By Jim Newton, special for CalMatters
This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
A year ago, vendors had set up shop across the street from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. They were dealing drugs and stolen goods from underneath makeshift tables at their stands.
Langer’s, the neighborhood’s historic deli, was threatening to leave for good. And assaults in the area were on the rise.
Today crime is down in MacArthur Park, Langer’s is staying, and the drug vendors are gone — or at least displaced.
That’s the good news about the city’s yearlong attempt to bring safety and tranquility to MacArthur Park and its surrounding neighborhoods. There is progress.
The bad news is that the area remains blighted and filthy.
A walk through the park Monday morning found evidence of progress: most spaces were relatively clean and a couple young boys scurried around on the playground equipment, their watchful dads nearby.
But there were also painful reminders of how far this area has to go.
Stores along Alvarado Street were open, but customers were sparse. Litter filled spaces where fences keep out street vendors. Water from recent rains congealed beneath an underpass, forming a dank, dirty pool. And young men lay glassy-eyed on benches, staring vacantly, their mouths agape.
The city’s campaign to restore MacArthur Park to some of its long-faded glory has within it some elements of the larger work Los Angeles itself faces. The park is a congregation point for unhoused men and women, it is a locus of drug sales and it sits amid one of the city’s most heavily migrant communities.
Paul Thornton
It is, in all those respects, Los Angeles in microcosm. Its struggles are those of the larger city, and of urban America itself.
Recognizing that, city leaders focused attention on MacArthur Park in 2025, pouring money and resources into the area. Council member Eunisses Hernandez, whose district includes the park, cites $27 million in city investments in what she describes as “care first” programs that address drug overdoses, housing crises and conflicts between gangs.
Those investments have resulted in quantifiable results: the removal of more than 36,000 pieces of hazardous waste, including needles and other drug paraphernalia; distribution of more than 17,000 doses of Narcan; cleaned sidewalks; painted curbs and dozens of residents housed.
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In some cases, those interventions have literally saved lives. The council member’s office said 138 overdoses have been reversed by crews assigned to walk the parks and be alert for danger.
It’s thus heartening to see at least glimmers of progress.
The fences installed in early 2025 succeeded in boxing out vendors who were using the neighborhood to sell drugs and stolen goods. The increased police patrols helped chase off some local dealers and pushed some of the open drug use outside the perimeters of the park.
Those successes are directly attributable to city interventions by Hernandez and others. But the larger goal remains elusive.
This is not a community at peace, nor has it turned the corner from blight into prosperity.
Jane Ganahl
The streets smell of urine, and the air wafts a scent of weed and other drugs. The litter is degrading.
The overall effect is one of exhaustion. Storekeepers don’t look at drug users with compassion or a desire to help. They shoo them away from storefronts, tired of their smell and grime.
All of which serves as a reminder that this is hard work, that solutions to drugs or homelessness are not pulled from a shelf and rolled out into neighborhoods, that even $27 million of city investment does not change a community overnight.
Money and effort are essential to progress, but they do not guarantee it. Only commitment, work and time can be truly transformative.
It’s tough sledding under the best circumstances, and these are hardly the best. That’s at least in part because the federal government — which could have been a useful partner in this work — has chosen to be an active subverter of it.
It was here that President Donald Trump and his coiffed minion, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, chose to launch their summer assault on immigrants. On July 7, ICE agents, complete with a Blackhawk helicopter and horses (yes, horses), swarmed through and above the park, flashing their faux military gear and shouting at pedestrians.
Patricia Escárcega
The resulting theater accomplished precisely nothing in terms of the goals ICE set for itself — rounding up the “worst of the worst” and sending them back to home countries — but it produced two other results: It chased migrants indoors, where they have been sheltering ever since, and it smoothed a political path for Mayor Karen Bass, who had been foundering up to that point but has since redefined her political identity as the city’s bulwark against Trump and his mean-spirited nonsense.
And so the work to make MacArthur Park safer abruptly became a showcase for city and national politics, not to mention a preview of the unrest that Trump has spent the rest of the year provoking in other cities — Washington, D.C.; Portland; Chicago; New Orleans. Each has had a turn in the barrel, and each can point to Los Angeles as the testing ground for the new authoritarianism Trump has brought to America’s cities.
In the meantime, however, the sight of ICE agents stomping around in the park was enough to chase some immigrants and others who merely “look illegal” indoors. That has left neighborhoods feeling tense and deserted. Last week, the normally bustling health clinic at the corner of Westlake and 6th Street had just one family in the waiting room.
Looking back on the year, neither Bass nor Police Chief Jim McDonnell was willing to declare victory in MacArthur Park. In separate interviews, each acknowledged that the chain link fences that disrupted illegal vending have become unsightly and should be viewed as temporary fixtures, not permanent installations.
“They served their purpose,” Bass said, adding that the city intends to soon replace them with planters or other fixtures.
Both mayor and chief were pleased to see crime coming down in the area, but both recognize that the park is unfinished work. “It’s been overall good,” Bass said, “but it’s up and down.”
Next year may bring a new emphasis on design solutions. In addition to planters along Alvarado, Hernandez has suggested blocking Wilshire Boulevard as it passes through the park, restoring the area to its original configuration.
And the councilmember and mayor jointly endorsed a proposal to develop a fence that would surround all of MacArthur Park, regulating flow in and out, rather than simply having park visitors spill onto the sidewalks, as so many drug users do today.
Not all of the neighbors love that idea – there’s very little that everyone in this community agrees on – but it offers a chance for some decorative enhancement in an area bereft of much. The fence is being designed now and could go up next year. If so, it will be the latest effort in this arduous work.
“It is,” Bass said, “a long process.”
