Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-homeless-crisis-overview-20180225-htmlstory.html

by mixmastamyk • 8 years ago

74 61 8 years ago

jakecrouch• 8 years ago

People at the top of our economy are generally oblivious to how bad things are for the bottom half. The top 0.1% commands the same wealth as the bottom 90%. Historically wealth inequality finds its outlet in political unrest, and there is probably more of that to come in the next decade. In the last election a socialist and a populist both got suprising amounts of support, even though the broader economy was supposed to be doing well. The next recession will hit the bottom 50% hard, and we could see truly strange things if that occurs near an election.

ShabbosGoy2• 8 years ago

People at the top of our economy are generally oblivious to how bad things are for the bottom half.

Generally oblivious or willfully ignorant with malice?

throwaway1748• 8 years ago

That's an easy statement to make, but I don't think it holds true for most wealthy people. Especially wealthy people in Silicon Valley. If anything, most wealthy people I know are extremely aware of how bad things are for the bottom half and regularly vote against their economic self-interest for progressive candidates.

Runaway inequality isn't due to some evil conspiracy by rich people to hoard money from everyone else. It's due to the leveraging nature of technology and the plummeting demand for unskilled labor

jjeaff3• 8 years ago

It seems that rather than trying to fight the laws of economics with rent controls, special housing, and welfare programs, the focus should be relocation and job placement in less expensive areas.

It's unrealistic to try to get someone a low end job that will support them long term in one of the most expensive cities in America.

With the $1.2B bond measure, you could rent housing for every single homeless person in LA for a good 5 years in middle America. (less than $500 a month all in).

stevenwoo• 8 years ago

Given that about a third are mentally ill, that would not be adequate - the other states would undoubtedly object - so some sort of interstate pact or national program would be required for that sort of plan.

jernfrost2• 8 years ago

Isn’t the problem that republican controlled midwestern states chase all their homeless people out to democrat controlled big cities? They are not willing to pay anything to help the homeless. They are not even willing to look at them. They want it to be somebody else’s problem. I think that is a problem with having open borders between states but not equal social programs. It leads to a race to the bottom.

newfoundglory• 8 years ago

Not exactly - the bigger problem is that all the republicans controlled midwestern states are shitty economies and so people move to places where they hear that people can get jobs (functioning liberal states) and when that doesn't work out they end up homeless in the new city. (Various polls of homeless people in Seattle have found that most of them were already in the area immediately before they became homeless).

dfee• 8 years ago

This is a very curious comment. Troubling, too.

The answer you’ve offered up for confirmation reflects a perspective that is as bad as the one you’re demonizing.

brooklyn_ashey2• 8 years ago

There areno jobs in these areas in middle America. And sometimes the water and air is poison where there is affordable housing anyway in these places. We need social programs that actually help and that actually are accessible. Some of the Medicaid forms I've seen were more difficult to complete than a dissertation and turn everyone away until they literally have nothing, i.e. when it's so too late for help to actually help in any lasting way that could be built upon.

jjeaff3• 8 years ago

You are beyond ill informed. The huge majority of middle American housing is located in areas with much better air quality than any of the big coastal cities like Los Angeles.

maximexx• 8 years ago

Every living being on this planet should have the basic right for a house. It's a primary need. Houses should not be part of the "free" economy and should not be allowed to be traded for profit. If this pyramid scheme continues the future will look very grim for billions of people.

kenhwang2• 8 years ago

But does that house need to be near the beach? Why not Kansas?

Johnny5553• 8 years ago

Perhaps if you said "home", I'd agree with you. Not everyone needs, or even should have a house. But everyone should have housing.

Torwald• 8 years ago

I strongly disagree with everything you just said. (Except the overall notion that all people should get to their rights.)

prostoalex4• 8 years ago

Can the house be mobile?

mirimir6• 8 years ago

Reading this, I'm reminded of hobo life during the Great Depression. Hoovervilles. And in those days, you could at least get around on freight trains.

I'm also reminded of my own time living on the road. In my late teens through early 20s, as an illegal immigrant. And indeed, I spent some of that time in LA and SF. But mostly in the Pacific Northwest. Living in the forest, and squatting.

But it wasn't that bad, because I had many friends. And it was fun to drift aimlessly. But eventually, I went to college and grad school, so hey.

sshine• 8 years ago

I was homeless for a year in my late teens. But I also felt it didn't hurt me because I was young enough to still feel that it was a choice of my own, and I did go to school.

As the article points out, only a third of homeless are addicted, so the problem is not really about the homelessness itself. It's about losing hope and being alienated by your own community. I always wondered why so many homeless people like to flock around where it's crowded.

mirimir6• 8 years ago

I didn't actually feel "homeless" in a bad way. Someone we knew usually had a place where we could crash. And some source of food and money. Weed and LSD were always available, and sometimes psilocybe and peyote. But then, this was decades ago, before "homelessness" became a thing.

robert_foss2• 8 years ago

I write software for a living, and have on more than one occasion had the opportunity to live and work in California.

Seeing the poverty and, how the poor are treated in San Fransisco, Los Angeles, and every other large US I've been to, is so degrading and offensive that the idea of participating in the financial system that sustains it is unacceptable.

Surely I can't be the only one who feels this way.

Johnny5553• 8 years ago

Where have you seen the poor and homeless treated better? It's a hard problem to solve, even by throwing a lot of money at the problem. Part of the problem is that some people want to be homeless (for a variety of reasons (or a combination of reasons) like not losing their independence, not trusting the system, wanting to continue a drug/alcohol habit, bad experiences with the system previously, mental illness, etc).

In a country that values individual rights, it's not clear how you help that person get off the streets without forcing them. In a city with relatively mild climate like LA or SF, it's even harder to get the homeless into shelters where social services can more effectively help them.

Granted, there are plenty of people that do want to get off the streets, but not everyone living on the streets is willing to make the sacrifices to do so.

robert_foss2• 8 years ago

Where have you seen the poor and homeless treated better?

In most countries with functional social security networks. Canada, Germany and Sweden.

So while the above are leaps and bounds better, they aren't flawless. Canada has lots of mentally ill people on the streets due to _very_ poor mental health care available to them. And Germany and Sweden have people from Romania begging on the streets, since they're part of a group of people that have been historically (and currently are) mistreated in their homeland.

In a country that values individual rights..

If you want people off the streets, offer them free housing. There is even (and remarkably so) an example of this from Utah, where free housing was provided to the ones in need. And the city saved money doing it, since fewer other services were needed as a result.

Also, separately, I find this argument to be a bit of a straw man, since the treating homeless people decently and having strong individual rights aren't fundamentally opposed. In America some things are done well collectively, in the interest of everyone, like providing roads.

latch• 8 years ago

Frankly, despite your caveats, I think this is a reckless and hurtful thing to think and say. Unless you have sources, it's just a dismissive logical extreme. Sure we can find some non-mentally ill people who want to be homeless. But let's focus on getting the 2.5 million children off the streets rather than even looking at framing this as an individual freedom issue.

I've been to a lot of places for a prolonged periods of time. The only place that has ever made me think of LA was Seoul. Every other city, no matter how poor, was in considerably better shape.

One difference that I feel is key, are housing regulations. You can put up 4 cement walls, with a cement floor and corrugated metal sheet roof, meet no safety standard, but still have a home. An address, a place of safety, where you can cook, clean clothes, and have access to electricity and water (possibly not legally, and certainly not reliably). Where your kids have light and can read and do their homework. Often housing 3 or 4 generations and forming their own community.

icelancer2• 8 years ago

It was a significant reason I didn't continue working in San Jose, which is roughly 1000x worse.

San Jose, Costa Rica, that is.

mirimir6• 8 years ago

Indeed. True story. I was drifting through the mountains of southern Mexico with some friends, in an old pickup. We encountered an old woman, carrying a large pot, and gave her a ride to a nearby town, maybe ~10 km away.

So it turns out that she had made the pot. Mined the clay. Fired it in charcoal from a wood fire. And she was intending to sell it for several pesos, with which she'd buy corn, beans and chillies. Walking both ways.

mirimir6• 8 years ago

I get what you say. And there's a lot more poverty in the US than what you see in large cities. I recall being very disturbed by my first Amtrak from NYC to DC. North Philly. Somewhere further south, north of Baltimore. And damn, you can see some sad areas from the Northeast Extension of the PA Turnpike. And on back roads in the Southeast generally.

DoreenMichele5• 8 years ago

Housing policy in the US is a very large part of the problem. Tax incentives, financing mechanisms, zoning codes and myriad other factors have helped make affordable housing nearly non existent. Our default expectation in the US is that young single people rent a multi bedroom place designed for a nuclear family and share it with roommates, who may be total strangers. If for any reason whatsoever that doesn't work for you, well, fuck you. Enjoy sleeping under a bridge while cops harass you.

We really need to stop talking about The Homeless in this country and start talking about the housing crisis. No one can get a handle on how you fix homelessness when we focus on the people who are homeless. But we could make a lot of headway on the problem if we tackled the housing piece of it.

It would not get everyone off the street. But it would, for example, get retirees off the street whose income will not cover rent because we simply do not have housing at the price point they need.

prostoalex4• 8 years ago

myriad other factors have helped make affordable housing nearly non existent

That's quite a blanket statement for the entire US. Can we confidently claim that no affordable housing whatsoever exists in Detroit, Baltimore, rural Pennsylvania, non-metropolitan Texas, or Midwestern states, where in some places http://freelandks.com/ one can still get free land?

The problem seems to arise when everybody is vying for roughly the same space - large coastal cities with mild weather, proximity to public transportation, beaches, decent restaurants, some entertainment scene, job growth and economic prospects.

Same coastal cities also seem to be earthquake-prone and therefore require more expensive (than aforementioned Midwestern states) building codes and safety regulations. As the cities are dense, there's a set of regulations in regards to mandatory parking, green zones and other stuff that's just peculiar to large cities. Combined with higher than average cost of labor, the construction and compliance costs alone command a premium, and that's before we get into land prices.

JumpCrisscross2• 8 years ago

If for any reason whatsoever that doesn't work for you

What category of young person, wanting to live in an expensive city, cannot have roommates?

bamboozled2• 8 years ago

You're not alone.

I've lived in two major cities of the world, spent time in many others; However, I've never seen anything as bad as San Francisco and surrounding areas. Some of my colleagues are from Europe and felt so shocked and uneasy about what we saw.

I hate to say it, but it definitely left a bad impression of the USA on my friends and I. It certainly made me question a lot of the things the US claims to stand for.

Land of the free and home of the brave? If you say so...

DoreenMichele5• 8 years ago

When I was homeless and collecting recyclables for the money, thus picking up after housed people with zero respect for the land who just threw stuff on the ground everywhere, I often called it land of the sleeze, home of the depraved.

Cthulhu_• 8 years ago

Land of the free and home of the brave? If you say so...

Yeah as in, people are free to be homeless if they didn't work hard enough. It's the Trump argument, he's a self-made man who kicked off with a small loan of just one million. A lot of Republican, anti-socialist voters are poor, but don't see themselves as poor but "temporarily underfinanced". And the truly destitute / homeless apparently lose their right to vote.

YaxelPerez• 8 years ago

Oh, definitely. America's hatred of poor people is ingrained into it's culture. The prevailing attitude is that if you're poor, it probably your fault. Many evangelical christians go so far as to say that if you're poor, it's because god is punishing you for being a bad person. People love getting mad when they see a homeless person with a cellphone, or a mother buying a steak with food stamps, because poor people are seen as "leeches on society".

jernfrost2• 8 years ago

Good example of how private charity doesn’t work. The US has gotten ever wealthier, or primarly the 1% the exact portion of the population who should have been most capable of funding charity. Yet this problem grows. Charity is able feed people but not turn around people’s lives. You need comperhensive government programs for that.

refurb4• 8 years ago

SF spends $150M on homeless and it's one of the worse cities for homelessness.

You really think money is the problem?

Letmesleep69• 8 years ago

Am I alone in thinking that 150 million is not that much? When I was in SF i saw so much poverty and suffering I could not believe my eyes and I have seen homelessness plenty before. Build more affordable, high density homes and give them to the homeless for free for a few years with high amounts of care if you want to solve the problem.

prostoalex4• 8 years ago

The economically disadvantaged are the easiest to help as they cling to every opportunity to get their life back in shape.

But then you have the mentally ill, mentally disturbed, drug addicts and the criminals to abet them. A coordinator for a local charity in Santa Ana had a post on a local NextDoor mentioning that their charity was running below capacity. Few reasons people would refuse any help and continue tenting by the river included:

* general requirement by the charities to have drug- (which includes alcohol-) free zones

* people didn't want to be "in the system" whatever that meant, many did not want to be tracked by government or agency of any sort

* some homeless objected to the religious nature of some charities

* for some easy access to drugs was paramount (and concentrated encampments enable this to great degree)

* other mental issues

Not sure these can all be solved by more money.

kenhwang2• 8 years ago

So, the thing that always bothers me about how Los Angeles is reported on is the lack of normalization for population. LA is really big with a lot of people. It will naturally have higher population of homelessness.

57k/10.2m is ~0.56% homelessness, which is about par with Seattle (11.6k/2.1m = ~0.55%), but significantly better than SF (7k/870k = ~0.80%) or NY (77k/8.5m = ~0.90%).

Given LA's unrelenting rapid gentrification, wealth, and income inequality, I think the situation can easily get much worse.

But at least we're trying, trying to make the situation better, or at least slow down its progression. I'd hate to see us give up and invest in anti-loitering securitybots instead. The wealthy here haven't become that out of touch and scornful yet, but keep writing articles like this and maybe they might.

ShabbosGoy2• 8 years ago

I'd hate to see us give up and invest in anti-loitering securitybots instead.

Why would you need securitybots? Orange County police departments already do it for free by dumping homeless people in Long Beach.

The wealthy here haven't become that out of touch and scornful yet

I guess you’ve never interacted with people who live in Newport Beach. Or LA for that matter. Are you sure you’re from LA?

cylinder• 8 years ago

It's an example of major cities taking on what really is a federal problem. NYC and LA run welfare programs using local tax dollars. This is so obviously a federal-level problem that requires a massive federal project to solve. Putting this burden on the local residents of LA, SF, NYC etc is incredibly unfair. It's also inefficient to build homeless shelters in dense LA county when there is so much cheap land throughout the country (with people looking for work, too).

Bucephalus355• 8 years ago

All of this reminds me of the modern version of the Great Depression. Economists have gotten smarter this time around and have covered up the unemployment rate and CPI, but it’s mostly the same.

Studs Terkel, probably the most famous interviewer / oral historian who’s ever lived, wrote a book containing hundreds of oral histories about the Depression. It sounds just like today:

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression https://www.amazon.com/dp/1565846567/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Yh8K...

grondilu• 8 years ago

It's a bit paradoxical that homeless people can be a problem in a specific geographic area. By definition, it should be easy to relocate them.

RickJWagner• 8 years ago

It's a really hard problem. Some people are down on their luck and can be helped. Some people are out of control, there is no way to babysit them to normalcy. Money won't solve it.

Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis

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