Desperate Venice homeowners are now paying former gang members to do the job Los Angeles officials can’t seem to finish: keeping homeless tents off their streets.
Story Snapshot
- Venice residents and businesses are paying a private group called Ghost Town, staffed by former gang members and ex-addicts, to clear encampments and patrol property lines.
- The Rose Avenue and Hampton Drive encampment returned more than three years after Mayor Karen Bass and Councilwoman Traci Park cleared it under the Inside Safe program.
- A RAND Corporation study found city cleanups, including Inside Safe, produce only short-term drops before homeless numbers rebound within about a month.
- City Hall points to Inside Safe’s own numbers, over 5,800 people moved indoors and 1,431 permanently housed, as proof the program works.
Residents Turn To Private Patrols After City Fails To Hold The Line
Roughly 250 Venice residents and business owners now pay for Ghost Town, a private unarmed security group led by former gang members and recovering addicts, to keep encampments off their blocks. The group mediates disputes and clears property lines that city crews and police have struggled to protect for years. One California family even turned to a former gang member and ex-convict running his own gang-intervention group after being threatened by a man allegedly living in an encampment across from their home.
Longreads reported that homeowners are satisfied with Ghost Town’s work, even as some homeless residents object to being pushed out. That residents feel forced to hire private muscle instead of trusting city government says everything about how badly Sacramento-style leadership has failed basic public safety in one of America’s most famous beachfront communities.
A Notorious Corner Proves The Cleanups Don’t Stick
The encampment at Rose Avenue and Hampton Drive is the clearest example of the cycle. Los Angeles crews cleared it in 2023 under Bass’s Inside Safe program, only for tents to return to the same corner more than three years later. People living there told reporters they simply moved around the block and planned to come right back once cleanup crews left. Councilwoman Park’s office admitted enforcement zones only “largely” stopped repopulation, leaving gaps that persistent holdouts exploited.
By April, the New York Post reported the same stretch of Rose Avenue swung right back into a cleanup cycle, with city crews once again clearing the corridor near Hampton Drive. Days later, a mass brawl broke out at the very Venice Beach camp Bass had once held up as a cleanup success story. Fed-up residents mocked the entire operation as a revolving-door charade that never actually solves anything.
Even Researchers Say The Sweeps Don’t Fix The Real Problem
A RAND Corporation study, reported by the Los Angeles Times, found Inside Safe and similar cleanups have no long-term effect on how many people live on the street. Researchers who returned monthly to Venice, Hollywood, and Skid Row saw the same pattern every time: tents vanish briefly, then numbers creep right back up within about a month. A separate UCLA Luskin Institute study found that for every one person connected to services, five others were simply displaced elsewhere.
To be fair, Bass’s office touts real numbers, over 5,800 people moved indoors and 1,431 permanently housed citywide as of late February. Bass herself has said clearing tents is “only step one” and that preventing repopulation is the harder task. Those figures matter, but they clearly haven’t reached Venice’s most stubborn corners, where locals say the problem never really left.
Private Solutions Fill A Government Vacuum
Venice’s turn to Ghost Town reflects a broader truth conservatives have argued for years: when government fails at its core job, protecting law-abiding citizens and their property, private citizens step in to fill the void. A Los Angeles Times survey found residents saw fewer tents but no real drop in overall homelessness, meaning the crisis simply became less visible, not less real. That’s not progress. That’s a taxpayer-funded shell game dressed up as reform.
Under Newsom’s statewide leadership and Bass’s city hall, California has poured billions into homelessness programs while encampments keep cycling back through the same Venice streets. Residents hiring ex-gang members to do what police and outreach teams can’t isn’t a quirky local headline. It’s a warning sign that basic government functions have broken down in one of the state’s most valuable neighborhoods, and citizens are left to police their own sidewalks.
Sources:
foxla.com, nypost.com, fox.com, x.com, youtube.com, latimes.com, cbsnews.com
