Los Angeles has invested heavily in supportive and interim housing, rental assistance, and homelessness services, yet the supply still falls well short of demand. As the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games approach, officials face growing pressure to address unsheltered homelessness, particularly in highly visible areas. Los Angeles currently relies on two principal approaches to address encampments. Conventional encampment clearances, commonly called sweeps, direct people to move and may involve sanitation workers, law enforcement, citations, arrests, and the removal of personal belongings. Encampment Resolution Programs, or ERPs, are intended to offer a more service-oriented alternative. Programs such as the City of Los Angeles’s Inside Safe initiative and Los Angeles County’s Pathway Home use targeted outreach and offers of interim housing, typically in hotels or motels, with the stated goal of helping participants reach permanent housing.
This report examines how these approaches operate in practice, whom they reach, and what happens to the people affected by them. The quantitative analysis draws on ~17,000 monthly surveys completed by 1,600 participants in the Periodic Assessment of Trajectories of Housing, Health and Homelessness Study (PATHS) between April 2023 and July 2026. Because PATHS follows the same people over time, including after they enter shelter or housing, it allows us to examine not only whether someone experienced a sweep or was invited to participate in an ERP, but what happened afterward. Alongside these quantitative findings are first-person accounts developed through WeSearch, a poor people-led research practice grounded in the principle that people who have experienced homelessness possess expertise essential to understanding and addressing it. Through a Street-Writing Workshop and data walk convened by POOR Magazine and Aetna Street Solidarity, currently and formerly houseless poverty scholars documented their experiences of sweeps, policing, displacement, and interim housing, interpreted the PATHS findings, and identified consequences the survey data could not capture.