In Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, a fence won’t cure homelessness or addiction. But it’s a start

Los Angeles struggles to balance its humane responses to addiction and homelessness with its more instant but often less durable alternatives — police action.  MacArthur Park, a 35-acre space in the heart of L.A.’s Westlake neighborhood, is proving to be a frustrating testing ground.

Neighbors want a safer place for children to play and residents to enjoy the outdoors. Does that mean they must tolerate needle exchanges or encourage roundups of  homeless people? Are plans to beautify the park just window dressing or a genuine contribution to safety?

The latest debate involves putting a wrought iron fence around the park with limited access through gates. What does a fence say about how the city approaches and resolves its toughest issues?

Los Angeles’ Recreation and Parks Commission and some public speakers tackled those questions during a recent hearing. Most speakers who could make the hearing — which was held on Thursday during work hours — opposed the fence idea. 

Some said it would wall off their community while doing nothing to address the proliferation of drugs or the intractability of the area’s homeless population.  

“We have to ask ourselves why a fence is needed,” a health care worker who lives near the park said. “A fence will not bring dignity. It’s only going to push people further into invisibility.” 

Others warned about the fence’s “unwelcome” symbolism and the closing off of public space. They said it was shielding the public from the reality of homelessness,  “marginalizing human beings” and wasting city money. 

“I question whether this proposal is truly concerned with improving the community,” another speaker noted, “or whether its true intention is to improve the aesthetics of Los Angeles.”

A fence is not a wall 

Although critics dominated the public comments at the commission hearing, the fence has supporters. A fence is not a wall, those backers argue. Its gates would be open and it could be slatted, offering clear views into the park. And it might help steady the neighborhood and regulate access to the park, cutting down on the foot traffic from surrounding sidewalks, which sometimes teem with drug-addled people who wander in and out of the park. 

After the contentious hearing, during which the commission repeatedly threatened to throw out disruptive activists, the commission voted to approve $2.3 million for the project. Now city staff can produce a more complete design. But it hardly mollified the community’s advocates or brought the two sides together. 

Opponents of this project are roughly split between those who see the park as a magnet for crime and those who see it as a refuge for the city’s most put-upon residents.

For the former group, criminal justice answers — more police patrols and crackdowns on drug trafficking and stolen merchandise sales — are the logical way to make the park safer and more welcoming. 

But for those who see the park’s denizens as victims of misguided social policies, law enforcement solutions seem cruel and doomed to fail in the long run. They instead urge the city to use its resources to develop housing and fund “harm-reduction services,” such as addiction treatment and needle exchanges.

The stark division between them has the unfortunate effect of putting advocates in silos, from which they fail to appreciate that lasting solutions are almost certainly going to require elements of both approaches. 

Things that help can also hurt the park

It is true that the park cannot be cleaned up by arresting those who are homeless, whose principal crime is merely being poor. But it is also true that treating the problems of the park as mere symptoms of deeper societal problems postpones doing something now, and it may actually make things worse.

Take, for example, the understandable desire to treat addiction as a disease and to respond to it not with arrests but with treatment and outreach – with needle exchanges, for instance. Those exchanges save lives, but they also attract users and dealers — hardly what MacArthur Park or its neighbors need. 

Police Chief Jim McDonnell has seen the benefits of needle exchanges, but he also cautions that they have their place.  MacArthur Park today already is so burdened by drug abuse that anything encouraging users is misguided. “I feel like it’s enabling people,” he told me recently.

McDonnell acknowledged that some of the efforts at MacArthur Park will need revisiting. The temporary fencing now being used to block off merchants from selling stolen goods – and sometimes drugs – has helped protect stores along Alvarado Street, along the park’s eastern edge, and helped bring down crime in the neighborhood. But the chain-link fences are rickety and fill up with trash. “It’s not a good situation,” he said.

No solution will succeed on its own, and some proposals are more significant than they appear. Even the objection that the park perimeter fence is intended to improve the look of the park rather than to address its substantive problems ignores the connection between the two.

The ‘Broken Windows’  theory of safety

The relationship between an area’s appearance and its safety is not a matter of speculation. It is at the heart of the most important work of policing philosophy in the modern era, the 1982 Atlantic magazine article by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling that laid out the theory of “Broken Windows.” 

That article identified “order” as an essential element of community safety. Disorder, as exemplified by a neighborhood where broken windows are left unattended, is not just blight. It contributes to crime, with small offenses such as vandalism creating space and opportunity for more dangerous activity.

That is precisely what is at work in MacArthur Park today. An atmosphere of disorder is manifest in slovenly streets and the ramshackle attempts to combat it. It is a neighborhood of trash and disrepair, radiating neglect and inviting crime.  And crime has followed, just as “Broken Windows” argued. 

Would a fence fix that? Probably not by itself. But it is wrong to say its effect would just be aesthetic. The feel of a community can create the reality of a community — one that cares about its wellbeing and defends it. A more beautiful park would be a more orderly park, with police to enforce that order and the community to benefit from it.

That’s a goal worthy of a $2-million fence.

This commentary is the fourth in a string of recurring coverage on L.A.’s attempts to restore MacArthur Park and areas like it, and the implications for distressed communities around the state.