A graffiti-covered house near West Century Boulevard and Western Avenue has sat empty since its owner died in 2022, and neighbors in the unincorporated Westmont community say it has become a magnet for trespassers, drug activity and prostitution. Residents describe strangers arriving in Bentleys and Mercedes, young women and an infant moving in and out of the property, and curtains that reappear in the windows no matter how many times authorities tear them down.
Pastor Carnell Powell, who lives in the area, told NBC Los Angeles that a demolition permit for the property was issued two years ago and that a building inspector confirmed an active order to tear the once-1,800-square-foot house down. Neighbor Patrice Weldon, who has watched the situation unfold from her home in Westmont, said she has personally seen young women and an infant coming and going from the house. “The past four years have been a nightmare,” Weldon said, according to the same report.
Curtains Torn Down, Then Put Back Up
Police and 311 personnel have physically removed curtains from the home's windows in an apparent effort to disrupt whatever activity is happening inside, only for the curtains to be replaced. Residents say the abandoned home has been a problem for roughly four years, according to their own account, and that people continue squatting there despite repeated intervention attempts.
Neighbors have taken their complaints up the chain, reporting the issue to the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, to City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, and directly to Mayor Karen Bass. LADBS has since submitted work orders to clean the site, and the Board of Building & Safety Commissioners has formally declared it a nuisance. The property owner, for his part, has said he is tied up in court proceedings.
City Pursuing Cleanup Costs and Legal Options
City officials plan to cite the property owner for cleanup costs and pursue legal options to hold him accountable, according to the report. That approach tracks with how LADBS generally handles abandoned structures: the agency's Contract Nuisance Abatement Program allows the city to declare an open, vacant building a public nuisance after a hearing, then hire private contractors to clean, secure or demolish it if the owner won't act, with the city recovering its costs through tax liens on the property, per the department's own description of the process.
Owners who ignore orders to secure a vacant, open building can also face fines of up to $1,000 a day on top of those liens, according to The Dusty Archive. Enforcement, however, tends to rely on residents flagging problems through the city's MyLA311 portal rather than proactive city patrols, which helps explain why complaints from Westmont neighbors were central to getting the property onto the city's radar at all.
Why Police Can't Just Clear the House
Bass and Harris-Dawson have called on police to address potential criminal activity at the property and have said that changing city policy and strengthening enforcement tools could allow for earlier intervention. But removing occupants from a vacant residence isn't as simple as sending officers to the door. Under California real property law, an unauthorized occupant who stays in a vacant home for 30 consecutive days, or who produces disputed tenancy paperwork, can shift from trespasser to tenant-like occupant in the eyes of the law, according to Hemlane. That legal status blocks police from performing an immediate removal and forces property owners and the city into a formal civil eviction process instead.
State lawmakers tried to speed that process up in 2025 with Senate Bill 448, which would have created a 72-hour law enforcement removal process for squatters on fire-hazard or abandoned properties. The bill stalled in committee after legal aid and civil rights advocates raised concerns, as Reason Magazine reported, leaving the standard civil eviction route as the primary tool for cases like the one in Westmont.
Budget Pressures Complicate a Citywide Fix
Mayor Bass says she will call on the City Council to restore $2 million in vacant-lot abatement funding, money she had already allocated in her proposed budget to address neglected properties across the city. That push comes against a tighter fiscal backdrop: Bass unveiled a proposed $14.8 billion city budget for fiscal year 2026-27 in April that called for eliminating 149 vacant municipal positions as part of broader belt-tightening, according to KFI AM 640.
The Westmont case is not an isolated one. In June, the LADBS Vacant Building Abatement division submitted formal requests to the Board of Building and Safety Commissioners to designate other fire-damaged and neglected South Los Angeles residential properties as public nuisances subject to city-ordered abatement, a required legal step before contractors can be sent in. Hoodline reported in April on a similar North Hollywood cleanup after years of complaints about squatters and drug use at a burned-out property, showing how the same administrative machinery can eventually move once a nuisance declaration is in place.
Westmont, an unincorporated Los Angeles County community of about 1.85 square miles bordering South Los Angeles near Century Boulevard and Western Avenue, recorded 33,913 residents in the 2020 U.S. Census. For now, the abandoned house sits in bureaucratic limbo — nuisance declaration issued, cleanup orders submitted, demolition permit on the books for two years — while neighbors like Weldon and Powell wait to see whether the city's next moves finally close the chapter on what they call a four-year nightmare.
