LA City Council’s Public Safety Committee voted 3-2 on October 6 to hold Councilmember Traci Park’s sweeping proposal to expand restrictions on sitting, sleeping and keeping belongings in public spaces, after public opposition and questions about how much of the city the new prohibitions would cover.
Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martínez, Nithya Raman and Curren Price supported the hold, while Park and committee chair John Lee opposed it. The proposal remains pending before Public Safety and the Homelessness and Health Committee, with no new hearing date listed. The vote delayed the expansion but did not defeat it.
The hearing brought into focus a deeper dispute over the City’s response to homelessness: should officials should expand enforcement against people living outside or concentrate on the housing, income and services that would allow them to leave the streets? Speakers challenged the proposal’s reliance on punishment, described displacement during extreme heat and questioned why Park was seeking greater enforcement powers while opposing policies intended to keep people housed.
Introduced in May 2025, Council File 20-1376-S5 would eliminate individual Council approval requirements for enforcement zones around parks, libraries, designated infrastructure and certain homeless-service facilities. It would add post offices, fire stations and police stations as sensitive uses, establish 500-foot exclusion areas around fire-hazard severity zones, environmentally sensitive areas and “critical infrastructure,” and ask the City Attorney to explore a citywide restriction on camping in the same general location for more than three consecutive days or nights.
Park’s motion describes existing rules as belonging to a “pre-Grants Pass era” and declares that “[i]t is time for Los Angeles to update its own rules.” It invokes the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson and Governor Gavin Newsom’s model camping ordinance as grounds for expanding the City’s restrictions.
Newsom’s model ordinance includes a prohibition on camping for more than three consecutive days or nights in the same location, defined as within 200 feet of the previous location. The governor’s office promotes the template as an approach combining enforcement with notice and efforts to offer shelter. But the proposed time limit does not itself provide someone with a permanent place to live.
At the hearing, Park said her proposal aligned with the flexibility provided by the Supreme Court, guidance from the governor and policies adopted elsewhere. She described encampments as sources of crime, fire hazards and threats to public access, and disputed that her approach criminalizes or simply moves people around. She also claimed her district had housed more than 1,000 people in less than four years, without presenting a breakdown distinguishing interim placements from permanent housing.
Soto-Martínez rejected the suggestion that the Supreme Court’s willingness to permit broader enforcement should determine Los Angeles policy.
“I don’t think we should be taking our cue from the MAGA Supreme Court about how Los Angeles should be doing their policies,” he said.
The committee also lacked basic information about the proposal’s reach. Raman requested definitions of “critical infrastructure,” “environmentally sensitive area” and “fire hazard severity zone,” along with a citywide map, fiscal and staffing estimates, and an analysis of what eliminating individual designations would mean for existing requirements.
“It’s important for us to just understand what we’re voting on,” she said.
When Soto-Martínez asked an LAPD representative what percentage of Los Angeles would be covered by the expanded restrictions, the representative did not know.
Price, who described using 41.18 in limited locations in his own district, warned that the City still lacked sufficient beds and resources. He raised the possibility that restrictions in coastal areas and hillsides would push people toward South Los Angeles and downtown, where homelessness is already concentrated.
Park dismissed the requests for further information as “stall and delay tactics.”
She also introduced an amendment to prohibit sitting, lying, sleeping and storing belongings along routes identified through a proposed Safe School Passages Program. The Department of Transportation would identify commonly traveled routes to schools and daycare centers across all Council districts, and the program would create a mechanism for reporting encampments along those routes.
The amendment called for outreach and shelter offers before and during enforcement. But it would extend restrictions beyond the existing 500-foot prohibition around schools and daycare centers, potentially covering routes connecting residential neighborhoods to those destinations. The oral amendment did not specify a buffer width. Raman asked that Park’s amendment be included in the questions staff would examine, and Soto-Martínez accepted that addition to his motion to hold the item. The committee did not adopt the school-route restriction or approve the underlying expansion.
Public testimony repeatedly challenged the assumption that more prohibitions would produce more housing.
“When people do not have housing, they still have to exist somewhere,” said Jesse, an organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network and a Skid Row resident.
Matthew, another speaker, said: “Nearly all homeless people want housing as long as it’s safe, habitable, and dignified.” Punishing people for remaining outside, he argued, would not make housing available.
Speakers also described the consequences of repeated displacement, including losing belongings, becoming harder for outreach workers to locate and being forced to move while already struggling with illness or disability. Jade, an LA CAN organizer, said the organization had spoken with elderly and disabled people who were given 15 minutes to move their possessions in 100-degree weather.
Those accounts challenged Park’s separation of encampment enforcement from the safety of the people living in encampments. Exposure to heat, disability and the loss of medication or identification can make displacement dangerous for the very residents officials say they are helping.
Grace, an organizer with LA CAN and Stop LAPD Spying, described the City and LAPD creating “conditions of abandonment” and then authorizing police to “punish people for surviving those conditions.” She identified people living in poverty, disabled people and Black and brown residents as those bearing the consequences.
“Stop expanding the map of punishment,” she said.
Grace also connected the proposal’s revival to the approaching Olympics, raising concerns that preparations for the event would accelerate policing and displacement. Other testimony similarly challenged efforts to make homelessness less visible without giving people somewhere safe to live.
Soto-Martínez argued that the City needed to address the conditions pushing people into homelessness, including unaffordable rents, inadequate wages and the lack of appropriate services.
“We’re really talking about issues of poverty and systemic racism,” he said.
He then challenged Park’s record directly, citing her opposition to housing development, living-wage policies, wage-theft enforcement and tenant protections.
“You are stopping the thing that is going to solve this issue,” he said.
The expansion itself creates no housing and establishes no requirement that everyone affected have a shelter bed available. Its principal change would be to increase the places where the City can enforce restrictions against people who remain outside.
The criminal consequences are also real. Under current 41.18, most violations are handled through infractions or administrative citations, but willful refusal to comply with an authorized employee’s enforcement request can trigger broader criminal penalties. Expanding its geographic reach would expand exposure to that enforcement system.
Residents can continue to submit public comments on Council File 20-1376-S5.