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The Return of Insane Asylums and Internment Camps

On my walk from Studio City to Burbank along Riverside Dr., I passed a gentleman in only shorts. He was making trips between the curb where he had his things and a commercial building with a water spigot. He seemed to be both washing himself and filling containers with water which he then brought back to his little set up along the sidewalk. He muttered to himself while he seemed to manically make trips to find reasons to run the water. As I watched him, I thought, “Oh, this is going to make people angry.” I had just watched a news report about an apartment building owner who locked up her water spigots to stop the squatters across the street from stealing her water. Burbank is good at incentivizing the homeless to go somewhere else. I once heard a library patron comment on the homeless in the surrounding park that ‘we don’t do THAT here.” For the past ten years or so, the call from homeless activists has been for ‘housing first’ and ‘harm reduction’. Taxpayers have paid millions...
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Open Letter to Los Angeles Regarding Homelessness #Homelessness #LosAngeles #HomelessLA

I am the guy that you don’t want to hear from - the guy that doesn’t focus on blame, but instead focuses on responsibility. LA can neither administrate nor buy its way out of its homeless issues. Homelessness is a community problem and until communities start putting direct work into their own neighborhoods, homelessness will not lessen. LA has it bad. It’s expensive to live here and the weather and the marketing is good - so the poor and desperate will always be in LA in order to find SOME joy in their lives. They are PART of us. And just like in our families, people with problems can’t ‘be fixed’. The repairs to their lives won’t come quickly and successes take time and effort. We know this because that is the human condition. We accept these things with people we care for, but we deny that reality to people we don’t know. For strangers, we think of them in terms of program costs, turnaround times, and statistics. And, it just doesn’t work. We have created a class of throw-aw...
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Does White Privilege Include Homelessness? #whiteprivilege

I was at a dinner party the other night and one of the people there and her friends asked me if I acknowledged my privilege. I was awkwardly silent because I knew I was about to get verbally jumped. I replied, "everybody has privilege in some way." This was not well received, but I ended up fighting them off by reminding them that I work on homeless issues. I said, "The reason I work on homelessness is that poverty is a great equalizer. If you show me a gay black man with cancer, I'll show you a homeless gay black man with cancer. If you show me a disabled Native American veteran, I'll show you a homeless disabled Native American veteran." My point was that having a stable place to live and a support system is a privilege in and of itself. I don't deny that there are a lot of people who don't understand adversity. My mother said she never went without and she was always protected by her family. Personally, both of my parents were stable and I gre...
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Being Just A Number - Counting The Homeless

Back in 2010, I had a police officer tell me that a shopping cart equaled one homeless person and a tent equaled two. Since that day, I have been very suspect of the accuracy of homeless statistics. This week, I participated in the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count because I wanted to understand their particular methodology. We did count tents, but not shopping carts. The tents also seem to remain tents in the final numbers - instead of equating them to a number of people. The people running the count were very kind, but there was this air of protecting the volunteers from the homeless that was floating about. The training video explicitly stated that the homeless were people too, but went on to tell us to not talk to them "in order to keep their privacy". I kept imagining some guy coming up to me on the street, not saying anything, writing a tally mark down on a clipboard, and just walking away. I would be so sad. People talk to people. People count items. Homeless pe...
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'Click Bait' Homelessness - The Difficulties in Marketing Poverty

I just watched an interview clip where Conor Skehan (an Irish housing official) talked about the pitfalls of pulling on people's heartstrings. His point was that people are pulled into action when humans say they have no shelter - and this could be used as manipulation. The headline for the article I read about the interview focused on Mr. Skehan calling homelessness 'normal'. Because he called it normal, the publication that wrote about the interview is banking on its readers to think that that is a polarizing thing to say - it's their click bait. In the eleven years that I have been documenting homelessness in the US, I would agree that homelessness is normal. No person in any city I have visited  has ever said to me, "We don't have any homeless here." The interviewer asks Conor Skehan if it being normal makes it right. It seems as if the interview's subtext is this: Skehan: People need to calm down and not react to people crying 'homeless...
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Homeless Scams! How Can We Ever Give Again?!

Recently, a homeless man (Johnny Bobbitt) got tied up in a GoFundMe scam to bring in cash for himself and his (what I call) housed pimps. What was the scam? He said he rescued his female pimp from having to get out and walk to fill her own gas can while she was stranded on the side of the road. He was legitimately homeless. That wasn't a lie. But, in today's world, it's not enough to just be homeless or to just be a homeless veteran (which he was). Homeless people have to do something super in order for us to care about them. These pimps knew this. All three used the power of marketing and publicity to get the public really excited about The Beast rescuing The Damselle in Distress - just like in a fairy tale. And man, did it work. This one homeless guy got $400,000 in donations from frenzied people who thought they could really make a difference with the simple click of their donation buttons. See, we all want a good story, we are all followers, and we are all too busy ...
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It's Not Enough To Be Homeless For Us To Care

I've been telling stories about the homeless since 2010. I am always intrigued by the irony of who we as the public think homeless people are versus the reality of homeless people's daily ingenuity, coping powers, and life skills. At the same time, I want to let homeless people know that they are people worth my attention because if you value a person, they are likely to value themselves. And obviously, the opposite is also true. I've been hoping that these stories will resonate with the public - that the public will see that the homeless person is just like them and that that realization will inspire people to do something to get their neighbor off of the street. Instead, the public pays little attention until something about the homeless makes them angry (like poop in the streets), sad (like homeless people getting killed by sociopaths), or impressed (like a homeless kid getting into Harvard). My publicist says people work on emotion and judgment. She wants me to ...
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