Hernandez at their encampment, the letter said.
LA City Council members have the ability to schedule sweeps, and they can also downgrade them to lighter cleanings that don’t require people to move out of the area for most of the day. They can also cancel sweeps.
On Wednesday, two of the encampment residents joined activists with LA Street Care to deliver the letter to Hernandez’s office in Westlake. A staffer accepted the letter and said they would follow up with the office’s homelessness and housing team. Encampment residents and activists also presented a banner that said “Services not Sweeps,” which was signed by encampment residents.
Norris was one of the residents who delivered the letter. He said he thinks more people should be “totally enraged by what we gotta go through.”
“I’d like the City Council to come down and go through what we gotta go through,” Norris said. “They can come down and move my tent [during sweeps] … and take a look at how clean the sidewalk is after they get done – because it’s just as dirty as [when] it started. ”
“It’s ridiculous, especially when the gum is still on the sidewalks and everything that was on the sidewalks that was there before,” he said.
Enrique Texis, another resident who came to deliver the letter, said it doesn’t feel like council members pay attention, and he thinks having more people come out to pressure the council member is needed.
Texis said many people are feeling the pressure of the current high cost of living. Meanwhile, efforts to house people on the streets have been slow, he said.
“I’ve been on the street 10 years,” he said. “I’ve seen six or seven people get housed.
In an emailed statement on Thursday afternoon after this story was published, Naomi Villagomez Roochnik, a spokesperson for Hernandez’s office, said they were working to schedule a meeting with members of the “delegation” that delivered the letter. The meeting would be to “listen to their concerns and explore potential solutions together,” Roochnik said. It is unclear if the meeting would include the council member herself.
Encampment residents also said that on Wednesday morning, Los Angeles Police Department officers arrived and told people on one side of the street to move. The department said in an emailed statement that officers “stood by for sanitation clean up.” LA Sanitation did not respond to a request for comment regarding the incident.
Roochnik said that Hernandez’s office was “working to determine which team was responsible” for Wednesday morning’s police and sanitation presence, which she said their office did not schedule.
Their office did schedule the March 25 and April 29 CARE+ operations, Roochnik said. She said their “office provides advance notice ahead of all CARE+ cleanups, which we schedule based on ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and public health needs,” but did not specify further what the needs were.
Roochnik added that the office has an “unhoused constituent services coordinator” who goes to each CARE+ operation “often alongside mutual aid groups.” She also said that they are working with USC Street Medicine to support residents at the encampment.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority did not respond to requests for comment on the concerns about the recent sweeps. LA Sanitation did not provide responses to questions before publication time.
Encampment residents said CARE+ Operations don’t actually clean
CARE+ operations, which require people to move out of an area targeted for clean up from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., are advertised by city officials as keeping streets clean. But unhoused residents at the Historic Filipinotown encampment said the reality on the ground is much different, with their belongings getting taken by the city and very little cleaning happening.
Last year, the adopted budget showed that LA city leaders allocated around $58 million on 22 CARE+ teams that provide at least five days of service per week to each City Council office, and five CARE teams that do cleanings that don’t require people to move, along with at least $20 million in contractual services related to the program, such as vehicle rentals and hazardous material cleanup.
Last week, the City Council approved a budget slashing funding for the cleanups to around $50 million (including at least $11 million in contractual services) – which kept at least five-days-a-week CARE+ services for each City Council district – and eliminating service to locations like the Bridge Home shelter sites that were set up under former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti’s administration. LA Mayor Karen Bass has five working days to respond to city council members on if she wants to veto anything in the budget before it is adopted.
In the first four months of this calendar year, the city performed more than 3,000 CARE+ operations, according to a log of sweeps provided by LA Sanitation.
In April 2024, a forensic examiner found that city officials provided doctored information in federal court to defend the city against a 2019 lawsuit accusing it of illegally seizing unhoused people’s belongings during sweeps, the Los Angeles Times reported.
One Historic Filipinotown encampment resident, who spoke to LA Public Press on the condition of anonymity because he is worried about retaliation, said he gets the feeling the sweeps aren’t really about cleaning.
“I feel like they use the clean ups more of like a retaliation for us being here,” he said, adding that “it does get dirty … but I feel like all they have to do is put a trash can [out] and we [would] clean it ourselves, you know.”
This resident also said when the sweeps happen, the city does not thoroughly clean the area, so he doesn’t understand why the people that live there would need to move out of the way. And he said there is no opportunity to give feedback on how these sweeps are affecting them.
Caleb Hunter, who lives in the encampment, said that during sweeps, their tents and other possessions are taken and thrown away into “dumpster trucks.” When they return to their encampment, their belongings are gone, he said.
“It’s a huge concern” for them to experience such frequent “seizures” of their property, Hunter said, especially due to the conditions they face living outside. “It’s pretty frustrating to continually not have any belongings,” he said.
Hunter said he would much prefer the city do more to train social workers to “talk to us better, house us faster.” Meanwhile, the sweeps are “impossibly grueling,” he said, and take a deep emotional toll on the encampment residents.
“It’s awful,” he said. “It takes a little piece away from you.”
Gary Donahue, who has lived at the encampment for three months, said that during the April sweep, a police officer shoved him against the wall. Donahue said he had already moved his own things out of the way for the workers when he saw his fellow encampment resident, Norris, “still in the clean-up zone that had been closed off.
“I came running around the corner,” Donahue said. “The officer that got out of his police car thought that I was doing something wrong and [came] running up here for some other reason, I guess, and he body checked me up against the wall.” LAPD did not provide comment regarding this incident by publication time.
Another encampment resident, Ernest Jones, said his electric wheelchair was taken during a recent sweep, but when he tried to retrieve it from a storage facility in downtown LA, in accordance with LA Sanitation officials’ instructions, which are posted as a notice after a sweep, the wheelchair was not there. LA Sanitation did not provide comment to LA Public Press on the incident before publication time.
“They [The city] just keeps sweeping, and sweeping and sweeping, never blessing, blessing and blessing,” Jones said.
