‘Longest night’ memorial across San Fernando Valley lets community grieve unhoused deaths

A memorial to mourn the deaths of unhoused people who lived in the San Fernando Valley will take place at multiple locations on Saturday, Dec. 18, and conclude with a candlelight vigil in North Hollywood.

The “Longest Night Memorial” event organized by two local groups supporting and advocating for unhoused neighbors in the Valley is being held as temperatures reaching freezing levels in Los Angeles.

Nearly 1,500 people have died on the streets of Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to UCLA researchers who released a report earlier this month titled “We Do Not Forget.”

According to the report, the deaths are “evidence of the dislocation and trauma caused by housing insecurity and displacement” and the prison-like “isolation in shelter and emergency housing programs,” including those set up during the pandemic, and it emphasizes the need for humane permanent housing — that does not come with conditions.

Organizers say the event is being held to allow the community to grieve over the many deaths that have occurred during the pandemic, and amid Los Angeles’s homelessness crisis.

“My community, my friends? They are dying,” Karyn Goldstein, an unhoused resident in the West Valley, said. “It’s unavoidable for us. It’s everywhere — all the time. Even if you refuse to acknowledge our lives and our deaths — we are humans and we matter.”

The event is a collaboration between two Valley-based groups, West Valley Homes Yes, in the northwest Valley, and NoHo Home Alliance, which works mainly out of North Hollywood. Both groups do regular outreach to unhoused communities in their area, and work to connect them with resources and housing.

Kim Olsen, a board member of West Valley Homes Yes, said the memorial event “grew out of conversations with our unhoused friends about how many people we had lost and a desire to honor our friends who had passed.

Hannah Bowman, another board member, said that the many locations will help illustrate that “deaths in the unhoused community are happening in all of our neighborhoods — not somewhere far away.”

A closing candlelight service will be held at the end of memorial event at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in North Hollywood, the home-base for NoHo Home Alliance. Participants can bring a votive candle to light in memory of one unhoused person.

Rev. Stephanie Jaeger, pastor of St. Matthew’s and executive director of NoHo Home Alliance, noted that this event is not only to mourn the deaths, “but an urgent call to action.”

“It is a time to reflect on how we can come together as a community to end homelessness,” she said.