We avoid numbers just like we try to avoid the people they
quantify:
“¢bull; 88,000: the number of homeless people in Los Angeles
County ““ three and a half times the number of students at
UCLA.
“¢bull; 12,000: the number of homeless people who live in the
area downtown known as Skid Row ““ the largest concentration
of the homeless in the entire United States.
Westwood is no stranger to homelessness. Though we simply prefer
not to think about it too much, the numbers confront us with the
truth: More people are ignored and disenfranchised in L.A. County
than anywhere else in the nation.
It doesn’t make you feel very good about walking out of
your way to avoid being asked for money.
Here’s a rosier number: $12 billion. That’s the
amount of money it will cost the county over 10 years to put a roof
over the head of every homeless person between Skid Row and Santa
Monica Pier, according to a Daily News article citing a study by
the Bring L.A. Home Blue Ribbon Panel.
In a city where, for decades, the Los Angeles Police Department
and the transient population have been locked in a dreary dance
““ police officers arresting the homeless and then shuffling
them off to jail or simply dropping them on Skid Row, only to
arrest them again if they haven’t died yet ““ this month
has shown a heartening flurry of attempts to help those who we
usually help only when they have cornered us in line at Buck
Fitty’s asking for the assortment of nickels we don’t
mind getting rid of.
Just days before the announcement of the $12 billion plan, which
calls for a drastic increase in the amount of affordable housing
and short-term housing available to the poor as well as an increase
in funding for social services, the L.A. County Board of
Supervisors approved a $100 million plan to establish five centers
across the county to provide shelter and care for the
transient.
On Friday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of
six homeless plaintiffs, saying it was unconstitutional for the
LAPD to arrest people merely for sitting or lying on the sidewalk;
they decided that the ordinance forbidding sitting or lying on the
sidewalk was essentially criminalizing the uncontrollable state of
being homeless, especially considering lack of shelter beds in Los
Angeles.
These plans do have their critics. Many don’t want
shelters and social centers to be built around the city, preferring
the homeless to stay downtown; many find the plans unfocused and
potentially unfeasible; and some simply do not wish to spend so
much money on those who don’t contribute to the municipal
pot.
But a wide-ranging and ambitious plan is better than no plan at
all.
It is time for those of us who call Los Angeles home to
recognize our homeless problem, to realize that 80,000 people
can’t pull themselves out of poverty when there is no
structural system for helping them do so, and to commit $12 billion
to those people to whom most of us individually would never even
think of giving $12.
It may seem counterintuitive to be praising a court ruling and
civic plans that effectively allow the homeless to stay on the
streets as long as they’re not being disorderly or
disruptive, and even potentially bring more of the homeless into
the area if a shelter is built nearby. It would certainly make it
easier on our psyches if the entire transient population were
shuffled off to Skid Row, where we would no longer have to think
about them.
Instead, these new developments signal the opposite: an immense
new drain of our tax dollars, a restriction on the LAPD’s
ability to cart the homeless carte blanche off to jail or to Skid
Row, and the construction of five centers for the homeless in
suburban areas of the county in order to spread the problem out
instead of continuing to use downtown as an inescapable vortex for
the disenfranchised.
Some neighborhoods are already beginning to voice displeasure
over the plans, feeling as if the city is somehow dumping
“that downtown problem” into their laps. It is the same
fundamental civic problem that plagues landfills, prisons, and
nuclear power plants: We would all like there to be more of them,
but none of us want them in our neighborhoods.
How appropriate that the centers to be built on behalf of the
homeless may themselves be without homes as L.A. municipalities
play hot potato over who has to build them.
Instead of that game, there must be a fundamental change in how
we view the homeless if these new plans are to have any chance of
success.
Whether this means that you will start giving money to those who
ask for it, that you will support shelters being built where you
live, or merely that you will support the use of your taxes to
build those shelters is, at least for now, immaterial.
What is most important right now is that the entire city of Los
Angeles gets behind a new vision to help our least fortunate, in
the same way that the city of New York has done ““ the number
of homeless people in New York City has fallen from 80,000 (nearly
as many as in Los Angeles) to 30,000 over the past several years as
the city has increased funding for helping the homeless to $750
million per year.
L.A. officials working on the proposal even visited Times Square
““ the national epicenter of the homeless problem before its
massive cleanup project ““ for inspiration.
The national epicenter of the homeless problem is now the city
we call home. The price tag to fix it is $12 billion. Are we, as a
community, up to the challenge? Can we make a crisis that we have
ignored into a priority? Or, when asked, will we simply avert our
eyes and pretend that we don’t have any change?
E-mail Atherton at datherton@media.ucla.edu. Send general
comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.