VENICE HOMELESSNESS - In April of last year, a neighbor of mine looped me into an email chain regarding an encampment a few blocks from our homes in Venice Beach. Over the course of eight months, residents, police officers, CD11 representatives and employees of two different homeless services organizations engaged in a singularly unproductive conversation about how to remove a dozen or so campers living just across the street from a nursery school, within a 41.18 zone. The encampment stank of human waste and featured dozens of bicycles in various states of disassembly. Neighbors recounted being threatened with physical violence just for walking by; local businesses were losing walk-in traffic.
In a December 2025 email, one neighbor said that he was told by the LAPD that “the city leads with services” and that “services have been offered. Specifically, outreach with services has been offered in (and not only in) October 2024, December 2024, as well as this March, May and October.” The campers had refused offers of temporary housing and services. Representatives of the organizations which offered them insisted that, in their experiences “it takes a few days to get the client’s consent”. Months went by.
After about six months, homeless services representatives and sanitation workers arrived, and the tents were cleared. But just a few months after that, they returned. Once again, the LAPD insisted that they could not act until the designated non-profit had been given an opportunity to offer services, and the cycle of emails resumed.
Enter Ghost Town Security LLC.
In December 2023, my friend and fellow Venice journalist Nick Antonicello interviewed Ghost Town principals Bobby Luna and Ricky Myers, “on their exploding business that is providing a sensitive service that many here desperately want and seek.” At that time, Ghost Town had been in business about a year and cleared roughly 25 encampments and RVs in a manner they described as “a mutually beneficial solution”. Customers – aka, anyone who wanted an encampment or RV relocated for any reason -- were charged on a sliding scale and found via referral.
Fast forward two and a half years, and Ghost Town’s business has grown exponentially. In July of this year, Hayes Davenport profiled the organization in a great piece of in-depth reporting for LA Material. Now known as Ghost Town Consultants, the firm has over 200 clients. Davenport points out something I heard from neighbors when Nick’s piece came out – that Ghost Town was comprised mainly of former gang members, operating on the fringes of legality. As Hayes notes, “Many people who are homeless in the area claim that its workers unfairly harass and intimidate them, pushing them around the neighborhood while doing little to help them access services and move indoors. Some have even alleged that the company’s staff have used physical force when engaging with them.”
The Ghost Town clients Hayes spoke with are by no means anti-homeless. Indeed, the first client he profiles is a long time, elderly resident of Venice whose first response to the people camping in front of her home was empathy…until their noise, drug use, and tent fires made caring for her cancer-stricken husband nearly impossible, and the LAPD told her “their hands were tied”.
Ghost Town’s rise in Venice is a prime example of what happens when law enforcement is either unable or unavailable to enforce public safety laws. The inevitable result of defunding, abolishing or tying the hands of the police is the privatization of law enforcement and the rise of organizations like Ghost Town, with their problematic tactics.
Nevertheless, the platform of DSA-LA, the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, to which five members of the Los Angeles City Council belong, calls for “Defunding police and reallocating funds into communities” and “Prison abolition”. DSA-LA members argue that this is justified because this city spends an astronomical amount on law enforcement. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, a member of the Green Party and staunch supporter of DSA-LA member Nithya Raman’s campaign for Mayor, has consistently insisted that the 24% of the budget the city spends on the LAPD – by far the top expenditure – is out of control and uncalled for.
But compared to other American cities, Los Angeles doesn’t seem quite as profligate when it comes to police spending. Milwaukee, Phoenix, Oakland and Memphis all spend over 40% of their budgets on law enforcement. Depending on how you analyze the numbers, Los Angeles spends between $741 – $880 per capita on policing – near the top of the list of American cities, but nowhere near as high as, say, Baltimore.
On August 18, City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, a DSA-LA member, won the repeal of twelve 41.18 enforcement zones in his district. He said the zones were “counterproductive” to solving homelessness. But there’s nothing in the 41.18 statute which states that its purpose is to help solve homelessness. 41.18’s is meant to mitigate the effects of encampments by controlling where they are allowed. Eliminating 41.18 because it doesn’t solve homelessness is akin to eliminating child-safety caps on Tylenol bottles because they don’t alleviate pain.
Martinez’s 41.18 rollback specifically targets Echo Park Lake, the site of a massive encampment which sprang up during the pandemic and garnered nationwide media coverage. Mejia’s Director of Homelessness: Accountability & Oversight, Ashley Bennett, was an organizer at Echo Park Lake. After encouraging campers not to cooperate with either LAPD or Park Rangers, she was fired from her position as an outreach worker at LAHSA.
Echo Park Lake was cleared in 2021, after (as I reported in the Westside Current) “Nearly 5600 people petitioned the city to clear the park, citing ‘Nearly daily incidents of unhoused people stalking, harassing, spitting, and using hate slurs against the housed citizens who actually paid to live here and want to use the park they also paid for’, as well as ‘rampant drug use and sales’ and ‘prostitution of unhoused women by the men of the lake’. The 41.18 restrictions that were put in place at that time have since kept the park relatively free of tents and crime.
Soto-Martinez says that, if campers return, they will be offered services and therefore law enforcement will be unnecessary.
Will Ghost Town one day expand to Echo Park? Stay tuned.
(Angela McGregor is a Los Angeles investigative journalist and longtime Venice resident whose reporting focuses on homelessness, housing policy, public accountability, and local government.)
