Homeless street workers took to the streets of downtown Los Angeles last month and delivered what is now a seasonal sales pitch: Give up your spot on the curb and try living in a nearby hotel room instead.

David Ruther, who owns a tent on Broadway near the 101 Freeway, had an emphatic answer: No way.

Ruther denounced the rules in place at the LA Grand, one of the hotels used by the city as housing for the homeless. He said it is not right for non-housed residents to have their bags inspected when they walk into that hotel.

“I told them I wouldn’t give up my constitutional rights and that they should search me every time I go to the store to buy a soda or a pack of beer,” said Ruther, who sat in an office chair and a Starbucks coffee and a Newport cigarette.

Since

she took it

office, Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe initiative has lifted more than 1,200 homeless people off the streets in Venice, North Hollywood, Del Rey, Beverly Grove and about a dozen other LA neighborhoods. In many cases, camp residents went to the same motel or group of motels, leaving an area clear of tents.

Yet Bass’ initiative recently stalled in one area of ​​downtown Los Angeles: the streets surrounding the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument, the city’s birthplace and home to Olvera Street and other landmarks.

In April, street workers went to that neighborhood with the Inside Safe program and persuaded an estimated 78 people to move in, according to figures from the mayor’s team.

Another month later,

at least three dozen about two dozen

tents still populate the streets around El Pueblo, including Main, Spring, Cesar Chavez, and Broadway, where Ruther keeps his tent.

In some locations, new arrivals have taken the place of those who accepted hotel rooms. In others, long-term camp residents have made it clear to aid workers that they are not going anywhere.

Tellingly, Bass’s team acknowledged the challenges in a May 3 memo

Local council

Members of the Inside Safe program had experienced drug addiction, serious mental health problems, criminal activity and “housing-resistant individuals” in that part of the city.

Despite the involvement of two provincial agencies and several nonprofits, “the many needs didn’t allow us to get everyone to housing,” wrote Mercedes Marquez, the mayor’s homelessness czar.

The Inside Safe program, which just received $250 million in next year’s city budget, has targeted 17 locations since December. Bass, early in his tenure as mayor, said Angelenos won’t see that initiative as a success until their communities are free of encampments. They want the tents to go away, she said at the time.

Still, Bass says she’s not discouraged by the pace of progress in El Pueblo, noting that the vast majority of homeless people approached by her program still say yes.

In an interview last week, Bass said the Inside Safe program has been dealing with an “intense” array of problems, particularly drug addiction, both in El Pueblo and on the streets bordering the 110 Freeway in South Los Angeles. Those locations made up three of the last four Inside Safe operations.

“There were literally people who overdosed during surgery” in El Pueblo, she said. “And the only thing that saved them was the fact that we were with USC’s street meds [teams]and they had to administer Narcan.”

Bass said her homelessness team will be doing a “deep dive” on Inside Safe in the coming days, examining the program’s weakness and identifying strategies to improve it.

“We know that we will encounter camps where there is resistance. I mean, I don’t think anyone was naive about that,’ she said. “But then we have to figure out what you do when people resist.”

Bass is not the first politician to try to get his arms around the El Pueblo encampments. Then mayor Eric

Garcetti opened the city’s first A Bridge Home shelter in 2018

on the eastern edge of the neighborhood, not far from Union Station. But that provision did not meet the need.

After the outbreak of COVID-19, the number of people living near El Pueblo grew dramatically, occupying at least six streets in the area. As pandemic restrictions were scaled back, Councilman Kevin de Len, who represents much of downtown, took a bipartisan approach to the area.

De Len’s office, working with outreach teams, provided the area’s unhoused residents with beds in two Bridge Home shelters, the LA Grand and Hilda L. Solis Care First Village, a transitional housing facility. In December 2021, his office reported that 84 households had moved in there.

At the same time, De Len designated some stretches of sidewalk near El Pueblo as “41.18 zones,” named after the portion of the municipal code that prohibits camping in locations chosen by the city council. Homeless advocates attacked the new 41.18 zones, saying they criminalized poverty. Some labeled the LA Grand and Solis Village, which require their residents to follow certain rules, as “carceral” or prison-like.

Over the next year, the streets around El Pueblo were slowly populated again. Some holdouts moved their tents to locations just outside the 41.18 zones.

Among them was Philip, who often relies on a manual wheelchair and now lives on Cesar Chavez Avenue.

Philip, who is in his 70s and declined to give his last name, told The Times last year that he considered the LA Grand a “concentration camp.” He said would

Hi

would rather be arrested than forced into that facility, which had curfews and regular searches.

A year and a half later, the Inside Safe team hasn’t changed their mind. Even though the LA Grand no longer has a curfew, Philip said he still has no interest in going there.

“Once they get in there, there are certain orders they give you, you can’t do this, you can’t do that,” he said last week. “That’s not democracy. That’s a concentration camp.”

That kind of hostility is at odds with the mayor’s message since the launch of Inside Safe. During her State of the City address, Bass said the program had “finally dispelled the myth that people don’t want to go in.”

Bass said during her interview last week that she had always expected that there would be some unhoused residents refusing to go inside. And she acknowledged that the rules at the LA Grand are “really strict.”

The mayor said her team will review the rules at Inside Safe’s hotels and motels and develop “consistent standards” for each location.

“If we encounter people who are resistant, we will have to use different strategies and different services,” she said. “Other

other

we are now trying to build out those services.”

De Len, who took office in 2020, said some of the challenges at El Pueblo can be attributed to location. Homeless people have settled in the area, he said, after being released from nearby prisons or after arriving on the buses and trains that converge at Union Station.

De Len also thinks the area has not received enough drug addiction and mental health services, which are the responsibility of Los Angeles County.

“We can house the homeless and relentlessly clean up the area, but if LA County doesn’t act and provide the mental health and addiction services that are so urgently needed, it’s going to be a never-ending story,” he said.

Cheri Todoroff, executive director of the county’s homeless initiative, hit back at that claim, saying the county was working closely with the city in El Pueblo, sending mental health clinicians, substance abuse counselors, and health professionals.

“To this day, they continue to engage customers on the site, she said.

El Pueblo isn’t the only location where the mayor’s program is progressing more slowly than past operations.

In late April, the mayor’s team took Inside Safe to a section of South Los Angeles along the 110 Freeway, targeting encampments from 42nd Street south to Vernon Avenue.

Bass’ team estimates that about 50 people went inside during that operation. On

Monday Friday,

those streets had 15 more tents or tent-like structures, many near an elementary school

Vernon Avenue Elementary School

.

Inside Safe moved to a different location in South LA last week, focusing on streets along 110 between 47th and 51st. During that operation, DASH buses brought more than 50 homeless people to motels.

However, not everyone got on the bus.

Willie Gutierrez, who has a tent on 51st, was initially interested and chatted with field workers who had set up folding chairs on a nearby overpass. But when it came time to move, he hadn’t found a home for his ladder and buckets of paint.

“If I’m not ready, I’m not ready,” said the 53-year-old.

Days later, Gutierrez told The Times that he had cleared his supplies and was pursuing a new plan: moving to San Bernardino County to live with his sister. Meanwhile, one of his unhoused neighbors now sounds like some kind of booster for Inside Safe.

Beyanira Lopez, 58, said she recently moved into a “nice” motel room on Central Avenue. Lopez, riding her bike back to 51st Street, said she tried to persuade two of the holdouts to come inside as well.

“I can shower every day. I can cook inside with my little stove. I can sleep when I want,” she said. “I’m very happy.”