Fifty-nine people who lived in encampments along the 110 Freeway in Los Angeles have moved indoors. That number isn’t final.
On Thursday, L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez stood at Lacy Street Neighborhood Park in Lincoln Heights, where the 5 and 110 freeways intersect, alongside former encampment residents, outreach workers, and housing advocates. The park and the freeway-adjacent land around it used to be covered in tents. They’re not anymore.
“Today we’re here to celebrate that 59 of our neighbors, human beings, finally have a roof over their heads,” Hernandez said.
The work was funded by a $6 million state grant that Hernandez secured through California’s Encampment Resolution Funding program, which operates with an eye toward converting freeway-adjacent encampments into resolved sites. The grant covered a 4-mile segment of the 110 and paid for a team spanning street medicine, social work, and nonprofit outreach. As LAist first reported, dozens of people who’d been sleeping under that stretch of freeway are now in units.
Getting someone from a freeway underpass into stable housing isn’t a fast process. It can’t be.
Straightforward on paper, yes. But finding a valid ID when you don’t have a fixed address can eat up weeks. Matching a unit to someone’s disability requirements takes time. Then there’s the question of pets. That detail sounds minor until you’re the outreach worker watching someone choose the street over a shelter because they won’t leave their dog behind, and you realize the animal is the reason they won’t come in. These aren’t edge cases. They’re routine.
Caitlin Schwan, director of USC’s California Street Collaborative, one of the organizations that worked this grant, didn’t sugarcoat the logistics. “It takes an investment of resources and a lot of coalitions, a lot of partnerships across street medicine, housing providers, service providers,” she said. Her team was out building trust with encampment residents long before any housing paperwork was signed, because without that foundation, placements don’t stick.
Los Angeles Global Care handled the bulk of interim housing. Beyond placing people in units, the organization ran daily meals for residents in transition and provided pet care and case management during the disorienting gap between street life and a stable address.
Rigo Vega was at Thursday’s event. He stood near the bridge where he used to sleep. He’d lived along the 110 for four years before outreach workers connected him to food, clothing, and the documents he needed to qualify for housing. He moved in last November.
When someone asked what he’s focused on now, he said he wants “to work, to get a job.”
That’s worth sitting with. People who’ve spent years outside don’t usually walk into housing and immediately start planning their next move. The first months tend to go toward stabilizing: catching up on medical care, sleeping without an ear out for trouble, learning that the roof isn’t temporary. The fact that Vega is already thinking about employment is a signal that the support wrapped around his housing placement is doing what it’s supposed to do.
Hernandez’s office said remaining grant funds are targeted at housing 11 more people from this same corridor. If that happens, the total from this stretch of the 110 would reach 70. The program’s model, which ties state dollars to specific encampment sites and requires coordinated service delivery, is part of California’s larger push to move the roughly 45,000 people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County off the streets and into some form of shelter or permanent housing.
“It takes an investment of resources and a lot of coalitions, a lot of partnerships across street medicine, housing providers, service providers,” Schwan said. The work doesn’t run on goodwill. It runs on funded infrastructure.
Hernandez made that point directly at the park. “It takes an investment of resources and a lot of coalitions, a lot of partnerships across street medicine, housing providers, service providers,” she said. The coalition in Lincoln Heights included street medicine teams, case managers, housing navigators, and interim housing staff, all working the same 4-mile zone simultaneously.
Vega wants a job. He’s inside. That’s where this work starts.