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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Los Angeles, the second largest city in the United States, with its oh-so clement weather and progressive populace has become the epicenter of America’s homelessness crisis, the poster child of what not to do with men, women and children living on the streets and in cars.
During his reign as governor, Ronald Reagan reduced funding for psychiatric hospitals in California, pushing the institutionalized out onto the streets with less than adequate provision for their care.
Combining the numbers of Americans returning from Vietnam broken in mind and with a limited ability to assimilate back into society with the deepening recession of the mid-70s, this was a recipe for disaster.
As president, Reagan then claimed it was the fault of left-wing lawyers who shut down the hospitals to protect the rights of the mentally ill that caused them to be dumped in the streets when it was his own gubernatorial penny-pinching that initiated the disaster.
The rise of the neo-cons under his presidency then led to the evisceration of union power and the decline in wages across the board. This was augmented by spiraling inflation and a decline in jobs for unskilled workers as industries mechanized en masse.
Those already on the street, self-medicating to relieve their suffering, were soon joined by the victims of the first wave of drug epidemics, followed and aggravated by the AIDS plague.
As racism was reduced on some fronts by regulation, people of color continued to suffer disproportionately from discriminatory housing policies, evictions, and the collapse of public housing, as its funding became a profit center for the wealthy (and white).
Redlining policies which concealed the overt racism of ostensibly integrated cities in economic stratification, drove exponentially increasing inequality by forcing Blacks into neighborhoods where the purchase prices went down, not up, leaving would-be homeowners on the street instead of participating in the American dream.
In the name of ensuring no-one took advantage of the social services net, government after government – federal, state, and local – added layers of complexity to the application for any type of benefit, essentially forcing those for whom help was intended out on the streets in despair.
Only those who could pay for lawyers to help navigate the bureaucracy succeeded. Which is why there is more corporate welfare today than there is for the disabled and the disillusioned.
Homeless counts don’t include all those couch-surfing, all those living in storage areas, cars and trailers, those hidden in condemned housing or currently in prison or detox or hospitals, so what’s reported is but a fraction, albeit a large one.
Hitting people over the head with horrendous statistics only thickens our skin, makes us turn away from the unbearable reality.
Ordinary people every day drive by tents below underpasses, pass by the homeless with their canine companions at freeway exits, step over drunks bumming cigarettes outside banks.
We’ve approved Measure H and Prop HHH, we’ve paid our taxes, what more can we do?
First of all, we need to ask the homeless what they want…
Not someone who’s been on the street and is looking to game the system so that they can get ahead. A practice learned long ago from the non-profits out to justify their own continued existence.
Just a regular human pushed out in the cold (or heat) by bankruptcy, by domestic abuse, by lack of consistent health care, by addiction, by a legal system that does not respect the poor, by unaffordable housing...
Matthew Desmond’s book Poverty, by America, points out that poverty in the United States is the result of deliberate policies: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct.”
The takeaway is that poverty persists so some people can profit.
The Trump government’s response to the pandemic was a deliberate choice, one of violence, targeting those with black and brown skins who worked in service jobs and were unlikely Trump supporters.
During the pandemic, frontline workers – for Amazon, in hospital systems and grocery stores – generated billions for corporate bottom lines. At the same time, management pursued policies of longer work hours, fewer benefits and lower pay.
These policies cost over one million Americans their lives while countless millions more still suffer from their loss of loved ones or from long-Covid or other side effects of the virus or the vaccine.
Poor health is manufactured in America in the same way poverty is: by decisions that create and embed it.
The United States spends two to four times as much of its GDP on healthcare as any other developed nation. For what?
The lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable and treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and close to the highest suicide rates. The last magnified by all too easy access to guns.
Poor health and poverty, violence and homelessness are inextricably intertwined on the streets of Los Angeles.
The most devastating debilitation of the homeless starts when they go onto the streets, not before. So the goal must be to not allow them out the door in the first place.
A homeless shelter isn’t a home it’s a shelter with rules and people who are not your friends.
Let’s look at the existing financial and social costs of homelessness – police, EMS, multiple hospital visits, social workers, government review, encampment fires, resurgence of diseases like typhus and TB, the risks to our children. And those shelters.
In our City, it’s not housing that’s needed, it’s affordable housing. But the City and State keep paying developers to build, build, build… which continues to push up the price of all housing.
Where are they going to put the homeless when World Cup soccer and the Olympics come to town?
Housing here has soared is so far out of reach of most lower income earners that the only option may be to triple the minimum wage… or aggressively pursue a housing paradigm that is truly affordable.
The average cost of a one-bedroom apartment now runs about $2,400, with a two-bedroom costing close to $1,000 more. Per month. And rising rapidly.
Even with the City’s hourly minimum at $16.78, a minimum-wage Angeleno working a 40-hour week pulls in just $2,900 a month. Before taxes, before deductions for social security, Medicare, unemployment and, if they would be so lucky, before union dues, health and pension carve-outs.
Social security, Medicare and Federal/California unemployment takes that down below $2,500. Housing is therefore an overwhelming burden for too many, especially considering the need for food, medicine, gas and vehicle maintenance, clothing, and more.
An educated electorate understands that some of the true causes of our challenges are privatization and bureaucracy, tax breaks to corporations, real estate developers, and the rich, all of which have been steadily draining resources from affordable housing and social services.
The numbers of low income Angelenos – working people, children and seniors – who are housing and food threatened, are so enormous as to make any proposed policy untenable from the get-go.
While the state can now force cities to approve projects, they can’t force developers to build if there is no profit incentive.
So perhaps the real solution is to STOP using taxpayer dollars to enrich the wealthy, those who are already profiting off construction deals in a city with a hundred thousand vacancies, and to invest in a different, more holistic approach.
At the Federal level, every entity must stop bailing out the rich and, instead, offer a helping hand to those who need one. Start assisting individuals with their home foreclosures and medical bankruptcies. Stop bank bailouts, ban stock buybacks, slash corporate welfare, and crack down on all forms of income tax evasion. Remove tax dodges carved out for and abused by the 1%.
Los Angeles must say NO to the current system and seek a new paradigm, stop enriching fat-cat developers who have bought out politicians at City Hall.
‘How’ has to be up to those we’ve elected, those we are paying to find more courageous advisors, and solutions not platitudes.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
