Venice Beach: the Purgatory Progressives Built

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. In iconic Venice Beach, California, it is also paved with feces, structure fires, knives, needles, tarps, and tents. My guide through this dystopian underworld, my Virgil, is named Soledad Ursua. Ursua is a native Angeleno who spent much of her professional life in New York. When she returned five years ago, she wanted to live in a walkable neighborhood similar to her adopted home of New York. Venice, with its mixture of historic bungalows, pedestrian-friendly walkways between them, and its proximity to the beach and restaurants, seemed like a perfect fit. It wasn’t.

[...]

On the boardwalk I see a man sitting on a bench spreading canned tuna across bread with a hunting knife. “I’m glad you saw that,” Ursua tells me. “Would you take your kids here?” This is such a common refrain that I almost think it should be on a bumper sticker. We walk to where the boardwalk meets the boundary between Santa Monica and Venice, which is part of the City of Los Angeles. “It’s like a Tale of Two Cities,” Soledad explains. In neighboring Santa Monica there are no tents on the beach and the boardwalk comes back to life with people. Liberal Santa Monica, not exactly a bastion of rightwing law and order, is where the No Man’s Land ends. Unlike Los Angeles, Santa Monica enforces the laws requiring overnight encampments to be disassembled during the day.

Ursua walks me back down the boardwalk while a woman inside a tent shouts expletives to herself. Along the way she points out a senior center. In the good old days, five years ago, you would see seniors outside the building enjoying the weather. No more. We end up in front of a L.A. County Sheriff’s “outreach” tent where food and drink are being distributed with the hopes of assessing people’s needs and getting them off the streets.

“This is the battleground between capitalism and socialism,” Ursua explains to me. “The Marxists,” by which she means far left activist groups like Street Watch L.A., which is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, “don’t want these people to get off the streets. They want to keep them here so they can keep saying how evil capitalism is.”

Ursua, and other frustrated and beleaguered residents I meet—again, many of them Democrats who likewise denounce the “far left” in their midst—make clear distinctions between the “activists” and the “residents.” The activists show up to shout at law enforcement and hand out food. But then they go home. The residents of Venice can’t go home—this is it.