Why Ending Homelessness Is Political Poison
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_ending_homelessness_is_political_poi
son_20150903/
Posted on Sep 3, 2015
By Bill Boyarsky
Bill Boyarsky
This is the first installment in a three-part series that Truthdig columnist
Bill Boyarsky is writing on homelessness.
On a hot, sultry day in July, I walked through Los Angeles Skid Row, the
largest and most infamous of the citys numerous homeless encampments. It is
a little-visited part of a city better known for its celebrities and showy
materialisma city where the very rich build mansions with a dozen or more
bedrooms while the poorest of the poor live on sidewalks, under freeways or
in parks.
Buildings trapped the streets heat. Some residents sat in tents or under
tarps in stifling conditions. Others were standing or sitting on the
sidewalk, with their backs against the buildings. So packed were the
sidewalks with people, tents and possessions that sometimes I had to walk in
the street. I was so intent on observing the scene that at one point I
stumbled and almost fell. A homeless man asked if I was OK. I assured him I
was. He patted me on the back and told me to be careful.
Skid Row is a very California sceneone from the underside of the mythic
state of sunshine and dreams of wealth. The down and out, as well as many
other types of outsiders, have always had a rough time in this lush land.
Decades ago, immigrants who had moved westwardthe Okies, Arkies and
otherswere pushed into farm labor camps or were blocked at the California
border. Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in camps during World War II. An
alien land law banned Asians from owning farmland, and in the states early
days, invading Anglos and their heirs persecuted Mexicans and Native
Americans. Remnants of that attitude linger.
What those oppressed groups all had in common was being treated as an under
class by the governing majority. The people in the homeless encampments have
now inherited this unfortunate status.
Today, the problem of homelessness is immense. The National Center on
Homelessness & Poverty estimates that in the United States, 2.5 million to
3.5 million people sleep in shelters, in temporary transitional housing, on
sidewalks, in parks, underneath freeways and on buses and trains. An
additional 7.4 million, the center says, are living with relatives or
friends after having lost their own homes. These figures are far from
exact, because they come from several different sources, each with their
own way of counting the homeless. But they reflect the depth of the problem.
There are 25,686 homeless in the city of Los Angeles, the largest city in
Los Angeles County, where the homeless number 44,359, according to the Los
Angeles Homeless Services Authority. There is definitely a racial component.
African-Americans are the hardest-hit, composing 47 percent of the homeless
population, although only about 9 percent of Los Angeles residents are
black.
Mollie Lowery, a consultant at Housing Workswhich finds housing and care
for the homelesshas worked with the homeless on Skid Row for decades. She
told me that Los Angeles is a city of abundance, but the abundance is not
shared. Steve Clare, the executive director of Venice Community Housing
Corp., which also helps people find housing, shared a similar view. Los
Angeles is known as the meanest big city in America, he said.
While the popular idea is that most of the homeless are addicted or mentally
ill, experts say the reality is much more complicated. A more common story
goes like this: A single parent loses a job, cant pay the rent and moves in
with friends or family. Next, the streets.
We have single mothers with limited job skills, couldnt pay their rent,
were evicted, Rabbi Marvin Gross told me. Most of the people we work with
are born into poverty.
Gross, who leads Union Station Homeless Servicesan organization that serves
a wide area of Los Angeles County reaching into the San Gabriel Valley
suburbswas referring to victims of an economy that is brutal to the poor.
When moving in with friends and relatives doesnt work out, he said, parents
and kids may end up living in their cars, with Mom or Dad always on the
lookout for welfare workers who might take the children away. From there,
the next move is downward to the streets and the parks, a process that would
drive anyone to the edge of sanity.
Homelessness has always been with us. The hobo is a familiar figure in
American history and culture, and so is the term skid row, which came into
common use in the U.S. in the 19th century, first as a timber-industry
reference. In a social context, it took on greater resonance during the
Great Depression.
In 2007, the Great Recession put many women and men on the streets as it
wiped out jobs and savings. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Congress,
particularly the House, cruelly slashed federal funds for the subsidies that
help pay for housing for the poor.
The Houses
proposal severely limits our ability to end homelessness,
invest in distressed communities, and provide housing support for very low
income households, Secretary Julián Castro of the Department of Housing and
Urban Development said in a statement last May. In a nation founded on the
principle of equality of opportunity, its unacceptable to support anything
less than an expansion of opportunity for all.
I have visited Los Angeles Skid Row for years while reporting for the Los
Angeles Times and now for Truthdig, but I have never seen it so bad. It is
now smaller and much more crowded than it once was. Gentrification has come
to once sleazy parts of downtown, squeezing Skid Row into fewer blocks. Old
hotels, which once offered low-cost housing, and office buildings have
become expensive lofts, and tattered saloons have become fashionable
purveyors of craft beer.
I finally arrived at my destination, the headquarters of Los Angeles
Community Action Network, which organizes the impoverished residents of Skid
Row and South L.A. to fight for decent housing. It also vigorously opposes
punitive city laws aimed at criminalizing homelessness.
I gratefully accepted a bottle of water and sat down with Becky Dennison,
the co-director. We talked about Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Attorney
Michael Feuer, two liberals involved in the controversy over the new laws,
which Feuers office wrote.
After the election, Dennison said, Feuer called a meeting in his office with
representatives of the police department and businesses in the Skid Row
area.
He did not invite the grass-roots groups, she remembered. This was the
first couple of months after he took office.
Despite not being invited, Carol Sobel, a civil rights lawyer representing
the homeless, was there and insisted that homeless advocates go in.
They were not pleased to see us, Dennison added.
Dennison and the others pressed for more housing and a relaxation of tough
policing. We asked for regular trash collections and more bathrooms, she
said, with no result, yet there are more than 15,000 luxury units downtown
and [only] 900 low-income.
She said the police and the business people favored tough enforcement of the
laws. They said the homeless were creating crime. Since then, she
continued, enforcement has increased. We have not [previously] seen this
level of enforcement.
At the center of the controversy are three ordinances. One would ban the
homeless from camping in parks or leaving their possessions in them. Another
would make it a violation of the law for the homeless to put up tents or
tarpaulins on sidewalks, in alleys or in any other public place. A third
measure, awaiting approval, bans the homeless from living in motor vehicles.
These laws are as punitive as any law in the country, civil liberties
lawyers say, criminalizing behavior that the homeless cannot avoid because
they have no other place to go.
I wanted to know how liberal public officials in a reliably liberal city
could support such laws.
I asked the mayor. He is trying to satisfy property owners, business people
and other residents who want the homeless off the streets, but he doesnt
want to be inhumane to the downtrodden. Its the dilemma of liberals in city
halls from here to New York.
So far, he has halted enforcement of the laws until the City Council removes
some of their harsher penalty provisions. A City Council committee voted 3-2
to do this recently, but its not known whether the full council will
support the action.
Garcetti, a Democrat who represented the Hollywood area on the City Council
for 12 years, was elected mayor in 2013. Caution marked his tenure on the
councilwhere he rose to presidentjust as it has marked his time in the
mayors office. When police shootings, including those of two
African-American men, one homeless, provoked demonstrations, Garcetti was
reluctant to speak out on an issue that pitted the police against the black
community, avoiding the public peacemakers role that was badly needed.
Perhaps his caution stems from a belief that if he can survive City Hall,
the chance of higher office, and possibly a race for the Senate, awaits.
I think we should set the goal of ending homelessness, he told me. A lot
of people say dont talk about homelessness and dont talk about ending
homelessness because there is no political upside, the problem is
intractable.
But I have worked on this issue ever since I was 14 or 15.
When I was in junior high school, I used to come down and volunteer on Skid
Row.
It would be a surprise if Garcetti succeeded, although I hope he does. The
issue, as he suggested, is considered political poison. If a politician does
something for the homeless, he or she will be the target of rage from
businesses and entire neighborhoods.
Homelessness doesnt rate a mention on the presidential campaign trail. For
President Barack Obama, its an afterthoughtfar overshadowed by his
determination to get the Iran deal through. Republican reductions in funding
for housing aid for the homeless have occurred without a protest except from
homeless-advocacy organizations. The subject is ignored or followed
sporadically in the national media outside of policy-oriented journals.
Washington is happy to leave it in the hands of local politicians, cops and
reporters who cover city halls and city streets.
Out of sight and out of mind is the American treatment of the homeless. In
Los Angeles, out of sight means imprisonment in a house of horrors known as
county jail.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Why Ending Homelessness Is Political Poison
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_ending_homelessness_is_political_poi
son_20150903/
Posted on Sep 3, 2015
By Bill Boyarsky
Bill Boyarsky
This is the first installment in a three-part series that Truthdig columnist
Bill Boyarsky is writing on homelessness.
On a hot, sultry day in July, I walked through Los Angeles Skid Row, the
largest and most infamous of the citys numerous homeless encampments. It is
a little-visited part of a city better known for its celebrities and showy
materialisma city where the very rich build mansions with a dozen or more
bedrooms while the poorest of the poor live on sidewalks, under freeways or
in parks.
Buildings trapped the streets heat. Some residents sat in tents or under
tarps in stifling conditions. Others were standing or sitting on the
sidewalk, with their backs against the buildings. So packed were the
sidewalks with people, tents and possessions that sometimes I had to walk in
the street. I was so intent on observing the scene that at one point I
stumbled and almost fell. A homeless man asked if I was OK. I assured him I
was. He patted me on the back and told me to be careful.
Skid Row is a very California sceneone from the underside of the mythic
state of sunshine and dreams of wealth. The down and out, as well as many
other types of outsiders, have always had a rough time in this lush land.
Decades ago, immigrants who had moved westwardthe Okies, Arkies and
otherswere pushed into farm labor camps or were blocked at the California
border. Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in camps during World War II. An
alien land law banned Asians from owning farmland, and in the states early
days, invading Anglos and their heirs persecuted Mexicans and Native
Americans. Remnants of that attitude linger.
What those oppressed groups all had in common was being treated as an under
class by the governing majority. The people in the homeless encampments have
now inherited this unfortunate status.
Today, the problem of homelessness is immense. The National Center on
Homelessness & Poverty estimates that in the United States, 2.5 million to
3.5 million people sleep in shelters, in temporary transitional housing, on
sidewalks, in parks, underneath freeways and on buses and trains. An
additional 7.4 million, the center says, are living with relatives or
friends after having lost their own homes. These figures are far from
exact, because they come from several different sources, each with their
own way of counting the homeless. But they reflect the depth of the problem.
There are 25,686 homeless in the city of Los Angeles, the largest city in
Los Angeles County, where the homeless number 44,359, according to the Los
Angeles Homeless Services Authority. There is definitely a racial component.
African-Americans are the hardest-hit, composing 47 percent of the homeless
population, although only about 9 percent of Los Angeles residents are
black.
Mollie Lowery, a consultant at Housing Workswhich finds housing and care
for the homelesshas worked with the homeless on Skid Row for decades. She
told me that Los Angeles is a city of abundance, but the abundance is not
shared. Steve Clare, the executive director of Venice Community Housing
Corp., which also helps people find housing, shared a similar view. Los
Angeles is known as the meanest big city in America, he said.
While the popular idea is that most of the homeless are addicted or mentally
ill, experts say the reality is much more complicated. A more common story
goes like this: A single parent loses a job, cant pay the rent and moves in
with friends or family. Next, the streets.
We have single mothers with limited job skills, couldnt pay their rent,
were evicted, Rabbi Marvin Gross told me. Most of the people we work with
are born into poverty.
Gross, who leads Union Station Homeless Servicesan organization that serves
a wide area of Los Angeles County reaching into the San Gabriel Valley
suburbswas referring to victims of an economy that is brutal to the poor.
When moving in with friends and relatives doesnt work out, he said, parents
and kids may end up living in their cars, with Mom or Dad always on the
lookout for welfare workers who might take the children away. From there,
the next move is downward to the streets and the parks, a process that would
drive anyone to the edge of sanity.
Homelessness has always been with us. The hobo is a familiar figure in
American history and culture, and so is the term skid row, which came into
common use in the U.S. in the 19th century, first as a timber-industry
reference. In a social context, it took on greater resonance during the
Great Depression.
In 2007, the Great Recession put many women and men on the streets as it
wiped out jobs and savings. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Congress,
particularly the House, cruelly slashed federal funds for the subsidies that
help pay for housing for the poor.
The Houses
proposal severely limits our ability to end homelessness,
invest in distressed communities, and provide housing support for very low
income households, Secretary Julián Castro of the Department of Housing and
Urban Development said in a statement last May. In a nation founded on the
principle of equality of opportunity, its unacceptable to support anything
less than an expansion of opportunity for all.
I have visited Los Angeles Skid Row for years while reporting for the Los
Angeles Times and now for Truthdig, but I have never seen it so bad. It is
now smaller and much more crowded than it once was. Gentrification has come
to once sleazy parts of downtown, squeezing Skid Row into fewer blocks. Old
hotels, which once offered low-cost housing, and office buildings have
become expensive lofts, and tattered saloons have become fashionable
purveyors of craft beer.
I finally arrived at my destination, the headquarters of Los Angeles
Community Action Network, which organizes the impoverished residents of Skid
Row and South L.A. to fight for decent housing. It also vigorously opposes
punitive city laws aimed at criminalizing homelessness.
I gratefully accepted a bottle of water and sat down with Becky Dennison,
the co-director. We talked about Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Attorney
Michael Feuer, two liberals involved in the controversy over the new laws,
which Feuers office wrote.
After the election, Dennison said, Feuer called a meeting in his office with
representatives of the police department and businesses in the Skid Row
area.
He did not invite the grass-roots groups, she remembered. This was the
first couple of months after he took office.
Despite not being invited, Carol Sobel, a civil rights lawyer representing
the homeless, was there and insisted that homeless advocates go in.
They were not pleased to see us, Dennison added.
Dennison and the others pressed for more housing and a relaxation of tough
policing. We asked for regular trash collections and more bathrooms, she
said, with no result, yet there are more than 15,000 luxury units downtown
and [only] 900 low-income.
She said the police and the business people favored tough enforcement of the
laws. They said the homeless were creating crime. Since then, she
continued, enforcement has increased. We have not [previously] seen this
level of enforcement.
At the center of the controversy are three ordinances. One would ban the
homeless from camping in parks or leaving their possessions in them. Another
would make it a violation of the law for the homeless to put up tents or
tarpaulins on sidewalks, in alleys or in any other public place. A third
measure, awaiting approval, bans the homeless from living in motor vehicles.
These laws are as punitive as any law in the country, civil liberties
lawyers say, criminalizing behavior that the homeless cannot avoid because
they have no other place to go.
I wanted to know how liberal public officials in a reliably liberal city
could support such laws.
I asked the mayor. He is trying to satisfy property owners, business people
and other residents who want the homeless off the streets, but he doesnt
want to be inhumane to the downtrodden. Its the dilemma of liberals in city
halls from here to New York.
So far, he has halted enforcement of the laws until the City Council removes
some of their harsher penalty provisions. A City Council committee voted 3-2
to do this recently, but its not known whether the full council will
support the action.
Garcetti, a Democrat who represented the Hollywood area on the City Council
for 12 years, was elected mayor in 2013. Caution marked his tenure on the
councilwhere he rose to presidentjust as it has marked his time in the
mayors office. When police shootings, including those of two
African-American men, one homeless, provoked demonstrations, Garcetti was
reluctant to speak out on an issue that pitted the police against the black
community, avoiding the public peacemakers role that was badly needed.
Perhaps his caution stems from a belief that if he can survive City Hall,
the chance of higher office, and possibly a race for the Senate, awaits.
I think we should set the goal of ending homelessness, he told me. A lot
of people say dont talk about homelessness and dont talk about ending
homelessness because there is no political upside, the problem is
intractable.
But I have worked on this issue ever since I was 14 or 15.
When I was in junior high school, I used to come down and volunteer on Skid
Row.
It would be a surprise if Garcetti succeeded, although I hope he does. The
issue, as he suggested, is considered political poison. If a politician does
something for the homeless, he or she will be the target of rage from
businesses and entire neighborhoods.
Homelessness doesnt rate a mention on the presidential campaign trail. For
President Barack Obama, its an afterthoughtfar overshadowed by his
determination to get the Iran deal through. Republican reductions in funding
for housing aid for the homeless have occurred without a protest except from
homeless-advocacy organizations. The subject is ignored or followed
sporadically in the national media outside of policy-oriented journals.
Washington is happy to leave it in the hands of local politicians, cops and
reporters who cover city halls and city streets.
Out of sight and out of mind is the American treatment of the homeless. In
Los Angeles, out of sight means imprisonment in a house of horrors known as
county jail.
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