Traci Park has built her political career on the removal of unhoused people from public view. She has expanded enforcement zones, pushed through vehicle bans, blocked affordable housing, and overseen relentless sweeps that optimize for displacement rather than care, all while spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars with almost nothing to show for it in housing placements.
No LA City representative is more aggressive about sweeping unhoused people off the street than Traci Park. Our Westside Councilmember has introduced ten motions expanding anti-camping enforcement zones under LAMC 41.18 (the city’s controversial anti-camping ordinance) and more than twenty motions targeting vehicle dwellers.
Traci Park’s office oversees CARE+ operations in Venice that send an average of 15 city workers and 10 city vehicles to displace a handful of people with nowhere to go, while outreach workers make contact with fewer than one person per deployment. In the same period her newsletters celebrate encampment removals nearly fifty times for every mention of housing or services. Park does not have a homelessness strategy. She has a removal and propaganda strategy.
LAMC 41.18, the anti-camping ordinance Traci Park relies on most heavily, has been found to be a failure. An analysis of 174 encampment clearings conducted under 41.18 concluded the law is “generally ineffective” at housing people and preventing encampments from returning. The numbers are stark. Of all people swept under 41.18, 92.2% either did not receive housing before being displaced, were placed in interim housing and exited back to the streets, or are entirely unaccounted for.
Only two people out of hundreds were placed in permanent housing. Eighty-one percent of cleared encampments saw the same people return. The sweeps also actively disrupt people’s paths to housing. People lose contact with outreach workers, lose trust in service providers, and lose the ID documents they need to qualify for housing at all.
This report was ordered by the City Council, completed in November 2023, and then buried for months, kept from City officials and the public while Traci Park and others continued expanding the very zones it condemned. Meanwhile, the City spent over $3 million on 41.18 enforcement alone, not counting law enforcement costs, to permanently house two people.
Every sweep Park orders takes something from people who already have almost nothing. Tents, sleeping bags, medications, phones, identification documents, family photos and more are all routinely seized and destroyed by sanitation crews operating under her direction.
In Venice, nearly a third of unhoused Venice residents report losing possessions during their most recent forced move. More than a third are forced to move more than five times in a single month. Nine out of ten experience a forced move within any given week. In almost none of these cases is shelter or housing offered. People are not being helped. They are being ground down, repeatedly, at public expense, while Traci Park posts before-and-after cleanup videos for her constituents.
Park claims her enforcement policies are working. Independent data say otherwise. The share of unhoused people sleeping completely without shelter on the Westside, with no tent, no vehicle, no protection from the elements, has more than doubled under Traci Park’s watch.
Vehicle bans have pushed people out of their last form of shelter without placing them in housing. The official homeless count is missing more than a third of the people actually living outside, in part because constant displacement makes people harder to find and harder to count. The crisis is not shrinking. It is being hidden, and the people left behind are more vulnerable, more exposed, and harder to reach than before.
For the thousands of Angelenos who live in their cars, vans, and RVs, their vehicle is their home. Traci Park treats this last vestige of shelter as a problem to be eliminated. She has introduced more than twenty separate motions restricting where vehicle dwellers can park or exist, expanded overnight ban zones across dozens of street segments, pushed state legislation allowing the City to seize and destroy RVs outright, and passed a ban on renting RVs to unhoused people, with no alternative shelter in place.
The City has spent millions on signs, citations, and tows under these restrictions. The number of people living in vehicles has gone up, not down. Every approach Park has tried has failed to reduce vehicle homelessness, and she responds by escalating the same failed approach.
CARE+ sweeps cost Los Angeles tens of millions of dollars a year. In CD11, that money pays for large enforcement deployments that move small numbers of people from one block to the next, destroy their belongings, and connect almost none of them to housing or services.
Additional costs to LA taxpayers, including law enforcement, legal exposure, and court-ordered sanctions are not even tracked. A federal court found that the City fabricated evidence to justify sweeps, and another court found the City approved a mass encampment clearance plan in secret, in violation of open meetings law. Traci Park has championed every piece of this machinery. The public is paying for a program that makes homelessness harder to solve while making unhoused people’s lives actively worse.
The research is unambiguous. Homelessness is a housing problem. A large and consistent body of academic and policy research finds that the single strongest predictor of homelessness in any given city is the cost of housing. Housing costs explain far more of the variation in homelessness rates than substance use, mental illness, or any other factor commonly blamed for the crisis.
Cities with high rents have high homelessness, while cities that build affordable housing see it fall. That is the crisis Traci Park is supposed to be addressing, but instead, she is blocking the solutions. She has actively obstructed the Venice Dell affordable housing project, opposed the city policies that streamline affordable housing approvals, opposed rent stabilization and other tenant protections that keep people in their homes, and claimed credit for new units on the Westside that her office had nothing to do with.
She spends public money criminalizing the people her own policy failures have left without homes, while standing in the way of the housing that would actually solve the problem. For the full picture of her record blocking affordable housing and opposing renters’ rights, see Traci Park is Anti-Housing.
Constant displacement is not a neutral inconvenience. It destroys access to medications, severs connections with outreach workers, exposes people to cold and illness, and kills. A man known to Venice residents as Paul was swept again and again from block to block in the weeks before his death in February 2026, pushed from commercial corridors into residential streets and pushed again, with no offer of housing, no shelter available, and no alternative provided.
Paul’s death is not an isolated tragedy. More than six unhoused people die every single day in LA County. This is what happens when criminalization replaces compassion as the organizing principle of local government. As long as Traci Park continues to treat unhoused people as a nuisance to be cleared rather than neighbors to be helped, more people will die.
