California: the homeless poor and the temporarily homeless rich
The blaze that swept through the hills of Bel-Air last week, destroying six homes and damaging a dozen others, was sparked by a cooking fire at a homeless encampment in a nearby ravine, Los Angeles officials said Tuesday.
The encampment was nestled in a canyon several hundred feet from Sepulveda Boulevard and the 405 Freeway, hidden from passing cars. For several years, it had been home to an unknown number of people, officials said.
That’s an area I know very very well. I used to pass that way on my journey to my ballet classes years ago.
Investigators said the fire had not been set deliberately and they have not found any of the people who lived there. The camp ”” one of scores of makeshift communities that have grown along freeways, rivers and open space across Los Angeles ”” was largely destroyed in the fire, leaving authorities with little evidence…
Nickie Miner, vice president of the Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council, said residents had long worried about the fire hazard from hillside homeless encampments, but “all the agencies’ hands seemed to be tied.”
“We knew it was only going to be a matter of time before something horrible happened,” Miner said.
Miner said she was skeptical of the proposed campaign to educate homeless people about fire risks. Los Angeles needs a massive regulatory overhaul like the one that followed the 1961 Bel-Air fire, she said, which should include eliminating hillside encampments.
The article goes on to say that the homeless population in the area has been growing. I’m not the least bit surprised, because rents have been growing as well, and the weather in southern California means that tent living is highly possible (compared to an area such as New England, for example). Although Los Angeles is a huge city, it’s mostly suburban and a great many of those suburban areas are surrounded by empty stretches of canyon and hillside, good for hiding such tent dwellings and highly subject to fire because of dry brush.
The homeless problem is a big one, and growing. It’s not even just a question of building affordable housing, although I assume that would be of some help. But a certain proportion (I’ve read differing estimates) of the homeless are mentally ill and/or addicts and/or alcoholics, and resist efforts to treat them or move them into housing, temporary or otherwise.
As I’ve posted before, the homeless problem is a direct consequence of the anti-establishment, pro-civil rights efforts of the 1960s.
The actual numbers may vary, but the majority of the chronically homeless are psychotic, drug and alcohol abusers, or both. When schizophrenics have the civil right to refuse medication, the right to engage in psychotic behavior, of course the numbers of the unhoused will grow.
Try visiting the Seattle/Tacoma area where I live. There are homeless camps under I-5 near downtown Seattle that are draws for homeless from every where as the local government just enables the addiction and violence that are rampant in these camps. Now they want to set up ‘safe injection’ sites for the heroin addicts. And yes housing is ridiculously expensive here in ‘Amazontown’ but its not like these people could afford much even if rents were lower. And then you have the run down motor homes which park on streets all over the Puget Sound area and are filled with our charming homeless population.
But that’s life living in a wildly left wing area I guess. Sad.
Freezing NH just had another article about our homeless hobos, & how EMS was called for a fellow with hypothermia ,EMS said they did 3 such calls last year. They live in tents& tarp sheeting, there are about 24 & up to 30 in the nicer weather. Paper reported some have jobs. They huddle around around a campfire.most nights. They were previously evicted from along the river & now have selected deserted RR tracks. -Some folks just like this lifestyle, the struggle, uncertainty, camaraderie who knows, it’s a free country. There is a shelter dedicated bldg in town. If it’s super cold they are off to the library during daytime.
MollyNH:
Oh yes, they exist in New England. But go visit California (LA and SF) and you will see something quite different—large camps that look almost like refugee camps, not small enclaves. The weather in California favors that sort of thing, New England does not.
The weather in western Washington isn’t that great either this time of year but they have the same refugee style camps. They raided one a while back and found hundreds of stolen bicycles. I really think a big part of it is how the local governments react. You get more of what you subsidize and these local governments here anyway are subsidizing homelessness.
The escalation in the homeless population (I’m looking out my office window right now, where on 12/31/15 my son and I phoned the fire department because the homeless living against the freeway on-ramp wall ignited a beautiful 60 foot pine) is a direct result of public monies being doled out to the “mentally” ill. Why the quote marks? I know of one personally (one of our subconstractors tried to help him w/employment over a period of time) who is a heroin addict who after repeated arrests by our city and incomplete stays at rehabs over the years, was deemed “mentally” ill. He blew through his parents +$300,000 inheritance upon their death and now receives $1000 per month from the city/state because of his mental condition. Any guess what he spends that money on? In the last year the number of drug addicts doing their deals in our parking lot here at work has increased dramatically. BROKEN!
Griffin–Just this week I noticed a big increase in the number of the homeless in our midst with bikes. And you are exactly right about the subsidizing. As the inmitable Milton Friedman said, “That which you want more of, reward.”
Yes the camps are in NE & country wide, smaller area you get a smaller version of it it s eems. And didn’t the courts say these people had rights to be doing this.
Just like crimes by illegals you got to accept it people.
(sarcasm warning)
When I’ve lived here in the US, it’s been in northern towns and cities. Thankfully, the cold climate keeps out most of the riffraff. That’s why I so greatly fear global warming.
P.S. I know next to nothing about the problem of homelessness, but I read Michael Totten’s articles pretty regularly, and last year he wrote a good piece on the homeless of Portland, where he lives. His observations might be applicable elsewhere.
For anybody who’s interested, here’s a link: https://tinyurl.com/y9cavbrb
I’ve bought more than a dozen of these books and given them away. This author presents a concise history of our country’s treatment of the mentally ill while sharing his family’s personal story. An informative account for what I believe is a HUGE issue of our times.
https://www.amazon.com/My-Brother-Ron-Personal-Deinstitutionalization/dp/1477667539
Bring back the poor farms. Get back, get back to where you once belonged.
Parker,
What about the workhouse?
When you shut down the snake pits, the world becomes th e snake pit.
I am always interested to read articles, such as the one to which you linked, Neo, that purport to address the problem of “the homeless” as though everyone living without a home is thereby a member of an amorphous, uniform mass of clones all exactly alike in appearance, intelligence and personality.
I’m not condemning that tendency at all. I get it. Everyone does it and I totally understand why. It’s because the sub-group of homeless people that we all encounter each day do all tend to look and act, (and smell), the same:- dirty, unpleasant and anti-social.
These are the people who inhabit the public square and whom we pass sleeping in bus shelters and in door ways and who wander in from their group encampments to solicit and lie around in parks drinking that are referred to in the article you link to and to which some of my fellow commenters have referred.
But these are merely the most visible cohort of the homeless. Because they are so visible and intrusive they become the public face and image of the homeless. And so the traits that brought them to that stage, and keep them there, tend to be attributed to all the homeless. It’s natural.
But it’s a tendency that misleads.These visible, dysfunctional “poster boys” for homelessness that so annoy us are, by and large, drug and alcohol addicted and/or mentally ill.
(The two groups often overlap but need not necessarily). Some of the alcoholics and drug addicts are not technically mentally ill and some of the mentally ill are not actually burdened by addiction. Members of both groupings do, however, tend to look and act, (and, yes, smell), alike to the rest of us.
Despite what many do-gooders will tell you, such people needn’t be romanticised. It is a very, very grim and dangerous way to live and frankly, is a wasteful way to pass one’s life because so much human potential goes unfulfilled. Homelessness for them is a symptom of a much deeper and chronic set of problems.
But there is no universal template for a homeless person.
Having volunteered in several capacities and at quite a few refuges and services targeting the homeless over the years the thing I learned and never expected to discover is that homeless people are as varied a group as the rest of us. Many are in fact far more resourceful and better people than I.
There are many “tribes” making up the homeless, most of whom are no threat to other people’s property or personal safety or to themselves.
No one, afterall, ever speaks of the “be-homed” as though having a home to go to at the end of the day should define all those who do, without more, as if all the people who go home each night to their own place are all exactly like each other: the same IQ, personality traits, likes and interests. It’s exactly the same for the homeless. That one common condition they share ought not to define them.
My experience working with people who lack a place of their own to go to has been that just like any other people they come to their current circumstance by different routes and more importantly, as all human beings always do, they each bring to the experience of homelessness their own unique set of personal resources.
A great many homeless people can be and each day are helped to lift themselves out of their predicament because they have nothing wrong with them that a job and a regular paycheck won’t cure. These are the people you will never know are homeless. Despite being about all day they are invisible to the rest of us. They simply have had no work for so long that their financial assets have been used up. Fortunately with many their spiritual and mental resilience is astounding and inspiring and they deserve to be respected as the individuals they are.
Studies routinely confirm that many citizens are at any one time just a paycheck or three away from homelessness and we all need to remember that. Statistically, some people will be unlucky enough to have their job off-shored in the interests of “fair trade” and global efficiency.
I was privileged over the years to meet many such people. The story is always the same. For a while they they hold it together but it gets harder over time. The experience of unemployment after 1 year is different to the experience of unemployment after 3, and so on.
Like the whisky priest in Graham Greene’s “The Power and The Glory” they undergo a relentless process of stripping away of material possessions over time but so many of them still manage to retain their self belief and self respect. That is no easy feat and it inspires me.
It riles me that the same SJW’s and their pet politicians that spend so much energy breaking down the Gay community into an entire alphabet of jumbled letters and who would criminalise any failure to refer to the gender-confused by their preferred form of address because their individuality is vital to their dignity are never concerned to show homeless people the same consideration. Instead such people persist in referring to homeless people as though they were just one single group and to the problem of homelessness as though it had only one cause and one solution.
Bring back the poor farms….What about the workhouse?
Bring back Single Residence Occupancy hotels. Some of them had a communal kitchen. History of S.R.O. residential hotels in San Francisco.
OTOH, some homeless want to live out in the woods. I once had a conversation with a homeless person about housing. I pointed out that at the time (circa 2000), a 2 BR apartment in the “diverse” part of town could be had for $400- which would mean that 4 could live rather cheaply. His reply was that he didn’t want to live in the “diverse” part of town. He preferred the woods.
One time I found a homeless person sleeping by our condo’s pool. I called the HOA manager, who called the cops.The cop gave the homeless guy a stern talking-to, informing him that the next time he was found on the premises, he would be arrested.
After he left, the cop commented that a lot of the homeless were alcoholics. The homeless guy fit the bill. I will spare the details how I knew.
Gringo Says:
December 13th, 2017 at 8:28 pm
Bring back the poor farms….What about the workhouse?
Bring back Single Residence Occupancy hotels.
* *
As usual, the solution to a problem made it even worse.
Removing a “blight” from one place just moved it to a worse locations and even worse living conditions.
Another thing the SRO situation illustrates is how well-intentioned movements (community activism in this case, but including feminism, environmentalism, and civil rights) morph into parodies of themselves that fail in their ostensible goals because they are captured by self-interested operators who change their aims and operations.
(also from your link)
“S.R.O. neighborhoods were targeted for elimination because their populations did not fit into the long-term plans of the economic-political elite. … “This land is too valuable to permit poor people to park on it.” …
The wave of S.R.O. demolitions began with the construction of the Bay Bridge and its ramps in the early 1930’s. With the public policy of urban renewal in the late 1940’s, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency became an important player in this onslaught calling for “blight removal” and revitalization essential for the city’s survival.
…
In the face of these powerful forces, community members marshaled opposition. They formed the Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment (T.O.O.R.) Through lawsuits, lobbying and advocacy T.O.O.R. and its supporters were able to delay but not stop the Yerba Buena Project… Organizing pressure compelled the Board of Supervisors to pass this law which banned demolition and conversion of S.R.O.’s unless an in lieu fee is paid to the city’s affordable housing replacement fund. Continued community activism led to the strengthening of the ordinance in 1990 as the Board of Supervisors increased the amount of the fee and gave neighborhood nonprofits legal standing to enforce it.”
Corporate greed in the center of the OWS and SJW homelands? How could that be?
(In some fairness, one could argue they are a reaction to the attitudes so clearly displayed in the SRO situation, but again, they do nothing to solve the problem, and may just make it worse.)
I don’t know what to say about this, except “sign of the times” and all that:
San Francisco animal shelter faces backlash after using robot to scare off homeless people. (https://tinyurl.com/yd6kgz7n)
Stephen Ippolito Says:
December 13th, 2017 at 8:11 pm
* * *
As part of my church assignments, I have done considerable work with the “disadvantaged” — not always homeless, but often only one step away, despite in most cases being very hard working and with decent personal standards of morality, and sincere family feelings.
They are very diverse personally, and many of them have a resilience and even cheerfulness in adversity I’m not sure I could achieve, but they do share one characteristic.
Most of them have no concept of planning ahead.
They will work until present needs are satisfied, but the idea of saving money for the future is almost inconceivable.
Aesop,
Agreed. Good point.
But then how does anyone, no matter how good they are at planning ahead, make financial provision in advance for years out of work ?
And that is the reality for some demographics.
PS. Damn the politicians who so blithely work to import countless new competitors for basic jobs each year when so many of their own are out of work.
When I did economics in my final year of High School they taught us that, all other things being equal, to increase the supply of a commodity is to lower its price.
Is that no longer the governing wisdom?
Why do that to one’s countrymen and women? It’s not just insane but so callous and cruel.
Aesop Fan
They are very diverse personally, and many of them have a resilience and even cheerfulness in adversity I’m not sure I could achieve, but they do share one characteristic.
Most of them have no concept of planning ahead.
That characteristic is not confined to the “disadvantaged.” I know someone in his 50s who is a skilled electrician. He has no problem finding work, as he is good at his craft. But he works when he wants to. In 30+ years as an electrician, he has maybe $1000 in the bank and no home ownership. No, he wasn’t cleaned out in a divorce. His frugal mother owns 3 properties- he probably figures why bother to own a home when he can inherit.
And here’s the problem with welfare of any kind… if you make it impossible to fail, a lot of people will have no incentive to succeed.
Now, I’m not arguing against having welfare programs, because there are obviously people who need them, but this will always be a problem. I don’t have any solutions, although some of the things we’ve abandoned from past eras might be better than what we are doing now.