The City’s moratorium on encampment cleanups is still in effect due to Covid concerns. The results are the dangerous and disastrous expansion of encampments on our sidewalks.
The scheduled cleanups that would move encampments and disinfect the sidewalks beneath them were suspended in March. The BID clean teams do not have the authority to move people or their possessions.
We have expressed our concern about the public health consequences of this to our City elected representatives, directly and through media interviews, but there is no expectation that the moratorium will be lifted anytime soon.
On December 4, the BID hosted Federal Judge David Carter for a walking tour of our District. Carter is overseeing a lawsuit brought by the LA Alliance for Human Rights against the City and County of Los Angeles to force them to humanely and comprehensively address LA's homelessness crisis. We explained to Judge Carter that our community has in recent years seen outbreaks of contagious diseases among the unsheltered and that since the onset of the COVID pandemic in March, the City stopped performing basic sanitation services in our area. It was clear that he was deeply troubled by what he saw and found the situation unacceptable. We remain hopeful that Judge Carter will raise our issues at his next hearing with the City and that officials would be compelled to act.
While we wait for the City to resume cleanups, the BID makes every effort to obtain voluntary compliance from the people living in the street to give us any trash they want removed. Our Clean Team hits the streets at 5 a.m. and begins the steady work of hauling away tons of trash and debris from gutters, sidewalks and streets. The BID's 50 trash cans throughout the district are emptied several times a day.
Once again, the BID’s on-demand pressure washing service hit its highest call load this past quarter ending December 31. During the final three months of 2020, our BID Clean Team responded to 980 power wash requests.
The BID’s #1 priority is to get the City cleanups back. Our district is under enormous pressure as the epicenter of the country’s homelessness crisis.
