Only Los Angeles could spend billions fighting homelessness, watch tents swallow sidewalks and parks, and then decide the city has been too aggressive keeping people from camping.

That is what the Los Angeles City Council did this week.

By a 10-3 vote, council members stripped anti-camping protections from a dozen locations. Parks. A senior center. Gone.

This is not compassion.

Barnsdale Art Park is pictured on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. The city council voted 10-3 to eliminate 12 designated anti-camping zones in Council District 13. Jonathan Alcorn for CA Post

It is surrender.

Councilman Hugo Soto-Martínez, the socialist who pushed the rollback, says enforcing the anti-camping law just moves homeless people from block to block instead of housing them.

Fine. Then where do they go?

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Not wherever they want.

Public parks belong to the public. Sidewalks belong to pedestrians. Senior centers belong to seniors. Being homeless doesn’t grant a permanent claim on public property.

Take Barnsdall Art Park, home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House — Los Angeles’ only UNESCO World Heritage site. 

A homeless man is seen in the Madison West Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, on Wednesday, August 19, 2026. The Los Angeles City Council voted 10-3 to eliminate 12 designated anti-camping zones in Council District 13. Jonathan Alcorn for CA Post

Before anti-camping restrictions went into effect there, the park battled fires, vandalism and blocked pedestrian access, according to the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation, which pushed for a carve-out from Tuesday’s vote. 

“This park needs to be treated differently than other public spaces in Los Angeles,” foundation president Daniel Gerwin told The Post. One neighbor described years spent dousing fires, scrubbing waste and patching graffiti on Wright’s buildings.

Ten council members voted to remove the protection. Residents near the Las Palmas Senior Citizen Center remember the pandemic-era encampments. They don’t want a rerun.

Councilwoman Traci Park objected loudly, and it’s easy to see why. She’s the closest thing Los Angeles has to an adult on the City Council.

“These protections need to be expanded citywide,” Park told The Post.

Four months earlier, the council voted 11-4 to designate a no-camping zone in Park’s district. Councilwoman Nithya Raman was one of the four no votes. Now a 10-member majority has voted to erase the protections entirely in Soto-Martínez’s district.

Four months earlier, the council voted 11-4 to designate a no-camping zone in Park’s district. Councilwoman Nithya Raman was one of the four no votes. for CA Post

So whether a neighborhood gets to keep encampments out of its parks depends on whether its council member, like Soto-Martínez, decides enforcing public order is politically inconvenient.

That’s not a homelessness policy. That’s one council member getting his way.

Then there’s Nithya Raman.

Raman, running to replace Karen Bass as mayor, voted for the rollback. She’s opposed expanding the anti-camping law for years, insisting it pushes people somewhere else.

Voters should pay attention. Tuesday wasn’t a stray council vote. It was a preview.

Bass officially backs the anti-camping law as an enforcement tool.

Bass is the mayor of all of Los Angeles — every council district included. Her own City Council gutted the law in one of them. She said nothing.

Raman, running to replace Karen Bass as mayor, voted for the rollback. She’s opposed expanding the anti-camping law for years, insisting it pushes people somewhere else. Jonathan Alcorn for CA Post

No mayor wins every council vote. But a serious one says something when her own signature issue collapses.

Bass has been mayor for nearly four years — long enough to build the gravitas and leadership to drive an agenda through her own City Council. She hasn’t.

Los Angeles has a City Council pushing an activist-left agenda and a mayor too weak to steer them.

Taxpayers have poured billions into this.

A court-ordered audit of roughly $2.3 billion in homelessness spending found serious weaknesses in oversight, record-keeping and the city’s ability to tell whether any of it worked.

Call it the homeless industrial complex.

A court-ordered audit of roughly $2.3 billion in homelessness spending found serious weaknesses in oversight, record-keeping and the city’s ability to tell whether any of it worked.

Agencies. Nonprofits. Contractors. Consultants. An ecosystem gets paid to manage the problem. Nobody pays a price when it stays the same.

For a comparison, drive 30 miles south.

Santa Ana has a Democratic mayor and an all-Democratic City Council. Mayor Valerie Amezcua reached a different conclusion.

Santa Ana offers shelter, detox, services. But refuse help and keep breaking the law, and you can be arrested.

“It’s inhumane” to leave people unsheltered, Amezcua says.

Imagine that. A Democrat who thinks leaving people to rot on the sidewalk is the cruel option.

Santa Ana’s unsheltered homeless count dropped from 871 in 2024 to 714 this year. In one enforcement operation, 11 people accepted shelter, one reunited with family, and 69 went to jail for refusing services and continuing to break the law.

Imagine that. A Democrat who thinks leaving people to rot on the sidewalk is the cruel option. Jonathan Alcorn for CA Post

That’s not cruelty.

That’s a city saying two things can be true at once: We’ll help you, and you don’t get to live on the sidewalk forever.

There’s nothing compassionate about watching someone in the grip of severe mental illness deteriorate in a tent.

There’s nothing compassionate about telling families and seniors that giving up their parks is the price of enlightened government.

The most disturbing part of this vote isn’t that Los Angeles has failed to solve homelessness. We knew that.

It’s that 10 council members voted to make peace with the failure.

Raman and Soto-Martínez supply the ideology. Bass supplies the silence that lets it win.

Los Angeles City Hall has confused tolerance with mercy, disorder with compassion, surrender with policy.

The homeless deserve better.

So does everyone else who lives there.

Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com