by Cathleen Williams with Peggy Kennedy
Venice, Los Angeles: A neighborhood for poor people, for renters who used to thrive in cheap apartments on the rundown back streets, a neighborhood famous for its countercultural vibe and freedom, where the wide beach and boardwalk teemed with performers, drag queens, artists, and outcasts. In the 1950s, Venice was a center of the Beat Generation in southern California—a local counterpart to San Francisco’s North Beach. By the ‘80s, it became a home to a growing population of unhoused people, spending their nights on the ground and in vehicles.
Peggy Lee Kennedy grew up in Venice in the ‘60s and ‘70s and emerged as a leading fighter for her neighborhood. Big real estate money—and the politicians who serve it—colluded to take over Venice and make it what it is today: a neighborhood for the white and the wealthy, mobilizing the police to get rid of the “undesirable” unhoused residents who had the tenacity to refuse, resist and stay.
It’s a similar scene in other California cities—including San Francisco—that are now moving to disperse streetside and vehicle-dwelling communities from public view.
Kennedy describes this lost paradise of her teenage years: “When the circus came to town and those nomads needed a place to stay, they stopped in Venice. The Deadheads, following the [The Grateful Dead], migrated through Venice. The big nude beach thing … the next thing we knew people were walking through town, totally naked!”
She describes how residents fostered their culture and strong sense of community. “It was mixed. My high school had every ethnicity imaginable— one-third white, one-third Black, one-third Latino.” She reflects, “We were working class, though of course we didn’t know that then, and we also didn’t know we were targeted for elimination.”
According to recent data, the neighborhood is now predominantly white, and earns more than $200,000 in yearly median income.
The process of displacement of the people who used to live in Venice began with development of the neighborhood next door, Marina Del Rey— wetlands that were once the home of the Tongva and Shoshone people. Despite its ecological significance, developers considered it useless and dug out the area in the ‘60s, replacing it with a yacht harbor.
“That was the beginning of the end,” Kennedy says. Then came the demolitions, the prosecution of code violations, the exceptions to rent stabilization, conversion of housing to short term rentals, the construction of luxury housing, the “market rate” rentals that locals couldn’t afford.
Political disempowerment followed dispossession. City Hall used every strategy: discrediting and breaking down local structures and leaders, redistricting city council representation, promoting and electing fake “progressive” politicians by activating the new affluent residents, popularizing their narrative of hatred for homeless people.
“We fought and we fought and we fought,” Kennedy says. “The fighters and advocates—we are all ‘socialists,’ or ‘Peace and Freedom,’ or whatever.” There were many blows. One time, the Sheriff refused to investigate the theft of their Food Not Bombs van. Another time, the Police Department shined lights through her windows at night to scare her off.
In 2001, Kennedy and her allies founded the Venice Justice Committee., now called the Venice Justice Committee and Media Group. The committee filed lawsuits and won many of them—including an historic decision in 2018 striking down the city’s attempt to block them from gathering signatures and donations, or even passing out leaflets, on the boardwalk.
“Meanwhile, they were demolishing Venice and putting up giant buildings, hounding people, pounding on their doors, pressuring them to ‘cash out,’” Kennedy says, pointing out that the number of Black people in Venice started to drop, “their little craftsman homes demolished for luxury mansions.” The city conducted huge operations to get rid of Black people—in 2006, a multi-agency warrant campaign that included the Sheriff and LAPD.
“Kids driven out, grandmas forced out, people who had survived code enforcement, the crack epidemic,” Kennedy says, recalling the uprooting of Oakwood, Venice’s historic Black area and multi-generational community.
Deliberately, in the open and in secret, the political attack focused on vehicle-dwelling residents, even as their population exploded. Of course, this goes far beyond one politician, city planner, or billionaire/multimillionaire developer—and includes the current city council representative, Traci Park—but former city councilmember Bill Rosendahl also served as a prominent example.
In 2010, Rosendahl delivered the following message for vehicular residents and advocates like Kennedy in a town hall: “If you are defined as a homeless person, you are not welcome in Venice. If you operate an RV, you are being targeted, and just so you understand we’re going to threaten you, intimidate you, without offering any reasonable solutions based on respect and dignity.”
In her 2016 obituary of Rosendahl for The Venice Beachhead, Kennedy described the tools that were used to outlaw vehicular residents. “Bill Rosendahl brought in two new anti-homeless L.A. City laws (OPD [Overnight Parking Districts requiring permits only available to housed residents] OVO [Oversized Vehicle Ordinance outlawing parking between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.]) and used the Living in Vehicle law (LAMC 85.02),” she wrote.
Kennedy continued to describe how “Rosendahl appropriated funds to study a never-created safe parking program, which was an imaginary carrot—illusional compensation for the harsh, inhumane, unconstitutional treatment of vehicle-housed people in Venice.”
Kennedy notes that the use of 85.02 in 2010 led to a strong rebuke of the city in 2014, when the Venice Justice Committee and allies brought a federal civil rights lawsuit, Desertrain v. LA, against its enforcement. In 2014, the court found the ordinance, which outlawed “living” in a vehicle, to be unconstitutionally vague, leading to selective and discriminatory enforcement against the unhoused for even “staying in a car to get out of the rain.”
During this period, Kennedy lost friends and allies from the attack on vehicularly housed residents, especially those whom she befriended. “Some got sick,” she wrote in The Beachhead. “Some died. Others were permanently driven from their home. Later, after the harm had been done, some were housed and used as [Rosendahl’s] success story.”
Kennedy concluded her piece, pointing out a stark reality: “NOT ONE PARKING SPACE WAS EVER CREATED IN VENICE via this safe parking program pipe dream.”
But the win in the Desertrain case was short-lived. The ordinance was amended and enforced with new language. Today, Kennedy says, “ It’s sweeps, and towing, towing, towing.”
But this is not the end of the story. Affordable housing advocates continue to fight, after ten years, for Venice Dell, a project which would house over 100 low income and unhoused residents.
And the beat goes on. “We had to do something,” Kennedy says. Last week, with the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the Venice Justice Committee released a report that included findings from an in-person survey of 99 vehicle residents residing in West Los Angeles over a year’s time.
“Los Angeles is a starkly unequal city,” the report opens. “One in which the accumulation of wealth in gated and guarded estates rests upon the impoverishment of workers and tenants.”
The analysis is stark and unflinching: in a city where there are 13,549 vehicle dwellings used as “a personal safety net,” the main strategy of managing mass homelessness is “banishment,” or forced mobility through criminalization, described as a coalescing strategy across municipalities that displaces and dispossesses vehicle residents “in an effort to discipline and push them into whatever program government officials are pushing at the time.”
The city of Los Angeles imposes parking restrictions as its main weapon—there are 1,367 restricted parking zones across the city, according to LA’s progressive Controller Kenneth Mejia—and then uses tickets, towing and impoundment to make it virtually impossible for owners to retrieve their vehicles.
As the report points out, this “vicious cycle of debt and dispossession for minor reasons” isn’t unique to vehicle residents, as it disproportionately impacts poor and working-class people generally and makes up a substantial portion of impounded vehicles, earning these seizures the moniker “poverty tows.”
The controller’s report is more than practical and factual: It’s also visionary. It makes clear recommendations that would solve the crisis of unhousing the people:
“While governments across California and beyond expand policies of displacement and dispossession of vehicle residents, parking stability paired with supportive services that enable access to affordable housing offers an alternative vision.”
The report testifies to the power of engagement, tenacity and unity of a dispossessed and impoverished class that is under fire, and leaders, like Peggy Lee Kennedy, who carry the fight forward.
“We have to change the narrative,” she says. “That means listening to lived experience.”
photos courtesy of Peggy Lee Kennedy
