Trash-strewn tent city a hotspot for Hollywood drug trade, neighbors say

A large Hollywood Boulevard homeless encampment that residents say is a hotspot for selling and buying drugs, a trash-strewn tent city they say took the city three months to clear, has sparked continued concern as unhoused residents are already returning to the location.  

The encampments are a persistent problem plaguing neighborhoods not just in Hollywood but across greater Los Angeles.  

“It starts with one tent and then they basically become a whole line of maybe five or six tents combined,” Hollywood resident Asko Akopyan told KTLA’s Rachel Menitoff. “Actually, they become structures.”  

Another resident who lives close to what was a sizable encampment on Hollywood Boulevard and Taft Street, just east of the 101 Freeway, likened the area to what people might see in a post-apocalyptic film.  

“Pre-clean up, it was pretty dystopian,” Marth Burr said. “It was like a ‘Mad Max’ movie.”  

Longtime resident Brian Winchell, who described that particular encampment as “the worst,” said that while he empathizes with those down on their luck, those living in the tent cities are stealing electricity from nearby buildings, leaving behind mounds, causing disruptions at all hours of the night and bring violence and the drug trade to the neighborhood.  

Winchell places much of the blame on city leaders.  

“We pay their paychecks, that’s my big beef,” he said. “They have failed miserably to provide a safe to have my house, to have my dwelling. I’ve worked hard for it and so have my neighbors and we all don’t feel safe walking to the 7-Eleven. We are scared that we are going to step on a used syringe or there’s human [excrement] everywhere.”  

Akopyan captured video of city crews attempting to clear the tents and trash earlier this week. Caution tape now surrounds the sidewalks, but the trend seems to be that within a day or so, the encampment returns and begins tormenting neighbors yet again.  

“We call 311 and all the politicians in this district and it’s really very slow to respond with any kind of action,” Akopyan said.  

Burr, who has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, said there is a criminal component to the encampment and that her elderly neighbor was attacked and mugged by a person living on the tents.  

She hopes police will take more of an active role in patrolling the area.  

“I mean, if we see them smoking crack and selling drugs continuously, I just wonder why police couldn’t do a little bit more to keep an eye on them.”  

Asked for comment, L.A. City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez’s office, whose district the encampment is in, said that regular cleaning to the site will continue. Officials also said they referred all those living in on the corner into housing as soon as beds become available, though when that will be is unclear.

There are an estimated 3,000 unhoused people in the district and only 400 beds to accommodate them.