Permits in progress to keep planters from encamping on Hollywood sidewalks – NBC Los Angeles

If you want to install planters to prevent homeless encampments on Los Angeles sidewalks, you will need a permit.

That’s what the city said after removing planters Monday that neighbors had placed along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

The planters that the city of Los Angeles removed Monday from Sunset near Highland for lack of permits weren’t the first time someone in that part of Hollywood used planters to prevent homeless encampments to enter.

Two blocks from the Sunset Sound recording studio, Paul Camarata took advantage of a moment when the city of Los Angeles was conducting a deep cleanup of Sunset and Cherokee Avenue.

“At that point we thought we should try to take some of it back and put in some planters, we had no other alternative,” Camarata said. “All the news outlets picked it up and that’s when it caught the attention of the mayor’s office. She called me and said ‘we’re going to do an Inside Safe cleanup for YOU.'”

Camarata said the planters helped to some extent, but wherever there were no planters, encampments sprung up. Sunset Sound struggles with encampments that, in some places, stretch a block in each direction.

In May, Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program cleaned up the encampment and has kept it clean ever since. Camarata said that as soon as someone tried to camp there, a Los Angeles city worker would evict them.

Camarata is pleased with the results of Inside Safe and Mayor Bass’s responsiveness to his situation. He added that the mayor had informed him that his planters needed to be licensed.

Councilman Hugo Soto Martinez’s office said community members need an “R” permit to install sidewalk planters.

Camarata said he was studying the issue but there were “a lot of requirements.”

Next door, his neighbors in the Assistance League of Los Angeles hope he succeeds.

“They’re like a layer of protection for our building,” says Melanie Merians, CEO of the Assistance League of Los Angeles. “There were fires, there were drugs, there were a lot of mental health issues,” Merians told NBC4.

The Assistance League of Los Angeles provides services to children, including those who are homeless, but those same children had to navigate encampments.

Merians said she hopes city permits will allow planters to be placed in a way that deters encampments. Even more, the two business leaders hope the city can keep the area clean.

“If it remains clear where people can safely walk on the street and where people with disabilities can access, we don’t need planters,” Camarata says.