Many of the tenants of Echo Park Lake were already connected to LA’s homeless services agency. They had done everything their caseworkers asked: collected documents, signed paperwork. They were told to survive outside and wait.46 But with no permanent housing available, they knew what was at the end of many of the city’s waitlists: a bed in a congregate shelter, whose cramped, shared spaces were infamous for noxious conditions and COVID outbreaks; an unshaded tent in a fenced “safe sleep site,” subject to twenty-four-hour surveillance; a “tiny home,” where two residents share a prefabricated shed smaller than the American Correctional Association’s standard prison cell for one.47 The converted hotel rooms in Project Roomkey, an emergency pandemic program, banned guests, pets, or more than sixty gallons—one trash bag’s worth—of personal belongings. Residents couldn’t gather or visit each other and had to abide by a 7:00 p.m. curfew, after which they were locked inside. To many, those options didn’t look like housing as the provision of a human need; they looked like incarceration for the crime of not being able to afford rent.