“Protected by Ghost Town”

ANA PETROVA, 84, LIVES IN VENICE, “about a mile from the sand.” Two years ago, an encampment popped up outside her front door.

Her first response, she said, was empathy: “I’d get in the shower, and I’d think about: ‘Oh my God, look at me. I'm having this wonderful, warm shower, and these people are out there in the rain.’”

Her second response was to call the police. Petrova’s husband is in palliative care for cancer, and Petrova is his caregiver — the noise, drug use, and tent fires at the encampment had derailed their lives further. “We had treatments to go to and what have you,” she said. “And there were times I had to cancel it because we were scared to come out.”

If anyone should have been able to get help from the police, it was Petrova. She’d volunteered on her area’s LAPD Citizen Advisory Board for 20 years, and she was able to text her local Senior Lead Officer and call division captains to ask for help. But she heard a common refrain: “Their hands were tied.” And when officers did show up, Petrova says that it didn’t have much effect on the encampment. “It got to a point where they had lost all respect for law enforcement,” she said. “And law enforcement would come by and they’d just laugh at them.”

So her third response was to call a new company called Ghost Town Consultants. Ghost Town, she’d heard, helped people resolve issues with homelessness that the police couldn’t.

Within days, the encampment was gone and never came back.

“It's really amazing the results they have been able to accomplish,” Petrova told me. “I think it's just because they know who everybody is… you know, they’re OGs.”