Long before many found out about Nury Martinez, unhoused victims of street sweeps knew how 'bad' she was
Residents of a Valley encampment long battled with Martinez. They're still here, she's all gone.
VAN NUYS — Long before the larger public found out about Nury Martinez, unhoused residents in her council district who bore the brunt of her policies say they already knew what she was really about.
When Rebecca Chavez lived on Kittridge Street, her tent was destroyed by city workers, as she arrived back from the hospital where she had undergone a C-section birth. Sanitation crews threw away baby clothing, a carseat, medicine and other supplies given to her by her friends and family to take care of her newborn.
“They call us bad,” Rebecca said Wednesday.
“That’s bad – what she did,” she said of the years of sanitation operations she and others had suffered through in the district that Martinez oversaw. “That’s bad, that’s bad, that’s bad.”
Already devastated by that experience, Rebecca soon faced more enforcement on Aetna Street, where tents that ran next to the Orange Line Station off of Van Nuys’ main strip, sat across from a LADWP electrical substation, and industrial buildings.
Back in the summer of 2020, Martinez had installed a temporary shelter in the Metro station parking lot. Along with the homes of her neighbors, Rebecca’s was once again swept up by city sanitation crews, the workers often flanked by police officers.
For many surviving on the streets, Aetna Street, along with those around it, have long served as an ideal location where they can be close to the civic center, transportation and bathrooms.
But the idea was, if a shelter existed in an area, there was less justification for the existence of Rebecca and other unhoused residents on that street.
What led to former Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez’s downfall ended up being the racist words she uttered on secretly recorded audio — during a nearly year-old meeting — that broke out into the open last week, through media reports.
Last Wednesday evening, just hours after Martinez turned in her resignation notice in the wake of the leak, I visited Aetna Street. While Martinez had fallen, the community of unhoused residents living in the Sixth Council District, still stood. And according to those living there, that was because during that time, they fought against the former council president’s regime of encampment sweeps.
Joined by neighbors and activists, they formed a blockade against one of the earliest of the sweeps, in August 2020. It was a precursor to the larger Echo Park Lake blockade that drew wide attention months later, in March 2021.
Throughout the past two years, following the initial blockade that took place amid a record-setting heat-wave, unhoused residents and activists, most of them neighbors in the San Fernando Valley, continued to resist the sweeps in various ways, week after week. At one event, activists distributed breakfasts of eggs, bacon and watermelon.
When I arrived, one of the unhoused residents, La Donna Harrell, was about to set up their weekly movie night. She had picked out “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” to feature, touting the comedic skills of the movie’s star, Regina Hall.
The movie would be projected on a brick wall where they have held many of their community events.
“We sit down and watch a movie that’s recently in the theaters, and we connect with different organizations that come out, and stuff,” she said. “It’s cool.”
Even though La Donna and others had gotten the news that Martinez had resigned earlier that day, they had not yet heard the audio, which leaked onto Reddit weeks ago. The audio had only just spread to the wider public about two days ago, by KnockLA, and reported on by the LA Times.
When I played one of the clips for Rebecca, she was speechless for several seconds, her jaw dropping.
“Is she fucking nuts?” Rebecca finally said. Like many others, she took issue with Martinez calling a colleague’s Black son a “monkey” in Spanish.
“And nobody bothered to turn around and correct her?” she added quickly, repeating the same question several more times in disbelief.
I told her that when Martinez said those words, Councilman Kevin de Leon, a former mayoral candidate, Councilman Gil Cedillo, and the Los Angeles Labor Federation President Ron Herrera, were also in the room. Herrera has since resigned, while calls persist for the other two to do so as well.
Rebecca said Wednesday she was “still processing” the news that Martinez was now gone, unsure of how she thought of the sudden development. She eventually said she was “overjoyed.”
“Maybe the next person that does step in her place does actually do things the right way,” Rebecca said. “And that's the only thing we can do, is just hope for a miracle, and just wait and see you.”
As for who will take Martinez’s place, the council will need to set a special election to fill the vacant Sixth District seat, which Martinez resigned from last Wednesday with more than two years left to her term, which ends December 2024. The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday is also set to vote on filling the now vacant Council President seat.
Rebecca now lives in an apartment, which comes with its own struggles. She and her husband are paying for the rent themselves, because there was a problem with the filing of her voucher paperwork.
Which is why she maintains “a spot right here (on Aetna) … that I come back to, because well, I might be homeless all over again,” she said. “I consider myself still homeless.”
Many of her longtime neighbors have also remain on Aetna Street. Some had accepted offers to live at temporary shelters set up during the pandemic, such as the Project Roomkey hotels that were opened for people who needed shelter during the pandemic, but they have returned after those programs ended, many without the promised housing. Others were never able to leave.
Despite accepting offers for shelter, or putting themselves on lists, many have received little help of real substance, she said. “We're still all here. There's people still waiting to get into the hotel rooms, from two years ago. Everybody's still here. It’s the same people.”
When we last spoke, more than a year ago, Rebecca was lamenting how frequent sweeps, as well as the subsequent offers of shelter that often did not lead to housing, were having an erosive effect on the community they had built on Aetna Street.
“Before they started doing the clean-ups and moving us, and all of that, it was a really tight community,” she said at the time. “Slowly but surely … they started doing the cleanups. They would literally have us pack up everything — what we could, and the rest of it got thrown in the trash.”
This Wednesday, she was focused on the idea that the residents of Aetna Street have still managed to band together in the face of such enforcement in Martinez’s district.
“These people here, I consider my family,” she said. “You know, they've been there for me through thick and thin. Everybody out here has been on the street for quite some time, you get to know people's true colors, what they're really about – the true person that they are.”
People in their situation are typically careful about complying with enforcement measures — they have much to lose if they don’t — whether they face those rules on the streets or while living in heavily regulated shelters. So protest is often not seen as the safest route to take, and many feeling powerless opt to take the hits, despite how much they hurt.
But Aetna might have been different because people were “fed up,” she said. And they were helped by activists who came by and passed out “Know Your Rights” flyers, arming them with knowledge and support that they otherwise might not have had.
“If it wasn’t for them … we’d probably be somewhere else, and having a harder time,” she said. “They gave us that lift. You know, they gave us that, ‘This is what we can do. Let’s put our heads together and brainstorm together.’”
Martinez was often on the minds of Aetna Street residents. In 2020, La Donna found an abandoned banner that displayed Martinez’s face and name. She used it as a tarp for her tent. After one of the sweeps, staffers of Martinez’s office came by to take it back from her, she said.
La Donna admitted she was not a supporter of Martinez. It was an “ironic” gesture to use the banner to build her tent, and it was used during one of the blockades, as a way to call out who they felt was responsible for the sweeps they endured.
She is not as hopeful as Rebecca, predicting that the effect of the leaked audio that led to Martinez’s resignation would be limited: “What will change is for these people to move more quietly, keep their thoughts to themselves – that’s the lesson they are going to learn, unfortunately.”
La Donna said that what she had wanted out of her council person was someone who got involved more, who was more of a “human being,” and got the idea that homelessness was a complex issue, with “different classes of people with different needs.”
La Donna has gone to protests outside Martinez’s home, including one in which she and others urged the council president to make use of more FEMA funding to keep hotel rooms open for people experiencing homelessness.
After one of the events, she expressed to me her dissatisfaction with how even the federally funded hotel program was working. Public officials didn’t understand how to design the programs so that they actually met people’s needs, she said. Instead, those programs often defaulted to treating participants like prisoners.
The shelter that was installed by Martinez along Aetna Street was like a fortress – razor wire across the top of the fencing – and those who stayed in it seemed cut off from those who lived around it, she said.
The facility could have been more open, and offered its showers and other resources to those living outside, she said, whether or not they accepted a bed in it. But it wasn’t, and didn’t.
On Wednesday, La Donna said that it was ultimately housed activists who served as their “lifeline.”
“They’re not well to do,” she explained, but they have worked out a network to support people living on Aetna, and on other more tucked away streets. Thanks to those neighbors, she said, “Aetna is still holding strong.”
“When we need to go on doctor visits, all that stuff, they’re here to take us,” she said. “If I needed to go to the hospital right now, I could call and then have somebody (come). They have a whole chat for it.”
At that moment, one of the activists, Carla Orendorff came by. She had been floating around checking on Aetna residents, and was also providing updates about her visit to someone who lived on the street who was recovering in the hospital after suffering a stroke. The news seemed positive. He was making eye contact for lengthy periods at a time, mirroring words Carla spoke, and even noticed that her dog had gotten its fur trimmed.
“He was trying his damndest the whole time to talk,” she told La Donna.
Aetna Street residents know the dark toll living on the streets can have. In 2021, when deaths among the unhoused grew to ever more unbearable levels across Los Angeles County, with the community facing tragedies on a regular basis — around 5 deaths a day on average that year — activists worked with unhoused residents throughout the San Fernando Valley to hold memorials.
One of the bigger ones was on Aetna Street. The memorial, which included candle vigils, art and portraits, stayed up for several months. “There was rarely a day that the candles weren’t lit,” said Whitney Huima.
“People come together for stuff like that,” she said. “And with it being right in front of my spot, I really saw a lot of people who I had not seen interact (with each other) at that point. And people would come to sweep and clean, to try to keep it up – (though) there is only so much you can do out here.”
The memorial has since been cleared away by the city. The same wall was being used as the backdrop for projecting that night’s movie.
Whitney said she had been thinking about rebuilding the memorial – but logistically, she was not sure how it could be done.
When I brought up the fact that Martinez had resigned that day, she did not immediately give her reaction to it, but said that it is “isolating when the city and the police and the people that you're supposed to be able to turn to, and the people that are supposed to care, you find out that they don't care. And then it turns into harassment, and you can't turn to them for anything.”
She gave the example of police officers who taunt those living in encampments. “Like, the police will come through and they'll spotlight you if you're walking down the street,” she said. “You're not doing anything. They spotlight and they'll throw their siren on for half a second. And sometimes their windows are down, and you can hear them laughing and stuff like that.”
“Something like that could be something that makes somebody end their own life,” she said, or it could cause someone to “act out in a manner that they wouldn’t have – we don’t need that extra tension.”
Whitney finds it hard to believe that anyone in who holds seats of power could relate to their situation, or that their life experiences have equipped them to know how they could really help.
“You've had money to campaign (for office),” she said. “I don't have money to buy a pack of cigarettes some days. I'm pretty sure that you don't know what it's like to be broke.”
When Whitney does finally touch on Martinez directly, she was unforgiving, describing her as “a very ignorant woman … It really worries me that we really don't look into who people are.”
But she also said it was pointless to place all of the blame on Martinez.
“Everybody wants to nail her to the cross,” she said. “At the same time, how many homeowners were coming out and speaking to the people that they had problems with?”
“We're all responsible for Nury Martinez just as much as she is, because she's representing the people in the community,” she said.
(Carla, who is housed, once told me this is one of the reasons she volunteers her time — because she felt partly responsible for what is happening).
“If you're going to work every day, and driving by homeless people, and you don't like that I'm dirty, have you tried writing to, you know your Senator or have you tried writing to the city council and saying, ‘Hey, we need to be able to have dumpsters out there for them to use, or like, if you think that homeless people smell or you don't like that there's, you know, excrement on the sidewalk, have you written in, or called and started a petition saying we need to get public bathrooms back? Or are you just going to be part of the group of people that are out there with a mob, with torches and pitchforks, and saying, ‘Fuck these people, they're disgusting. We need to do something about them. They're all criminals. They're all drug addicts. We need law enforcement.’”
Whitney said those on Aetna Street and elsewhere are the ones out in the proverbial rain.
“Everybody's talking about us, while they’re underneath all this protection and everything else,” she said. “It's like maybe if they just came and talked to us, and realize that we're human beings, it wouldn't be so scary … maybe a lot of people wouldn't feel so alienated and fulfill what is being said about them.”
