LA Councilman said he would end sweeps. Activists say he broke that campaign promise.

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Los Angeles City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez and his staff were honored as “housing champions” Sunday, Sept. 14, at a fundraiser held to benefit the tenant advocacy organization, Inquilinos Unidos, for his office’s work on housing and homelessness.

But several activists handing out flyers outside the event, hosted at the Ahmanson Senior Citizen Center in Exposition Park, said Soto-Martinez has not kept his campaign promise to end encampment sweeps in his 13th City Council District.

Soto-Martinez represents unhoused constituents in an Eastside district that stretches west-to-east from Hollywood — through East Hollywood and Historic Filipinotown — to Echo Park, and goes northeast into Atwater Village and Glassell Park.

The activists, who are part of coalition of LA-area mutual aid groups that do regular outreach and advocacy at encampments, say Soto-Martinez is far from being a champion for such communities’ unhoused residents. Their flyer pointed to continued enforcement in his district of Los Angeles Municipal Code 41.18 — a law that criminalizes sitting, sleeping, lying down and storing personal property in public — during his first year in office.

And since getting elected in 2022, sweeps in the 13th District have been just as brutal under Soto-Martinez as they had been under the previous council member, they said, even though Soto-Martinez had stated he was opposed to the law during his 2022 campaign.

His campaign website described sweeps as violent and cruel. Such sweeps are often carried out using 41.18 along with the many other enforcement tools used against unhoused Los Angeles residents.

The flyer, which carries the logos of multiple mutual aid groups that do frequent outreach at encampments, includes a demand for Soto-Martinez to repeal 41.18 zones in his district. Those zones were set up by the previous council member.

According to City Council files, 27 zones were set up in the 13th District through three resolutions, including the first ever resolution submitted, after the new version of the law was adopted by the City Council in July 2021 to replace an earlier version that was found unconstitutional. The resolution was submitted by Soto-Martinez’s predecessor Mitch O’Farrell in September 2021, and created zones in 17 locations. Additional zones were set up in the 13th District through two resolutions submitted in October 2021, which added nine more zones, and June 2022, which added one more.

One way the new version of 41.18 differs from the earlier one, which first went into effect in 1963 as a law against loitering, is that it calls for specific zones to be set up and designate certain categories of locations in the city, as places where the law could be enforced.

Back in 2021, Soto-Martinez had taken City Council members to task for their support of 41.18, calling what city leaders were doing as having “everything to do with politics.” He wrote that it reminded him of the “broken windows” theory of policing, which he described as “another failed strategy.” 

For the activists, Soto-Martinez’s political career has hinged on the stances he took in his 2022 campaign, when uproar over 41.18 was at its height amid the brutal and militarized treatment of unhoused residents at Echo Park Lake and throughout the district. Many housed constituents at the time were especially vocal in their opposition to the law.

Community members and major organizations, such as homeless services providers, wrote letters opposing the law, to the LA City Council, with some denouncing the policies of Mitch O’Farrell, the council member Soto-Martinez unseated.

One Oct. 21, 2021 written comment, from someone who identified themselves as a resident of the Hollywood studio district, called the September 2021 O’Farrell resolution to set up 41.18 zones “cruel, superficial, and unproductive.”

The commenter also pointed to a double standard being placed on their unhoused neighbors:

“Rather than doing the long, difficult work of housing the homeless, this ordinance will simply shuffle our mentally ill and addicted to another location,” the person wrote. “Our houseless neighbors in this area are no more troublesome than our housed neighbors. I live in the immediate vicinity of the location listed as #14, Angelica’s Daycare. While the people who live in tents on this block do cause some disturbance, it is FAR less than that of Angelica’s Daycare and AT&T.”

They wrote that they could “lodge a noise complaint daily against the daycare for all the Baby Shark and shrieking I have to hear.”

“Mitch, you make me ashamed I voted for you,” the person wrote.

An unhoused constituent of Soto-Martinez’s echoed what activists have said about the continued harassment they face in the district for simply living outdoors. In an interview with The LA Reporter on Sunday — the day his council member’s homelessness team was being honored for their work — the 13th District resident said that his day-to-day experience tells him Soto-Martinez has not kept his campaign promise to end sweeps.

The police are frequently harassing him and his neighbors for living on the street, he said, even though efforts to leave enough room for wheelchairs to pass by and to access scarce resources and services were far from lacking on their end. They also don’t have the benefit of routine city services such as trash pick-up, the constituent said.

The flyer the activists handed out at the fundraiser also called on Soto-Martinez to downgrade the sweeps to what are known as “spot cleanings,” which don’t force people to move their homes out of the way. Typically trash is picked up during such operations, which also don’t require as much city resources to complete.

“[My council member] wants to say that he wants to decriminalize and not have the arrests,” said the constituent, who asked that his name not be printed for fear of retaliation from the police. “Well, I'm here to tell you I was just threatened by the LAPD that I would be arrested if I didn't move.”

That constituent — who said he is a veteran and registered voter — recounted that last week he was displaced from a street, a block over, due to a major encampment sweep. Such sweeps, known as CARE+ sweeps, are scheduled by Soto-Martinez’s council office.

This 13th district constituent said he and others had chosen that location because it was a place where they felt safe. But when he tried to go back to the spot after the sweep, a police officer said he would arrest him. A fence had also been set up there, taking up the entire sidewalk.

At the fundraiser earlier that day, The LA Reporter had tried to approach Soto-Martinez to inquire about the flyers being circulated outside. The council member quickly declined to comment. Instead, he questioned the reporter repeatedly about whether she had purchased a ticket to the fundraiser. He also said that the reporter approaching him to ask for an on-the-record comment at the fundraiser was “a little unethical.”

The LA Reporter did not get a chance to talk to Soto-Martinez again over the next few days, despite requesting an interview. His spokesperson Nick Barnes-Batista provided a written statement that said very little about what the council member’s current stance is on 41.18.

Barnes-Batista’s statement only referenced the law by saying that the council member has not introduced nor supported any 41.18 resolution since taking office. There was no elaboration on why he was doing that.

The statement also included assertions about how their office conducts sweeps, which activists dispute.

“I look forward to applying pressure until we get some answers because there's no reason for these prepared bullet points,” Kris Rehl, an organizer with LA Street Care, one of the groups backing the flyer circulated at the fundraiser, said in response to Barnes-Batista’s statement to The LA Reporter.

The flyer being circulated carried the logos for the mutual aid groups Echo Park Mutual Aid, Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid, LA Street Care & Mutual Aid, Aetna Street Solidarity Community Defense, South Bay Mutual Aid and Care Club, and Venice Justice Committee.

LA Street Care does much of its outreach in the 13th District, and in the neighboring 1st District, represented by Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez. The other groups do outreach in the San Fernando Valley, the South Bay, Palms and Venice.

Other activists handing out flyers noted that many of people hosting and attending the fundraiser were sympathetic to their cause. One activist, Peggy Lee Kennedy of Venice Justice Committee, shared that the banquet room for the fundraiser was filled with “lefty activist lawyers,” some of whom attended the People’s College of Law that educated many of the National Lawyer’s Guild attorneys.

Roxy, one of the activists, said there are “some shared values, and also there's a lot of people don't know that the sweeps are happening or are aware of the extent of harm, and so trying to activate people on what the problem is and where pressure is needed to make things better, is a lot of the work.”

A longtime board member for Inquilinos Unidos, Steve Zrucky, was among those who spent a good hour, just before Soto-Martinez arrived, talking to activists. He told The LA Reporter they had decided to honor Soto-Martinez based on recommendations from other tenant advocates and the council member’s record on tenants issues.

Zrucky, who had worked at Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles as a tenants rights lawyer, said that while he believes Soto-Martinez has “always been on the right side of tenants rights,” he would be supportive of talking to the council member about 41.18, which Zrucky said he opposes and should be repealed.

Council members have got “a lot of imperfections,” Zrucky said. “We honor him for what he’s done, and we gotta deal with him for what he needs to do better.”

Other honorees at the fundraiser were Jose Felix Cabrera-Larios, who was highlighted for his 20 years of leadership in the Westlake/MacArthur Park area and volunteer work on protecting green spaces and keeping families housed; Alma Corral, for being a community defender; and the Latino Community Foundation’s Los Angeles Giving Circle Network, which according to the event program was founded in 2016 and includes more than 100 members who got together to raise funds through their own financial networks that they used to invest into “grassroots, Latino-led organizations” around Los Angeles County.