A man turned the roof of a bus stop shelter into his personal campsite this week, hauling a shopping cart full of belongings onto the structure at the southwest corner of South Barrington Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard in Brentwood. The unusual scene drew city sanitation workers, police officers, and a homeless outreach worker to the affluent Westside neighborhood, though the man ultimately came down on his own and was not cited or detained.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the man stretched out atop the shelter roof Monday and somehow managed to get his fully loaded shopping cart up there with him. City sanitation workers and police officers arrived Monday afternoon to address what officials described as a safety threat to both the man and passersby below, the paper reported. He eventually descended, discarded some of his belongings, declined homeless services offered at the scene, and left without facing any citation or detention from Los Angeles Police Department officers.
Local government also mobilized quickly. Councilmember Traci Park's office dispatched a homeless outreach worker to figure out what was happening, while a staff member and the sanitation department were also on scene, according to KTLA. Mayor Karen Bass weighed in as well, telling FOX 11 that city crews responded to clear the location at her direction, as reported by FOX 11 Los Angeles. That station also noted officials were working with the council office to connect the man with services.
Ownership Question Surfaces Amid the Cleanup
The episode raised a wrinkle over who is actually responsible for the shelter itself. KTLA reported that Metro said the majority of Los Angeles bus stops, including the one at Wilshire and Barrington, are owned and maintained by the city rather than the transit agency, meaning Metro does not have authority over most of these structures.
Key details about the man remain unknown. It was not clear why he climbed onto the structure or how long he had been up there, and his name was not immediately available, according to Yahoo News. The report also did not specify whether he received any services after turning down help at the scene.
Homelessness Trends Remain Murky
The rooftop encampment surfaced against a backdrop of conflicting data on the city's broader homelessness trajectory. The New York Times reported that the latest point-in-time count found 45,194 people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles, a 3.4 percent increase from the previous year, with the number sleeping outside in tents, encampments, or vehicles up 7.9 percent. Yet the Los Angeles Times, citing the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, reported that the city's total number of unhoused people appeared to have increased compared with the previous year, though an accounting glitch made the increase difficult to determine.
Those figures sit alongside the city's flagship anti-homelessness effort. The Los Angeles Times found that the city has spent more than $300 million on its Inside Safe program since Mayor Bass launched it in December 2022, moving roughly 5,800 people into interim housing, mostly hotels and motels. But by the program's third year, about 40 percent of those who had gone indoors — 2,300 of the 5,800 — were back on the street, per the same Times analysis.
The Brentwood shelter incident is not the first only-in-LA encampment story to catch attention this year. KTLA previously reported on video footage from March showing several people living in city storm drains near the 110 Freeway, underscoring how unhoused residents have found increasingly unconventional places to shelter across the region.
