Traci Park has built her political brand on fear of the unhoused. When she moved to Venice in 2021, anti-homeless hysteria on the Westside had reached a fever pitch. Wealthy property owners, confined to their home offices during the pandemic, fixated on encampments that had formed along sidewalks and near the beach. Many were seeing visible homelessness for the first time, the direct result of COVID-19 policies that reduced shelter capacity and halted encampment sweeps while thousands lost their jobs and housing.
Instead of addressing root causes, Park joined the chorus of resentment. She flooded social media with videos of encampments, described the Westside as a “dystopian hellscape,” and accused then-Councilmember Mike Bonin of “destroying the city.” Her rhetoric echoed the anti-poor messaging on neighborhood apps like Nextdoor, where anger over the presence of unhoused people masqueraded as civic concern. That narrative, framing homelessness as a crime problem rather than a housing problem, would become the foundation of her political career.
Park is a vocal supporter of the city’s anti-camping ordinance, which makes it illegal to sit, sleep, or store belongings in designated public areas. The law has been ruled unconstitutional in the past, yet Park helped expand it across her district. She declared nine new enforcement zones, including one that would have criminalized resting on the beach. That proposal was withdrawn only after the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles warned it violated state law.
Her approach has brought real harm. In one sweep along Jefferson Boulevard near the Ballona Wetlands, city contractors towed RVs containing people’s possessions, leaving residents with nowhere to go. Park had just blocked a $2.3 million housing plan for the same group. Weeks later, a man living in the encampment burned to death in his vehicle.
Under LAMC 80.69.4, Park has pushed a rapid expansion of overnight bans on “oversized vehicles,” the same RVs, vans, and buses that serve as homes for thousands of Angelenos. Her motions have extended these restrictions to dozens of new streets in CD 11. The ordinances do not offer safe alternatives or services.
Park’s policies mirror state bill AB 630, which allows cities to seize and destroy RVs ahead of schedule. Her “Vanlord Ban,” prohibiting people from renting RVs to unhoused residents, continues a forty-year cycle of punitive vehicle-dwelling crackdowns that have failed every time. According to the City Controller, Los Angeles has spent millions enforcing more than 1,300 oversized-vehicle restrictions, yet the number of people living in RVs has increased 31 percent since 2020.
After a 2023 freeway fire caused by stored hand sanitizer, Park falsely blamed the blaze on people sheltering under overpasses and proposed inventorying all “critical infrastructure” to keep encampments away. Her motion targeted exactly the places where unhoused people seek cover from rain and cold, such as bridges, tunnels, and freeway underpasses, reinforcing a pattern of exclusion rather than safety.
Nationally, cities have followed a similar path. A recent panel hosted by the Inner City Law Center found that more than 320 anti-homeless laws have been enacted since the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson decision, which weakened protections against criminalization. Park’s legislative record puts Los Angeles squarely in that trend.
While pushing police-led enforcement, Park has simultaneously obstructed affordable housing in her district. In October 2025, the California Department of Housing and Community Development issued a formal letter of inquiry to the City over delays to the Venice Dell Affordable Housing Project, delays directly tied to Park’s actions. Days later, she called the project “defunct” and “a waste of taxpayer dollars” on the Council floor.
Her alternative proposal to relocate the project to Lot 701 was widely dismissed as a stall tactic, and the state warned that her interference could violate housing law and cost Los Angeles future funding. The contrast is stark: Park criminalizes poverty while blocking housing that could prevent it.
Park often claims her aggressive enforcement policies make the Westside safer and cleaner, but new data tells another story. A RAND Corporation study found that Los Angeles’s official homeless count missed up to a third of unsheltered residents in neighborhoods like Venice, meaning thousands are excluded from city services and planning. The gap shows that what Park presents as “progress” is often just disappearance — people pushed out of view, not into homes.
Park supports Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program, which relies on police-assisted encampment clearings and temporary motel placements. Participants describe being moved repeatedly, sometimes miles from their doctors, families, and jobs, with little notice or support. Many have yet to receive permanent housing.
Park routinely tells constituents these residents have been “housed,” but interim motel rooms are not housing. For her, absence seems to equal success. The growing body of evidence, from state investigations to RAND’s data, shows that the crisis is not being solved. It is being hidden.
