Echo Park Lake is currently the nicest, cleanest park in all of Los Angeles. It took much effort to move out the vagrants and clean up the trash, drugs and human feces a few years ago. Activists have been demanding that a fence that keeps vagrants from moving back in be taken down.
Guess what? They are being taken down. Will the vagrants return? Probably.....
A chain-link fence surrounding Echo Park Lake that has been criticized by homeless activists will be removed, Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez announced on Thursday, Feb. 2.
The fence was installed following the removal of around 200 people who were living in controversial encampments in the park in March 2021. Parts of the fence have since been knocked down several times, including earlier this week.
“We will take down the fence, and we will take painstaking care to do it right, with more transparency, so the city can see once and for all that criminalization and segregation don’t solve homelessness,” Soto-Martinez said in a statement.
The exact date of the fence’s removal will be announced later, according to Soto-Martinez.
The fence removal effort on March 25, 2021 was met with large protests, in which hundreds of police officers descended on Echo Park and arrested about 180 people, including journalists.