This week Traci Park secured a new 41.18 enforcement zone to clear a Venice encampment that she already cleared two years ago, and attacked a voter-approved tax that funds rental assistance. In one update, Park highlights two policies with a single through line: the people who fund her win, and everyone else pays the price.
Let’s start with the numbers. The Rose Avenue encampment near Gold’s Gym in Venice was already cleared during Park’s tenure, back in January 2023, and she announced it as a big success. She partnered with Mayor Karen Bass’ signature Inside Safe program, and moved people into temporary interim housing. Now the encampment is back, and Park is clearing it again.
Park doesn’t mention any of this in her update. She does not ask why people returned, what happened to the people placed in interim housing in 2023, or the fact that 40% of people who entered Inside Safe temporary housing are back out on the street. She also doesn’t address whether a strategy that failed once is likely to work better the second time. Instead, she secured a new 41.18 zone for the area and used the vote to deliver a lecture to her mailing list about ideology.
“Repeatedly taking no for an answer when people refuse help is actually exacerbating the problem,” she said. “We need to focus on results, not ideology.”
But what are the results she’s bragging about? This is the same location, cleared twice in three years, with no permanent housing placements documented, no explanation of where people go after enforcement, and a new legal tool to keep doing the same thing that research shows time and again does not work.
Traci Park’s Sweeps Do Not Work. She Keeps Doing Them Anyway.
The evidence on encampment clearances is not ambiguous. Study after study finds that sweeps without permanent housing placements do not reduce homelessness. They move it around, like a game of whack-a-mole. People cycle back to the same locations or disperse to nearby ones, worse off after having all their belongings trashed. The Rose Avenue timeline is a textbook illustration of exactly that cycle.
Park’s own update acknowledges that some people accepted interim housing and some refused. She does not engage honestly with why many people refuse interim housing, and she ignores what happened to the people who accepted help in 2023. Shelter is not housing, and interim placements frequently end without a permanent exit. Not only that, interim housing placements are notorious for having carceral rules, providing little to no food, separating people from family, pets and vital services that keep them afloat, and more. Without tracking that data publicly, “moved into housing” is meaningless – gesturing to a road that leads nowhere.
What 41.18 does accomplish is legal cover for clearances near designated sensitive areas including schools, parks, libraries, and senior centers. It criminalizes the presence of unhoused people in those zones without resolving where they are supposed to go. Park has been one of its most aggressive proponents since taking office, and she frames any opposition to the ordinance as the reason homelessness persists rather than as a reasonable objection to a failed policy that displaces without resolving.
The colleagues who voted against her motion this week are not, as Park implies, the reason Venice has a homelessness problem. They are raising a legitimate question about whether enforcement without housing supply is a meaningful governing strategy.
Traci Park Is Attacking a Renter Protection Tax. Her Real Estate Donors Thank Her.
The second major item in this update is Measure ULA, the transfer tax on property sales over $5 million that voters passed in 2022 with 57 percent support. Park called it a “deliberate lie,” said voters were deceived when it was described as a mansion tax, and argued it has halted housing production, driven up rents, and failed fire victims.
This is misleading at best. First, ULA passed with strong support after a public campaign that included exactly the debate Park is now reframing as deception. Calling it a lie told to voters is a characterization of a contested policy dispute, not a factual finding.
More importantly, ULA is not just a tax. It is one of the most significant tools Los Angeles has to keep renters housed and stem the tide of homelessness. Revenue from ULA funds rental assistance and homelessness prevention directly for tenants at risk of losing housing. That means real people, in CD11 and across the city, who would otherwise face eviction, displacement, and ultimately the street. Rolling back ULA does not just affect property transactions, it pulls the financial ground out from under the programs that keep people from ending up in encampments like the one Park is currently sweeping on Rose Avenue. You cannot credibly claim to care about homelessness while gutting the funding mechanism designed to prevent it.
Park’s criticism that ULA funds were unavailable to help Palisades fire victims is accurate, but the reason is restrictive spending guidelines, not a flaw in the tax’s underlying purpose. She misses that distinction entirely, using a legitimate implementation problem to indict landmark legislation.
And then there is the question of who is asking her to do this. Her donor list includes corporate landlords, real estate executives, and development interests whose financial exposure to ULA is direct and significant. R.W. Selby and Co., one of Los Angeles’ most aggressive corporate landlords with over 500 eviction filings since 2023, has poured money into Park’s political orbit. So have executives at Decron Properties and a constellation of real estate PACs and Republican-aligned donors with deep interests in how the city taxes property transactions. When Traci Park calls a voter-approved renter protection tax a deliberate lie and pushes for its rollback, she is not speaking as a dispassionate housing economist. She is delivering for the people and corporations bankrolling her campaign.
