L.A.'s Massive Homeless Problem
Homelessness affects the lives of all Angelenos, not just those forced to live on the streets. And it does so almost daily, in ways large and small.
Consider the pairs of thick gloves that George Abou-Daoud has stashed inside the nine restaurants he owns on the east side of Hollywood. When a homeless person accosts his customers, Abou-Daoud says, he can no longer count on the police for help; unless there’s an imminent threat to safety, he contends, they don’t respond quickly and can’t just haul the person away. So he’s had to take matters into his own hands, literally, by physically ejecting problematic homeless people himself. That’s why he has the gloves — to keep his hands clean.
Abou-Daoud’s gloves are a particularly bleak symbol of the relationship between the homeless and the non-homeless. But everyone’s got a story of one sort or another. Day in and day out, Metro riders step into trains with homeless people on them — often visibly disturbed or threatening, prompting nervous passengers to edge away or change cars. In downtown L.A., shop owners worry that customers will opt for suburban malls to avoid the panhandlers and glassy-eyed wanderers. In Venice, besieged businesses have banded together to share the cost of security guards and cleanup crews to clear garbage, bedding or worse from the sidewalks.
Across the city, drivers exiting freeways routinely encounter homeless people on the off-ramps shuffling from window to window requesting money. Libraries, train stations and public parks have become refuges for homeless people. In many residential neighborhoods and commercial districts, encampments have become a seemingly immutable fact of life.
As homelessness spreads across Los Angeles County — the official tally shows a 46% increase from 2013 to 2017 — it is drawing two conflicting responses, at times from the same people. There’s sympathy and a desire to help, but there’s also a sense of being invaded and perhaps even endangered — in terms of both physical safety and public health (see, for example, the state of emergency California declared last year over a hepatitis A outbreak that spread among the homeless, or the Skirball blaze that was sparked by a cooking fire in a homeless encampment). There’s an unavoidable, often unspoken, fear that the city around us may be in a state of irreversible decline, and a suspicion on the part of some that the rights of homeless people have trumped the rights of everyone else.
The increasing visibility of homelessness and destitution contributes to the uneasy feeling that the problem is closing in on everyone. It’s also a daily reminder that the values and systems to which we cling — liberty, democracy, free enterprise, the social contract that’s supposed to hold a community together, the safety net that is supposed to protect the most vulnerable — haven’t steered us out of this mess. Nor have our leaders.
It’s not surprising that some Angelenos are angry or even afraid. But we need to channel those concerns into constructive action.
The city and county must find a way to balance effectively the needs and rights of homeless people against the demands and expectations of everyone else. Respecting the rights of homeless people doesn’t mean consigning the sidewalks and parks permanently to tents and shopping carts, just as respecting the rights of property owners doesn’t mean rousting the unsheltered and shuffling them from one neighborhood to the next. Instead, what is needed are reasonable compromises that protect the health, safety and basic needs of homeless people while ensuring the community’s ability to function day in and day out. That, in turn, requires residents and businesses not just to accept the presence of homeless people, but to have a stake in getting them off the streets and into housing. (They should start by remembering that only a minority — though a visible one — of homeless people are mentally ill or drug addicted; many are simply down on their luck and pose no threat to others.)
Some compromises have already been laid out. What’s often been missing, though, is the political courage necessary to implement them. For example, the L.A. City Council adopted an ordinance two years ago that requires homeless people to abandon their carts and put most of their possessions in storage once the government has made a storage facility available nearby. The city, however, has been able to open only two such facilities, and only one — on skid row — has available storage space. Community opposition has killed or hamstrung projects in San Pedro and Venice.
Similarly, faced with mounting complaints about homeless people sleeping in their cars and campers, the council adopted an ordinance in late 2016 imposing a ban on people lodging in their vehicles overnight in residential areas. But the city has been far too slow to follow through on the safe parking areas it called for on property owned by churches, nonprofits and public agencies. That was at the heart of the compromise, and without it, the problem is merely shifted to commercial and industrial zones. Today, there is just one small safe parking lot in the city, at a church in South Los Angeles.
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Originally Posted by Zippyjuan
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