Not long after Ramón J. Goñi moved to Los Angeles seven years ago, he went on a date. The pair strolled around the serene Venice Canals, a small Westside enclave with homes separated by shallow waterways. “What is this place?” Goñi remembers thinking. “And also, how many millions of dollars do you need to make to live in this place?” The area’s natural beauty stuck with Goñi, who originally hails from Madrid. “I was really attracted to that, but I thought it was never going to be possible to live here.”

But when the pandemic surged through Southern California a few years ago, rents dropped all across Los Angeles County. Suddenly, Goñi had some wiggle room to negotiate on monthly rental rates, and he nabbed a one-bedroom apartment in the back of a house along one of the canals. He soon realized he was far from the only renter in this idyllic slice of Venice, with homes that sell for $1.8 million on average, and found himself more connected to his neighbors given their proximity to one another in the car-free canals. “It’s really hard to be a complete isolationist living here,” he says. “The connections are going to happen, whether you want it or not.”

Those connections have turned into tight-knit neighborhood groups, like the Venice Canals Association, and a campaign called Know Your Neighbor that encourages people living along the canals to mingle and feel comfortable leaning on one another. “They have this outsized presence,” Anthony Carfello, the curator of the Venice Heritage Museum, says of the canals. “It’s a quite small portion of a neighborhood, and yet it’s so definitively as much a quintessential part of Venice as the boardwalk.”

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A view of the Venice Canals on Aug. 13, 2025, in Los Angeles.

Water in the Venice Canals on Aug. 13, 2025, in Los Angeles.

A view of the Venice Canals on Aug. 13, 2025, in Los Angeles.

Boats float in the Venice Canals on Aug. 13, 2025, in Los Angeles.

Lately, the unlikely bond that’s emerged from this placid community has been tested. Last year, a man sexually assaulted two women on the canals; he killed one of them. (A man was arrested and charged with murder, and pleaded no contest.) Earlier this summer, a different horror has gripped the canals: Since mid-June, a suspected 27 dogs have gotten severely sick after they were walked around the area, and five of those dogs have died, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. (The estimates from neighborhood residents differ; they estimate that 31 dogs have fallen ill and seven of said dogs have died.)

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What made the dogs sick remains unanswered, though various theories have been floated thus far, including pest control chemicals, snail bait, debris from the Palisades fire that ravaged the region earlier this year and toxic algae bloom. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health stated that “testing of the canal water, algae and scum by the California Water Boards has........

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