Seeing a homeless person in Westwood or in neighboring cities around UCLA is not uncommon for many students.
However, it can be an unpleasant and shocking experience to witness, especially if you are not a native to Los Angeles, said Angela Liu, a fourth-year neuroscience student and administration director of the Hope 4 Homeless Project.
The Hope 4 Homeless Project will be hosting the Homeless Health Awareness Colloquium today which will feature experts in the field of homelessness. They will share their insight on what it really means to be homeless, and how the community can get involved to help these people.
“I couldn’t believe how many homeless people live in Los Angeles and the drastic contrast … you have Beverly Hills and Bel Air down the street which has no homeless people, and then in Santa Monica and Westwood you see a huge population of them,” she said.
The oft-ignored but everpresent homeless population in the city can be explained by Los Angeles’ amazing year-round weather, said Scott Fears, a psychiatrist at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center and one of four speakers at the colloquium tonight.
“It’s not that Los Angeles is doing anything wrong for homeless people, it’s just that the weather is great,” Fears said. “If you’re going to be homeless, San Diego and Los Angeles have the best weather for it … you can be homeless in L.A. much easier than you can in Chicago or New York.”
Fears plans to discuss the psychiatric issues specifically affecting homeless people and how the public treats them.
He said homeless people who are on the streets for the long term are usually so depressed or psychotic that they lack the cognitive skills, the concentration or the focus needed to work a job or pay their bills.
“There are many reasons for why people become homeless. For some people, it’s temporary and financially they’re on the edge or they lose their job or something happens which leads to homelessness,” Fears said. “A lot of these people are homeless for two months to a year and then they come back on board.”
It is hard to imagine that many people could have been homeless at one point in their lives. For example, Vincent Moore, president and founder of Anew Rehabilitation Center and a speaker at the colloquium, has played a very active role in the rehabilitation of the homeless in L.A. At one point in his life, Moore himself was homeless.
Not only is Moore a graduate of L.A. Mission’s education program for the homeless, which grants people general education degrees after graduation, he also holds a doctorate in systematic theology.
Born to successful actors who were strong advocates of the civil rights movement, Moore had trouble accepting his parents’ goals for him.
“I wanted to escape the pressures my parents put on me, so I turned to drugs,” Moore said.
His drug abuse as a teenager led him to a life of homelessness for five years on Skid Row, a downtown area known to contain the highest concentration of homeless people in Los Angeles.
While living on Skid Row, Moore realized that his life was going nowhere.
He said he saw Skid Row as the lowest point of his life.
“I saw people living in cardboard boxes and sleeping on the street. … I had no hope, I was just eating out of trash cans,” Moore said. “To me it was like the end of the road, it was like hell, hell on earth.”
Moore started writing down the struggles he faced in the form of poems. Those poems turned into songs that he and other homeless people would sing in local churches.
Not until he met a music producer at a television show who invited Moore’s group to sing did he find his way out of homelessness.
The kind act of the church he was involved with gave him a new outlook on life. Moore said he believes students can make an enormous impact on the current situation Los Angeles faces.
“The best way to help homeless people is to first come in contact with a homeless person yourself. You can do this by volunteering in organizations like L.A. Mission, located in downtown,” Moore said.
The group hopes the colloquium will not only raise awareness about homelessness, but that it will also show students the current struggles faced by homeless people in terms of health care.