This is part six of a 20-month long investigation looking into hygiene stations that the City of Los Angeles distributed to homeless encampments. This project was produced for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2020 Data Fellowship. Start from the beginning here.
When the pandemic first hit, the City of Los Angeles raced to roll out hundreds of portable sinks and toilets to the tens of thousands of people living on the streets. But they didn’t have much of a plan to ensure that those units were maintained properly or protected from vandalism. After a 14 month, long L.A. TACO investigation revealed that vendors were getting paid millions of dollars for work they weren’t completing, the city once again sprung to action. Only this time they decided to remove all of the units.
“Whoa. What happened?” A representative from United Site Services (USS), the largest provider of portable sinks and bathrooms to the city, wrote in a late-June email after receiving an unexpected request to remove hundreds of units just days before the start of a new billing cycle. According to emails obtained by L.A. TACO through a public records request.
“I thought this was going to be long term for the homeless situation,” the USS employee wrote.
After collecting more than $4 million in fees, the rug was pulled out from under them. “I'm sorry, I do not have any info on how this was determined,” a city employee explained after breaking the news. The following week, USS began removing hundreds of portable sinks and toilets, just as the Delta variant became the most dominant coronavirus strain in California.