The Way of the Wanderers (Part Two)
There were preexisting pandemics of the United States long before Covid-19, and one of the most pressing was, still is, the ascendance of homelessness throughout our supposed first world society. It’s a comparable malaise to systemic racism and anti-intellectualism and it’s hardwired to each of those. I’ll stick to California, as that’s where my echo location resides, though it’s a nationwide dilemma affecting every state, every city, every town.
California is the premiere sanctuary state for unhoused individuals and families. In 2020, there were better than 160,000 homeless people within state borders living in shelters, their cars, or on the streets. That number rose fast due to pandemic economic hardship. Nearly half of the entire country’s homeless population lived in California at the time. The bulk of those numbers resided in the state’s largest coastal cities, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego, with a good fraction also stemming from two major inland hubs, Sacramento and Fresno.
A succinct summary of California’s unhoused issues was published in early 2020 by Matt Levin and Jackie Botts of Cal Matters, a nonpartisan, nonprofit webbie journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s policies and sociopolitical blueprints and guidelines were working, or not working. Levin and Botts were earnest, civic-minded folks without agendas. Legit sources are tantamount in this age, as we all know it’s come to a point in this country where journalism is often politicized with bipartisan filters.
That sort of news op-ed manifests in no small part because of social media threads, which sadly compose the greatest portion of American reading these days. As a rule of thumb, we must verify information for ourselves outside of social media posts, and we should never take any one source as verbatim, be it a book or a newspaper or a website or a cable news channel or your Uncle Jim-Bob. Or this very column.
Research requires in-depth effort examining an array of reputable news sources. ‘Alternative facts’ are now an actual thing for the United States. Heretofore irrefutable sources of truth can now be twisted to fit right or left hand propaganda. Tread lightly. It’s a swamp of disinformation in these internet days. Every human has a voice now thanks to WiFi and it’s a cacophony of unwashed masses out there. Present company included.
In their article, Levin and Botts posed a number of stark statistics on California’s unhoused. They maintained the United Nations compared the tent cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles to the slums of New Delhi, Mexico City, and Brazil’s slums in Rio and Fortaleza. They cited counts in early 2020 that showed over 5,000 people lived in the six square blocks of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.
I visit Skid Row a few times a year, and other smaller outposts of wanderers in Venice Beach, Long Beach, occasionally out in the high desert at Cathedral City and Indio. Last time I was there, I handed out a pickup bed full of small bags of dry dog food for the locals’ accompanying unhoused doggies (there are many furry vagabonds on those mean streets too, and I admittedly have a soft spot for those poor raggedy mutts).
In 2020, I wagered 5,000 was fair short of the actual number, and guessed it might have been as much as twice that, what with overlap in downtown business districts, west and east side suburbs, and the greater West Hollywood and North Hollywood vicinity. It was, and still is, difficult to verify a consistent agreement on unhoused statistics in California because there’s a hundred odd different papers published each year about the phenomenon from a variety of sources, and also, as Levin and Botts pointed out, the numbers were frequently based on volunteer based ‘one-night counts,’ a slapdash measure that failed to summarize an accurate annual estimate. Most experts agreed the overall numbers were far more than what was known, as volunteers simply didn’t have the funding or manpower to cover all areas, find every encampment, or visit all vehicles.
Visiting Skid Row is a life changing experience for any who haven’t seen it, much less so than becoming a resident thereof, but it’s eye-opening regardless. Most Americans can’t fathom the day-to-day in such a place. Some have seen brief slices of life from there through news footage and occasional advocate interviews and documentaries, but it’s hard to convey the nuts and bolts of what’s it’s really like without witnessing it in person.
It’s been around since the 1930’s, it’s about two and half square miles between 3rd, 7th, Alameda, and Main, with a bulk of its tent neighborhoods camped on 6th, all of which are immediately adjacent to downtown LA’s multi-million dollar high rises. A more palpable rendition of class tiers would be hard to find in Southern California.
A few blocks away, high above the freeways on the 35th floor, upscale patrons at the Westin Bonaventure’s LA Prime Steakhouse dine on $200 caviar and Napa Valley chardonnay, only the length of a football field apart from thousands subsisting on Mickey D’s dollar menu and stale food bank offerings. Yes, it’s exactly like all those sci-fi clichés you know from fiction; upper crust citizens stationed safely away in towers of steel and glass, teeming underclass outcasts below in streets of crime ridden squalor. That’s actually happening right now for many Americans. It’s not a near future, it’s here and it’s been here for decades.
Although the third world sub-nation of Skid Row is constantly under siege from police raids, crisscrossed city initiatives that constantly fizzle out, anti-camping ordinances, and drug crime and addiction, its residents have managed to eke out a meager existence in the face of impossible odds. The abject poverty is hard to take in. The most noticeable aspect of Skid Row is the smell; the urine and the shit and the sweat, a pungency alien to most suburbanites, an amalgam of despair, anguish, and yes, a little hope as well, dim futures beckoning with their temptations of second chances. It’s a bustling place where dealers prey, refugees hide, children play, mothers shelter as best they can manage and fathers provide however they can.
Too many of its residents are former wards of California’s lapsed state hospital system. A few years back, investigations were launched into the practice of ‘dumping’ psychiatric patients from assorted hospitals across the Los Angeles basin, as well as police doing the same for incarcerated victims showing mental health decline. Tent cities and slums across the world are dumping grounds for all tiers of what society deems ‘irredeemable’ humans. Read: time, blood, sweat, tears, and money will fix this, do we want to expend all of that on them? Our consumer world can’t be bothered to deal with those who have fallen, so it moves on and leaves a wake of broken humans behind.
The tolerance of homelessness is one of our greatest failures as a culture.
Here’s some sobering conclusions in Levin and Bott’s 2020 findings:
“African-Americans are disproportionately found on California’s streets — roughly 30% of the state’s un-housed population is Black, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Several Bay Area regions, including San Francisco and Marin County, have some of the highest rates of black homelessness in the country. A legacy of racial discrimination in rental housing, higher rates of poverty among black families, and over-representation in the state’s incarceration and child welfare systems all lead to higher numbers of African-Americans experiencing homelessness.”
“One of the more enduring myths about California’s homeless population is that the vast majority have traveled here from other states, seeking generous government assistance and climate more hospitable to living outdoors. It’s a baseless claim perpetuated by both sides of the aisle (even Governor Newsom has claimed as such). While comprehensive statewide data is lacking, local surveys indicate people living on the streets are typically from the surrounding neighborhood. Example: 70% of San Francisco’s homeless people were housed somewhere in the city when they lost housing; only 8% came from out of state. 75% of Los Angeles County’s homeless population lived in the region before becoming homeless.”
“A Los Angeles Times investigation found two-thirds of L.A. County’s residents living on the streets suffer from a psychological or substance abuse disorder, far more than what’s been reported in official statistics that exclude mental disorders that aren’t “long-term.” Methamphetamine use is high throughout the West Coast, and is often to blame for some of the most visible episodes of homelessness seen on Californian streets. Worse still, meth can exacerbate existing mental illnesses. Addiction and psychological conditions are often inextricably intertwined, and present a complex case for outreach workers or (more often) law enforcement to confront.”
That’s just a sample, but their entire study is a thorough write up of Californian unhoused demographics as they stood in 2020. Four years later, it’s monumentally worse out there, despite the pandemic’s retreat. Once again, we perpetuate muddled resource allegation to a marginalized population. Lawmakers and social service agencies continue to struggle with addressing what’s likely the most daunting sociological issue for the world over…the fallout from mental illness.
I might make a fair argument that racism, in and of itself, is a legitimate form of collective mental illness. I tend to fall on the side of shrinky-dinking that advocates racism as a kind of psychiatric disorder. Other psych types lean away from that, saying it’s a ‘medicalization’ of a social problem. There are many mental illnesses that derive from learned experience, like post traumatic stress disorders and psychotic breaks. I’ll wager that racism is a silent contender in that regard, born from primal fears. Much of the despair in Californian unhoused culture originates from mental illness.
Continued…
*Compiled and reconstructed, June 17, 2020