MacArthur Park has come to symbolize some of Los Angeles’ most intractable issues.
Homeless people crowd the park and streets nearby. Drug dealers peddle fentanyl in public. Businesses struggle to stay afloat. The mayor and other city leaders have searched for answers.
Now, a City Council candidate is vowing to live in a trailer at the park if he is elected.
Raul Claros, a 45-year-old community organizer hoping to unseat Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, said he will use the trailer as his home and office, taking meetings there, until the park is “cleared out and cleaned up.”
“We need to do something out of the box,” Claros said. “MacArthur Park itself and the immediate area has now become a disaster zone, a multilayered crisis.”
Claros, who lives in Chinatown, acknowledged his plan is a publicity stunt but hopes the publicity will get results.
“We definitely do want the attention,” he said. “We want the attention of every department and resource.”
A spokesperson for Hernandez, whose district includes the park, shot down Claros’ plan.
“Our office remains focused on delivering results, not exploiting low-income neighborhoods for publicity stunts or misleading residents about how the city works,” spokesperson Naomi Villagomez Roochnik said.
Problems with drug dealing and drug use in and around the park worsened in recent years. Norm Langer, who owns the iconic Langers Delicatessen on the southeast end of the park, has said he might have to close, asserting that crime and homelessness are keeping customers away.
On Labor Day a dead man was pulled out of the park’s lake, and last year a man was stabbed to death nearby.
The city committed significant resources to the park, from increased foot patrols and street medicine teams to a plan to build a $2.3-million fence. Mayor Karen Bass said in March that conditions have improved, crediting the patrols and mental health outreach workers who help people experiencing drug overdoses.
“The results are beginning to show,” she said at the time.
Community organizer Raul Claros hopes to be elected to the City Council and promises change.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
Claros, who was executive director of the American Red Cross Los Angeles Region, most recently founded a nonprofit called California Rising, which advocates for safer, cleaner neighborhoods and describes itself on Instagram as “questioning DSA policies” — a reference to the Democratic Socialists of America.
Claros said the city’s actions in MacArthur Park haven’t been enough, noting that the area has been dubbed “Skid Row West” by some.
“There’s drug addicts living in and around the park,” he said. “It’s a free-for-all for organized crime. There’s human trafficking and sex trafficking.”
He hopes that by living there, he would bring increased scrutiny and investment to the park. If he holds meetings there as a council member, he said, every city department head will have to come to the park to speak with him.
“If any department wants my vote for their budget, they will have a list of items that need to be fixed before they get any vote,” Claros wrote in an Instagram post.
Villagomez Roochnik said Hernandez brought cleaning teams, violence prevention workers and street medicine teams to the park. Overall, the council office has invested $27 million in the park and surrounding areas.
“Councilmembers can’t hold the entire city’s budget hostage over personal demands — the Charter doesn’t allow it, and ethically it would be unacceptable,” Villagomez Roochnik said.
Claros is one of eight candidates vying to unseat Hernandez to represent Council District 1, which includes Westlake, Koreatown, Lincoln Heights and more. Claros has raised the third-most money in the race, after Hernandez and Sylvia Robledo, who once served as a council aide in the district.
Claros is running on a public safety agenda. He wants to bring the Los Angeles Police Department up to 10,000 officers and supports an increase to the L.A. Fire Department’s budget.
He called for the LAPD to protect him while he lives at the park, which he said would bring additional officers to the area and make the park safer. He said he would use the city’s anti-camping laws to drive homeless people from the park and hopes to work with the district attorney to enforce a proposition passed in 2024 that authorized greater consequences for drug dealers whose sales of fentanyl result in a death.
Andrew Wolff, corresponding secretary of the MacArthur Park Neighborhood Council, said he supports Claros’ pledge to live at the park.
“We need as much attention as we can get,” Wolff said. “Right now, the park is X-rated, and we want the park to be G-rated.”