Lost Angeles: City of Homelessness

Introduction

Homelessness in Los Angeles is a complex issue that’s been around for decades. Many have tried to fix the problem, but the numbers increase year after year. This documentary takes a look at the roots and causes of homelessness, arguably the largest issue currently facing Angelenos. FOX 11 spoke with experts on homelessness and those experiencing homelessness themselves on how we got here and how we can make progress toward solving the issue. (source)

Quotes

“The homeless count is an imperfect science and it gives us kind of a baseline to work off of. I believe there probably are more individuals that are on our streets that are invisible because they don’t want to be seen.”

“It’s mushroomed into an epidemic and it has reached crisis levels because now the homeless encampments are encroaching and destroying the business community, the tourism industry, impacting the quality of life of our residential areas, contributing to the rise in violent crime and just overall misery, while the homeless are dying in record numbers.”

“Homelessness in Los Angeles dates back to the late 19th century when migrant workers arrived in droves on the southern pacific railroad … Skid Row becomes the Skid Row that we know of it in the 1940s and 1950s when that population begins to stay … so the 1970s you see this explosion of all of these services in these communities and communities responded by saying we don’t want these services in our communities, we want them somewhere else, and that somewhere else became Skid Row.”

“These are all real people that had lives, that have had jobs, that have had marriage,s that have had divorces, they’ve had hard times. They’re not there because that was their first choice, this is their last choice but they become used to it and it’s a life that they can deal with and maybe it’s too painful to confront their families or their past problems.”

“59% of newly homeless in L.A. County cite economic hardship as their main reason for ending up on the street. 32.4$ of L.A. County’s homeless population is female. Of those, 49% report a history of domestic violence.” [Source: 2020 LAHSA Homeless Count]

“1 in 4 of California’s former foster youth report having experienced homelessness in the two years after aging out of the system.” [Source: California Youth Transitions to Adulthood Study: Conditions of Youth at Age 23]

“Our mission is to both prevent and end people’s homelessness. This is a place where people can come, they can get off the streets, they can get stable and then we can assist them in ending their homelessness and moving into permanent supportive housing. All of our shelters operate very similiarly. We have three meals a day delivered on site. On top of that we have hygiene facilities, laundry facilities, case management and housing navigation, which is the critical piece because it’s so hard to get an apartment in Los Angeles.” [Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission]

“Project Room Key is a program that was established out of the coronavirus pandemic. It was the governor’s way of helping the unhoused get shelter during the most uncertain time; provided shelter to the unhoused. It took unused hotel rooms or hotel rooms that now were going to be converted into this program to give the unhoused a place to stay.”

“There’s nothing wrong with HHH as an initiative. What complicated it and what was driven up those costs is how it was implemented. The ones that were supposed to cost $375,000 a unit, they’re now averaging $600,000 a unit, some $700,000.”

“I think it’s important to realize that homelessness is a traumatic event, that even if you weren’t a drug addict before, becoming homeless can change you and it changes you physiologically. The psychosis on the street are due to primarily three things: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia’s of various type, and methamphetamine and methaphenamine bleeds over to the other two as well.”

“1963 – President John F. Kennedy signs the Community Mental Health Act into law.
1967 – California Governor Ronald Reagan signs the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act into law.”

“The worst thing we can do is to criminalize poverty, to criminalize homelessness, to criminalize mental illness, and we also know that it’s not a solution to just say get off the sidewalk, we have to find a right balance so that we can help as many people as we possibly can.”

“What you saw at the VA shows that if there’s a political will things can get done. You can cut through the red tape if you’ve got the right people saying this needs to stop. It’s the same thing that we saw happen in Venice along the Venice boardwalk when people in power, in leadership, want to get something done, they can.”