A Crisis of Habitation in LA’s Last Remaining Wetland

The Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve lies just south of famous Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Its 600 acres (240 ha) are all that remains of the once mighty watershed of 14,000 acres (5 700 ha) of wetlands historically present in the area. Back in the 1990s, environmentalists fought hard to protect these wetlands from development, even though they were already highly degraded by decades of human abuse. In 2020, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and the State of California approved an ecological restoration masterplan that many environmental organizations embraced. Yet others were upset because it promised years of bulldozing to comprehensively reshape the landscape, thereby restoring a connection to the ocean and the tides. Ballona contains a complex mix of different brackish and freshwater marshes, as well as riparian and upland habitats including coastal sage scrub and sand dunes, with many birds and other wildlife depending on more than one habitat type. Various restoration experts questioned whether a heavily engineered transformation into a full tidal wetland would constitute an appropriate “restoration” of the past, arguing instead for a larger freshwater component. [1] In early 2024, the CDFW’s multimillion-dollar restoration masterplan was successfully litigated by environmental groups that prefered gentler alternatives. Technicalities concerning correct tidal flows and calculated future sea-level rise resulted in the decertification of the masterplan’s environmental impact report (EIR) (Sahagún 2019, 2023). As of early 2025, the revised EIR draft has yet to be released for public comment.

We would like to use this window of opportunity to remind Angelenos that there is another type of flow that cannot be ignored in the plans for the future of the wetlands : the flow of people seeking shelter in the wetlands due to the unaffordable and sometimes hostile urban environment around it. Restoration plans for urban wetlands such as Ballona would benefit from a multispecies justice perspective that creates space for displaced humans, including through interim and permanent supportive housing projects.

Ballona’s multispecies history

Ballona was called Guashna by the Native Gabrielino-Tongva peoples, whose presence antedates European colonization of the area. [2] The Spanish and Mexican governments awarded the land to the Machado and Talamantes families to graze their cattle on, with the Alta California governor confirming the area surrounding the Ballona Creek Watershed as Rancho La Ballona in 1839, encompassing 13,920 acres (5,633 ha). Following the Mexican Cession to the United States in 1848, Ballona’s ownership rights were later confirmed by the California state government.

As Los Angeles experienced rapid growth throughout the 20th century, Ballona’s wetlands shrunk. The US Army Corps of Engineers cased Ballona Creek in concrete for flood protection in the 1930s. In the 1940s, the tycoon Howard Hughes established an airport and aircraft factory in the area east of Lincoln Boulevard. In the 1960s, Marina del Rey harbor was carved into the wetlands and the dredged soil dumped next to the creek. After Hughes Aircraft Company vacated land used for an airstrip in the mid‑1980s, Ballona became a site of environmental contestation regarding the development of an upscale planned community, Playa Vista.

Playa Vista was eventually built in the early 2000s, violating Native burial sites even as its original New Urbanist master plan was celebrated by some (Pristin 2007). Detailed documentation of what archeologists call the “pre- and early-historic occupation” of Native peoples of the area was buried in Appendix D.viii of the Draft Environmental Impact Report for Playa Vista, while the actual remains of the Tongva ancestors were eventually reinterred in a “discovery park” adjacent to the community’s new elementary school. The developer also restored sections of the riparian corridor along historic Centinela Creek and funded the creation of a 25‑acre (10‑hectare) freshwater marsh just west of Lincoln Boulevard. The system was completed in 2009 and has become a local birding hotspot. The freshwater marsh receives water from the development side via three inlets and can release water of improved quality to Ballona Creek. The remaining unrestored Wetlands Reserve is severed by roads and impacted underground by gas pipelines and storage tanks, yet still functions as a refuge for a multitude of species of birds and other animals, including humans.

The entanglement of habitat restoration and a housing crisis

While one co‑author of this piece mainly wanted to highlight the political struggles around the competing visions for the ecological restoration of Ballona as a habitat for different animals and plant species, the other was focused on raising concern for the crisis of human habitation in our midst. On the habitat restoration side, many voices remain wary of a full implementation of the official master plan for a variety of reasons, ranging from technical disagreements over total maximum flow loads for the pollution in the creek and projections for future sea-level rise to concerns over which species will benefit or lose out most from the creation of more freshwater- or more saltwater-focused habitats. Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge of the area is also not well integrated into the official master-planning efforts.

The developer-funded Freshwater Marsh completed in 2009 as a “nature-based infrastructure” and mitigation wetland, meanwhile, was severely impacted by an encampment of vehicle dwellings and makeshift shelters that grew alongside it on Jefferson Boulevard during the Covid‑19 pandemic, thus highlighting the fact that any local habitat restoration and protection effort remains inseparately entangled with the crisis of the unhoused in LA.

In late summer 2023, those encampment residents were displaced by city and county authorities. Previous efforts in 2022 had sought to obtain over $2.2 million for largely interim “housing and vehicular interventions,” but the newly elected city councilperson Traci Park reportedly rejected those funds (Scott 2023). With urging from local environmental and neighborhood groups, Park’s office led an operation to “sweep” those living in recreational vehicles (RVs) along Jefferson Boulevard. Individuals were asked to relinquish their RV for impoundment in return for a temporary stay in a hotel room. Most vehicle residents scattered to surrounding areas while sections of the freshwater marsh were closed for rehabilitation after sustaining damage from the encampment.

While nearby wealthy communities benefit from the rising property values that in part drive homelessness, they don’t build their fair share of affordable or supportive housing, exemplified by NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) opposition to the Venice Dell Community. Just north of the wetlands abutting the Venice Canals, an empty city-owned parking lot was to be turned into 120 to 140 apartments for people experiencing homelessness and low-income artists, developed by two respected affordable housing nonprofits and designed by an award-winning architect. After overcoming a lawsuit ostensibly brought against the project on grounds of its environmental impact and passing the notoriously protective California Coastal Commission, the affordable housing development is still being thwarted behind the scenes by Councilmember Park and city attorney Feldstein Soto (with tacit approval by LA mayor Karen Bass), according to a new lawsuit filed on behalf of three local residents, including one whose RV was displaced from the wetlands. In the absence of such projects, the unhoused will continue to be pushed to the edges of human habitation—freeway underpasses, industrial areas, waterways, and wetlands—where they sometimes infringe upon natural habitats.

Towards multispecies justice in the Ballona Wetlands

Following Heise and Christensen (2020), we find Ballona to be an ideal place to investigate the concept of multispecies justice, moving questions of environmental justice beyond simple binaries and including nonhuman actors in the mix (see also Chao and Celermajer 2023 ; Haraway 2018). Interdisciplinary action is needed to achieve a more peaceful, resilient, and sustainable human–nature coexistence in this densely settled, “blasted” landscape (Tsing 2014 [3]). Yet the ultimate reality is that in a city embroiled in a crisis of affordable housing, restoring a wetland to higher-order ecological and recreational uses without considering how many less-fortunate humans will continue to flock to it as a last resort for habitation seems shortsighted.

The wetlands are clearly beloved by many Angelenos, not just environmental activists, and its future shouldn’t leave them out. As scholars engaged in respective movements for environmental and housing justice, we reject siloed interpretations of these struggles. During a recent “Conservatory” event at Soka University’s Pacific Basin Research Center, we collaborated with sound artist Daniel Rothman to bring together key perspectives on Ballona alongside a unique 24‑hour sound installation that gave voice to the more-than-human Ballona next to human stakeholders. Such multisensory collaborative efforts of multilayered re‑storying and listening are especially needed in the aftermath of the devastating Palisades and Eaton Fires, when rebuilding efforts across the region have to balance a complex web of interests and needs.

Ultimately, habitat restoration requires multiple compromises—and we cannot fence off our way to a restoration that excludes human realities. Elsewhere in California, recent efforts to clear areas such as the Sepulveda Basin in Los Angeles and the Guadalupe River in San Jose of long‑standing unhoused camps demonstrate the shortcomings of restoration work that does not sufficiently attend to housing for human habitants. Restoration of wetlands like Ballona thus requires multispecies justice that remains attuned to the complex needs of all species.

Restorationists will continue to fight over whether costly, large-scale bulldozing should be involved, which kinds of native species should be nurtured or replanted, which invasives uprooted, and how much human access should be allowed during and after restoration. Yet restoration attempts that seek to undo humans’ damaging influence on ecosystems while not attending to the extractive processes that produced that damage are not engaging the full spectrum of restoration. As researchers of the environment and housing, and as frequent visitors to the wetlands, we believe that housing the unhoused needs to be part of the restorative puzzle at the wetlands.

Bibliography

• Chao, S. and Celermajer, D. 2023 “Introduction : Multispecies Justice”, Cultural Politics, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 1–17.
• Haraway, D. 2018. “Staying with the trouble for multispecies environmental justice”, Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 102–105. Available online at the following URL : https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2043820617739208. DOI : 10.1177/2043820617739208.
• Heise, U. K. and Christensen, J. 2020. “Multispecies Justice in the Wetlands”, Ecozon@ : European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 169–177.
• McCawley, W. 1996. The First Angelinos : The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles, Banning : Malki Museum Press.
• Pristin, T. 2007. “A Glimpse of a More Vertical Los Angeles”, New York Times, 21 March. Available online at the following URL : www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/realestate/commercial/21Real.html.
• Sahagún, L. 2019. “‘Coastal Disneyland project’ ? Groups debate plan to restore Ballona wetlands”, Los Angeles Times, 23 December. Available online at the following URL : https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-12-23/ballona-wetlands-restoration-plan-conservationists-split.
• Sahagún, L. 2023. “Judge orders halt to Ballona Wetlands restoration project”, Los Angeles Times, 30 May. Available online at the following URL : www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-05-30/judge-orders-halt-to-ballona-wetlands-restoration-project.
• Scott, J. 2023. “Traci Park intervened to kill planned housing operation at Ballona Wetlands before man burned to death”, Knock LA.
• Tsing, A. 2014. “Blasted Landscapes (and the Gentle Arts of Mushroom Picking)”, in E. Kirksey (ed.), The Multispecies Salon, Durham (North Carolina) : Duke University Press, pp. 87–110. Available online at the following URL : www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780822376989-004/html.

Further reading

• Masters, N. 2012. “The Lost Wetlands of Los Angeles”, KCET/PBS SoCal, 29 February. Available online at the following URL : www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/the-lost-wetlands-of-los-angeles.
• McKeown, K. 2020. “Bulldozing parts of Ballona is no way to restore the wetlands”, Los Angeles Times, 19 January. Available online at the following URL : www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-19/letters-to-the-editor-bulldozing-parts-of-ballona-is-no-way-to-restore-the-wetlands.
• Shingne, M. C. 2022. “The more-than-human right to the city : A multispecies reevaluation”, Journal of Urban Affairs, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 137–155. Available online at the following URL : www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07352166.2020.1734014. DOI : 10.1080/07352166.2020.1734014.
• Society for Ecological Restoration. [n.d.]. “What is Ecological Restoration ?” [web page]. URL : https://ser-rrc.org/what-is-ecological-restoration.

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