Karen Bass, Nithya Raman, City Council surrendered – Latest News
Only Los Angeles may spend billions preventing homelessness, watch tents swallow sidewalks and parks, after which resolve the town has been too aggressive conserving people from tenting.
That is what the Los Angeles City Council did this week.
By a 10-3 vote, council members stripped anti-camping protections from a dozen areas. Parks. A senior middle. Gone.
This just isn’t compassion.
Barnsdale Art Park is pictured on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. The metropolis council voted 10-3 to eradicate 12 designated anti-camping zones in Council District 13. Jonathan Alcorn for CA Post
It is give up.
Councilman Hugo Soto-Martínez, the socialist who pushed the rollback, says imposing the anti-camping law simply strikes homeless people from block to dam as an alternative of housing them.
Fine. Then the place do they go?
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Not wherever they need.
Public parks belong to the public. Sidewalks belong to pedestrians. Senior facilities belong to seniors. Being homeless doesn’t grant a everlasting declare on public property.
Take Barnsdall Art Park, home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House — Los Angeles’ solely UNESCO World Heritage web site.
A homeless man is seen within the Madison West Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, on Wednesday, August 19, 2026. The Los Angeles City Council voted 10-3 to eradicate 12 designated anti-camping zones in Council District 13. Jonathan Alcorn for CA Post
Before anti-camping restrictions went into impact there, the park battled fires, vandalism and blocked pedestrian entry, based on the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation, which pushed for a carve-out from Tuesday’s vote.
“This park needs to be treated differently than other public spaces in Los Angeles,” basis president Daniel Gerwin informed The Post. One neighbor described years spent dousing fires, scrubbing waste and patching graffiti on Wright’s buildings.
Ten council members voted to take away the safety. Residents close to the Las Palmas Senior Citizen Center keep in mind the pandemic-era encampments. They don’t need a rerun.
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Councilwoman Traci Park objected loudly, and it’s straightforward to see why. She’s the closest factor Los Angeles has to an grownup on the City Council.
“These protections need to be expanded citywide,” Park informed The Post.
Four months earlier, the council voted 11-4 to designate a no-camping zone in Park’s district. Councilwoman Nithya Raman was one of the 4 no votes. Now a 10-member majority has voted to erase the protections fully in Soto-Martínez’s district.
Four months earlier, the council voted 11-4 to designate a no-camping zone in Park’s district. Councilwoman Nithya Raman was one of the 4 no votes. for CA Post
So whether or not a neighborhood will get to keep encampments out of its parks relies on whether or not its council member, like Soto-Martínez, decides imposing public order is politically inconvenient.
That’s not a homelessness coverage. That’s one council member getting his method.
Then there’s Nithya Raman.
Raman, working to switch Karen Bass as mayor, voted for the rollback. She’s opposed increasing the anti-camping law for years, insisting it pushes people some place else.
Voters ought to concentrate. Tuesday wasn’t a stray council vote. It was a preview.
Bass formally backs the anti-camping law as an enforcement instrument.
Bass is the mayor of all of Los Angeles — each council district included. Her own City Council gutted the law in a single of them. She mentioned nothing.
Raman, working to switch Karen Bass as mayor, voted for the rollback. She’s opposed increasing the anti-camping law for years, insisting it pushes people some place else. Jonathan Alcorn for CA Post
No mayor wins each council vote. But a critical one says one thing when her own signature difficulty collapses.
Bass has been mayor for practically 4 years — long enough to construct the gravitas and management to drive an agenda via her own City Council. She hasn’t.
Los Angeles has a City Council pushing an activist-left agenda and a mayor too weak to steer them.
Taxpayers have poured billions into this.
A court-ordered audit of roughly $2.3 billion in homelessness spending discovered critical weaknesses in oversight, record-keeping and the town’s potential to inform whether or not any of it labored.
Call it the homeless industrial advanced.
A court-ordered audit of roughly $2.3 billion in homelessness spending discovered critical weaknesses in oversight, record-keeping and the town’s potential to inform whether or not any of it labored.
Agencies. Nonprofits. Contractors. Consultants. An ecosystem will get paid to handle the issue. Nobody pays a price when it stays the identical.
For a comparability, drive 30 miles south.
Santa Ana has a Democratic mayor and an all-Democratic City Council. Mayor Valerie Amezcua reached a totally different conclusion.
Santa Ana affords shelter, detox, providers. But refuse help and keep breaking the law, and you may be arrested.
“It’s inhumane” to depart people unsheltered, Amezcua says.
Imagine that. A Democrat who thinks leaving people to rot on the sidewalk is the merciless option.
Santa Ana’s unsheltered homeless depend dropped from 871 in 2024 to 714 this 12 months. In one enforcement operation, 11 people accepted shelter, one reunited with household, and 69 went to jail for refusing providers and persevering with to interrupt the law.
Imagine that. A Democrat who thinks leaving people to rot on the sidewalk is the merciless option. Jonathan Alcorn for CA Post
That’s not cruelty.
That’s a metropolis saying two issues will be true directly: We’ll help you, and also you don’t get to stay on the sidewalk eternally.
There’s nothing compassionate about watching somebody within the grip of extreme mental sickness deteriorate in a tent.
There’s nothing compassionate about telling households and seniors that giving up their parks is the price of enlightened authorities.
The most annoying half of this vote isn’t that Los Angeles has failed to resolve homelessness. We knew that.
It’s that 10 council members voted to make peace with the failure.
Raman and Soto-Martínez provide the ideology. Bass provides the silence that lets it win.
Los Angeles City Hall has confused tolerance with mercy, dysfunction with compassion, give up with coverage.
The homeless deserve higher.
So does everybody else who lives there.
Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com
