Western Avenue, at the edge of the Larchmont neighborhood. (Dania Maxwell / L.A. Material)
THE FIRST TIME SHEILA HOYER saw a sex worker in her Windsor Square neighborhood, she assumed the woman, decked in platform heels and a skimpy skirt, must be an actress shooting a production nearby.
“She was out of central casting,” Hoyer recalled.
But there was no movie. And Hoyer now knows what’s really happening in her neighborhood: a robust nightly sex trade that neighbors say has grown more intense — and more dangerous and disturbing — due, in part, to actions of Los Angeles City officials.
Almost every morning, residents in this exclusive enclave east of Hancock Park wake up to its detritus: used condoms, clumped up tissues, and the torn foil of condom wrappers scattered about the curbs and grass. “The amount of biohazard debris is disgusting,” said resident Sam Uretsky of Larchmont, who described the situation as “a full-on neighborhood emergency.”
Hoyer said her sleep has been disrupted by the sounds of strangers having sex outside her bedroom window. Once she and a neighbor ran to the rescue of a sex worker who was being assaulted and helped her escape.
The neighborhoods of Windsor Square and Larchmont are considered among the city’s most idyllic. The Spanish Colonial Revival and Craftsman homes can cost upwards of $5 million, and neighbors treasure their historic preservation districts and their walkable, quaint village in the heart of the city. They also, lately, trade tips with each other about the best tools and methods for picking used rubbers off the pavement.
Nearby Western Avenue has long been one of the city’s sex trafficking corridors, where johns in cars trawl by women and girls clad in cutout tube tops and mesh mini skirts. From there, some migrate to leafier quarters in Larchmont and Windsor Square, seeking a more discreet locale than the dense, busy streets of Koreatown. But some city officials and residents say the sex traffic has grown markedly more intense here recently, following a crackdown on another prostitution corridor along Figueroa Street in South Los Angeles. In trying to address the trade there, city officials may have inadvertently created a rare municipal example of exporting a problem from a poor neighborhood into a rich one.
Prostitution, like homelessness, is challenging to confront, in part because it is both an intractable tragedy for many of the people involved and a nuisance — though a genuinely unsettling one — for residents.
So far, residents and advocates for trafficked women say the city is struggling to tackle both aspects of the problem — although not for lack of trying.
At first, as the influx of prostitution and its attendant condom dregs built up in the tony neighborhoods to the north of the Figueroa trafficking corridor, Councilman Hugo Soto-Martínez said he and his deputies “were like, ‘Why is this happening?’” But then, he said, they conferred with advocates, who explained that the ongoing efforts to address the problem in South L.A. had led to an uptick elsewhere.
“If you place significant attention to any one problem, you’re going to have displacement of the problem,” said LAPD Capt. Rachel Rodriguez, who oversees the Olympic Division that includes a part of Western Avenue. Other trafficking corridors, including Holt Avenue in Pomona and Long Beach Boulevard by Compton, also saw an increase in activity, according to law enforcement and advocates.
City officials, including Mayor Karen Bass and City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, trumpeted the anti-trafficking effort on South Figueroa in September of 2024. Feldstein Soto called it the “the most horrific red light district ... I've ever seen in my life.” While many sex workers say that prostitution does not have to be an inherently exploitative job, social workers and advocates say that many of the young women working the city’s prostitution corridors are far from consensual professionals; they are trapped in a form of slavery, with well-organized networks of traffickers who take their wages, impose nightly quotas, and sometimes beat and drug them. In October of last year, a New York Times piece depicted, in heart-rending detail, the plight of underage girls and young women working the Figueroa strip. The story prompted national outrage, and increased attention to the problems there.
“That’s when we started seeing an influx of complaints and activity on Western,” Soto-Martínez said. The councilman said he wanted to help the residents in his district, who were flooding his office with distraught messages containing photos of condoms and reports of brazen sex work. But he wanted to address the problem in a more holistic” way. In November, Soto-Martínez’s office launched a task force committed to targeting Western Avenue and awarded $200,000 to Journey Out, which works to help women escape from trafficking.
Four or five nights a week, Perla Landa, a crisis team leader for Journey Out, climbs into her car and drives up and down Western, starting at about 11 p.m. and sometimes continuing until 6 a.m. She approaches the young women, giving them food and hygiene supplies such as hand sanitizer. Journey Out tries to work subtly, building trust night after night, aware that pimps and supervisors are always keeping an eye on the young women and girls. And they try to offer them a way out.
What has stunned Landa — a Chicago native who spent nearly a decade working for the U.S. Navy — is the number of children and teenagers she encounters.
“You clearly see they are minors, they are children,” Landa said. Authorities are “trying very hard” to swoop in and arrest traffickers and save children, she said, “but it’s so fast moving that by the time officers respond, they are gone.”
In her time on Western, Landa said she has learned that traffickers run well-organized, “meticulous” operations.
“The pimps are not what everyone believes them to be, like teal-colored suits,” said Landa. She said they are well organized criminals, who sometimes even send minors to get purposely arrested so they can end up in a group home and recruit other younger girls. Many of the young women feel they have few other options. “It's difficult to try to leave,” Landa said.
Landa and other outreach workers said they were sympathetic to the neighbors who must pluck condoms from their manicured bermuda grass on the regular, but their primary concern is for the women forced to parade the streets and meet their nightly quotas.
“They are still somebody's daughter, somebody's sister, potentially somebody's mom, and they are worthy of love, dignity and respect — not the scum of LA,” she said.
Larry Kohn, who has lived in Larchmont for 26 years, said he was well aware of that. “My problem is minor compared to the problem of the women who are being trafficked,” he said. The word trafficking, he explained, is not strong enough. “It sounds like a traffic ticket,” he said. But “it’s slavery.”
Still, Kohn is among those residents who got so fed up that he spoke to local TV and radio stations in January after angry residents summoned them to air their grievances.
“We see used condoms with semen leaking out of them on the street. Sometimes they are covered in blood,” Kohn told FOX-11.
Those interviews — containing as they did lurid accounts of sex work in a fancy neighborhood — went viral.
“People from New York and Florida were calling me,” Kohn said.
Despite the flood of news coverage, and the city’s renewed efforts on Western, the problem has persisted.
Many city officials who are focused on curbing prostitution cite additional factors driving the uptick on Western beyond the crackdown in South Los Angeles that pushed waves of women and their traffickers north to tonier neighborhoods.
Among them: a 2022 change in state law which effectively decriminalized loitering for prostitution, taking away one of the chief tools police had to help curb the practice. A spokesperson for the L.A. City Attorney pointed out that trafficking nationally has risen since the pandemic.
Residents also point to the streetlights. A large number in the area were inoperable for up to months at a time — a result of the scourge of copper wire theft. The cover of darkness makes the area all the more attractive for the business of prostitution.
Other residents speculate it is the unintended result of relatively newer permit parking in parts of Larchmont. The special parking zones, intended to make sure residents could park near their homes, instead created wide open spaces for johns to pull over for their illicit trysts.
Whatever the constellation of causes, city officials said they are working hard to solve it.
Recently, the LAPD unveiled plans to install 18 cameras along Western, specifically to surveil for trafficking and prostitution. The cameras could go up by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office said that it intends to begin targeting johns more aggressively, by charging them with conspiracy to commit lewd conduct, a felony. Previously, many faced a misdemeanor charge for the commission of lewd conduct.
Some sex workers also protested the city’s initial efforts, saying law enforcement made little distinction between consensual sex work and coerced human trafficking. Dozens of sex workers even staged a protest at L.A. City Hall in late 2023, wearing corsets, negligees and thigh-high boots and carrying signs that declared: “Sex Work Is A Valid Career Choice.”
But nobody approves of trafficking young women against their will.
“The folks that live in these communities are fed up with this blatant sex buying in their streets, so they want to see some changes,” said Assistant District Attorney Gilbert Wright.
Still, the District Attorney’s office faces challenges in bringing cases against pimps and sex traffickers, said Guillermo Santiso, who oversees the sex crimes unit at the L.A. County D.A.’s office. Many current and former sex workers are reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement and testify against their former pimps. Some refuse because they don’t want to see their traffickers punished; many others are terrified of what the criminal networks will do to them. Meanwhile, police do not have the personnel to build many such cases in the first place.
Rodriguez, who oversees the Olympic Division that includes a part of Western Avenue, said that her vice squad has only five officers, and they are also tasked with enforcing alcohol laws at local Koreatown bars and restaurants.
“These cases are really challenging and very unique,” said Santiso. “If law enforcement doesn’t have the tools and their resources to be out there investigating and pounding the pavement….then unfortunately, we’re not going to receive them.”
And so, advocates such as Landa continue to spend their nights roaming the streets, trying to provide a way out for any woman or girl who wants it. Sometimes, they are successful. Often, they are not.
“Some nights are harder than others,” Landa said.
And residents continue to trade tips for the best way to pick up the detritus of the sex trade.
Hoyer, of Windsor Square, said she believes police and city officials are doing the best they can to solve a difficult problem. So is her family; her husband obtained a grabber tool to pluck waste from their yard. “He’s not going to pick up used condoms with his bare hands,” she said.
On Friday morning, Jonathan Swaden came to his car outside his Larchmont home and saw freshly used condoms on the pavement. He snapped photos and typed out an email to Soto-Martínez’s staff.
“Just wanted to send a pic of what I had to step over to get to my car this am,” Swaden wrote.
