Now, a City Council candidate is vowing to live in a trailer at the park if he is elected. <\/p>\n
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 \u201ccleared out and cleaned up.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to do something out of the box,\u201d Claros said. \u201cMacArthur Park itself and the immediate area has now become a disaster zone, a multilayered crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Claros, who lives in Chinatown, acknowledged his plan is a publicity stunt but hopes the publicity will get results. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe definitely do want the attention,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want the attention of every department and resource.\u201d <\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Hernandez, whose district includes the park, shot down Claros\u2019 plan. <\/p>\n
\u201cOur office remains focused on delivering results, not exploiting low-income neighborhoods for publicity stunts or misleading residents about how the city works,\u201d spokesperson Naomi Villagomez Roochnik said.<\/p>\n
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,<\/a> asserting that crime and homelessness are keeping customers away.<\/p>\n On Labor Day a dead man was pulled out of the park\u2019s lake<\/a>, and last year a man was stabbed to death nearby.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. Mayor Karen Bass said in March that conditions have improved,<\/a> crediting the patrols and mental health outreach workers who help people experiencing drug overdoses.<\/p>\n \u201cThe results are beginning to show,\u201d she said at the time.<\/p>\n Community organizer Raul Claros hopes to be elected to the City Council and promises change.<\/p>\n (Brian van der Brug\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n 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 \u201cquestioning DSA policies\u201d \u2014 a reference to the Democratic Socialists of America. <\/p>\n Claros said the city\u2019s actions in MacArthur Park haven\u2019t been enough, noting that the area has been dubbed \u201cSkid Row West\u201d by some. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s drug addicts living in and around the park,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a free-for-all for organized crime. There\u2019s human trafficking and sex trafficking.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n \u201cIf 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,\u201d Claros wrote in an Instagram post. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cCouncilmembers can\u2019t hold the entire city\u2019s budget hostage over personal demands \u2014 the Charter doesn\u2019t allow it, and ethically it would be unacceptable,\u201d Villagomez Roochnik said.<\/p>\n Claros is one of eight candidates vying to unseat Hernandez<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s budget.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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<\/a> that authorized greater consequences for drug dealers whose sales of fentanyl result in a death. <\/p>\n Andrew Wolff, corresponding secretary of the MacArthur Park Neighborhood Council, said he supports Claros\u2019 pledge to live at the park.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need as much attention as we can get,\u201d Wolff said. \u201cRight now, the park is X-rated, and we want the park to be G-rated.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MacArthur Park has come to symbolize some of Los Angeles\u2019 most intractable issues. Homeless people crowd the park…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[2076,1409,4579,13260,2321,4422,44948,48,52,51,47,50,49,20459,346,1833,3230,44950,44947,44949,3728],"class_list":["post-78064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-budget","tag-city","tag-district","tag-fentanyl","tag-hernandez","tag-homeless-people","tag-immediate-area","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-macarthur-park","tag-office","tag-park","tag-plan","tag-publicity-stunt","tag-raul-claros","tag-spokesperson-naomi-villagomez-roochnik","tag-trailer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n