Creating Homelessness in the Antelope Valley, Part 1
Speaking of veterans, there’s a guy named Joey Gallo, a disabled vet with three serious medical conditions. Up until recently, he was living on his own land, with his cat and dog, in a remote location in California’s Antelope Valley. Officials began to show up and order him to get rid of stuff — at first, trash and weeds. Next, it was a motor home they said he couldn’t keep. Then, they escalated their demands and made him demolish some sheds.
Finally, they came back and ordered him to tear down his home. You’ve heard of the Stand Down, an event where homeless veterans can get help. Adding outrageous insult to injury, one government minion presented him with a flyer giving the date and location of the next Stand Down — as if to say, “Welcome to your new life, loser.” Will Gallo’s next stop be Skid Row? If so, he may meet some neighbors there.
We have already offered (satiric) lessons on “How to Become Homeless.” One way is to be a resident of this high desert region which is, unfortunately, only an hour or so travel time from Los Angeles. The local administration is trying very hard to cause massive homelessness out there. The photo on this page gives an idea of the sparseness of the population in the high desert region. There might be half a mile between dwellings. Yet the authorities insist that anonymous neighbors are constantly making “eyesore” complaints about various structures and vehicles, many of which are only visible from the air.
Under the aegis of the L.A. Weekly, Mars Melnicoff devoted six weeks to investigating the horrifying situation, and accomplished what promises to be an award-winning piece of journalism, “L.A. County’s War on Desert Rats.” A message comes through loud and clear: the victims of the Antelope Valley Land Grab are living national treasures, the quintessence of all the qualities that made America great.
The writer shows how the rugged individualists at the hardscrabble butt-end of nowhere are being systematically removed from their homes for some murky, as-yet-unknown reason. It’s kind of like one of those “sweeps” of the homeless that cities do before the Olympics or the political convention. Except these folks are on their own land — or what used to be their land — so the process is taking just a bit longer.
Melnicoff says,
The government can define land on which residents have lived for years as ‘vacant’ if their cabins, homes and mobile homes are on parcels where the land use hasn’t been legally established. Some have been jailed for defying the officials in downtown Los Angeles, while others have lost their savings and belongings trying to meet the county’s ‘final zoning enforcement orders.’ Los Angeles County has left some residents, who appeared to be doing no harm, homeless.
Melnicoff tells their stories. Some are retired people, who thought they were finished with hard labor, and figured they had earned the right to enjoy the little corner of the world they had paid for and fixed up to their liking. She tells of people who live frugal, thrifty, minimalist lives, and sincerely practice recycling far beyond sorting trash into different-colored buckets.
They came here to get off the grid, practice “VONU,” make monumental art, race their dirt bikes, commune with the spirits of the ancestors, or whatever. That’s why people settle in environmentally inhospitable areas in the first place: they possess a fine willingness to trade the convenience and amenities of the city for the space and opportunity to do things their way. They are people who can’t afford lawyers when they’re being railroaded, hogtied, and hung out to dry. They came here to get away from the depredations of gang members, and ran afoul of a much more dangerous gang — the bureaucrats of Los Angeles County.
(To be continued.)
Source: “L.A. County’s Private Property War,” LA Weekly, 06/23/11
Image by AlishaV (Alisha Vargas), used under its Creative Commons license.
The Unavoidable Problem of Human Waste
We have talked about the inordinate amount of time, energy, and financial resources that are spent on preventing benches from being slept on, or even sat on by people experiencing homelessness. The same brand of madness goes on over public bathrooms. The object is to make the homeless disappear by not providing any public toilets. Now, nobody can find a place to take a leak, and don’t even think about the other thing.
Someone with money can spend a few bucks in a store or restaurant, thus earning the right to perform natural functions in their facilities. Someone without money can hold it till they get home. Someone without a home can pee in an alley. What a brilliant solution — not! This is a lose-lose-lose outcome for everybody except business owners, who pick up some extra revenue by capitalizing on an unavoidable human need.
There is a terrific organization called STREATS — that stands for “Homeless Individuals Striving To Reach Educate And Transform Society’s Views on Homelessness.” Its media division has produced a video called “Gotta Go.” About half-an-hour long, it contains lively commentary with some humor from some very articulate people on the subject of going to the bathroom.
We have talked about the ongoing conflict between housed residents and “rubber tramps” in Venice, California. Last fall, for instance, two people were arrested for dumping human waste from a camper toilet into the street. The prosecution wanted to put them in jail for 90 days, but the judge has ordered a 36-months probation, to pay restitution, and to get the heck out of Venice.
There is reportedly a legal RV waste disposal facility 7.7 miles away from the area where the Venetian vehicle dwellers tend to cluster, and it costs $10, which sounds reasonable. But there might be many reasons why people living in a parked RV could not or would not vacate the space they had claimed. It’s a tough problem.
In a newsletter, a local citizen gloated over the fate of another pair of miscreants, a couple with a nine-year-old child. They too were charged with dumping waste in the street, and their RV was seized as evidence and towed to an impound yard many miles away in the San Fernando Valley to await a release from the police. The citizen says, “Beautiful evening for a walk to the SFV.”
This is from Dana Goodyear’s “Street Scene” column in The New Yorker, a while back, reporting on the Skid Row area of Los Angeles:
Plastic outhouses were removed because people were using them for sex and drugs and deals, and now there are several self-cleaning, European-style public toilets whose doors automatically open after an interval.
This controversy carried quite a history, as shown by a piece written by Penelope McMillan 20 years earlier, about a particular settlement known as the “Love Camp,” with a distinctly different reputation than those of other Skid Row encampments of the time. The journalist wrote,
Its residents, numbering around 50, rotate cooking, cleaning and security duties and share the $70-a-month rental cost of the portable toilets.
What portable toilets? The ones that were a symbol to the camp’s inhabitants that they would not sink beyond a certain level, and would indeed rise again to take their places in society. The portable toilets that were snatched, one day at dawn, by a city work crew. On the same day, the camp’s leadership kept an appointment with city officials to supposedly arrange a “model cleanup,” to be used as a prototype for future sweeps meant to clear out the homeless population. Strange that the city’s idea of a “cleanup” should begin with stealing the toilets.
Just last week, Kathleen Edgecomb reported from New London, Connecticut, about the shutting off of a new fountain on a downtown plaza because people experiencing homelessness used it to clean themselves. Actually, the last straw was when a passing cop discovered an intoxicated man washing solid matter out of his pants. The homeless were accused of using the whole area as an outdoor toilet. The reporter quotes Cathy Zall, director of a 50-bed shelter, who reminds us that being homeless is not a crime, and that the majority of the problems are caused by a very small minority.
In Eugene, Oregon, there are a few areas where a tiny fraction of the people who live in vehicles can safely park, and the city provides portable toilets and garbage collection. Apparently, some cities did get a clue, to some extent. It’s not rocket science. In fact, humankind has figured out how astronauts can go to the bathroom in zero gravity, for Pete’s sake. Surely we can think of ways for people to go to the bathroom in a modern city.
In Austin, Texas, an online commentator complains that the hundred or so people who are turned away from the ARCH shelter every night tend to hang around the neighborhood and relieve themselves in streets and alleys, and that Waller Creek is called a “giant alky toilet.”
It’s a strange situation. The city apparently paid a design firm a million and a half dollars to create a plan for renovating the creek and the downtown area surrounding it. Then it ditched the plan and is currently looking for another.
Here’s a thought. Whatever money there is for the new plan, take half of that and hire a student instead. (That’s what homeless people do to get their teeth fixed — let students practice on them.) Then take the other half and build some freakin’ restrooms. There you go — problem solved.
Reactions?
Source: “Venice RV Dumpers Sentenced,” 100kissfm.com, 10/13/10
Source: “Street Scene ,” The New Yorker, 05/05/08
Source: “Skid Row Camp’s Portable Toilets Swept Away,” LA Times, 03/11/87
Source: “Fountain incident puts spotlight on homeless issue,” The Day, 06/08/11
Source: “Will the Waller Creek Development be the death of Red River music scene?,” Yelp, 10/24/09
Source: “Private conservancy outlines plan to rescue, revive Waller Creek,” Statesman.com, 04/27/11
Screen capture of Public Toilet in Skid Row, Los Angeles, California, used under Fair Use: Reporting.
Medical Ethics and the Hospital Industry
The lives of people experiencing homelessness are inextricably involved with hospitals. One of the most affecting parts of Richard R. Troxell’s book, Looking Up at the Bottom Line, is the story of Diane Breisch Malloy, whose tragic death in Texas inspired the inauguration of Austin’s annual Homeless Memorial. If this sick woman had been in a hospital where she had probably belonged, she would not have been sleeping in a dangerous spot, and would not have been swept away by storm water and drowned.
A few days ago, we talked about past behavior by an Inglewood, California, hospital that strikes many people as quite irresponsible, and some consider it downright unethical. At the very least, it was lousy patient discharge management. That news story was the latest, but not the only case of what has been rudely called homeless dumping, which looks like a growing trend.
Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Winton writes,
Since 2006, the city attorney’s office and Los Angeles Police Department have uncovered hundreds of cases in which patients were dumped by hospitals across the region at facilities in skid row and other homeless shelters.
Winton previously reported on other examples of what LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo calls a “horrendous and unconscionable practice.” For instance, the journalist wrote about how 54-year-old Gabino Olvera had been unloaded from a Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital van and left on Skid Row. This was done in front of several witnesses who questioned the driver about the lack of wheelchair or other support equipment. Winton wrote,
Olvera, wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag, was found in February 2007 crawling in a gutter downtown.
In 2009, Winton joined with fellow reporter Cara Mia DiMassa to expose other similar disposals of discharged patients, like the one performed by College Hospital. The patient was Steven Davis, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder:
Doctors at the Costa Mesa mental institution prescribed him numerous drugs to deal with paranoid delusions that had led to an earlier suicide attempt. But that didn’t stop the hospital from hauling Davis into a van and driving him more than 40 miles north to downtown L.A., where they dropped him off outside the Union Rescue Mission. When mission officials complained to the hospital, the van returned and drove Davis a few miles south to another shelter. Davis wandered away without ever entering.
When these various news articles were published, comments from the public voiced emotions that ran the gamut from intense sympathy for the patients to total exasperation. What is a hospital supposed to do with a patient who has nowhere to go? If the person still suffers from the presenting diagnosis, but it’s not life-threatening, what then? If the person has been cured of an acute illness but is still burdened by one or more chronic illnesses, what then? If the person is as well as a homeless person ever gets — what then?
The reporters tell us about a new city law that requires the written consent of a patient to be taken anywhere other than his or her residence. Exactly how this will help any homeless patients is not clear. The Southern California hospitals that have been reprimanded and fined for wrongful disposition of discharged patients have also been made to sign an agreement about future behavior. An injunction orders them to not transport homeless psychiatric patients to the streets or shelters of the “patient safety zone,” in other words, Skid Row and the extended area of downtown and south LA where most of the missions and shelters are.
But… that’s where the missions and shelters are. What if that is exactly where the patient wants or needs to go? Taking them somewhere else just makes it more difficult for them to obtain the needed services. It’s hardly a solution. And, of course, like any rule, the rule against dumping discharged patients in the worst inner-city areas has to be enforced by somebody. That would be the police, and it’s another wrinkle in the overall situation. Apparently, law enforcement agencies are also in the habit of routinely dropping off people released from custody in the Skid Row area. Well, where else are they going to take them? Rodeo Drive?
Who is responsible for what? The situation is complicated by larger questions of personal freedom and autonomy. What if a person of legal age is discharged from an institution and simply does not want to be delivered anyplace? What if she or he doesn’t feel like requiring anyone to show up and take responsibility? Shouldn’t an adult citizen have the right to just walk out the door? The whole situation is a mess from any point of view, and it’s one problem that really, really needs to be handled.
Reactions?
Source: “Hospital accused of dumping L.A. homeless woman to pay $125,000 fine,” LA Times, 03/18/11
Source: “Skid row dumping suit settled,” LA Times, 05/31/08
Source: “College Hospital to pay $1.6 million in homeless dumping settlement,” LA Times, 04/09/09
Image by miss pupik (Shira Gal), used under its Creative Commons license.
Homeless Dumping – the Wave of the Future?
It used to be that Southern California was the predictor. Whatever the folks in LA were doing, the rest of the country would be doing it pretty soon. Maybe that tendency still applies.
In the case of homeless dumping, let’s hope not. Some deny that there is such a thing. Others say well, yes, but what else are we supposed to do? This Los Angeles Times story could bring a strong man to tears or make an angel curse.
Staff writer Richard Winton tells us about a legal matter that has finally been settled after four years of wrangling. This goes back to early 2007, when a woman with lung disease, and connected to a portable oxygen tank, was discharged from Centinela Freeman Regional Medical Center in Inglewood, California. She was dropped off at a homeless shelter — not even an established, permanent shelter, but a temporary cold-weather shelter at the Armory in West Los Angeles.
A lawsuit was brought by the City Attorney’s office, and here’s the upshot:
The hospital’s owner will pay $125,000 in penalties and charitable contributions and will abide by rules forbidding such practices at medical facilities it owns… The hospital corporation did not acknowledge any wrongdoing but agreed to abide by best practices protocols for discharging homeless patients.
Let’s fantasize for a moment. What if that $125,000 had been spent on the homeless woman? For much less, the hospital could have hired private-duty nurses round the clock to take care of that patient’s every need, plus an advocate to work full-time at finding a safe lodging for her. For comparison purposes, it costs the criminal justice system $47,000 per year to incarcerate someone out there in Cali. That 125 grand could have bought that homeless woman more than two and a half years’ lodging in the Graybar Hotel. It could have even paid room rent for a couple of years in a real hotel, a nice one.
At first glance, that $125,000 figure sounds almost impressive. But it is illusory. It breaks down to $5,000 worth of civil penalties, a cash amount that in no way compensates the city for what it cost to prosecute the case. Not even close. This is not to imply that the charges should not have been brought, merely to point out that the heftiest portion of the bill is paid, as usual, by the taxpayers. As for the hospital owners, the bulk of the settlement will be payable in the form of $120,000 worth of “charitable contributions to a homeless recovery network that helps mentally ill patients.”
A person doesn’t like to be cynical, but this sounds kind of amorphous. A good lawyer could convert the sentence to “in kind” contributions, like some vaguely promised counseling program for certain types of patients, which may or may not ever materialize. A person doesn’t like to be distrustful, but this penalty appears to be largely symbolic. And it took four years to even get that much.
Centinela Freeman is not the only hospital that agreed to an out-of-court settlement recently. In a similar case, Kaiser Permanente (having sent a 63-year-old woman out into the world by taxicab, wearing a hospital gown) promised to donate half a million dollars or, possibly, something intangible that it claims is worth that much.
College Hospital must pay $1.6 million in penalties and charitable contributions to various agencies. It is said that in 2007 and 2008, this one hospital alone dumped more than 150 patients on skid row. Mentally ill patients. Hollywood Presbyterian’s homeless dumping case involved the donation of $1 million to nonprofit groups. It would be real interesting to know if anything close to a million ever finds it way to those organizations.
Of course, they all promise to adopt better discharge rules. Hospitals can volunteer to sign on with a voluntary code of ethics. Or they can be required to, as part of the settlement agreement, if they are accused of unscrupulousness. Things have reached the point where hospitals must be told not to dump patients on skid row. Wouldn’t that be a thing you would want to kind of take for granted? Winton says,
The protocols, signed in recent years by several Southern California hospitals, give specific requirements for how patients are to be released from hospitals and how they should be evaluated after their release. It also outlines a process for getting those who need additional care placed into medical or social service programs.
As for homeless dumping spreading to the rest of the country, it looks like it already has. Last November, for instance, we noted an incident in Indiana where a bureaucrat shocked the parents of a disabled child whose benefits had run out, by suggesting that they drop off the patient at a homeless shelter.
Los Angeles had a couple of City Attorneys, Rocky Delgadillo and Carmen Trutanich, who took this shabby treatment of people experiencing homelessness very seriously. California has a state law designed to prevent unfair business practices, which allows a corporation to be sued for unscrupulous behavior. Imagine that! In general, granting human status under the law to corporations is a lousy idea. But if they can be sued for a lack of scruples, there’s an example of how it might not be such a bad thing.
What the hell is going on with the human beings, here on Planet Earth? More to the point, what is going in the USA? As Southern California sets the fashion for the nation, America sets things in motion for the rest of the world. We think we’re so great, we want every other country to imitate us in every possible way, adopt all our systems and assumptions, and model itself after the United States of America. And this is the example we are setting for the world.
Reactions?
Source: “Hospital accused of dumping L.A. homeless woman to pay $125,000 fine,” LA Times, 03/18/11
Image by Joe Shlabotnik, used under its Creative Commons license.
Deadly Violence Among and Against the Homeless
If a person were inclined to really concentrate on the negative, it would be possible to spotlight quite a number of incidents where people experiencing homelessness are randomly slain by bands of townsfolk for apparent sport, or by a citizen with a twisted lone-avenger fantasy. Even worse are the reports of homeless people assaulted or killed by other homeless people. Add to that the incidents that are never reported. Plus, when the topic is police violence against the homeless, there are unfortunately many examples.
Last month in Northern California, guilty pleas were entered by two out of three teenagers accused of the 2009 beating death of a homeless man. They also agreed to testify against the third member of a murderous expedition, the purpose of which was to “kick a bum’s ass.” This they effectively did, using metal bars and a table leg as weapons to kill Timothy Lee Alcorn. Just a couple of weeks ago, a Northern California resident was found guilty of murdering Richard Seeger in order to steal the car in which Seeger had been living.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida, is likely a pleasant enough place, except for when the occasional citizen is set on fire, like Johnnie Roberts was. This happened about a week ago, under a bridge (of course), where the victim was found by a homeless veteran. Meagan O’Halloran reports,
Authorities say they found Johnnie Spencer Roberts tied to a pole by his shoelaces. He was unconscious and intoxicated, but, miraculously, he survived… Now other homeless people say they’re afraid they’ll be targeted next.
Speaking of homeless veterans, that is the category to which Thomas Higginbotham had belonged, before he was killed by police gunfire in Oregon. Maxine Bernstein reported on this January tragedy that took place in an abandoned car wash, where the victim and at least one other homeless man were indoor camping. The victim was 67, alcoholic, armed, and had been persistently threatening a security guard. The scenario, according to the witnesses, sounds like a determined effort to commit suicide-by-cop. If that was what Higginbotham intended, his plan was successful in achieving not only his death, but a stain on the careers of two long-time police officers.
St. Petersburg Times staff reporter Rita Farlow relates how in Florida, a resident of a homeless encampment was convicted of manslaughter last month, another suspect having already pleaded guilty last year. The two beat a fellow homeless man to death back in 2007. Apparently the victim, Michael J. Picciola, had attacked one of them first, and caused other problems, and the two wanted to convince him to leave the small colony. Instead, the troublemaker ended up dead.
Last year was also when three teenagers beat Joseph Ruba to death in Lakeland, Florida. Just last month, a homeless man was charged with the burning death of a 26-year-old homeless woman in Largo, Florida. What is going on down there in the lovely state that we are accustomed to thinking of as a retirement haven and amusement park heaven?
David Greisman reported on the deadly autumn season in Laurel, Maryland, where Pamela Myers, who had been living in the woods, died after being set on fire by her “boyfriend.” Then, within weeks, in an unrelated homicide, Flavio Garcia was killed by another homeless man near a local racetrack. Maryland also saw the death of a homeless man named Adeolu Adedgoke Otemolu, shot by a teenager.
The fall of 2010 was also a bad season in Houston, Texas, where several homeless women were murdered and rumors of a serial killer abounded. Then, in December, an elderly homeless man was killed by a fast-food restaurant employee in Detroit, Michigan. December was also an ill-omened month in Connecticut, where a homeless man was beaten to death by his tent-mate, who then asked a third person to help him bury the body.
Violence occurs among the homeless, as people lacking in social skills attempt to self-police their settlements and camps by what amounts to vigilante action. It happens between people experiencing homelessness, who are driven by deprivation and unimaginable stresses to turn against those who were formerly friends or even lovers.
It happens through malicious hate crimes committed by housed people, who seem to think they are doing some kind of societal cleanup, and who refuse to understand that they are not part of any solution at all, but rather part of an increasingly horrifying problem. Long ago, I knew an Air Force captain, a pilot who held the record for flying a certain kind of Southeast Asia mission and living to tell the tale. Home on leave, in a backward part of the American South, he took his Harley out on the remote country roads. Some bigot was cruising around in a pickup truck, with a head full of spiteful visions of Billy and Wyatt, the motorcycle-riding hippies of Easy Rider. He forced the bike off the road, and though the captain recovered from other injuries, one of his arms was made absolutely, totally useless, forever.
The savages who beat a homeless man to death, or set him on fire, have no idea whom they are attacking, but they too need a story to tell themselves. Chances are, they convince themselves they are doing a good deed by ridding society of a nameless degenerate who will be missed by no one.
And violence happens through the disordered thinking of an individual who wants to escape from life and can’t think of a better way to do it than by taunting the police, in hopes of a quick death that will leave behind lingering problems for officers of the law.
One thing is clear: If homelessness were ended, this violence would also end. And how can that be accomplished? One measure that could go a long way toward a solution would be the adoption of the Universal Living Wage, which would end homelessness for more than 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all 10.1 million minimum-wage workers. Learn more about the Universal Living Wage here, and from Richard R. Troxell’s Looking Up at the Bottom Line.
Reactions?
Source: “Two plead guilty in fatal beating of homeless man,” Redding.com, 01/07/11
Source: “FWB Homeless Man Lit on Fire; Investigators Still Looking for Suspect,” WJHG-TV, 01/31/11
Source: “Grand jury reports: Portland police shot homeless veteran 10 times after he advanced holding a knife,” OregonLive, 01/28/11
Source: “Man found guilty in 2007 death at homeless camp,” Tampabay.com, 01/14/11
Source: “One Homeless Man Accused of Murdering Another Homeless Man in Laurel,” Columbia.Patch.com, 12/04/10
Image by sparr0 (Clarence Risher), used under its Creative Commons license.
San Francisco Sit/Lie Ordinance Documentary
The impressive Mission Local website is only part of a grander scheme, which encompasses print and multimedia avenues in two languages. Its aim is to generate quality journalism that fairly and thoroughly covers San Francisco’s Mission District. The staff are from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, San Francisco State, and the community.
Reaching back a couple of months, we’re looking at a piece of video journalism by Patricia Espinosa and Christine Mai-Duc, in which everyday people react to the Sit/Lie ordinance. Not surprisingly, the local law represents yet another misguided attempt to “do something” about the problem of homelessness by sweeping it under the rug. (It’s getting mighty crowded under that ragged shred of national carpet.) The reportage itself is great, but even more interesting are some of the comments the piece inspired.
For instance, “pdquick,” a doctor who treats people experiencing homelessness, points out the absurdity of forbidding people to sit or lie as a way to reduce aggressive panhandling. How aggressive can a panhandler be, after all, who is sitting or lying? That is some pretty laid-back aggression. Good point, pdquick!
“Lee” is impatient with housed people who convince themselves that the homeless are already spoiled and pampered by a plush existence, and is also angry with those who use a certain word:
The notion that the homeless are living a ‘lifestyle’ — which they could choose to stop living at the snap of their fingers — is truly ludicrous… You’d rather have the garbageman sweep up the unsightly blights on your block so you can walk down the street without having to think about all the bad stuff happening in your country. That’s why you have to convince yourself that homelessness is a ‘choice,’ a ‘lifestyle,’ a ‘decision,’ easily reversed, and that the homeless already have a vast and generous infrastructure of support.
“Lynae” makes a very good point about the sit/lie ordinance. How stupid is it, on the one hand, to encourage people to become employed, productive citizens, and at the same time hit them with criminal charges that will stick to their records, and make job hunting even more impossible? Plus, agencies providing basic services have more barriers against those with criminal records. This commentator reminds us of an even more basic truth:
It’s not illegal to be homeless. People have a right to NOT have housing. With that in mind, making laws that make it virtually impossible to be homeless without constantly being ticketed/arrested is just as wrong as making tons of laws that infringe on someone’s right to be black/Jewish/handicapped/what-have-you.
Many critics of the ordinance have also mentioned its redundancy, and this is true not only in San Francisco but just about every place where such ordinances are passed. There are already laws in place forbidding aggressive panhandling, loitering, public alcohol drinking, and so on. Additional rules are not really needed, and only serve to make the overall situation worse for people experiencing homelessness.
A society is only as good as the treatment it extends to its most vulnerable members, and America could be scoring a lot higher in this performance area. The thinking seems to be, if society can cut off the homeless from enough amenities, such as food and the right to sit on a park bench, all the drifters and transients and refugees will come to their senses and say, “Well, duh! This homeless thing just isn’t working out!,” and go get themselves a place to live, like decent people. And that’s not the worst of it. For some, the thinking is, take away enough amenities from people experiencing homelessness, and they will come to their senses and kill themselves, saving everybody else the trouble of dealing with them.
Paradox alert: We said that some hard-hearted Americans wish the people in the “homeless” category would just simply cease to exist. And we soft-hearted Americans also wish the category of “homeless” would cease to exist — only, we want to see this happen by finding everybody a place to live. We talked about the insanity of trying to legislate homelessness out of existence by forbidding homeless people to do just about anything.
Here’s a question. Name one social problem that has ever successfully been legislated out of existence. If you can’t think of one in five seconds, the point is made. Racism? Domestic violence? Murder? Addiction? We have plenty of laws, and still have plenty of all of the above. It’s unlikely that homelessness can be made to disappear by persecuting its victims.
Reactions?
Source: “About,” MissionLocal.org
Source: “Homeless React to Sit/Lie,” MissionLocal.org, 11/11/10
Image by TheTruthAbout, used under its Creative Commons license.
Homelessness, Wishful Thinking, and Insanity
Not long ago, Denise Wong reported from Reno, Nevada, on a special day set aside to strictly enforce a city ordinance that forbids “camping,” i.e. existing. People experiencing homelessness had already been discouraged from hanging around in certain areas, and those areas were expanded. This quotation from the piece is reminiscent of a comedy rule learned in screenwriting class: “A punch line is a punch word, and it belongs at the end.” Get this:
And police are allowed to arrest anyone camping on sidewalks outside the Record Street Homeless Services Center.
In the December sweep, Wong reports that no one was cited or arrested, but official warnings were issued. Rumor has it that many homeless people were forced to abandon their bedrolls and other possessions. Others say the street people had three days’ notice of the impending action and plenty of opportunity to move their stuff. Either way, three days’ notice doesn’t help when there is nowhere to go. Apparently, the other local possibilities are the railroad tracks or the riverbank. The same generous choices are available in many American cities. And then, if the homeless congregate in those places, the housed people still complain.
In January, Steve Chawkins of the Los Angeles Times wrote about the situation in Santa Barbara, California. It seems that in a fashionable area of town, benches are aligned parallel with the sidewalks, making it easy for beggars to sit around all day displaying to the shoppers and tourists their pitches written on cardboard. As one indignant business owner put it,
It’s just like they’ve made the street their living room. They just sit there — all day, every day. One of them even has a portable TV. It’s totally inappropriate.
Inappropriate? Anyway, the dignitaries in charge figure, they will hit those indigent homeless people where it hurts — in their overstuffed wallets. Here’s the plan: They’re going to rotate the benches 90 degrees, to be perpendicular to the flow of foot traffic. Thus, according to a re-development official Chawkin interviewed, the panhandlers’ backs will be facing half the people on the sidewalk, cutting their solicitation opportunities by 50%. Ta-dah!
But wait, there’s more. Benches along the “city’s most vibrant commercial thoroughfare” will also have their backs removed, so nobody can get too comfortable. The reporter spoke with a dismayed social worker who characterized the entire project as “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” Chawkin says,
Benches have been an issue elsewhere. Some cities install armrests in the middle of benches to keep people from lying down. In La Jolla two years ago, one community activist tried recruiting residents to sit three-hour shifts to keep homeless people off public benches.
By the way, to turn 14 benches to a perpendicular angle is going to cost — guess how much? $50,000. Now, that’s inappropriate. In Looking Up at the Bottom Line, Richard R. Troxell relates how, when House the Homeless was considering ideas for the Homeless Memorial, the city of Austin offered to sell the organization a $5,000 park bench with a divider in the middle to prevent sleeping. No, thanks!
Please see Richard’s report on the current state of things in Austin, where it looks like the city is trying to do the same thing that many other political entities have done so many times in the past, which is to legislate a problem out of existence. The solution, in the minds of many Austin residents, is to change the homeless into non-persons, by using the force of law to deny them the right to sit in public places. (And, of course, there are already plenty of laws everywhere, about what can be done on private property.)
The theory behind such measures is, if the homeless are forbidden to do something, and then another thing, and another thing, eventually the accumulated weight of all these ordinances will somehow magically make the homeless go away.
When I saw these bus stop benches in Shanghai I had to snap a picture. They are clearly designed to stop anyone from sleeping on them, but are also very uncomfortable to sit on at all. Another example of ‘Architecture of Control.’
So says Albert Sun, who took the photo on this page. (Follow the link to Flickr where, in the Comments, there’s an artistic yet very un-sleepable park bench spotted in Los Angeles.)
The following might apply to an individual or a society: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. Every time legislation is made to increase the misery of the homeless, it’s based on a belief that a certain category of people should not exist, and that they can be made to go away by illegitimatizing everything about them. This belief is as quaintly erroneous as the belief that blowing out all the birthday cake candles will make your wish come true.
The park bench maneuvers are a perfect of example of a society’s tendency to “cut off its nose to spite its face.” Some cities solve the park-bench dilemma by simply removing them. Take that, homeless people! Try sitting on our park benches now!
The downside, and it’s a big one, is that nobody gets to sit on park benches. Not the young mother, who is taking her kids out for a walk because it’s free, and they need some exercise. Not the retired teacher, who is still recovering from knee replacement surgery, or the young sweethearts, who need a few minutes to talk, away from their parents.
How about this? How about putting more park benches around town, so there are plenty of places for anybody who wants to sit down, without having to spend a day’s pay for the right to sit inside the fenced patio of a sidewalk café?
Quotation of the Day:
It’s from a video by Patricia Espinosa and Christine Mai-Duc of Mission Local, regarding the sit/lie ordinance in San Francisco’s Mission District. One woman says, and this is really worth thinking about:
I do not typically sit or lie on sidewalks, but I think that if I needed to or if I wanted to, I’d like to have the right to.
Reactions?
Source: “Homeless Residents Forced Off Reno Sidewalks,” KOLOTV, 12/06/11
Source: “Santa Barbara seeks to turn the tables on the homeless,” LATimes.com, 01/21/22
Source: “Homeless React to Sit/Lie,” MissionLocal.org, 11/11/10
Image by Albert Sun, used under its Creative Commons license.
Rubber Tramps — Houseless, Not Homeless
Historically Venice, California, has been the place where new societal mutations showed up early, and the place uniquely prepared and equipped to deal with them. Whether this is still true remains to be seen.
Last month, Peggy Lee Kennedy wrote in the Free Venice Beachhead of a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in November, in which the City of Los Angeles is charged with violating the Americans With Disabilities Act, as well as several Constitutional amendments. Kennedy says,
The plaintiffs in this civil rights lawsuit are part of the Venice community. Most are people who have lived in Venice for many years and used to be housed here. They get all their services here, they have been involved in the St. Joseph surveys, they are on housing lists, and they have given their personal information for getting in the ‘Streets to Homes’ program — if it ever happens.
They are vehicle dwellers, and many consider themselves fully entitled stakeholders in Venice. Some of them say things like, “I’m houseless, not homeless.” But many of the residents definitely consider these gypsies as undesirable riff-raff, who take up valuable parking space and cause unhealthful conditions for everybody.
Because of its attractive beach location and freewheeling culture, Venice has always contained a large number of people experiencing homelessness. For decades, a subset of that population has been a particular burr under the saddle of the housed residents. The irritants are the people who live in vehicles, mostly RVs, but also cars, vans, and campers. “Rubber Tramps of Venice” describes some of the colorful vehicles that were around in the early 80s, and a film that was made 10 years ago featuring the long-term Venice vehicle dwellers considered homeless by the housed residents.
In 2005, public outrage was inflamed by the actions of William Sadowski, who lived in his car in Venice. As described by two staff writers for the LA Times, Hector Becerra and Jennifer Oldham, Sadowski hijacked a patrol car belonging to a member of the airport police force. Trying to regain control of his vehicle, the officer was dragged and battered, and ended up dead. This did not enhance the reputation of the locals who lived in wheeled homes.
The Rose Avenue Neighborhood Watch added the phrase Vigilante Strike Force to its name, and residents took an angry and active part in tagging vehicles for towing. One resident claimed to have identified 250 RVs being lived in illegally. There was an uproar when one local organization accused another of distributing flyers all over Greater Los Angeles, supposedly inviting other rubber tramps to relocate to the streets of Venice. This turned out to be untrue, but it further eroded whatever little tolerance the homeowners and renters might have retained.
One resident got so upset she couldn’t even make logical sense, and wrote to a newsletter that A.) A lot of the vehicles people lived in were not even roadworthy, but were incapable of being driven away, and B.) If the police wanted to serve a warrant, vehicle dwellers could just escape by driving away. Various schemes for parking permits were the subject of many meetings and millions of words of debate, and indeed, many local residents defended the right of people to live in vehicles, noting that many such unfortunates are women, children, and veterans.
The Los Angeles police formed what Kennedy calls the Homeless Removal Task Force, especially to run the rubber tramps out of town. Apparently, they wear black SWAT outfits (a bold fashion statement at any beach) and dedicate themselves to making life miserable for RV owners in every way, from petty verbal harassment to towing.
But many of the vehicle dwellers are officially disabled, and thus exempt from the parking restrictions that were purposely created to banish homes on wheels. The police should know this, but they go ahead and do it anyway. Kennedy says that a jeering, cheering crowd has actually shown up in the past to applaud when some disabled person was arrested and his vehicle was towed away.
In another issue of the Free Venice Beachhead, Rune Girschfeld, self-described as a “mobile-homed Venice resident,” recounted her experience with a sweep, one of the aggressive enforcement tactics adopted by the police and practiced in the middle of the night on people they perceive as needing to be hassled, handcuffed, and cleaned from the streets like garbage. She said,
Sleeping citizens are ordered out of their vehicles. They are put off-balance with rapid-fire questions. They are lied to and told they must answer questions; that the police ‘know’ they are hiding something; that they can forcefully open doors if not opened voluntarily and that they can take away their children…
Girschfeld goes on to say,
Personally, I work full-time and still cannot afford to decriminalize myself. I do not understand where the idea came from that someone who is living in a vehicle is ‘taking advantage,’ as though they had chosen to live in third-world America…
America is full of people experiencing economic homelessness. We’re talking about working full-time, and still being unable to rent the cheapest housing. And this is just tenancy that they can’t afford. It’s not even anywhere near the crazy dream of owning a place. The more you think about it, the more obvious it becomes: When an American working a 40-hour week cannot afford basic housing, something is really broken in the entire system. Suggestion: Consider the Universal Living Wage, which is designed to end homelessness for over 1,000,000 minimum-wage workers, and prevent economic homelessness for all minimum-wage workers in America.
Reactions?
Source: “Lawsuit filed to protect civil rights of RV Residents,” FreeVeniceBeachhead, 12/10
Source: “LAX Police Officer Killed as Stolen Patrol Car Drags Him,” LA Times, 04/30/05
Source: “Rosendahl’s ‘Carrot and Stick’ means a knock on the door at 5 am,” Free Venice BeachHead, 10/10
Image by Colin Bowern, used under its Creative Commons license.
The Homeless Ex-Offender, Part 1
Registered sex offenders have a very rough time, since they’re forbidden to live near anything except a toxic waste dump. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. And some might say, why remind the audience of their least favorite variety of people experiencing homelessness? Unhoused people do come in many shapes, sizes, colors, occupations, and states of physical and mental health; and some of them, it’s true, have been convicted of sex crimes, and they have served time for it.
There are three things to remember. One, not every accused and convicted person is guilty. Two, the term “sex offender” covers not only the pedophile with a long history of molesting kids, but the youth convicted for having sex with his underage girlfriend, and the guy who has downloaded kiddie porn to his computer.
In terms of public menace, there’s a difference. Nobody here is condoning any kind of sex crimes. But if you’ve ever had a family member or a friend who ran afoul of the law in this way, you know what a slim chance they have of living a normal life again.
Now, here comes the really big theme: If the problem of homeless sex offenders can be solved, it will go a long way toward improving the general public opinion toward people experiencing homelessness, and possibly prevent some hate crimes. What stands in the way, in more than 30 states, are the restrictions on where an ex-offender may live.
Iowa was the first state to create tough residency restrictions. Consequently, the number of “whereabouts unknown” sex offenders doubled. When Kansas enacted its law, a constitutional challenge was slapped down, encouraging other states to “get tough” too. When residency requirement laws were enacted in various states, they not only forced some ex-offenders out of homes they rented or even owned, and cost them their jobs, but had made it nearly impossible for those newly released from prison to find anywhere to live at all. Some would even have families to return to, if not for rules about distance from places frequented by children.
The year 2006 saw the enactment of Jessica’s Law in California, named after the victim in an especially heinous case. In the following years, other horrendous crimes have taken place in the state regardless, and there were other unintended consequences. Within two years, the number of transient sex crime parolees rose by 800%. As of last month, the ban had led to what one reporter called “a dangerous 24-fold increase in the number of homeless sex offenders.” [The link is ours.] Isn’t that, like, a 2,400% increase? Sounds awful, when you put it that way.
With residency restrictions, ex-offenders tend to move to rural areas, where it’s easier to live far from a school or park, but this is difficult for the settled country residents. In the city, any landlord willing to rent to these unwanted people will probably be overwhelmed with applications. Washington Post reporter Karl Vick pointed out that in Long Beach, 19 ex-offenders ended up living in the same small apartment complex, and Carson had 30 pariahs in one hotel.
This kind of thing is alarming, so the neighbors become irate and active, and do whatever they can to eject the frightening newcomers… who are soon homeless once more, adding another spiral to the vicious circle. In Orange County, over a third of registered sex offenders are homeless, and a lot of them live in an encampment in the industrial part of Anaheim, the same town where Disneyland is located, which is kind of weird.
Understanding how unreasonable residency restrictions are, judges had been granting exemptions to parolees on an individual basis, but what a waste of court time and public money it is. Then, the state Superior Court recently found some parts of Jessica’s Law unconstitutional. A recent Los Angeles Times editorial said,
Before parents shudder at the thought of sex offenders now being allowed to live within 2,000 feet of schools and parks, they should remember the utter lack of evidence that the restriction ever kept a child from being molested.
Jessica’s Law could not change the ugly fact that most child victims (93%, according to the Justice Department) are molested by someone they know, family members or friends of the family, who live in the same house or have unquestioned access to their victims, and no prior convictions to provide a clue. Neighborhoods refuse to recognize that, preferring to obsess about strangers, and enjoying a false sense of security if the strangers can be kept at bay.
Of course, with limited funding and resources, it’s easy to think, “Wait a minute, why should we find housing for ex-convicts, when there are so many deserving young families out in the cold?” The prioritizing of who should be helped first is too big a question to go into right now.
The bottom line is, as many are beginning to discover, it’s better to be “smart on crime” than “tough on crime.” Even Georgia, not a notoriously liberal state, has loosened up, abandoning residency restrictions for those who have committed offenses before 2003. The state officials might even decide to exempt the elderly and disabled ex-offenders.
Coming Up: The Homeless Ex-Offender, Part 2.
Reactions?
Source: “The flaw in Jessica’s Law,” Los Angeles Times, 11/06/10
Source: “Laws to Track Sex Offenders Encouraging Homelessness,” The Washington Post, 12/27/08
Image by Tony the Misfit, used under its Creative Commons license.
The New NIMBY: Now In My Backyard
Venice, California, has been a city of Beats, hippies, and progressives of many stripes, and thanks to the beachfront culture and the ghetto-ish Oakwood area, it has always been a very “street” kind of place. Also, there are neighborhoods where people have lived for many years. St. Joseph Center has existed in its midst, in the local’s “backyard” so to speak, for more than three decades.
There is a café called Bread and Roses that serves people experiencing homelessness. Clients can send and receive mail, make phone calls, wash their clothes, or wash themselves. There is a thrift store. The staff members and volunteers (around 400) do a lot of things, like find emergency shelter and medical help for clients, and that includes people who might be mentally ill or substance abusers, or both. The Center offers various kinds of aid and advocacy in applying for benefits.
St. Joseph Center’s website states,
Homeless individuals who are ready to make long-term change may enroll in case management. Service plans developed jointly by the individual and the case manager assess each person’s strengths and needs and lay out a pathway to long-term stability and increased self-sufficiency by addressing issues such as permanent housing, job training, employment and ongoing treatment.
The part about the long-term change enrollment seems unknown to some of the neighbors, who don’t understand the levels of participation possible at the Center, and believe that all the clients must be fully enrolled in order to take advantage of the services.
I used to live within blocks of the Center, which was founded by nuns in 1976, so it was almost brand-new in my day. In 2006, the new main service center (family service and administration) was built on Hampton Drive, as described in this piece by Suzanne Thompson, in the Free Venice Beachhead (PDF),
Despite being so venerable, the institution has been embattled for years. I don’t live there anymore, but have followed the controversy through the neighborhood newsletters and other publications from Venice. Many of the neighbors equate the clients with criminals. Some are, some are not, and the same is true at any facility of this kind. A lot of people have records. A lot of people have been locked up at some point in their lives. (If you know a hundred people, one of them is in jail.) If they did their time, they’re even. Theoretically, here in America, a person with a criminal record has the same right to a free bowl of soup as anybody else.
There are always complaints about human excrement in the area. Why is that? It seems like, after the first year or so, the Center and/or the city would have figured out the restroom problem. The neighbors hate graffiti, and having their car windows smashed with bottles (or possibly from the impact of somebody’s skull). Some neighboring homeowners and renters live in constant fear. Others summon up their spiritual ideals or their old-school 60′s spirit, and try to exercise tolerance while they cope.
Some neighbors feel general compassion, but are exasperated by individual cases. They bring up the “homeless by choice” argument. It is true that throughout the history of the world there have been people who prefer to be vagabonds, and some prefer it now. But not nearly as many as the housed neighbors want to believe. Some call the center an “enabler,” and believe that any such facility that offers services to people experiencing homelessness will only encourage the lifestyle. Others disagree, such as Lars Eighner, who was quoted on this subject by House the Homeless a few days ago.
Almost a year ago, Va Lecia Adams, executive director of the homeless center, told Tidings Online:
We’ve always served families but, proportionally, we are seeing more families now. Certainly housing has been a very serious issue for our families. And I think so many families are just on the brink. When a member loses his or her job, it all can just crumble — especially in Santa Monica and Venice, where people are fighting to keep their housing.
At that time, the Center was serving 150 hot meals a day, and giving out thousands of bags of groceries. Donations were down, the staff was cut. Things have only gotten worse since then. There was a bright spot in September, when the Venicestock Festival with its seven bands raised money and awareness for the Center to continue its work. St. Joseph Center is currently, by the way, looking for a Manager of Venice Chronic Homeless Intervention Projects.
Reactions?
Source: “Homeless Services,” St. Joseph Center
Source: “Our History,” St. Joseph Center
Source: “St. Joseph Center struggles to serve Westside’s needy,” The Tidings Online, 01/29/10
Image by Steven W. Belcher, used under its Creative Commons license.
Austin, TX “Quality of Life” ordinances
Free: 2012 HtH Pet Calendar
2011 HtH HEALTH SURVEY
BUY THE BOOK
CONNECT WITH US
