Officials Plan to Landscape Downtown Encampment

Government and business officials on Tuesday vowed to turn an embarrassing homeless encampment across from Los Angeles City Hall into a terraced landscape as early as summer’s end.

At a meeting of the Los Angeles Civic Center Authority, a group that studies the course of downtown development, county officials said they hope to award a contract within two months to a contractor who will transform the lot.

The fenced-off lot between Broadway and Spring Street just north of 1st Street gained notoriety earlier this week when a Times article detailed rampant drug use there. Most of the residents fled the day the article was published, frightened by media attention.

Such encampments are common in Los Angeles, but this one represented what City Councilwoman Rita Walters, who chairs the authority, described as “the problem right in our faces.”

Walters noted the contrast between the people who populate City Hall and surrounding office buildings and the homeless nearby. “This truly is a tale of two cities,” she said.

Meanwhile, as a light rain fell on their temporary homes, the few remaining residents of the concrete lot expressed anger at officials and media who had besieged the area since the Times article.

“That’s all you reporters did was run us out of here,” said one middle-aged man who was packing up his clothes to leave.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department expected all the homeless to be cleared out within a week. By Thursday, several “no trespassing” signs are to be posted on the lot.

A minor verbal skirmish took place at Tuesday’s meeting when one of the members of the Civic Center Authority, real estate finance lawyer O’Malley M. Miller, lambasted the county, which controls 40% of the lot.

“I think it is scandalous the way the county has run this property,” said Miller, accusing the county of trying to hold onto the land in the hope of building a high-rise.

Sharon Yonashiro, representing the city’s chief administrative office, said the state, which owns the rest of the lot, also bears responsibility.

Plans for landscaping the vacant lot remain vague. Councilwoman Walters expressed hope that the project will include tables and benches where nearby workers could have lunch.

Officials from various agencies said all residents of the homeless encampment will be offered space in shelters or drug and alcohol diversion programs.

“We will have people there day and night in the next few days offering help to anyone who wants it,” said Henry Knawls of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.