The October 16 resolution, Council File 26-4118-S9, would prohibit unhoused people from sitting, sleeping, lying down, or keeping their belongings at six additional locations in Council District 11: Vista del Mar Park, the Dockweiler Beach sand dunes, Asilomar View Park, Temescal Canyon Park, and two pedestrian tunnels beneath Pacific Coast Highway.
Under Section 41.18(c)(4), City Council can establish additional enforcement zones only after determining, based on specific documentation, that conditions at each location pose a particular and ongoing threat to public health or safety. The ordinance identifies circumstances such as serious injuries, repeated violent crimes, or fires requiring an LAFD response as grounds for making that determination.
Park’s resolution claims that her office has submitted or posted documentation establishing those threats. But as of October 22, the Council File contains only the resolution itself. There are no supporting findings, incident reports, emergency response records, or other evidence for any of the six locations.
The omission is especially revealing given Park’s ongoing effort to eliminate many of the restrictions on her ability to establish 41.18 zones in the first place.
As Mar Vista Voice reported earlier this month, Park has proposed a sweeping overhaul of 41.18 that would dramatically expand the areas where unhoused people can be prohibited from existing in public space. Her proposal would eliminate the requirement for individual Council approval of certain enforcement zones, add new categories of prohibited locations, establish 500-foot exclusion areas around loosely defined infrastructure and environmental areas, and explore a citywide prohibition on remaining in the same location for more than three consecutive days or nights.
At the October 6 Public Safety Committee hearing, Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martínez, Nithya Raman, and Curren Price voted to hold that proposal pending further analysis. Among their concerns were the lack of information about how much of Los Angeles would become subject to enforcement, the costs of implementation, and the consequences of removing existing approval requirements. Park dismissed the requests for additional information as delay tactics.
The irony is hard to miss. Park wants to rewrite 41.18 to give Councilmembers far greater authority to criminalize homelessness without individual Council approval. In the meantime, she continues to seek new enforcement zones under the existing law without providing the documentation that law requires. Apparently, even the limited safeguards currently in place are too much of an inconvenience.
And this is hardly the first time. In August, the City Council approved seven additional 41.18 zones proposed by Park, despite serious questions about compliance with the ordinance. After Mar Vista Voice raised concerns about the absence of required documentation, Park’s office submitted a last-minute findings document purporting to summarize LAPD and LAFD data. But it contained no actual statistics, incident dates, report numbers, or underlying records. Instead, it repeated nearly identical allegations about encampments, obstructions, and emergency responses at all seven locations. The Council approved the resolution 10–4 anyway.
Park is not alone in disregarding the requirements of 41.18(c)(4). Councilmembers across LA routinely introduce resolutions designating new enforcement zones without providing the location-specific documentation the ordinance requires, relying instead on boilerplate assertions about public health and safety. And their colleagues routinely approve them. What is supposed to be a safeguard against arbitrary enforcement has become a rubber stamp.