A Los Angeles city councilman just coined a new appellation for the drug-addicted vagrants who colonize city streets. They are “our neighbors,” says Hugo Soto-Martínez, a member of the L.A. Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. Who knew?
This new identity is even more cheeky than the original rebranding of such vagrants as “the homeless.” Soto-Martinez used the “neighbors” designation to persuade his fellow council members to allow homeless encampments near senior centers and libraries and around freeway overpasses. The previous occupant of Soto-Martinez’s seat had banned such encampments in his and, eventually, Soto-Martinez’s district, which includes Hollywood and Echo Park. Last Tuesday’s 10–3 vote repealed that ban. At present, the repeal applies only to what is now Soto-Martinez’s jurisdiction. But expect this green light for street squalor to extend more widely, as the Left pushes Los Angeles further toward uncontrolled anarchy.
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“Neighbor” traditionally conjures the image of someone with an equal stake in one’s community as oneself, who shares one’s interest in stability, and who can be counted on, in times of need, for help. The occupants of the feces- and drug-strewn trash sites euphemistically referred to as “encampments,” as if they were part of a Boy Scout Jamboree, don’t fit the bill. Those transients are parasites on other people’s efforts to create a community. They contribute nothing, pay no rent or taxes, and inevitably bring lawlessness and predation. They almost invariably turn down the shelter and services offered by feckless outreach workers, since they want no interference with their unrestricted drug use.
Would Soto-Martinez and his fellow DSA members ask an encampment occupant to watch their children while they run an errand, or to keep an eye on their homes while they go on vacation, as one might with an actual neighbor? The instinctive answer is: Of course not! But such instincts are being rapidly overturned. Perhaps one day there will be a leftie so delusional as actually to live by the principles he inflicts on others and who does deliver his child to the tender ministrations of encampment dwellers. We can only hope for such an experiment in the practicability of progressive ideology.
Meantime, a member of the vast nonprofit industry dedicated to keeping vagrants on the streets demonstrated the brilliance of the original “homeless” moniker. Kris Rehl is an organizer with LA Street Care and the Abolish 41.18 Campaign, the latter of which seeks to abolish all remaining encampment bans in Los Angeles. “The only way to change the housing status of an unhoused person is to house them,” he told the Los Angeles Times in reference to the Soto-Martinez repeal bill.
The Aristotelian logic of this claim is unimpeachable. If someone is “unhoused,” you make him housed by housing him. Simple! On such logic billions of taxpayer dollars have been poured down the drain or pumped into the veins of drug addicts. It is the basis for the profoundly misguided “Housing First” strategy, which Donald Trump is trying to decouple from the spigot of federal homeless grants. Whenever the Democrats retake the White House, Housing First will again reign supreme across the United States.
All this while California’s Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has just required homeowners in particularly high-risk fire zones to pare back the vegetation around their homes, notwithstanding the power of greenery to combat rising temperatures without the use of air conditioning. The board could have accomplished far more by insisting that cities across California ban homeless encampments everywhere, not just in a few specialized zones. From January through mid-December 2025, the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to 16,982 “Homeless or Encampment Related” fires, an average of 46 fires a day, according to KABC Eyewitness News. Those fires are worsened by the combustible metals, flammable liquids, and lithium-ion batteries routinely included in the filthy detritus stored under vagrant tarps and tents and that make fighting those fires so dangerous for first responders. This double standard—strict rules for taxpaying homeowners, anything goes for the dysfunctional exploiters of ever-diminishing bourgeois order—is emblematic of the anarcho-tyranny that the Los Angeles City Council and its counterparts elsewhere are inflicting around the country.