Early one morning in Westlake, as neighborhood children walked to school, I spotted a woman heading in my direction. She was holding the hand of a little girl who wore a mask, carefully leading her around three people who were sprawled on the pavement.
They were walking on Bonnie Brae Street, a couple blocks east of MacArthur Park, where it’s not uncommon to see people who are either asleep or passed out, with syringes and needles scattered about.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
Eduardo Aguirre, the girl’s father, was hustling up behind his family and called my name. I had toured the neighborhood with him one night in September, taking inventory of broken streetlights, a torched playground in the park and countless other problems that have battered Westlake for years. The Aguirres generally don’t let their 6-year-old daughter use the park, even though for them and thousands of other apartment dwellers, it’s the most conveniently located green space.
Aguirre’s wife, Maria, pointed out the wooden planter boxes that had been placed on Bonnie Brae to discourage camping. People squeezed behind them and used the space as a toilet, she said. Aguirre explained that his kindergartner sometimes wears a mask because she doesn’t like the smells, and because her parents fear she might inhale a cloud of fentanyl smoke.
This is one of the sad realities of MacArthur Park. And my chance encounter with the Aguirre family was a reminder of why I’ve kept going back since August, when a frustrated Norm Langer told me he was thinking of closing his iconic delicatessen at 7th and Alvarado streets because of the erosion of order and civility.
After I wrote that column, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass went to the deli to have lunch and talk things over with Langer. “The bottom line is, we have to do whatever it’s going to take,” she told me that day, “and we have to respond urgently.”
I believed she meant it. But I soon discovered that, nearly a year earlier, Bass had told virtually the same thing to the Los Angeles Daily News.
“No one should be dying on our streets and all of our neighbors should feel safe and secure walking down the street in their neighborhoods, working in their local businesses and visiting community spaces like parks and libraries,” Bass told the Daily News in September 2023 after the newspaper published a series on the miseries in MacArthur Park.
Much of that work remains undone, and that’s a theme in the city of Los Angeles, beyond Westlake, and back through time.
We’ve heard multiple vows over the years, from various public officials, to end homelessness. (Despite a tiny decrease in the last year, the city count stands at roughly 45,000, while countywide the number is about 75,000.)
Almost 20 years ago, when I was writing about the human catastrophe on Skid Row, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa joined me on the street one night and vowed to clean up the neighborhood. (Despite years of attention at huge expense, the staggering toll of mental illness, addiction and homelessness remains.)
In 2014, Mayor Eric Garcetti promised to get City Hall refocused on delivering basic services. (The current waiting time for repair of ruptured sidewalks is 10 years.)
Bass, who took office two years ago and made homelessness a centerpiece of her agenda, has housed thousands, but with a budget deficit looming, a city report estimates it would take more than $20 billion — a doubling of city, state and federal funds — to end homelessness by 2032.
These are problems that have festered for decades, and no one expects a quick turnaround, but after all of the promises and all the money invested, people are tired of waiting for clear signs of progress.
Los Angeles is less than four years away from hosting the Olympics in the summer of 2028, and it’s fair to wonder if the city will look less like a sprawling encampment by then, with navigable streets and safe buses and trains running on time. But it’s also fair to wonder if there will be even more cracks in the foundation and more broken promises.
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In MacArthur Park, it’s not as if the problems have been ignored, nor are they easy to fix. They’re deeply rooted in poverty, homelessness, the lack of affordable housing, a low-wage economy, cheap and powerfully destructive drugs and gang-controlled criminal enterprise.
Recently, Bass and her team have been strategizing with the police, recreation and sanitation departments and working with supportive housing providers.
On Thursday, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who believes too much money is spent on law enforcement and not enough on social services, held a news conference in MacArthur Park to announce several partnerships and social service initiatives. She also said she is committed — along with county Supervisor Hilda Solis and state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, among others — to improving “the quality of life for residents and visitors alike.”
“We are standing in a historic place that, for decades, has been overlooked and left without the investment it needs to thrive,” Hernandez said, highlighting plans for more cleanups, medical intervention and overdose prevention.
Westlake is acutely impacted, she said, by “the dueling homelessness crisis and opioid epidemic. … But it is also a neighborhood of hope and promise.”
The neighborhood is primarily made up of low-income Spanish-speaking people, many of them undocumented residents who can’t vote and can be easily ignored even though they’re a critical part of L.A.’s economy, present and future. So it’s good to finally see such a response in a neighborhood that has become a symbol of the disorder that is crippling Los Angeles, but it shouldn’t have taken this long to confront the festering crisis head-on. I wondered if this might be yet another of the many MacArthur Park rescue projects that brought temporary relief before falling apart.
It’s not just neighborhood problems that have to be fixed. It’s the fractured relationships between various city and county agencies, the culture of over-promising and under-delivering, and the scourge of fragile egos and petty politics.
Despite the claim at the news conference that the arms of all the key parties were locked and ready to serve — rather than the usual disorganized and dysfunctional silo approach — I noted the absence of two critical players.
Bass and LAPD Rampart Division brass.
Gangs and other criminal operators play a key role in undermining public safety and quality of life in Westlake, from drug distribution to organized retail theft to the extortion of vendors, and many drug users are so desperately addicted they steal from local merchants to support their habits.
All of that has a crushing impact, and while you can’t arrest your way out of a drug epidemic or socioeconomic distress, Hernandez’s social services will be more effective if she also partners with police.
As for Bass, who has far more power than any individual council member as well as a bully pulpit, she might be the only one who can lead a true transformation. She once told me that having served as a state legislator and a congressional representative, and having built relationships with county supervisors, she’s in a unique position to make things happen. And back in August, when she was done with her pastrami sandwich at Langer’s, she said she was on the case and already making calls.
She has to be, or it’s the usual L.A. story of everyone having a piece of a problem but no one being in charge, or on the hook to deliver the fix.
MacArthur Park needs a champion and defender, if not a Marshall Plan. It needs someone to say, “Not on my watch.” It’s unacceptable that severely incapacitated people stagger about like ghosts, their bodies twisted and tortured, their eyes vacant. You couldn’t create a more disturbing horror film, even in L.A., than the reel that plays nonstop in MacArthur Park.
In infamous Yoshinoya alley, severely addicted people gather at all hours, sometimes by the dozens, to use drugs including fentanyl, a serial killer. Some of them are barefoot, caked in dirt, barely able to stand. Some are bent over and pretzeled, with oozing skin sores, as if they’ve been attacked by flesh-eating monsters.
The most disturbing thing about it is the silence, the acquiescence, the normalization. People walk by on their way to work. Children walk by. Public officials drive by. If you live in the neighborhood, it’s part of the landscape and it’s what you expect — a daily snapshot of social collapse and municipal failure.
Outreach teams work the area, along with those on Narcan patrol who swoop in to revive the nearly dead, but you’d need an army to make a big enough difference, along with a far more intensive and in some cases coercive treatment and rehab system.
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As the news conference concluded Thursday, L.A. Times photographer Genaro Molina saw a family walking past a group of people smoking fentanyl, one of whom said, “Everyone stop smoking. Family coming.”
It was a nice enough gesture, but the park can’t be an outdoor drug den.
Earlier this month, Molina and I walked to school with the Aguirre family. The kindergartner wore a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer hair clip and was excited about performing in a Christmas production.
Afterward, Eduardo Aguirre — whose 21-year-old son is serving with the U.S. Army in Syria — sent me a video of his daughter singing a song about snowflakes. He also sent photos of walks to school past a man on a mattress, a half-naked man, a man standing over a sidewalk fire, and a person folded in half on a bench under a blanket.
Aguirre, a mechanical engineer and member of the Westlake South Neighborhood Council, attended the news conference Thursday, and I asked what he thought about the presentation by Hernandez and others.
“It’s politics,” he said, telling me he’s heard similar promises many times before.
But he wanted to hold out hope, and he said he’d be watching closely to see what happens.
“We have to stay on them,” he said.
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