After more than a year battling homeless encampments taking root around his law office on San Pedro’s Beacon Street, attorney Charles Naylor is about ready to call it quits.

“It’s gotten to be such a problem,” said Naylor, who is contemplating a move to Long Beach. “And it’s getting worse, not better. The homeless encampments are becoming permanent. They no longer move about, they no longer come down during the daytime.”

He’s not alone in his frustration.

With offices down the hall from Naylor on the third floor of San Pedro’s historic post office building, attorney Robert Nizich looks out his window every day onto tents and encampments that line sections of lower Eighth Street.

“Basically, they occupy the street,” he said. “If they’re told to move, they move to the park (across the street), then back again — it’s an ebb and flow, like the ocean.”

City crews periodically force the homeless to leave during the daytime. But they return usually within hours.

Amid an all-out citywide and countywide effort launched last year to combat homelessness, the encampments have proven to be a persistent — and all-to-visible reminder — that the problem is far from solved and appears, in fact, to be growing larger.

And while the homeless have always lived in and around the area, the phenomena of tents, lean-tos and other shelters — once confined to Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles — springing up on city sidewalks and in open areas of city parks is relatively new throughout Los Angeles.

The problem has been especially stubborn on the blocks surrounding San Pedro’s main U.S. Post Office, a national historic landmark that overlooks the Main Channel from Beacon Street.

“We’re surrounded by it,” said Naylor, who has had his maritime law office in the post office building for some 25 years and now calls the area “ground zero” for the encampment problem. “I grew up in San Pedro, but I’m not everybody. … There are lawyers who just won’t come here. I had a judge come in for mediation and he had to step over a guy who was passed out on the street. I don’t know if he’ll come back.”

Nizich, who has had his office on the third floor since the 1980s, hears similar comments, adding that the sidewalk on Eighth Street is often blocked with the tents, shopping carts and other belongings, forcing pedestrians to walk in the street.

“The first thing people say is, ‘What’s happened?’ ” Nizich said. “Another person told me ‘This is the last time I’ll come to this post office.’ ”

George Palaziol of San Pedro, one of the founders of the social media group Saving San Pedro, also remains frustrated.

“It’s just like we’ve hit a stalemate with everything — they’ll do a cleaning (at encampment sites), but all they do is move across the street,” Palaziol said. He stressed that he was speaking only for himself and not as a member of San Pedro’s newly appointed Homelessness Task Force that is studying the issues.

The problem is worse in Venice, where Mark Ryavec, president of the Venice Stakeholders Association, estimates nearly 1,000 people live outside, many in encampments surrounding the popular boardwalk, in that beach community.

Ryavec’s organization filed a lawsuit late last year in an attempt to force government officials to address what has become a community nuisance. The suit is still working its way through the courts.

He points to another lawsuit — Jones v. City of Los Angeles — filed by the ACLU on behalf of six homeless people in 2003 as a leading factor in the burgeoning encampment phenomenon.

The ACLU won the case that argued insufficient beds were provided for the homeless in Los Angeles and that the vagrancy law — Ordinance 41.18 (d), prohibiting police from ticketing or arresting people who sit, sleep or lie on public sidewalks at night — amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and unfairly served to criminalize homelessness.

While L.A.’s vagrancy law remains on the books, under terms of the Jones settlement the city effectively cannot enforce it from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. until it can prove it has enough beds, homes and shelter space for the city’s estimated 25,686 homeless.

A shortage of manpower often results in the encampments staying in place through the daytime hours as well.

The city is trying to fast-track building new homes and stepping up its voucher and shelter programs but has a long way to go. Still, Ryavec, who has a long career in government and politics, expects the matter to come up again soon at the Los Angeles City Council.

Also making its way through City Hall is Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino’s motion to reduce from 72 hours to 24 hours the delay before city workers can collect abandoned items in public areas. Currently, items are stored in downtown Los Angeles but the Venice Neighborhood Council is weighing the idea of converting a senior center in that community to be used for homeless storage.

Homeless advocates are watching the push-back closely, suggesting that Los Angeles is becoming unfriendly to the homeless.

Late last year, Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin, who represents the Westside, said that because of the city’s inability to deal with homelessness over the past 10 years, “we are now a city of encampments.”

Ryavec said the growing encampment movement has had negative effects on the rest of society — and, in the long run, doesn’t help the homeless either.

“What’s happening here and throughout the city is not good for anyone,” Ryavec said. “The idea of the homeless advocacy attorneys saying that somehow getting rid of the vagrancy laws is going to help the homeless is a complete fallacy.”

As the encampments and spin-off facilities such as storage buildings multiply, he said, the city essentially is institutionalizing a new bureaucratic system while getting “very few people off the street.”

In Venice, he and others have teamed up with churches and the teen center to do outreach, offering to contact family members and provide bus tickets home for the younger homeless on the streets. They also offer vouchers in programs similar to those being used now in San Pedro.

“Certainly there are some gentle folks (out there) but there are many who are addicted to drugs and that causes them to behave in very dangerous ways,” Ryavec said, adding that the encampments have given rise to a new social dynamic as well that may explain why it is so hard to persuade many to accept housing when offered.

“There’s a tribal bond that develops in these encampments, it becomes their new family, so leaving to go into housing by themselves or to go back home is frightening to them,” he said. “They’re losing their current family.”

Meanwhile, Naylor says it’s largely just “gravity” that keeps him in his San Pedro office.

“It’s a million-dollar view but that’s what frustrates me so much, just the whole combination of a waste of community resources and what’s been allowed to happen.”

Nizich said he’s “too stubborn” to move his office and continues to email photos to Buscaino’s staff and others in hopes that something can be done.

“The question I think we have to grapple with is whether (living on the street) is OK,” Naylor said. “It might be OK with somebody who doesn’t have a business here, but it’s not OK with me.”