In Los Angeles, homeless house fires turn private spaces into public threats
Fires caused by homeless squatters at vacant properties routinely endanger nearby houses & families. Such fires are common and quickly forgotten, as are the stories of people who live near them.
Families living near the property at 6110 S. Main St. in Los Angeles say they watched it descend into chaos over the last couple years.
The SoLa Foundation, a nonprofit, intended the site as an affordable-housing development. But the project’s builder went bankrupt, according to a press release from Councilman Curren Price, who represents district 9. The builder left behind a half-built concrete shell.
Homeless squatters took over. Followed by all-night noise, trash in the alley. A bag of chickens, most of them dead, were found, with a few of the live chickens, looking diseased, running about.
“All these homeless people were in there doing drugs,” said Alfred Garcia, who lives nearby. “At night, they’d be arguing. You could hear them fighting, the girls yelling.”
Taggers hit the structure. One kid even brought a ladder and tagged the front-facing wall – in midday, Garcia said. Small fires broke out inside the property.
“We called police, 311,” said Monica Romero, 25, who lives next door with her parents and two autistic younger siblings. “We don’t know what has to happen for them to do something. We’re desperate for help.”
Then in early April, a fire broke out on the building materials left at the site, in a story first reported by FoxLA.
Flames poured from the structure’s windows, lapping near Romero’s family apartment. No one was hurt. Damages were confined to the unfinished structure.
Still, Garcia said, “you don’t feel safe.”
Indeed, in Los Angeles, private spaces have become public threats.
Fires caused by homeless squatters at abandoned or vacant properties routinely endanger nearby houses and families. So common are such fires that they are quickly forgotten, as are the stories of people who live nearby.
Especially vulnerable are working-class, Black and Latino, neighborhoods, where housing is generally older, thus more fire prone and expensive to remodel.
The public was jolted into greater awareness of homelessness as a source of fires by the stubborn blaze that shut down the Harbor (110) Freeway in early May. Authorities believe the origin was a trash pile within a homeless encampment.
The issue worked into last week’s mayoral debate. Mayor Karen Bass fretted that city “firefighters spent thirty percent of their time putting out fires related to homelessness.” Challenger Spencer Pratt promised to clear city streets of “drug addicts” many of whom, he said, invade “abandoned buildings … lighting them on fire virtually every other day.”
(Pratt also mentioned what he called “super-meth” as a factor in homelessness and mental illness in L.A., which the L.A. Times followed with a story. My book, The Least of Us (2021), broke the story that relentless supplies of meth made in Mexico were connected to mental illness and homelessness. I’ll post more on “super meth” later this week.)
Homeless- or tent-related fires now average 46 a day, with some 75,000, of widely varying sizes, reported between 2020 and 2025, according an ABC7 review of Los Angeles Fire Department data published earlier this month.
Neighbors of a house squatted by homeless people report living with noise, chaos, and the constant threat of losing everything.
This happened to Juan Galicia and his family. Galicia, a pastor and contractor, purchased his home on St. Andrews Place in Hollywood in 2008. He said he made improvements in it for years. “It was going to be my retirement,” he said.
Then a recently vacant house next door was squatted by a dozen homeless people displaying the deranged behavior associated with methamphetamine use: up all night, arguing and fighting, their days spent scavenging recyclables.
Galicia and his neighbors called police and their city councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez for a year. On Sunday, March 8, Galicia was preaching in his South-Central church when fire erupted at that squatted house next to his up in Hollywood. It quickly consumed the Galicia family’s house as well.
The remains of both houses show no signs of being removed. The eight-member Galicia family, homeless themselves for a couple weeks, found an apartment in South Central Los Angeles.
To many people, this incursion on private land is the final result of Los Angeles relinquishing control of its public spaces.
In 2011, Occupy L.A. at City Hall normalized the use of tents on public spaces. From there, tents colonized nearby Skid Row. They spread to Venice, then to Hollywood, Koreatown, Mid-City, South-Central, and to freeway onramps and underpasses.
Until recently, court cases enshrined in law the idea that homeless people have the right to live where they want if government doesn’t provide housing for them. Tents on sidewalks were deemed private dwellings that police needed warrants to search.
During these years, the aforementioned massive supplies of highly potent methamphetamine, then fentanyl, became major drivers of L.A. homelessness. Meth, in particular, keeps users up all night for days, provoking the deranged, sometimes belligerent and fire-prone behavior that neighbors often describe among squatters.
During Covid, bus stops and Metro trains, parking lots, parks and libraries, and, of course, sidewalks were occupied by homeless people. Tent encampments have receded, but remain common.
“There’s no public spaces that are safe for public use in L.A.,” said one Hollywood resident of the block of Wilton Place in Hollywood, who requested anonymity, fearing eviction for speaking publicly. As I wrote in this newsletter last year, Wilton Place saw four major fires at Craftsman homes squatted by homeless people in a recent 12-month period.
A predictable result is that encampments would move from the street to occupying vacant private spaces as well.
Older homes left untended, abandoned, or put up for sale are vulnerable to squatters. The city is often slow to respond or tells residents there’s nothing it can do because the land is private and eviction is up to the landowner.
Thus neighbors find no solution to wearyingly chronic trespassing on nearby private property, a misdemeanor.
Getting a “trespass arrest authorization” -- allowing police to actually arrest trespassers, instead of just shoo them away -- is “a byzantine process,” said Kim Cooper, a historic preservation advocate who co-authors the Esotouric’s Secret Los Angeles newsletter. “The amount of time it takes and many ways it can go off the rails … most people walk away.”
Fire consumed most of a 1907 Craftsman at 1970 S. LaSalle Avenue in Harvard Heights on April 27. A young man had squatted the place for months, even causing a fire a couple days before by throwing a burning gas can out into the yard, said Michael Morgan.
Morgan, 65, a retired engineer, has owned the house next door for 40 years. The April 27 blaze scorched the side of his house.
“We couldn’t get the guy out of there,” Morgan told me. “Cops came a couple times. He would leave, come back a few hours later. A month ago, [the owner] boarded everything up. He still got back in. You’d hear him yelling, things crashing, throwing things out the window, breaking glass.”
Perhaps the most predictable recent example of a private space creating public danger was the house at the corner of Bonnie Brae Street and West 12th Place in Pico-Union.
I spoke with a neighbor who said the Craftsman on the lot had burned three times before it was finally consumed on the morning of April 27 in flames visible from two blocks away. The fire burned parts of two adjacent houses, one for at least the third time.
In 2017, a tenant’s fire left the house standing, but unlivable and condemned. The crippled structure attracted homeless people for the next nine years, the neighbor said, even as the house partially burned again in 2020 and in 2022, scorching cars parked nearby.
(I contacted the city’s Department of Building and Safety spokeswoman to ask why the remains hadn’t been cleared in nine years. As of Sunday, I’d not heard back. If I do, I’ll print what she says here.)
Still, transients would invade the property. “Every single night, you’d see them climbing over the fence,” the neighbor said.
Rats from the house scurried across cables to nearby houses. Meanwhile, homeless squatters stripped the street lights of copper, leaving the neighborhood in partial darkness until the city installed solar-powered lights.
The house is now a pile of charred wood and rubble, perhaps finally ending the neighborhood’s nightmare.
At the property at 6110 S. Main St., neighbors aren’t sure what’s next. Construction will not recommence until at least next year.
“We don’t know if it’s going to set on fire,” said Monica Romero. “It’s anguish we live with. It’s heartbreaking that we have to be this desperate for something that they can control easily.”
This week’s story is part of my occasional series on the effects of fentanyl and methamphetamine on U.S. streets. It was produced in collaboration with, and the support of, LAReported.org, an online startup sponsoring deeply reported journalism about Los Angeles — which publishes the piece today as well. Please share it!!!
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More Great Stories from the Dreamland Newsletter:
“Natalie” — An audio tale in which California prison inmate tells the story of a friendship he struck up with an old lady — a Holocaust survivor and shut-in — when he was 7 years old.
“Follow the Dopamine” — With smart phones, addiction and recovery go far beyond drugs. A conversation with Colorado drug counselor Stefan Bate on legal and addictive stuff — gambling, porn, etc — damaging his clients.
Why The Purity of Meth Matters: A new report emphasizes once again how pure the meth is coming from Mexico, making it especially devastating in terms of addiction, homelessness, and mental illness.
“Reading my Own Book Aloud: The Making of an Audio Book”
I have given away over a hundred copies of “The Least of Us”. Such an insightful book (from someone who worked inside the criminal justice system for 30 years in Seattle). I hope you will consider one more book on this topic. Thank you.
We're grateful for your coverage of the impact on neighbors of the vacant, squatted houses that are eventually lost to fire. It's not right that Angelenos who appreciate older housing stock and often have been living in their homes for years are being terrorized and can't get any help. We suspect it's partly because to the City's thinking, their neighborhoods are more valuable if they're torn down and upzoned with dense new multi-family housing.