How Los Angeles Is Getting Scorched by Its Homeless Problem

VENICE, Calif. – Francesca Padilla was awakened by the sound of screaming people and breaking glass. Soon she could hear the tortured howls of her neighbor’s dog Togo as the bungalow right next to her Venice home was engulfed in flames.  

“It was yelping so loud–the sound isn’t the usual dog sound–it was suffering,” another neighbor told a local newspaper. “It was suffering.” The homeowner, Dr. Courtney Gillenwater, a pediatrician, was at work when the fire started around 3 a.m.  Her neighbors tried and failed to break into her bungalow to rescue Togo. But the Husky-mix ultimately died, and Gillenwater’s home in this Los Angeles neighborhood was destroyed.

Gillenwater suspected that drug addicts from the growing homeless encampment nearby started the April 2021 fire because she had asked city officials to remove a dumpster behind her house where they would congregate. 

Her neighbor, Padilla, also believes the homeless were the culprits. “Anyone can see the correlation between homeless encampments and the rise of fires,” she said. “We have people cooking drugs out in the open right across the street. Is that not a recipe for disaster?”

Initially, firefighters with the Los Angeles Fire Department also suspected arson, telling reporters candidly at the time that they believed someone threw something over Gillenwater’s fence to start the fire. But soon the department issued a statement declaring in euphemistic bureaucratese that “there is no evidence that indicates the involvement of a person experiencing homelessness.” Four years later, the cause of the blaze remains officially unsolved. 

The 2021 fire is now viewed by some Los Angeles residents as a symbol of the city’s failure to control the spread of homeless encampments that have become a major cause of fires in the city. While LA’s leaders have been quick to point to climate change and faulty power lines for the recent historic fires that razed large swaths of the city, critics say they have intentionally downplayed the role played by the city’s swelling homeless population.

A new investigation by KCAL News using LAFD data found that since 2019, the number of fires connected to a homeless person has increased by the thousands. In 2024 alone, there were nearly 17,000 such fires.

A separate investigation by NBC4’s I-Team tallied nearly 14,000 homeless fires a year earlier. The report found that some of the fires were sparked as a result of encampments illegally tapping into the city’s electrical system to power items in their tents. Regardless, the upward trend in these types of fires is clear. The 13,909 homeless fires in 2023 were nearly double the number in 2020 when 43% of all citywide fire incidents involved a homeless person. Today, more than half of the fires do, even as the homeless account for less than 1% of the city’s population.

Gigi Graciette, a reporter for Fox 11 television, says fire officials have been advised to evade questions about homeless fires from local journalists.  “Even when [high-ranking fire officials] know for a fact how a fire … was indeed connected to an encampment or to an unhoused individual, they are not to say that,” Graciette said during a February 21 broadcast. “They are just to say it’s under investigation,” she continued.

Graciette noted that “many chiefs, many battalion chiefs, many captains are extremely frustrated to see their men and their women risking their lives on fires” at the same encampments repeatedly, including one whose squatters have taken over an abandoned office building in the working class neighborhood of Van Nuys. “It was there that a battalion chief told me ‘we’ve been to this one building ten times and I’m not allowed to speak about it,’ “ Graciette said. “That’s just the politics at play here.”

Fire officials do speak up from time to time, as did Capt. Freddy Escobar, president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, last June after fire crews responded to a homeless encampment fire that has recurred at the same site in the Sepulveda Basin. In highlighting the department’s frustration with city leadership, Escobar described how fire crews were expected to respond to the same encampment fire over and over again. “It was caused by the homeless and we nearly lost a firefighter over this,” he said. “I’m asking the city of Los Angeles, where is the outrage for what’s happening in the city? Because what we’re doing today is not working.”

A dozen firefighters were injured due to a sudden explosion as they battled the blaze. One member of the fire crew sustained severe injuries, including head trauma and a severed ear, which had to be reattached by doctors after he was airlifted to a nearby hospital. The Los Angeles Police Department later confirmed that multiple suspicious devices were found at the encampment where the fire started, preventing fire crews from returning. Instead, a helicopter was used to douse the fire with water and extinguish the blaze.

Located in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, the Sepulveda Basin is surrounded by parks, fields for competitive sports and a long bike path. The area is also home to the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve, a favorite among local birdwatchers due to its diverse variety of avian species. 

Last June, San Fernando Valley Audubon Society treasurer Pat Bates told the Los Angeles Daily News that her organization had been worried about the fire risk posed by the makeshift multi-story structures, propane tanks and construction materials they’ve discovered throughout the wildlife reserve. She and her colleagues estimated that roughly 150 people were living there, with some in desperate need of mental health treatment. 

The president of the SFV Audubon Society even recalled witnessing a screaming man waving a machete during a recent field trip for around a dozen third-grade students. No one was harmed. But the incident highlighted what Escobar put bluntly: what the city is doing is not working. Bates agrees. “We are very frustrated,” she said. “Why is anybody allowed to bring construction materials in and live there?”

Bates isn’t the only one asking such questions. Business owners and residents alike have been lobbying local leaders to be proactive and do something about the risks associated with the open fires commonly seen in encampments. Among the critics is commercial property owner John Alley, who is furious that open fires continue to be an issue in Santa Monica and Westlake, where the city’s notoriously crime-ridden MacArthur Park is located.

“Every night, on the sidewalks across MacArthur Park and in MacArthur Park, there’s two types of fires,” Alley says he told L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. “There’s the fires which are used to cook meth and the others are used to stay warm,” Alley continued. 

Bass called Alley on January 4, mere days before massive wind-fueled fires tore through and leveled the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. “I said [to Bass] there’s going to be a problem there, and if these fires burn buildings and people die, it’d be very embarrassing for you Mayor to have to come back early.”

Alley secretly recorded his exchange with Bass and felt justified in doing so because he “felt my life and the safety of my tenants and their hard-working employees were in danger.” Alley says the crime in the area, including drug trafficking, shootings and stabbings, has gotten so bad that police often refuse to escort firefighters in MacArthur Park for protection. “If firefighters don’t have their backs covered, they’re not going to be safe,” Alley asserted. “But the problem is the police … are staying two and three blocks away from the park at night. The police are afraid, not enough of them.”

Mayor Bass did not respond to RealClearInvestigations’ request for comment for this article.

Alley’s claims have been brushed off by anti-police activists as nothing more than paranoid musings. In reality, the gang MS-13 has had a foothold in MacArthur Park for years, and several transgender sex workers have been stabbed to death by gang members seeking to rid the area of them. But they’re not the only victims. For decades, gang members have been charging a weekly fee to street vendors, drug dealers, sex workers, homeless individuals and even legal business owners in the area. In 2021 the Los Angeles Times detailed a horrific incident involving the killing of a 3-week-old baby who was struck by gunfire after 18th Street gang members opened fire on a street vendor who refused to pay them $50. 

A 2023 report commissioned by the LAFD detailed the challenges facing the Fire Department in dealing with its the high volume of homeless-related calls. Aside from battling blazes, the LAFD also responds to medical emergencies throughout the city, which has proven to spread their resources thin in the context of an ever-expanding homeless population. 

“Over the course of late 2021 and into 2022, the City and County rolled out a pilot project for the delivery of alternative, non-urgent patient care—including mental health and homeless program diversion; however, this is not enough,” the report stated. “The alternative response program needs to scale massively and quickly to lower the workload placed on fire units back down to moderate and serious emergencies.”

Two Calls Per Hour

To highlight how homeless-related emergency calls were overburdening the LAFD, the report cited that “in 2020, Fire Station 9 in the east downtown area responded to 18,986 incidents—an average of 52 per day, or two per hour,” and recommended that the city “shift low-acuity EMS incidents from firefighter-staffed rescue ambulances in very high-incident-demand areas to non-firefighter-staffed, low-acuity units to include medical, mental health care, and homeless resources.” 

Further, the report recommended that “well over 100 new non-firefighter personnel must be hired” for homeless response measures. Two years later, data show that the LAFD continues to be more severely understaffed than almost any other major city, with only one firefighter for every 1,000 residents. By comparison, other major cities like Chicago, Dallas and Houston have closer to two firefighters per capita. 

“This is a woefully understaffed fire department,” Escobar said during a tearful interview with CNN last January. “We’re either going to have a fire department that’s going to reflect 2025, or we’re going to have a fire department that’s going to reflect the 1960s.” 

Ironically, data show that the LAFD was actually better-staffed back then. In a December 2024 memo that has since been deleted from the city’s website, former Fire Chief Kristin Crowley drew attention to the fact that the city has fewer fire stations today than it did in 1960 despite the population growing from 2.5 million to 4 million by 2020. 

Bass faced fierce backlash after having slashed more than $17.5 million from the Fire Department’s operational budget months before January’s devastating wildfires. But she still denies the cuts despite overwhelming evidence otherwise. 

In fact, the Mayor originally proposed trimming LAFD funding by $23 million for fiscal year 2024-2025. But that plan was never adopted. Later, a leaked memo City Hall sent to division fire chiefs and captains, following a tense meeting between Bass and Crowley one day before the fires, communicated that the Mayor was looking for an additional $49 million in cuts. The memo suggested that as many as 16 fire stations could shutter, but also clarified that “this is a worst-case scenario and is NOT happening yet.” 

Nevertheless, the eventual $17.5 million cut from the department’s operational budget did hamper the LAFD’s response to the fires. It resulted in firings of civilian workers, for example, including mechanics who repair fire trucks. In announcing Crowley’s demotion later, Mayor Bass claimed that “a thousand firefighters could have been on duty the morning the fires broke” but “were sent home.” Bass did not mention the department’s 75 fire trucks that were sitting idle because mechanics were not available to repair them. 

Burning Acreage, and Money for Homeless

The city has endured annual increases in both the number of fires and acres burned, but Bass has consistently dedicated more taxpayer resources to nonprofits serving the homeless than to the LAFD, which is tasked with protecting millions of people. While $837 million was budgeted for the fire department in fiscal year 2023-2024, $1.3 billion was allocated for the homeless. As with the fire budget, funding for homelessness was also reduced in the 2024-2025 budget, but its amount was still higher than that of the LAFD.

Also of concern is how the city’s homeless funding is being spent. A new audit commissioned by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter shows that the city has failed to track the performance of homeless programs that received a total of $2.4 billion in grants. Auditors argue that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which chooses grantees, lacked “uniform data standards and real-time oversight” and that “increased the risk of resource misallocation and limited the ability to assess the true impact of homelessness assistance services.”

The audit maintained that LAHSA’s missing data and lack of oversight “made it challenging” to determine how program funds were used and “whether they achieved the intended outcomes.”

One example highlighted in the audit was a nearly $2.1 million contract LAHSA head Va Lecia Adams Kellum approved for Upward Bound House’s housing assistance program. Adams Kellum breached ethics rules by approving the contract because her husband holds a senior position with the organization. But LAHSA made two amendments to the organization’s existing contracts to increase the grant amount to $2.4 million. The latest judge-mandated audit found that LAHSA had no performance reports for Upward Bound House.

Bass has little to show for the many billions she has poured into alleviating the homeless crisis. A federally mandated annual count found that 75,312 people were homeless on any given night across the county in January 2024. That represented a slight 0.3% improvement from the year before when the homeless tally totalled 75,518 people. And while the fire department was suffering from chronic underfunding, city comptroller Kenneth Mejia discovered that $513 million of the $1.3 billion in homeless funding was never spent. 

LAFD’s Honorary Fire Chief Paul Scrivano speculated that the city’s failed approach was not the bug but a feature of their leadership. “If the problem goes away, the money goes away,” Scrivano said on the Wisenuts Podcast. “So, the problem will never go away. This is an industry.”

A little over a year after the Venice fire took the dog Togo’s life, in October 2022, one hundred firefighters battled for more than 80 minutes to put out another fire in Venice that locals say was started by the homeless. A home that was under renovation was completely destroyed and five others sustained serious damage. Neighbor Glenn Searle says he personally witnessed several homeless individuals entering the property that was being renovated. “I can say that all day before there were homeless living in here and using the toilet all day,” he revealed to CBS. When asked if the Fire Department had any suspicion that the blaze was started by a homeless person, an LAFD spokesperson had “no comment.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.