It’s nine o’clock on a blazingly sunny October morning in Echo Park.
A scruffy but fashionable group slowly gathers for breakfast around a table piled high with bagels. Not far away, two men put on boxing gloves and playfully begin to spar. Another is restringing a flamenco guitar on an old, cast-off sofa sitting on a grassy embankment. Any minute now, the socialists will arrive with their solar strips to charge everyone’s phones.
It’s another day in the life of an unlikely homeless community that has sprung up here—not on the outskirts of this trendy Eastside neighborhood, but right in its beating heart, the park itself. About 100 tents have popped up around the lake over the last 14 months—a city within a city. Open-flame cooking, which is banned by municipal code, is happening all over. There’s electricity being siphoned from city streetlights to power microwaves, personal sandwich grills, and other appliances. There’s a gas generator running a freezer and refrigerator inside one tent at the north end. Another tent along Glendale Boulevard is decorated with a full bedroom set.