Gangs turn LA’s homeless camps into squalid ATMs – collecting rent and running open air drug markets

On Los Angeles streets, tents aren’t just signs of homelessness — they’re where gangs openly deal drugs, sell women and collect rent.

Whether its RV rows choking Compton Boulevard, Skid Row’s packed tent maze or the once-quiet pockets of the Westside, encampments have morphed into open-air drug markets.  

This isn’t chaos — it’s control. Gangs blend into the population, hiding in plain sight, running street commerce behind tarps and inside RVs while City Hall looks the other way.

Nowhere is it clearer than Compton Boulevard, where more than 100 RVs sit bumper-to-bumper, windows blacked out. Outreach workers and residents say many are controlled by street crews tied to long-established Compton gangs — used to stash drugs, cook meth and sell straight onto the street.

People living inside those RVs don’t just park there, they pay rent.

“Depending on the area, you’ll see taxing,” former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said.

“Homeless people being pressured to hold drugs or sell for them, and they’re always owing.”

Debt, he said, becomes control.

Villanueva, who is running again for sheriff, said enforcing drug laws and dismantling gang activity in places like Compton was a priority during his tenure, and would be again.

“When you stop enforcing drug laws, gangs fill the vacuum. Every time,” he said.

On Skid Row, LAPD says the same dynamics play out, only tighter, louder and more visible.

“You used to have crack houses,” said LAPD Detective Hugo Ayon, a member of the department’s Gang and Narcotics Division and the FBI Gang Task Force. “Now you have crack tents.”

Ayon said drug dealing happens openly, with lines forming in broad daylight.

“People line up like you’re going to McDonald’s,” he said. “Four, five, six people deep waiting to purchase the drugs.”

Street vendors are ”extorted” too, paying $50 to $100 a week, he said.

Ayon said fentanyl has erased the fear that once pushed drug use into the shadows.

“Before, people using crack used to hide to smoke their drugs because it was a felony — you take them to jail,” he said.

“Now, there is no fear of repercussions. They smoke out in the open.”

On the Westside, Steven Brown has watched the same transformation unfold from the inside.

Brown has lived on and off the streets for nearly 50 years. He battled addiction, served time, and credits prison — and the structure it imposed — with saving his life. Now sober, he’s known locally as the “mayor” of Westminster Park in Venice, where he keeps the peace in his immediate area.

But Brown doesn’t claim control beyond that.

“I don’t run Venice,” he said. “I just know what goes on.”

What Brown sees, he says, is a business run by gangs.

“This is business now,” Brown said. “Business is business.”

Brown said certain RVs in Venice are well known on the street — vehicles that sit for months at a time.

“You know which ones they are,” he said. “Those aren’t just places to sleep.”

He described makeshift drug operations inside RVs, mobile setups using propane tanks, generators, and improvised wiring to cook, cut, or store drugs. 

Venice has seen repeated RV and encampment fires over the years, some exploding into major emergency responses. Authorities caution not every blaze is drug-related, but law-enforcement officials acknowledge RV corridors have become flashpoints, where drug debt, intimidation and retaliation collide.

Brown said gangs embedded in encampments don’t just sell drugs, they enforce order. Chaos brings cops, and cops are bad for business.

“They serve a purpose,” Brown said. “They don’t want attention.”

Meth labs, he said, is why fires rip through encampments so fast once they ignite. “Once it starts, you’re done,” Brown said.

But not every burned RV is an accident: ”Sometimes it’s a warning.”

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That warning has turned deadly before.

In January 2023, a 65-year-old man was killed in a burning RV near Exposition Park. Police arrested a 46-year-old suspect on murder charges after witnesses said he ignited the blaze following an argument earlier that night. Investigators said the suspect had been arrested and released less than an hour before the fatal fire.

LAPD has said separating legitimate unhoused residents from criminal gang members hiding within encampments remains a persistent challenge.

Former gang member Ansar “Stan” Muhammad doesn’t deny the drug economy — but he sees it differently.

Rather than gangs cleanly controlling encampments from the top down, Muhammad said many of the people involved are gang members and associates who have fallen hard into addiction themselves.

“These drugs don’t give you time,” Muhammad said. “They break people down fast — and that makes people easy to prey on.”