When Councilmember Traci Park announced in her district newsletter that the 405 freeway underpass along Venice Blvd would soon receive a new mural, she framed the change as a triumph over “blight.” What she refused to acknowledge was that until recently this stretch of pavement had been home to a long-standing encampment of unhoused Angelenos, repeatedly swept and harassed until it was finally erased. For those who lived there, and for the community members who supported them, the story of Venice and the 405 is not one of blight removed, but of a fragile and vital community broken apart.
The encampment’s location was emblematic of Los Angeles’ overlapping bureaucracies and failures. The freeway median belonged to Caltrans. One side of Venice fell under Culver City, while the intersecting streets were split between LA’s Council District 5 and Council District 11. In practice, this jurisdictional patchwork created a void in accountability. Everyone had authority, yet no one took responsibility. Sweeps became the default management strategy, carried out by one jurisdiction after another in a grim relay that made it nearly impossible for residents to find stability.
“It was a jurisdictional nightmare,” said Victor Hinderliter, Director of Street-Based Engagement for the County Department of Health Services. “We had outreach teams who were supposed to stay in Culver City, and teams who were supposed to stay in Los Angeles,” Victor explained. “People would move to whichever side wasn’t being swept that day. But if someone crossed the line, they might not be eligible anymore. They could lose access to housing just by moving twenty feet.”
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city provided porta-potties and handwashing stations as part of emergency measures. Service providers from the Department of Mental Health, UCLA’s mobile clinic, and needle exchange groups circulated with some regularity. But as soon as the emergency orders expired, the sanitation facilities were removed and the outreach visits dwindled until they disappeared altogether. By late 2021, residents and volunteer mutual aid groups were often the only consistent sources of support.
Yet the community persisted. Many residents had lived alongside one another for years, and in the absence of reliable institutional care, they created their own networks of safety and survival. Overdoses were reversed not by professionals but by neighbors armed with Narcan. Peer education and harm reduction practices spread organically, contributing to a notable decline in fentanyl deaths within the camp. People shielded each other from violence, shared food and supplies, and tried to keep one another afloat in conditions that were harsh, dangerous, and constantly under threat.
The city’s final large-scale sweep, carried out nearly two years ago, dismantled this fragile ecosystem overnight. It also laid bare the fragmentation baked into Los Angeles’ homelessness response. Culver City officials declined to take responsibility for anyone on their side of the underpass, leaving the County to absorb those clients. The only motel rooms available at the time were in South L.A., so people were displaced twenty miles from the community that had kept them alive.
Some residents placed by Inside Safe were housed nearby in Westside motels. Others, picked up by the County’s Pathway Home program, were relocated to unincorporated South Los Angeles. The distance deepened isolation, fractured relationships, and stripped people of support networks. These placements also consumed substantial public resources while offering little long-term stability. With more people being routed into motels, housing subsidies became stretched even thinner, leaving fewer options for everyone else. At the end of the day, what Culver City provided was an air-conditioned RV for their police and fencing that went up before the operation was even finished.
Progress on housing vouchers stalled. Residents were subjected to searches, barred from having guests, and removed for minor infractions. One man was evicted for letting his mother stay with him. Others fled or were discharged. “It’s good to have a roof and a door,” Hinderliter said. “But if we’re not offering real housing pathways, we’re just cycling people through the most expensive version of temporary shelter.”
The costs were devastating. An elder resident known as the “matriarch” of the camp died alone in a motel room, isolated from the friends who had once checked on her daily. Others were lost to overdoses that might have been reversed had they still been surrounded by their community. Some, displaced to riverbeds and freeway underpasses, perished during storms. Those who survived often slipped into deeper precarity, stripped of belongings, medical supplies, and the fragile webs of trust that had sustained them.
Advocates argue that the tragedy was not inevitable but the direct result of policy. By prioritizing the optics of encampment removal over the slow but effective work of building individualized housing plans, officials ensured that displacement, not stability, was the outcome. “Death is the logical conclusion of these policies,” said Ndindi, who conducted extensive outreach at the site. “Our elected officials are okay with human beings dying. That’s not hyperbole. It’s the truth.”
Meanwhile, housed neighbors were invited to celebrate. Park hosted community gatherings in the wake of the sweeps, where photos with local neighborhood council leaders circulated alongside claims of “cleaned up” streets. In a recent Instagram reel, Park toured areas in Mar Vista, boasting of having “closed out” numerous encampments, including Venice and the 405. The video is cheerful, full of smiling constituents and backdrops of cleared sidewalks, but it makes no mention of where the displaced people went. Park cited housing 45 individuals from the underpass – a figure that, according to outreach workers, has not been substantiated. What was clear, though, was her focus on enforcement and cleanliness, and not on human beings.
For supporters of the encampment, the spectacle is galling. The transformation of the site into a canvas for a mural, rather than a place for housing or services, strikes many as a symbolic erasure. This is art imposed from above to cover over the lives that had been displaced. “A mural is people’s art,” Ndindi said. “What’s happening here is art-washing, a politician painting over the suffering she caused.”
The reality on the ground belies the narrative of success. Unhoused people are still present throughout the Westside, only now they are more isolated, harder to reach, and at greater risk. Encounters with police have grown more frequent and hostile, while residents in hiding lack the safety net that community once provided. Those who hoped dispersal would reduce visibility of poverty find themselves face to face with more individuals living alone or in pairs behind garages, on side streets, or in alleys. What officials framed as resolution has in practice deepened alienation and instability.
The RAND Corporation recently confirmed what residents and outreach workers already knew: dispersing visible encampments does not reduce homelessness. It only fragments it. The research shows that repeated sweeps increase overdose deaths, disrupt service connections, and make rehousing efforts harder. That cycle played out with painful clarity at Venice and the 405.
The story of this underpass is not simply about a single encampment. It is a window into the broader failures of LA’s homelessness policies. Temporary motel placements without services, coercive sweeps masquerading as outreach, and cosmetic projects designed to reassure the housed rather than support the unhoused all reflect a political calculus that prioritizes appearances over outcomes. The mural now planned for the site may signal renewal to some, but to those who remember the community that once thrived there, it is a monument to erasure.