The saga of an L.A. shelter
Neighbors say a Bridge Home homeless shelter opened w/ promise but the city ignored that it became a magnet for crime/psychotic behavior as fentanyl, meth, mental illness changed the streets.
It is the opinion of some neighbors of a Los Angeles homeless shelter that the killing of a man named Richard Ware last month was predictable amid the facility’s chaos.
Ware had lived at the 100-bed Bridge Home shelter in the Los Feliz neighborhood and lost his bed for leaving for several days. By July 5, he was living in a van just outside, with his female bull mastiff dog, Nala, which he kept unleashed.
Ware had feuded with a former friend, who lived at the shelter. The other man told police he carried a knife as protection from Ware’s dog, which had bitten him in the past. Early that morning, Ware entered the shelter and sicced the dog on the other man, who ran from the building to a park across the street.
During the fight that took place, both Ware and his dog were stabbed. Ware died, the dog lived. The other man had his clothes shredded and suffered “severe dog bites” from which he was bleeding profusely, according to a prosecutor’s report, which found that he acted in self-defense.
For several years by then, neighbors had feared that chaos at the shelter would trigger just such a tragedy.
This is a journalist’s newsletter. As such, it will focus on stories, columns, interviews that I’ve done on a wide range of topics in my 38-year career.
This is the first in an occasional series of stories, extending the work I did in my book, The Least of Us, on the effect on our streets of fentanyl, methamphetamine, mental illness & homelessness.
The shelter opened in September 2020, with promises of extra security and a lease limited to three years. Ever since, they say, it has been uncontrolled and a magnet for crime, criminals, and frequent fights.
The folks I spoke to give two reasons for this.
First, the shelter was run with few hard and fast rules. Drug use was tolerated, though it was often a reason for individuals’ homelessness. Thus, the shelter attracted drug dealers, gang members, pimps who preyed on its residents and treated the shelter, in the words of one neighbor, as “in effect a retail outlet for them in drug dealing and sex trading.”
Often, they say, Bridge Home residents could participate in these activities and still hold a bed at the shelter. “Drugs were everywhere,” said one former resident who recently left the shelter. “You could just walk out your cubicle and it was there. You didn’t have to go looking for it.”
Second, neighbors say, the city councilwoman for Los Feliz, Nithya Raman, has refused to order special police enforcement for the area surrounding the shelter, despite clamor for years from neighbors and businesses about the associated crime and psychotic behavior.
A Los Feliz citizens committee had even studied the shelter’s problems. The committee’s 2023 report is believed to be the first study of its kind in Los Angeles. It called for the Bridge Home to be either 1) closed or 2) provided with strict operating rules and focused police enforcement. After all, the committee wrote, the shelter was in a park – south Griffith Park – across the street from a nursery school, tennis courts and soccer fields, and on property that had been promised to a senior center.
Dozens of angry neighbors showed up at a stormy meeting of the Recreation and Parks Commission shortly after the report was issued, demanding enhanced police protection or the shelter’s closure.
Raman chairs the city council’s ad hoc committee on Unarmed Crisis Prevention, Intervention, and Community Services, among others. Instead of extra police attention, Raman used city funds to pay members of the nonprofit she co-founded in 2017 -- the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition -- to act as “ambassadors,” essentially outreach workers who gave out water, food, and burn care.
Neighbors say the chaos around the shelter continued. Their clamor and the 2023 report on the Bridge Home’s impact were ignored, they say, both by Raman and by L.A. media.
Meanwhile, several neighbors told me that police tell them they cannot enter the shelter.
The shelter “was a noble experiment,” said Chris Laib, a Realtor, past president of the Los Feliz Improvement Association and member of the Griffith Park Advisory Board, which conducted the 2023 study of the Bridge Home. “We knew it was an experiment. The experiment has failed. Why does it continue? It's shocking that it’s still open.”
The shelter’s three-year lease was not terminated. Instead, the city, through its Recreation and Parks Commission, has since given it three one-year extensions, the last coming quietly in June, just before Ware’s death.
I emailed questions to Raman’s office.
“Drug use is not permitted within the shelter or on park property,” she wrote, “and those activities have led to participants being exited from the program. However, sobriety is not a requirement of the program for any of the A Bridge Home Shelters … because the goal is to bring people off the streets and into an environment where they can access consistent services, and not to leave people on the streets.”
She did not yet support closing the shelter, she wrote. It allows city officials “to sustainably remove tents and encampments from across Council District 4 because we have had shelter beds to offer to people. …
“Given that this shelter operates on city-owned land, it provides some of the most cost-effective beds in the system. … While our office continuously strives for better management and outcomes at the shelter, what we have seen across the district is that crime goes down when you can shelter and house people who are living in tents and encampments.”
She added that her “Ambassadors, trained in trauma-informed care, work alongside other outreach teams including LAHSA, CIRCLE, and Healthcare in Action to ensure a positive community environment both in ABH Riverside and the surrounding area through a combination of outreach, support events, and community engagement.”
The shelter and the 2023 citizens report were caught up in a larger political battle over homelessness and policing that wracks Los Angeles. Indeed, the Bridge Home has pitted progressives aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America against many Los Feliz liberals, for whom the shelter has become a symbol of the city’s insistence on approaches to homelessness that ignore how fentanyl, methamphetamine, and the mental illness they produce, have changed everything on the streets.
Bridge homes were created by Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Los Angeles City Council as shelters where homeless people could live and work with case workers to find more stable housing. They opened with great hope and promises of permanently housing large numbers of homeless people.
Not all L.A. neighborhoods have accepted them. Liberal Los Feliz was one that did, imagining it could provide a compassionate model for addressing a citywide emergency.
The shelters were to be run by non-profits – in this case, People Assisting The Homeless (PATH) -- which use a “low-barrier” approach, meaning little is required of shelter occupants, including sobriety, as many shelters have been run in decades past.
However, about the time Bridge Homes were opening in Los Angeles in 2020 the nature of homelessness had already been changing.
The 2023 citizens committee report described it this way:
“There was a very unfortunate, radical transformation of the homeless community into an aggressive, belligerent, threatening, sometimes naked, severely hyped on drugs and extremely mentally disturbed/psychotic population.”
As I’ve written elsewhere (here, here, and here, and discussed here and here), this change coincided with relentless supplies out of Mexico of highly potent fentanyl and, especially, psychosis-inducing methamphetamine that have covered the country.
In Los Angeles, these intensely addictive drugs combined with the violence and trauma of street life, which was itself enhanced by all-but stationary tents in encampments that kept people imprisoned in their addictions and fueled their mental illness.
This blunted the effects of policies conceived in previous eras — for example, say, a homeless shelter where drug use was tolerated.
Los Feliz residents noticed the change.
“We had our normal homeless people in the neighborhood,” said one long-time resident. “We kind of all knew these different guys. They disappeared. Then it became like a zombie apocalypse.”
This converged on the Bridge Home in Los Feliz after it opened in 2020, neighbors say and the citizens study reported.
People were allowed to leave the shelter at night and use drugs. Several of the residents are suspected of leaving the shelter at night to burglarize homes and businesses. Whatever the case, burglaries in the area rose after the shelter opened, according to the report.
Fights and arguments outside the shelter grew common.
Recreational vehicles lined the street, some of them stealing electricity from a nearby auto-body shop, Caliber Collision. The shop reported people were scaling its walls at night and burglarizing customers cars – some 60 cars at least, according to the shop manager. Others began stealing catalytic converters from the cars on Caliber’s lot.
The Rascals, a gang from the Atwater Village neighborhood nearby, are alleged to run meth sales and copper-wire theft. The William Mulholland Memorial fountain at the corner of Los Feliz Boulevard and Riverside Drive hasn’t functioned since 2020, due in part to repeated theft of copper tubing and wire.
Meth dealers often post up outside the shelter, selling to shelter residents. Pimps trafficked women from the shelter, sometimes in the bathrooms of the recreation center across the street, say those deeply familiar with the shelter.
The tennis program across the street reported to the citizens committee: “constant car thefts”; “Kicking, profanity, nudity, fighting, banging with pipes, tire irons and metal poles on the ground and violently against garbage cans and fixed structures”; “open needles and drug paraphernalia”; “human feces on the ground and spread on the walls” of bathrooms and tennis courts; “electric wiring stolen from the soccer field”; “unleashed pitbulls.”
The “drug behaviors seem to be from stimulants, not opiates,” one reported.
The nursery school director, who is also a parent, wrote “people who are under extreme influence of drugs are now regularly … wandering towards and then up to the short fence which surrounds the playground. … All kinds of behavior ensue from the persons while very high – nudity, shouting, cursing.”
One parent of a 3-year-old at the nursery school reported: “screaming homeless people … raving and violent. A few of whom wearing very little or no clothing.”
“I could not believe that was going on in front of children of that age,” said Chris Laib, the Realtor and member of the Griffith Park Advisory Board.
Fires increased. An abandoned building near the Bridge Home burned twice before a third blaze destroyed it.
Meanwhile, relatively few Bridge Home residents have transitioned to more stable housing.
Meetings with case workers were rare, said the recent former resident I spoke with: “The staff didn’t really do too much. Some people were content with staying there for years. Others really wanted to use the services and, you know, get in and get out. But I think the people in the office preferred people to be zoned out. It keeps the beds full. It’s how they get paid. People were there two, three, five years -- still no housing.”
For some shelter residents, going to jail for a prolonged period has been a better option, said Cameron Flanagan, who as a volunteer counselor at the Bridge Home in the last couple years said she learned the place’s pitfalls. “They get out of jail sober and healthier. But then they get back to the shelter and, boom, drugs are all over there. The meth, because it’s so cheap, lets people run for days on end without sleep.”
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Overlaid on this, and exacerbating the problem in the view of many Los Feliz residents, is the political battle over defunding police.
Nithya Raman, an urban planner educated at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was elected as the district’s city councilwoman in 2000 with support from the Democratic Socialists of America.
The group’s political influence has grown with the election of at least four of its allies to the Los Angeles City Council. DSA has long argued that homelessness is due to lack of affordable housing, and that police funding should be curtailed and directed elsewhere.
In Los Angeles the fight has turned to limiting where the police might naturally focus their attention – for example, on a homeless shelter alleged to function as a hotspot of criminal behavior.
At particular issue is the question of what in L.A. is known as an SPEZ -- a special enforcement zone, which allow for targeted police enforcement and patrols. SPEZs and where they should go have at times become proxies in the larger battle in Los Angeles over use and funding of the police.
When Bridge Homes were allowed as a form of shelter, the City Council also made it easy for councilmembers to request an SPEZ nearby. Neighbors say they have asked for a SPEZ and related signage near the shelter that explains penalties for criminal behavior in the area, say neighbors. Raman’s office said complaining neighbors have that wrong — that the shelter is already in a larger SPEZ. Policing does occur in the area, the office said.
“My personal objection to ABH is that it is located in a public park!” wrote Chris Laib. “And, that the city did not implement the outside security, as was promised in the [Bridge Home] agreement, in writing.”
Several residents active in Los Feliz civic affairs said that through the years dealing with the Bridge Home’s impact, they have stopped resorting to Raman’s office for help.
“When it comes to the homeless,” said one, “even if there’s murder, gang members, drug dealing, [Raman’s] advocacy is always going to be that homeless people … are prioritized above the rest of the community.”
In her email, Councilwoman Raman responded that her office takes citizen input seriously and that the 2023 citizens report “helped to guide the scope of our South Griffith Park Master Plan. Our office is working with the community to plan for and invest in new facilities throughout the area, including a new permanent home for the Griffith Park Adult Community Center, a rebuilt pool, new recreational facilities such as basketball courts, and better circulation between both sides of Riverside Drive.
Raman wrote that a new shelter operator will be selected soon: “We are looking forward to establishing a stronger relationship between this new partner and our neighbors.”
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These days, the Bridge Home is not plagued by the intensity of the problems it once had.
But from what I could see, drug dealers and copper-wiring stripping gang members still hang near the area. Fights and arguments are still common.
Then there was the unhinged incident involving Richard Ware, his dog, and the shelter resident they attacked.
The family of Richard Ware counts his arrival at the shelter as one of two misfortunes that led to his death.
The first misfortune, his family said, was that he was rendered homeless in 2023 when squatters took over the house he lived in and that he and his siblings inherited from their father. Ware, 47, a long-distance truck driver, was absent for several months and returned to find the family home occupied by people who had simply taken it over.
Ware physically fought the squatters at the time, was arrested, placed on probation, and was then homeless, while the squatters remain to this day, his family said.
After that, his life spiraled down and may have included methamphetamine by the time he and his bull mastiff arrived at the Bridge Home.
Friends have said that he was using the drug while at the shelter, and later, while in his van parked outside it.
But whatever Ware’s state of mind, the last thing he needed was the chaos and drug availability around the shelter, said his older sister, Jessica Carter, who said she remained close to her brother during the two years he was on the street.
“Meth is very, very prevalent” at the shelter, Carter said. “I never saw him use any drugs. But I know at times he would be different, and he was seeking mental health care. My brother got entangled in this web supposedly there to help you. I feel the [Bridge Home] is a hopeless place.”
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Photo of the week:
Julian, CA — I drove through these hills not long after I had been listening to Dave Alvin’s “Here in California.”
“Here in California, fruit hangs heavy on the vine
There’s no gold, I thought I’d warn ya.
But the hills turn brown in the summertime.”
It’s upsetting that this individual became homeless on the account of other homeless (the squatters taking over his home). This all seems like it was very avoidable.
Politicians who are not seeking solutions are part of the problems society faces that you so eloquently write about. At my old age I remember when politicians would work together for the common good. Now our country and society have devolved into the chasm of no return. Without working on a collaborative basis all of us will suffer.