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-away people. We think of them as disposable and many of them agree with us.
How many “trash people” in your family end up succeeding on their own? I know of none. People need support in order to succeed. They need self respect. They need a community to underpin their efforts and not one that counts down their time in a program or tallies the cost of the help.
It’s not going to get better until we 1) take direct positive action and 2) find a way to see a sustainable return on our community investment.
This is difficult but it’s our responsibility.
