By Caroline Tracey for High Country News.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

On a late August morning, the Echo Park Trash Club approached an underpass below Los Angeles' 101 Freeway. Months earlier, the city had dismantled a homeless encampment located there during one of its routine sweeps. It was the Trash Club's first return to the site since its residents had come back to and set up tents on the median between opposing lanes of traffic on Silver Lake Boulevard and in the alcoves where the bridge above intersected with the sloping hillside. Erin Fein, the club's founder, and the 20-some volunteers came to help clear the encampment of trash - a necessary hygiene service that also helps the community avoid another sweep. They approached the residents, introducing themselves and offering to take any trash they wanted to get rid of. One resident joined the cleanup, sweeping disintegrated pieces of Styrofoam and broken CDs into a dustpan. Two others joined the group photo at the end of the morning.

The environmental movement started with picking up trash. On April 22, 1970, schools and community groups held trash cleanups all across the U.S. Fifty years later, during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order, the Echo Park Trash Club began bringing together neighbors for the very same activity - but with new significance in the midst of worsening housing and climate crises. The group uses cleanups not only to beautify their neighborhood but also to support its unhoused community, whose trash buildup can result in encampments being dispersed, or "swept."

Trash buildup is a key factor in the city's decision to sweep encampments, according to club volunteers, sanitation department workers and housing activists. While the city justifies sweeps on hygiene grounds, they also displace residents, pushing them out of the shelters they rely on to mitigate the effects of extreme heat and weather. The sudden dispersal leaves housing-insecure communities even more exposed to the effects of Southern California's increasingly hot, and increasingly unpredictable, climate.

Isolated in her studio apartment in spring 2020, Fein thought of the idea of a trash pick-up group to simultaneously address increasing trash in her neighborhood and build community in a socially-distant way. When she put an initial post on the social media network NextDoor, "it exploded with comments." Others in her community were also worried about the aesthetic aspect of trash-filled streets and its broader environmental impacts, such as the possibility of toxic trash like cigarette butts ending up in the ocean.

During the club's first pickups, Fein used her own car to bring the filled trash bags back to her apartment dumpster. Others started to help her ferry and unload the trash, but what Trash Club members really wanted was the city's support. They started, in Fein's words, "a heavy-duty campaign" of emailing the city to request a sanitation department truck at their cleanups. They went weeks without a response, but one day, a truck showed up. "We were like, huh, that garbage truck is just sitting there," said Fein. They approached the driver. "Is there any chance you're here for Echo Park Trash Club?" they asked. The driver said he was.

Once they had a truck regularly coming to the Sunday morning pickups, Fein expanded the club's efforts to collect trash at the neighborhood's homeless encampments.

Between 2018 and 2020, homelessness in Los Angeles climbed 32%. Other cities in the West saw similar increases, a symptom of rapidly increasing housing costs and the defunding of social services. Currently, there are an estimated 41,980 unhoused people in LA.

In Echo Park - as in many other neighborhoods - gentrification is part of the reason that many have ended up without housing. At the end of the 1990s, housing prices in the once working-class, majority-Latino neighborhood increased by 50% in three years Today, the neighborhood's median home value is $1.5 million.

"It's getting gentrified, so it's pushing people into corners - there are sometimes 50 or 100 people living in one place. That creates a massive amount of trash," said Joe Rodríguez, one of the garbage truck drivers who often takes a Trash Club shift. Rodríguez started his career in Los Angeles Sanitation and Environment's homeless cleanup branch, working as a maintenance laborer for five years before becoming a driver. He said that trash often built up so much at encampments that they had to use an excavator to remove it.

Tensions around Echo Park's unhoused community came to a head in March 2021, when the city of LA shut down a large encampment at Echo Park Lake, the neighborhood's central green space. The encampment had formed during the pandemic, when the city was not enforcing its anti-camping laws. As word of an impending sweep spread, protesters came to the community's defense. But on March 24, 400 police officers entered the park to evict the encampment's remaining residents, whose numbers had dwindled from around 200 to fewer than 20 as warnings circulated. In the process, they arrested 182 protesters - including some Echo Park Trash Club members - and detained at least 20 journalists.

Though it was uniquely high-profile, the Echo Park Lake sweep wasn't a singular event: The city of LA undertakes multiple sweeps daily throughout the city. These involve multiple city agencies, including the departments of sanitation, homeless services and police, and are hectic. The Los Angeles police department and the department of sanitation close the area with barrier tape, and "once they do that, you can't go back in, so people will be rushing to get their things," said UCLA sociology graduate student Sam Lutzker. "It's a big issue in terms of losing documents and medicines."

Just two weeks after the August pickup, Los Angeles experienced a record-breaking heat wave. Unhoused people were some of those most acutely affected by the extreme weather. Addressing housing and environmental crises most meaningfully requires addressing them in tandem. Reducing the urban heat island effect and providing cooling centers, for instance, helps all city residents mitigate and adapt to climate change - but especially those who are directly exposed to the ambient weather. And to keep encampment trash from building up, some cities have created initiatives to pay unhoused residents for trash collection, simultaneously employing those in need of work and keeping the city clean.

Now studying for a master's degree in psychology, Fein hopes that Echo Park Trash Club can be part of restructuring sweeps to center encampment residents' health, hygiene and sanitation needs, including trash pickup and mobile showers. "If they were led by gentle people with mental health-realm experience, they could do it in a helpful way: provide lunch, put belongings into tubs, clean the area and then set it back up together," she said.

Rodríguez said Fein has already made a difference. "Trash Club is a big accomplishment for the city," he said. "It's hard to do as much as Erin has done. I hope people piggyback on her work."

Caroline Tracey wrote this article for High Country News.


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Rural New York organizations are working to tackle issues with rural housing. Rural counties throughout the state are suffering from aging housing stock and an ever dwindling supply.

In 2021, the New York State Comptroller found 10 rural counties had 5,500 fewer housing units than in 2016.

Megan Murphy, executive director of the rural housing organization Adirondack Roots, said places like Essex County are seeing the ripple effects of rural New York's housing problems.

"The county itself has dozens of jobs that are going unfilled because one of the hardest parts of this is that hiring in people from outside, they're not able to find housing," Murphy observed. "We're hearing this from health care institutions, we're hearing this from nonprofits, and from others."

She argued solutions require new rental units and affordable housing projects in rural areas. Murphy added while most rural counties are facing a housing shortage, the problems look different in each place. Essex County, for example, needs increased funding for Adirondack Roots' existing home rehabilitation, and New York State's mobile home replacement program.

New York State is investing in rural areas. Several new rental developments have been built across the state in 2023. But Murphy pointed out new projects are expensive and potential renters are already struggling to make ends meet with low wages.

"When you're talking about new builds, it's 'how do we figure out how to create a situation where we can either reduce the cost of building, or create a situation where there is a subsidy for folks so that they can get into new homes?'" Murphy explained.

She emphasized it also applies to maintaining existing homes. Murphy acknowledged there is no silver bullet to the issues surrounding rural housing, but contended it will take an interconnected, holistic approach to solve them.


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Advocates for the homeless in Ohio say effective and well-funded federal programs have helped cut the number of homeless veterans nearly in half over the past decade.

Federal agencies with a "housing first approach" have prioritized getting veterans into stable housing quickly without preconditions and provided greater assistance to landlords willing to help.

Marcus Roth, communications/development director for the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, said the same approach should apply to all homeless people.

"It's been really refreshing to see that we can make progress for homeless veterans," he said. "If we apply the same approach to other populations, we can help other folks, too."

There are still more than 600 homeless veterans in Ohio, according to federal data.

Advocates for these veterans have said high rental prices and increasing eviction rates statewide could add to that number. Rent prices skyrocketed a year into the pandemic, increasing nearly 25% in Ohio from 2021 to 2022 with Cleveland and Cincinnati alone showing some of the highest rent increases in the country.

Roth said the state's continued lack of affordable housing is driving people into homelessness.

"We hear about tenants that are getting bills with a rent increase of 40% to 50%," Roth said, "and a lot of people can't afford that, and then they look around to find another place to live and they can't find anywhere else that's affordable either."

Roth said the General Assembly's creation of a new affordable-housing tax credit could offer some relief. The Senate Select Committee on Housing has been holding a series of hearings to address the affordable-housing crisis.

This story was produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.


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A Connecticut group is holding several roundtable discussions about ways to end homelessness.

The Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness is speaking with elected officials to bridge the gap between understanding what it will take to reduce homelessness in the state and actually ending it. Between 2021 and 2022, a point-in-time report tracked a 13% increase in homelessness on a single January night. This year's report saw an almost 3% increase.

Sarah Fox, CEO of the Connecticut Coalition for Ending Homelessness, said the numbers are trending up for several reasons.

"They're becoming homeless due to poverty from returning back to the community after incarceration, from just generally not being able to thrive in the current environment," Fox observed. "We also know that you cannot uncouple homelessness from the affordable housing crisis."

Other reasons people are becoming homeless include the economic impacts of the pandemic, and rising rents. While Fox is eager to see progress, she is aware of the challenges ahead. In addition to competing fiscal priorities in the General Assembly, there is also the need to raise funds for homeless service systems. She said helping legislators understand the pressure the system is under to serve a growing population is a step in the right direction.

During the past session, the group brought legislation to the General Assembly to allocate funds to begin work necessary to end homelessness. The bill called for $50 million in funding to improve Connecticut's Homeless Response System.

Fox noted lawmakers approved far less.

"We received in total, $7 million, including $5 million for shelters, and $2 million that the Gov. had issued for flexible funding subsidies."

She added though it was not nearly enough, it is more money than other groups and causes got, many of whom received nothing.

As winter approaches, Fox is concerned about how to keep the growing elderly homeless population safe. A National Alliance to End Homelessness report predicted senior homelessness will grow from 40,000 to 106,000 by 2030.


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