Op-Ed: Is it just me, or does Los Angeles feel a lot less safe these days?

I noticed a change in my neighborhood about a year and a half ago. It began to feel more dangerous, even during the day.

Scavengers regularly dig through my trash and dump what they can’t use. The remains bake in the sun. Sometimes the scavengers pass out on my lawn. In late July, a homeless man set fire to a trash can a block from my home. Flames engulfed the adjacent carport and two vehicles caught fire. One exploded.

A few weeks ago, I was awakened late on a Saturday night by gunfire. It sounded like six shots.

My car has been broken into and vandalized multiple times. The side mirror was stolen, glass popped out with a flat-head screwdriver. Once someone pried a door open. The next morning, I found blackened tin foil and an empty Bic lighter on my front seat.

Over the course of the summer, more than one young woman was robbed in broad daylight.

I’ve lived here, south of Beverly Boulevard and north of West 3rd — Hollywood, more or less — for eight years. I was born at Cedars-Sinai. I grew up in Los Angeles and I believe that things are worse now than any point in my three decades. Many can barely afford to pay the rent. Wages are not rising, but the cost of living has skyrocketed, making the city more expensive and less livable.

A week after the trash fire, on a particularly hot evening, the bathroom window was open to catch the breeze. My girlfriend was undressing after a long day at work, and as she turned to get in the shower, she saw a man wearing a hoodie staring at her through the window. She was terrified.

The Los Angeles Police Department told us there’d been a spate of peeping Tom incidents. One officer warned me about stabbings by transients. “You never know what these guys are on or what weapons they have,” he said.

When I scoured the crime section of the Nextdoor app, I found that the people I pass every day, walking their dogs, going to work, were all experiencing the same problems.

Crime here is, of course, linked to addiction and homelessness. There’s a free clinic close by that some people use as a headquarters to score meds. They pitch tents and rummage through the neighborhood. With encampments come more transients and more crime.

There’s a man who lives in the alley near my apartment. He strums a stringless guitar. Locals leave out food for him like a stray cat. Another man throws his feces at passersby. Sometimes he wears it on his head like a hat. (I can’t make this up.)

As more and more people slide into homelessness, their desperation makes life more difficult for everyone but the very wealthiest among us, who can cloister themselves behind gates and security guards.

The visible changes in Hollywood may be tied to a push to empty the encampments on L.A.’s periphery. When the city government cleared the tents along the Arroyo Seco, homeless people had no choice but to flood into residential areas.

I decided to call the mayor’s office to describe what I’d witnessed in my neighborhood. Staffers disputed this cause and effect. And they assured me that the city was trying its best to get on top of the situation, with temporary housing and crisis shelters, among other initiatives.

But not even the mayor is immune to what’s happening in the streets.

“There’s a guy in my neighborhood who wakes me up each morning,” Mayor Eric Garcetti told me in an interview he was kind enough to grant last week, referring to a homeless man who spins through his block’s trash cans like a tornado.

“A friend of mine was held at knifepoint a couple days ago,” he added. “This can’t continue.”

Ever the optimist, he thinks we can beat the homelessness crisis in the next decade, mentioning so many city plans that my head began to spin. As if on cue, I heard two men shouting at each other in the alley close by.

As I walk around Hollywood every day, it seems to me the problem is getting worse, not better. But for the vast majority of us who can’t afford to just pick up and move, resignation seems the only option.

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Thirty minutes after speaking with Garcetti, I took out the trash. The stringless guitarist was waist deep in the dumpster.

“Excuse me,” I said, placing the bag in the bin. He smiled, then took the bag and opened it. I thought about the police officer’s warning about transients, smiled sheepishly, went back inside and locked the door.

Adam Popescu is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.

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