The 10 Freeway Fire in 2023.
Photo: YOUTUBE
If one was going to be on television, one might buy a new outfit or at least make sure the dress/suit one is going to wear is clean and pressed. One would probably make sure they had a haircut/or hair styled and perhaps even some makeup.
Not Los Angeles, which seems proud of its litter, graffiti and homeless gathered around freeway underpasses and in parks, and its illegal vendors.
The World Cup is coming in 2026, and SoFi Stadium will host five group-stage matches, two Round of 32 ties and a quarter-final. Games will be held June 12, 15, 18, 21, 25 and 28, July 2 and 10. Over the next two years, L.A. is slated to host the Super Bowl 61, the NBA All-Star Game, the Woman’s Open Golf Championship and in 2028, the Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games.
One would hope that the City of Los Angeles, would be tidy clean, a tinseltown, glamourous, impeccable, showing itself off to the world, with the hopes of increasing tourism, which is down. According to SF Gate (click here.) “Recent marketing has tried to overcome the perception that the city is unsafe or inaccessible after the fires.”
According to data from Los Angeles World Airports, or LAWA, international bookings in March 2025 were down 3.5% from last year. Data from Visit California supports the trend: A recent report states that in March 2025, California welcomed 494,952 nonresident international arrivals, a decline of 11% year over year.
A resident wrote CTN, “We drive into the Silverlake area as we rented there for a while and now, we go back as our new vet is there. On Silverlake Boulevard just south of the Kalaveras restaurant for several blocks under an underpass the homeless and trash situations are out of control.
“Hugo Soto Martinez is the city council rep for that area, and he DOES NOT clean up Silverlake. It is beyond appalling. Why do these people run for office if they aren’t going to help their constituents?”
So, just imagine if a homeless camp catches fire under a freeway, as people are attempting to get to a World Cup soccer match. “Never happen,” you say.
Think back to November 2023, when a fire started in a homeless encampment under the 10 Freeway downtown.
Governor Gavin Newsom said CalFire made a determination that there was malice intent. “That it was arson, and that it was done and set intentionally,” Newsom said. “That determination of who is responsible is an investigation that is ongoing.”
Then Mayor Karen Bass said, “There’s a lot of accusations against the homeless people that were in the area. There is no reason, at this point in time, to associate the encampment with the fire that took place there.”
No one has ever been charged.
This fire in the Via de las Olas bluffs was started by a homeless individual.
A brush fire, started by a homeless individual raced up the hillside below the Huntington Palisades.
Hmm, ask Palisades residents who luckily escaped prior homeless fires on the Palisades Bluffs. Many may remember when a couple were living in the brush, she got upset with him and threw a hot cooking pan at him, setting the brush on fire. Another time, a homeless man was cooking, just above PCH at Temescal and set the bluffs on fire. Yet, most remember an earlier Highlands Fire, where a homeless man purposely set the brush on fire.
Highlands resident Peter Culhane took this photo from the second floor of his home on May 15, 2021.
Ask any firefighter. They are told they cannot say the homeless start fires, because they have been told that they are not there to witness when the person starts the fire. Instead, the homeless fires are listed as “under investigation.”
Time for prevention, but that includes honesty about who is starting the fires.
(Editor’s note: Even though the Palisades escaped earlier homeless fires, they did not escape the January 7 Fire started by fireworks. People had warned police and firefighters for years about the fireworks that were being set off in and around the town. People always received the same answer from officials, “unless we can see someone set them, there’s nothing we can do,” and even after they had been shown video—police said there was nothing they could do.)
Palisades was lucky that the Santa Ana winds were not blowing and LAFD responded so rapidly or the Highlands and portions of Marquez would have been threatened with the January 1, 2025 Lachman Fire.