L.A. Issues Permit to Tear Down Wilmington's 100-Bed Homeless Shelter

The $800,000 permit covers the fabric shelter and trailers at 828 N. Eubank Ave., on Port of Los Angeles land due back by Feb. 2027.

Wilmington's 100-bed homeless shelter on Eubank Avenue has a city permit to come down: the fabric hall, the trailers, the ramps and the shade canopy.

L.A. Department of Building and Safety records show the demolition permit for 828 N. Eubank Ave., near Anaheim Street, was issued Sept. 25, a month after plans were filed Aug. 26. The job's valued at $800,000. The permit calls it "demobilization of the emergency shelter site," with every structure to be "detached and removed from site."

That covers one membrane structure, two prefab modular trailers, a raised metal deck, ramps, stairs and the canopy. A permit is permission, not a crew on the lot, and the record lists it only as issued.

The ground was never the city's. The shelter sits on Port of Los Angeles property, and state tidelands rules put a time limit on uses there that aren't maritime, the city's General Services Department told the City Council in an Oct. 30, 2025, report. The city's permit to use the Port land runs out Feb. 28, 2027, and the land's supposed to be fully back in the Port's hands by then.

That report also set the calendar. The shelter program would start winding down in February 2026, and the teardown would start around August. The plans reached the counter Aug. 26. For City Hall, that's a schedule kept.

This was always meant to be a short stay. The council told city staff on July 3, 2018, to find out whether the Eubank site could hold a temporary shelter. It opened in early July 2020, at the same time as a 100-bed sister site in San Pedro, under then-Mayor Eric Garcetti's A Bridge Home program.

The Daily Breeze reported that the Wilmington shelter was half full when Garcetti toured it July 28, 2020. It also reported that Bridge Home sites were costing about $5 million each, more than the city expected, and were meant to stay open for three years. Tahia Hayslet, then executive director of Harbor Interfaith Services, told the Daily Breeze that on-site case management could move people "from bridge housing to permanent housing."

The three years came and went. A city environmental notice filed in November 2023 stretched the site's life to as long as 6.5 years in total.

The operators changed along the way. U.S. VETS ran the shelter at opening with Harbor Interfaith, the Daily Breeze reported. By 2025, the city had handed it to Holliday's Helping Hands Foundation, a Carson nonprofit picked through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. That was a zero-rent lease that went month to month after December, and the city put $3,248,500 in state homelessness money toward keeping the 100 beds open through June 30, 2026.

City records don't say where the people sleeping there went, or whether those beds reopened anywhere else in the Harbor area.

If the city's schedule holds, the 47,233-square-foot site on Eubank Avenue goes back to the Port of Los Angeles by Feb. 28, 2027. In 2020 it was sold as temporary. It's finally living up to the word.

Source: data.lacity.org, retrieved October 8, 2026. Other sources: cityclerk.lacity.org, my.lwv.org, State of California.