Updated: 2:55 p.m. July 17, 2026
The city says its latest Inside Safe operation outside the Los Angeles Police Department’s Olympic Station was a success, moving 24 people into interim housing and cleaning up an encampment that had been there for years.
Residents aren’t ready to call it a victory yet. At a community meeting this week, they wanted to know how the city plans to keep the encampment from returning to Olympic Boulevard and Menlo Avenue and what other changes are planned for the site. Meanwhile, advocates and experts are watching to see if the people placed in hotels or motels get the help they need to move off the streets for good.
The July 2 operation outside the police station was the first Inside Safe effort at the site, according to Mayor Karen Bass’ office. Outreach teams spent weeks building relationships with people living at the encampment before moving two dozen people into interim housing, spokesperson Jieun Kim said.
At the community meeting on Tuesday, neighbors received an update from the mayor’s office and police and also weighed in on what else they’d like to see now that the encampment is gone. According to the mayor’s office, the most common requests from meeting attendees were additional plants and greenery, community cleanup events through Shine LA, more trash receptacles and an Adopt-a-Block program, which lets volunteers regularly clean and maintain a neighborhood block with city support.
Concrete bollards, benches and bike racks were also among the options the city presented to attendees.
Jovita Carrillo, who lives nearby on New Hampshire Avenue, said she’s “very happy” about the Inside Safe operation. But after years of seeing the city clean the site only for people to return, she said she’s more interested in what happens next.
“The encampment has been around for years, more than three years I would say,” Carrillo said. “People came two or three times to clean the trash but once they finished cleaning, the homeless people would come back.”
As of Thursday afternoon, the encampment had not returned.
Carrillo said this operation felt different because people were offered housing instead of simply being displaced.
“It’s the first time they did something like this, where people got a home or shelter,” she said, adding she’d like to see more trees, greenery and planters at the site to make it feel more like a green space for the community.
The Pico Union operation was the 134th since the launch of the Inside Safe program three years ago, according to the mayor’s office.
Launched in 2022, the program targets “the largest encampments across the city,” according to Konstantin Hatcher, the mayor’s senior director of community engagement, by offering people interim housing before crews clear the sites. City officials say the program is intended to help individuals move from interim to permanent homes.
While the program appears to be effective at reducing encampments, clearing a site shouldn’t be the measure of success, said Benjamin Henwood, a professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work who studies homelessness policy.
“It’s really about what happens to the people in the encampment and then whether or not those encampments are either reconstituted or the individuals end up in a different place,” he said.
Interim housing is only one step, he added, and the larger challenge is helping people move into permanent homes.
“The biggest issue is there’s just not a pipeline of affordable options for people,” he said. “It addresses sort of half the system of getting people off the streets but not how you end homelessness for them.”
Questions about what will happen now that people have left the encampment also came from advocates at the meeting.
Sherin Varghese, an organizer with Ktown for All, said she supports efforts to move people indoors but questioned whether Inside Safe provides the long-term support people need.
She said some residents had already been working with outreach teams and caseworkers to secure housing before the operation and questioned whether moving them into the program could disrupt that progress.
“I’d like to understand why the focus, too, is that they can’t bring people into their rooms, which creates a lot of isolation for folks with mental health issues,” Varghese said, referring to visitor restrictions at some interim housing sites.
Ktown for All recently highlighted another Inside Safe operation that moved a man to a hotel room, where he later died. Details about the circumstances of his death were not immediately available — Kim said the mayor’s office is looking into the situation and will share more information when it comes available — but Ktown for All has called for more services to support unhoused people’s safety and health in the program, as well as getting people into permanent housing.
“It doesn’t seem like the level of services that are being offered match what the needs actually are,” Varghese said at the meeting.
For Ernesto Gomez, who has lived across the street from the former encampment since 1998, the operation gave him reason for hope.
“It’s a step in the right direction,” Gomez said. “I just hope it continues because usually city projects start and they get abandoned.”
“I’ve been living here all my life and this seems like the first positive step towards something,” he added.
Despite the city’s reported decline in homelessness over the past two years, Gomez said he hasn’t seen that reflected in his neighborhood. If anything, he said, it feels like there are more unhoused people in the area.
Asked what he’d like to see at Olympic and Menlo, Gomez was matter-of-fact.
“I just want to see consistency,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what they put, as long as they keep working on it.”
The mayor’s office said the city’s Field Intervention Team will continue monitoring the area weekly for new encampments and offer housing if people return. Not everyone at the meeting was optimistic about future efforts.
Eduardo Aguirre, a member of the South Westlake Neighborhood Council, said residents have spent years asking the city for basic services without seeing lasting results.
“We’ve been asking for outside trash cans on our street for the last four years. We’ve asked them to clean our street for four years, and they don’t respond. If there’s a meeting like this they say they’ll get your information but nothing happens,” Aguirre said. “This is what bothers the community.”
The LA Local reporter Angelo Claure contributed to this report.
