Independent L.A. journalist Sam Quinones is the author of five books of narrative nonfiction, including two about our nation's epidemic of drug addiction, and writes the Dreamland Newsletter on Substack, where a version of this piece also appeared.
Here’s a scandalous image:
Gang members driving luxury vehicles into Los Angeles’ Skid Row to sell drugs out of tents to homeless people imprisoned by the highly addictive nature of the drugs those dealers make so readily available.
It is hardly new. It’s been going on since the city began allowing stationary tents as a response to homelessness, according to my interviews with police, business owners, drug counselors, shelter providers and others.
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The arrests earlier this month of two dozen alleged Skid Row drug dealers are further evidence of the toxic reaction that results from encampments full of stationary tents combined with drugs, especially readily accessible methamphetamine and fentanyl. What was intended as a compassionate policy has created semipermanent swamps of exploitation, where drug dealers can hide their business and chain their customers to the products they sell.
After 14 years of reporting on our national drug-addiction epidemic, I have concluded that whatever benefit stationary tents may provide is far outweighed by the human abuse they protect.
The chaos and degradation that stationary tents have caused, of course, stretch far beyond Skid Row – to South L.A., Hollywood, Venice and parts of the San Fernando Valley.
Almost as damaging: the physical and emotional toll on the city and its residents. I’ve interviewed so many Angelenos who are bone-weary from the deterioration of neighborhood life that encampments foster – trash, fires, rats and the diseases they carry such as typhus – from years of city inaction.
Stationary tents are the result of court cases, among them the Jones settlement in 2007 that first prohibited the city from removing tents from Skid Row, combined with others that the city interpreted as requiring it to leave tents untouched. In 2024, however, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ruled that cities have the right to ban camping on their sidewalks.
The Skid Row arrests and the upcoming mayoral election allow Los Angeles an opening to consider modest new proposals that would be truly compassionate.
The first step should be controlling the use of stationary tents, as so many other cities have chosen to do. Several ban them outright, including L.A.’s neighbors Vernon and Huntington Park. If the city has no appetite for banning tents completely, it should make them temporary by at least returning to its former policy of prohibiting tents on public property between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.
This would not criminalize homelessness, but it would force people out of their tents during the day and deprive drug dealers of the stationary clientele they currently enjoy. Finding drugs might still be possible, just not nearly as easy. Constantly having to move would add incentives for homeless people to get off the street that they do not have now, mired in encampments of addiction.
It’s worth remembering that this situation didn’t always exist.
Golden State staff
Sidewalk tents were a rare sight before the Occupy L.A. protests in 2011. Protesters set up a large tent encampment around City Hall, until the city evicted them months later. Within a few years, tents, often provided by churches and similarly well-intentioned nonprofits, colonized much of Skid Row.
During roughly the same period, cheap, prevalent and hyper-pure methamphetamine from Mexico also moved into Skid Row, creating widespread symptoms of schizophrenia, as it has done nationwide since then.
Fentanyl arrived in 2018, adding greatly to the toll of overdose deaths.
Through the mid- and late-2010s, tents and meth, then fentanyl, spread to the rest of the city – a "skidrowification" of homelessness in L.A. By the time COVID arrived, they were citywide. The pandemic’s shelter-in-place orders simply magnified the problem of stationary tents beyond anything Angelenos had ever seen.
As the city and county were spending millions on homelessness, meth and fentanyl subverted it all by each finding its own special relationship with the now-ensconced encampments.
Golden State staff
The hyper-pure meth coming out of Mexico can drive users to psychosis so severe that they’re only fit to live with other meth addicts. It also prompts hoarding. Evolving case law led to the bizarre result that tents with large accumulations of junk, bike parts, furniture and more on public sidewalks were protected as personal property, not regarded as symptoms of a mind-mangling meth addiction that required intervention.
Highly lethal fentanyl, meanwhile, metabolizes quickly. Thus, those addicted to it must use it many times a day, which keeps them living close to their dealers, until they die of overdose or get off the street. Permanent tent encampments are perfect dispensaries for the drug that will kill them.
As encampments and these drugs spread, so did the death toll among homeless people: from 766 in 2015 to 2,500 in 2023. Though it dropped to 2,200 in 2024, an average of six homeless people were still dying each day in L.A.
Rape is a lesser-known scourge. It goes all but unreported in tent encampments. Homeless people I’ve talked to say that most women who live in encampments have been raped, many repeatedly. Equally unreported is the incidence of assault, robbery and pimping in encampments, according to outreach workers, shelter providers and former homeless people I’ve interviewed.
Contrary to the recent claim of Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez when proposing to exempt a dozen areas of his district from the enforcement of sidewalk camping bans recently, tents do not make homeless people easier to help. They inure them to abuse.
Paul Thornton
"The encampments of more than four or five tents I was working at exist as a network of trading and using drugs," said one former county homeless-outreach worker I interviewed for another story. "No one who wasn't actively using drugs would have the power to stay in a place like that."
Is removing tents during the day all that's needed? Of course not. But it is a modest first step forward, a way to leverage, rather than undermine, the millions of dollars the city and county spend on homelessness.
And one that would begin to liberate encampment residents and the city itself from a policy that drags them both down in the name of compassion.
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