Ghost kitchen delivery drivers have overrun an Echo Park neighborhood, say frustrated residents

Yahoo

21-05-2025

As soon as Echo Park Eats opened on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Douglas Street in the fall of 2023, Sandy Romero said her neighborhood became overrun with delivery drivers.
'The first day that they opened business it was chaotic, unorganized and it's just such a nuisance now,' she said.
Echo Park Eats is a ghost kitchen, a meal preparation hub for app-based delivery orders. It rents its kitchens to 26 different food vendors. The facility is part of CloudKitchens, led by Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber Technologies, which has kitchen locations across the nation including 11 in Los Angeles County.
With a long list of vendors and the ease of placing an online food order, Romero said the daily influx of delivery drivers coming into her neighborhood has surged and drivers are often taking up parking spaces, idling in red zones and double parking.
In an already high-density community, with seasonal traffic from Dodger stadium less than a mile away, the residents of Douglas Street say the opening of the ghost restaurant suddenly swamped the neighborhood with more people, cars, trash and crime.
Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, whose district represents the neighborhood, said there is a glaring issue that is much larger than just parking and traffic safety. The ghost restaurant, which replaced a medical office, is designated as a catering business, allowing it to operate adjacent to a residential neighborhood, he said.
The business phenomenon of ghost kitchens has only been around since the 2010s so there isn't an up-to-date land-use definition for them.
CloudKitchens did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The facility is a nuisance "that does not belong in a residential area, especially not on a residential street," said Erika Torres, a resident of more than 30 years on Douglas Street.
Torres lives two houses away from the facility's rear parking lot and is frustrated by the army of food carriers on mopeds who speed along the sidewalk, the traffic congestion on her block and the overpowering smell of oil, onions and other cooked foods permeating her home.
She and other neighbors say they have heard angry confrontations between drivers trying to get in and out of the parking lot and loud music blasting in the early mornings and late at night.
Several concerned neighbors asked that they not be identified citing safety concerns.
Another neighbor, J.C. Arias said he suspects there is a connection between the increase in people coming into the neighborhood and an uptick in theft on the block, including stolen tools and license plates.
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An email thread created to discuss the safety issues and possible solutions to the ghost restaurant problem has as many as 90 people on it, including neighbors, Soto-Martinez's district staff and other city staff. The email chain is still active today.
Soto-Martínez is presenting two possible fixes to the City Council. One possible solution is to request that city staff create a specific land-use designation for ghost kitchens while assessing how these existing facilities can affect a neighborhood.
If ghost kitchens are categorized differently from other commercial operations, they might have to operate in designated industrial areas, for example. However, a change in land-use rules would likely only apply to future ghost kitchens, not to the exiting facility in Echo Park.
Another solution presented by Soto-Martínez would use geofencing technology to immediately keep drivers at least 1,000 feet from the ghost kitchen, prohibiting drivers from loitering on the block while they wait to claim a delivery.
The technology is currently used on Lime scooters to remotely enforce speed, parking restrictions and dead zones. Soto-Martinez is asking city staff to look into how that would apply to app-based delivery drivers.
"The theory behind this is that the traffic will sort of disperse or it'll be a little more disaggregated because, right now, they're literally hanging out feet from the [facility]," he said.
But some neighbors worry that the geofencing idea would not solve the problem but only force the delivery drivers to hang out in other neighborhoods.
"We feel bad because we don't want to do that to anybody else," said a resident who asked not to be identified.
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Incremental changes have been adopted on Douglas to try to mitigate the traffic and other concerns, such as adding permitted parking last year and deploying more parking enforcement officers.
In December 2024, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation received complaints of frequent illegal parking in the neighborhood and began weekly patrols to address the community's concerns, said Colin Sweeney, spokesperson for the department.
On top of the patrols, the department deploys officers to respond to complaints or calls for service.
The situation on Douglas escalated so far in February that a neighbor said a traffic enforcement officer was assaulted when trying to enforce the parking laws.
Sweeney confirmed that the LAPD is investigating an "alleged attack on a traffic officer during the course of his duties on February 8" but declined to offer more details.
Echo Park Eats also implemented five-minute parking on their lot in 2024, but neighbors say that has only pushed more delivery drivers to linger on the street or on the sidewalk with their mopeds.
Last summer, Arias said food carriers, mostly men, parked or idled their cars and hung out under the shade of the large tree in front of his home, across the street from the ghost restaurant.
The men would bring their chairs, snacks and sit under the tree until they claimed a delivery. Arias frequently asked the men to pick up their trash and move their vehicles from blocking the street.
Arias was so frustrated by the loitering delivery drivers that he chopped off the branches that shaded the drivers.
The drivers stopped hanging out under his tree but many simply moved to another shaded areas on Douglas Street.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.