Homelessness

A prevalent and ever-growing social issue in my community is the problem of homelessness. According to the federal government’s annual report on homelessness, the number of homeless people in America has recently increased for the first time in eight years. The West Coast, with its warmer climates, tends to have greater homeless populations than elsewhere in America. Even though the economy in the nation is booming more acutely, the cost of housing continues to rise, and more and more people simply can’t afford a place to live (McEvers, 2017). In southern California, there isn’t a city where this is more vividly represented than in Los Angeles, on skid row. While skid row isn’t my community, southern California is, and skid row reflects the core of this social issue. The homeless tend to congregate there, and in greater downtown Los Angeles, and for good reason: this is where several missions are located, which provide shelters, meals and temporary housing, sometimes even permanent housing for some (McEvers, 2017).

The problem in Los Angeles is even more exacerbated, as the area where homelessness is most acute, downtown Los Angeles, has experienced a surge in development and a general boom in luxury housing. This has caused tensions to rise even higher as the city struggles to balance the rights and needs of the homeless against the rights and needs of the tax-paying residents who have to walk around the homeless and their many encampments, with the smell of urine and sometimes feces in the air (LATimes, 2018). Los Angeles, a warm urban metropolis, has always had a homeless problem, like so many major cities. However in recent years its gotten far worse, and this paper will examine why.

In the last six years, the number of people living in streets, doorways, and in shelters of Los Angeles expanded from 32,000 to 55,000—a 75% increase (Holland, 2018). Los Angeles has a problem that is specific from the rest of the nation; in fact, if you removed the city of Los Angeles from national homeless statistics, the number of national homeless people would have dropped last year for the first time in a decade (Holland, 2018). This is largely a result of the fact that the economic recovery has left behind the homeless: young professionals have become affluent and have forced rents up to exceedingly high levels (Holland, 2018). In previous years, the homeless might have found more low-income housing, but all of those options have all but dried up given how many evictions and renovations have occurred all over the city. Many argue that this social problem has only gotten worse since Mayor Garcetti took office half a decade ago and the Democratic hold took control of the County Board of Supervisors: more and more homeless people have emerged in tents in neighborhoods around the city (Holland, 2018). Los Angeles lags behind the rest of the nation in its efforts to provide free or low-income housing. If the problem continues to expand at the current rate it is in danger of becoming completely unmanageable.

The current problem that Los Angeles is facing in this regards is that the city is attempting to arrest their way out of the homelessness problem, something which is futile and a waste of city money, and even something that one could argue, exacerbates the homelessness problem. For example, if a police officer sees someone sleeping on the street, they can issue a citation for a fee of around $300, something that most homeless people simply cannot pay. The homeless person then needs to appear in court to address this citation, something they often never do. Experts have found that the increase in the number of arrests and citations generally is something that follows an increase in the number of homeless people (LATimes, 2018). Using arrests and citations, as a means of thwarting the general homeless problem in Los Angeles is completely futile and something that undermines all viable solutions. For homeless people, having arrests or citations on their record is something that can prevent them from getting jobs or appropriate housing. There are better, more humane efforts to address this problem, as one scholar writes, “For starters, officers need to have the resources to offer a homeless person an alternative to a citation or arrest on the spot. If they're not accompanied by an outreach worker to help persuade a homeless person to accept services and temporary housing, they need to have a phone number for one” (LATimes, 2018). Anything other than what is described here is just a callous, narrow response that only adds to an exacerbating problem.

Instead, there needs to be a more aggressive solution to homelessness in Los Angeles. The budget that Los Angeles currently has for homelessness is around $150 million, and that is considered a modest sum. With such a modest amount of the budget to deal with such an out of control problem, puts Los Angeles in danger of becoming the next miniature third-world nation within America. More and more tent cities and homes are advancing, and soon they will be even in the wealthiest neighborhoods. City and county officials have a severe responsibility to start organizing a consistent source of funding (such as via sale tax) to address this problem (Lopez, 2016). This needs to be taken on aggressively.

The $2 billion bond idea is another way to address this issue, and could be one that turns the problem around using a series of financial transactions from the local economy. Former California senator and now mayor of Sacramento was one of the architects of a favored pieces of legislation known as Proposition 63, also known as the Mental Health Services Act of 2004, which put a small tax on wealthy individuals (around 1%), and which is something that generates around $1.74 billion per year (Lopez, 2016). Using a portion of this money would help to bankroll a $2-billion housing bond (Lopez, 2016). The money created from this 1% tax is an ongoing source of revenue; capitalizing on it is in the city’s best interest, particularly when there are so many who are struggling and living below the poverty line (Lopez, 2016). Until Los Angeles is able to move aggressively onto a great idea like this one, there needs to be temporary solutions put in place to address certain issues of the homeless problem. For example, homeless people who live in cars or RVs need to be redirected into safe parking lots overnight that are run or owned by the city, and where they can ultimately be connected to permanent housing (Lopez, 2016).

So many of the resources set aside by the city only exacerbate the problem, misusing resources and not being able to achieve any real change. One scholar of social sciences believes the crux of why homelessness in Los Angeles has only gotten worse over the years is because the city fails to address the two problems that go hand in hand with homelessness: mental illness and drug addiction. Seth Kurzban, a clinical associate professor at the USC School of Social Work, sees a direct correlation between homelessness and the inadequate treatment of mental illness. Kurzban points out that while mentally ill homeless people only make up one-third of the actual homeless population at any given time, they still consume 75 percent of all resources available (Kruzman, 2016). If the mentally ill homeless population is adequately addressed and removed from the streets, it would help the larger homeless population as a whole, because then the massive amount of resources that have so long been concentrated on this one portion can then be redistributed across the complete collective of homeless people, Kurzban explains (Kruzman, 2016).
Other experts disagree. John Kelly, the outreach coordinator of the Los Angeles Mission, believes that drug addiction is the main cause of homelessness in Los Angeles. In fact, Kelly goes so far as to say that Los Angeles will never overcome homelessness until it is able to win the war on drugs (Kruzman, 2016). In 2013, reports from the Community Epidemiology Work Group demonstrated that “16.6 percent of all people admitted for drug abuse treatment were homeless at the time of admission. In comparison, homeless individuals formed only 0.39 percent of the overall population” (Kruzman, 2016). So many of the program available to help annihilate homelessness such as in allowing prescription pills to be affordable or free to the mentally ill homeless, actually enable drug addicts to keep using, and virtually help perpetuate the problem of the homeless junkie (Kruzman, 2016).

In conclusion, if this data and examination of the homeless problem demonstrates anything, it shows without a doubt that homelessness in Los Angeles is a complex problem created and perpetuated by complex forces. As this paper has discussed, rising rents, lack of affordable housing, the untreated mentally ill, drug addiction, and inadequate political and legislative action, along with imbalanced enabling forces from the social services sector. If one thing is certain, a bigger investment from city government needs to aggressively tackle this problem, before it becomes unmanageable. Furthermore, a frank audit needs to occur of the level of abuse of services for the homeless, such as junkies taking advantage of free prescription drugs meant for the mentally ill. Once Los Angeles officials are pushed to take proactive moves to lessen and contain this problem, it will continue to spiral out of control.