Living On Venice Beach: Homelessness, Desperation And Community

By Lexie Harrison-Cripps and Eric Pape/Capital & Main

For generations, a carnival-like spectacle has helped draw millions of visitors to the soft sands of Venice Beach — a place second only to Disneyland among Southern California’s tourist sites, according to the Venice Chamber of Commerce.

But a year and a half after COVID-19 touched down in California, Venice’s rough edges are feeling, well, a little rougher — especially to new tenants and homeowners who pay some of the highest rents and housing costs per square foot in the Southland.

People spending millions on nearby homes and stylish offices are often aghast at sporadic violence, visible drug use and the sprawling unhoused masses around them. And they haven’t been alone as the number of robbers and aggravated assaults surged more than 40 percent during the pandemic, according to LAPD data.

L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has set a Fourth of July deadline for people living on the street to accept services or move away. Otherwise, he says, they will be arrested. He’s promised to target people who are not from California — he wants them to go back to where they came from — and insists that they make up an outsized portion of the unhoused population.

Such points of conflict are not particularly new to Venice, even if there is a question of scale as Los Angeles emerges from the worst of the pandemic and heads into what may be a long, hot summer.
A bohemian spirit of coexistence has long reigned on the two-and-a-half-mile pedestrian Ocean Front Walk and the neighborhood around it. The area, launched as a seaside resort in 1904, has been steeped in counterculture since the 1960s. It is hard to think of another oceanfront where Beat poets, street activists and Rastafarians intersected with skate culture, flamboyant weightlifters and trash-talking basketball players. Vietnam War and Iraq War veterans have long wandered among or slept on the ground near curious Angelenos and wide-eyed Midwestern tourists.

In the 1980s, homelessness increased, fueled by the federal government’s closure of psychiatric hospitals, and many former patients ended up on or around the beach, where they often found a degree of acceptance in the mild weather and within the post-hippie vibe. And other people from around the country followed.

Some inherent tensions, like the clouds of marijuana, have been there for decades, and they are part of what draws visitors to the area.

They are not, however, what brought the huge infusion of tech money to “Silicon Beach” or the magnet for most wealthy newer residents. Some such people, as well as some older residents, have had enough and are hoping that authorities will crack down, much as they did on Echo Park.
In January of 2020, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority counted more than 66,000 people without homes in L.A. County, with 1,685 of them in Venice. Across the county, Venice is second only to Downtown’s Skid Row in the number of people living on the street.
But that was just before COVID-19 hit California, spurring shutdowns from which the state is only now emerging. Since then, the housing crisis has worsened.

For unhoused people on or around Venice Beach, their interactions with authorities changed. To avoid exacerbating the spread of the virus, people living on the streets and sand, or in their cars, were sometimes allowed to settle wherever they were. It could be seen as a sort of shelter-in-place mandate for those without a place to call home.

People who had been living transient lives in the shadows suddenly became more visible sleeping in the rough.

Without shelter available for those who need it, responsibility is falling to charitable organizations and residents’ associations. Dr. Coley King, who heads the street medicine teams at the Venice Family Clinic, says that in addition to addiction, many of the homeless people in Venice suffer from intense childhood trauma. As part of the quest for solutions, Dr. King says that in the short term, it is crucial for such people to feel safe when they sleep, and that true solutions will require access to free or affordable lodging. Contrary to what some observers insist, he says, most are open to moving into permanent housing.

This sentiment was echoed by Monique Contreras, the LAPD senior lead officer for Venice Beach. In the past few months, Contreras says she has been able to place only one person in housing because of the bureaucratic process combined with a shortage of beds.
The organizations that work with people on the streets, whether for sanitation or distributing tents, hygiene kits and clothing in Venice, often ask for police support for safety reasons. This pushes the LAPD into the realms of mediation and social work, which officer Jeff Chiantaretto said has led his wife to ask an incisive question: Why is this a police job? (She is not the only one wondering.)

Captain Steve Embrich, the commanding officer of the LAPD Pacific Area, offered a possible answer as he made his way into the police station: “It is a police problem when all other social safety nets have failed.”

Photojournalist Lexie Harrison-Cripps went on a ride-along with officers from the LAPD in May 2021 on behalf of Capital & Main. To see the full photo essay, click here.

Copyright 2021 Capital & Main

This article was produced by the award-winning journalism nonprofit Capital & Main on June 18, 2021.