These are touching portraits of people's backgrounds. However, they are exactly the archetypes I expect in the Venice homeless encampments.
The first person is an addict who chops up stolen bikes. The second person has untreated mental health issues. The third person came to LA with no money or employment because the weather was nicer.
They've all had struggles and we need better support for all of them, but nothing surprising here. It is nice to get a more individualized and personal background on each, it's easy to dehumanize when you're walking by and afraid of who is the 1-in-100 that's dangerous.
exactly. empathy is a wonderful thing to cultivate when designing solutions for obvious problems like homelessness and the community impact it has. But, the fact that homeless people are very real people does not change the fact that their encampments need to be dealt with and the communities around these encampments are suffering very real impacts.
It's also easy to dehumanize by assuming there are 'archetypes' that can be reasonably applied to people just because they're poor or living on the street.
I lost everything due to Covid in 2020. I have been on and off homeless since. Not able to find affordable or stable housing. I wrote three books, one of which is top ten on Apple Books for "design system", while living in parking lots at the library. I get continually harassed and fired for things I cant help. Americans are cruel to the homeless. Its quite disturbing. I have met so many that quite literally will never get out of their situation. No facilities, no showers. One lost a leg due to infection. Never trust your eyes only and most humans these days dont even use theirs very good.
Our government collects a lot of taxes for helping people like you. I guess I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that that’s not working but do you have any insight into why none of the homeless assistance projects aren’t capable of bringing you back to a stable situation?
Just an offhand comment, but looking through your personal site[1] makes it seems like you're living this amazing life and smashing goals. One of those real "Instagram vs. Reality" contrasts.
A minimum wage job will get you at least $900 a month.
You can get an apartment for $500. Health Insurance is $30, utilities $200. You can get a minimum of $50 per week in food stamps. You will get about $1000 in EITC each year.
That is with bare-bones, $7.25 an hour minimum wage and the lowest level of assistance.
With a tiny bit of advancement you can afford much more.
I wonder if there are some folks within the city council or whatever governmental group that essentially allows people to camp / live in this area that want this to be a public eye sore to get public support to do something about it? Because if you take at face value what these folks say, they like the fact that the location is beautiful and it’s convenient for them in various ways. The same reasons members of the public would also enjoy coming to the same area but are not able to enjoy it because the area is an eye sore / does not feel safe. Caring about the homeless and allowing them to live in a gorgeous public park seems like really the only goal to allow it is to want to generate public discussion since it is so obviously unfair to people who live nearby, people who want to visit it and enjoy it, and businesses in the area that are impacted by the homeless needing bathrooms / leaving trash / causing problems (likely a small minority who cause problems but still the problems do exist let’s be real).
There's really no conspiracy, this is the cheapest thing to do. You kick people out of the parks, they just move around and you still have basically the same problem next week.
In order to permanently get people to leave you need to build semi-permanent camps. But these camps do need to be in somewhat desirable areas because the people in the camps need to live near where they can find work (many don't have cars.) You put them out in the boonies they're just going to come camp in the city because there's no jobs in the boonies and they are mostly normal people who want to find work and not have to camp in tents.
Obtaining land and permitting such camps is hard. The more expensive option is building permanent housing. The most expensive option is prison.
You know what's even more unfair than you having to deal with this "eye sore"? That these people are homeless. Have some empathy. They are people, too.
If you like this kind of thing, then you'll love Soft White Underbelly [1][2] which is a collection of hundreds of intimate, colorful and brutal interviews done by Mark Laita with people from Skid Row (and elsewhere.)
Then there's also Invisible People which has been interviewing homeless people for even longer. [3][4][5]
I've been working in Venice Beach for the past 4 years. 2 blocks from that library.
Right across the street, someone camped on the empty lot at the intersection. They chose this spot because of the outlet that powered the christmas lights. Few days later, the whole thing caught on fire, including the tent. Few weeks later, the city cleaned it up and installed plants and a fence so no one could live there. Well, someone moved on the other side of the road and ran a daisy chained outlet that went over the intersection and into the plug... It also caught on fire.
I was there when the police came in the middle of covid and destroyed all the tents and kicked everyone out. It took a long time, but eventually someone installed a single tent by the library. Then someone else joined. Now there is an entire community that lives there.
Venice is the most confusing place in the world, it has million dollar homes with homeless people tents surrounding them. It's really hard to decide what is the right thing to do.
There was a man that slept right in front of the door of our building. Sometimes when I'm leaving work in a hurry, I'd stumble on him. I got used to it and didn't report him or anything. But then, he started pooping on the stairs. As terrible as that is, it's not my building. But, the owners have found a cruel and effective solution. They installed sprinklers on the stairs and in the parking lot.
These stories resonate with me because those are the people I see outside right now. When you struck a conversation, this is what you hear. Someone who has lived a whole life just to end up here. Young men that look like surfers living the life, they are stuck here. Young ladies wearing fancy clothe and make up, but live in a honda fit. You don't need a mental illness to be homeless here. You can't afford anything anyway.
I live in West Los Angeles and have been by this encampment, as well as many others throughout West LA. The article portrays the encampment as some sort of "community" where people who have made a few bad decisions or caught a few bad breaks have come to "get back on their feet".
The reality is this encampment, like many others, is pretty close to hell on earth. It's a site of abject misery, squalor, and violence. People regularly get stabbed, beaten, and raped there. The people in the camp set fires, scream wildly at all hours of the day and night, fight with the fire department, consume hard drugs openly (i.e. meth and fentanyl), and destroy the surrounding environment with an astounding amount of trash and human waste. The park they occupy as well as the nearby library are now unusable by the general public.
I'm reminded of the article the Seattle Times did on a local homeless encampment that was in the Ballard Commons park for over a year. They did their best to make it sympathetic to the people living in the park, but it was hard to take it too seriously when the cover picture chosen had a visible crack pipe in it. Even in the linked article, "Coconut" has a crack pipe in his hand.
It's a complex issue, and people tend to talk about different things when discussing the homeless problem. As far as I can tell, there are two groups of people - able people who have been displaced due to financial, medical, job-related reasons and are now homeless, who need social support (in the form of cash) to get out of the poverty hole and not fall back in.
And then there's the second group, for whom living on the streets is preferable to entering shelters or rehab facilities due to a crippling drug dependency. This is the group that makes the headlines, mainly because they're the ones making public spaces unsafe (there's a headline every day about an assault in Seattle where somebody gets attacked unprovoked by someone in this second group of people).
What do you do with the repeat offenders who refuse to go to rehab and stay clean? Public spaces should be usable by all.
Are these profiles or just a reporter transcribing people pitching the best version of themselves? I don't mean any snark, I have a huge amount of sympathy and empathy for the plight of the homeless and more should be done for them, a lot more. However, these 'profiles' seems to smooth out a lot of the complexities involved. To boot, there are only 3 people profiled.
You hit the nail on the head I think. You meet a lot of these types when you spend time doing volunteer work. Eloquent, relatively intelligent, very street smart, and pathologically unable to take accountability for anything in their lives. I suspect it comes from years of taking advantage of the kindness of others, usually due to a history of drug addiction.
I don't mean to paint with broad strokes here: there are many kind, honest homeless people who really just need help finding a way to live. There are also a lot of shucksters who will tell you exactly what you want to hear.
This is the state of reporting (generally speaking) in 2022.
I mean the guy Coconut looks like he's holding a meth pipe - and personally I wouldn't believe a thing he says. Tells you his ex RAN away with the kids, that his daughter wants nothing to do with him along with his sisters who send him money. He also likes to play games where he lies to people and sees what they'll believe. Seems to take zero responsibility and tells grand stories of the things he's done...
Still sad about the others, but yes some actual journalism would be nice!
there was a homeless woman living in a cocoon of bushes/trees in one of the yards of an apartment building in my neighborhood. she was very tidy, quiet, and had a pet cat. friendly but not quite put together, she was nevertheless a normal part of our neighborhood. one day, some contractors for the owner came and kicked her out of her makeshift home, and put a fence up to keep her out. she was then forced onto the sidewalk/parkway area where she was less safe and secure. about a year later, she was found dead there.
These seem cherry picked and it smells of propaganda.
Now, don't get me wrong, it looks awful and I don't want unnecessary suffering. And most of all I bet a lot of those people could slot into housed productive lives if there was a smart and well funded platform for them. That's what I'd love...
But I want to see a survey of :
Criminal status. Health issues. Drug use. Mental Health. Education. Age. Sex. Gender. Marital Status. And then aptitude tests in English and Math. Maybe even an IQ test. But most of all a Big 5 personality test.
Many of those answers could lead towards to matching a person with substitutes or hopefully even a job.
My fear is that a majority can never be self sufficient. Who would that be? Low intelligence and low agreeableness. With or without attendant health issues those two dimensions make for a life of pure misery without a rich support network.
My dad works with people to help them find housing and while peoples’ stories are similar with a broad brush, each one is uniquely complex.
There are many steps involved to qualify for housing or to apply for disability benefits and it can be pretty overwhelming to navigate.
One person needed a birth certificate to get ID, they born in a state on the other side of the country, you had to mail forms to apply for the new birth certificate and then you needed an address where it could be sent, and there was a fee for a new one.
My dad’s approach is to not worry about solving Homelessness, but instead to partner with someone and help them solve homelessness in their situation.
Has he had a high success rate with this approach? If so, maybe we should considering employing a few people with the city or state government to do this professionally.
Is this a representative sample? The article/title certainly suggests this, but the cynic in me thinks that only the interesting stories get published.
I can't recommend the 99% spinoff podcast "According To Need" enough, really illustrates the situation well & humanizes the problem in a way that isnt done enough. https://99percentinvisible.org/need/
The worst part of that are the demagogues who then paint California as some post-apocalyptic hell-hole. There's no doubt cities have problems with homeless, encampments, etc... but for many good old boys to paint this as a blue state, liberal city problem is such a bad faith argument.
Steve Lopez (LA Times columnist who also wrote The Soloist) talked with local homeless people in Hollywood a few years ago. I can't find the links now, but some were similar to TFA - local people who ended up on the street owing to a confluence of factors including eviction, injury, addiction, and bad luck.
But there were a number of profiles involving people, usually outsiders, who made decision to come to southern California because they wanted to live near the beach (on a $600/month social security check) or they wanted to break into show business or the music industry.
One young couple from Detroit had a friend of a friend of a friend who was a producer, bought a one-way ticket to LA and when that connection didn't pan out were stuck on the street. Even Lopez, who has done a lot to document the human tragedy on the streets of LA, seemed a little exasperated by these cases which had their origins in unrealistic assumptions about making it big or leading some sort of dream life in LA ... and the burden put on the already overwhelmed system to help people in need.
I also recommend viewing some of the "Invisible People" interviews all over North America and sometimes Europe:
I recommend the YouTube channel 'Invisible People' if you are interested in hearing homeless people's stories. Each video is unedited; you get it as they tell it.
There's a law school dropout/hippie/merchant mariner/retired writer with the NY Daily News and The Village Voice who lives in Los Gatos, Campbell, and Los Gatos. His memory is sharp enough that he could win at Jeopardy.
What I have learned from watching lots of interviews with drug addicts and homeless is that some people are so broken by life that it is impossible to fix them. No amount of resources spent on “fixing” them will work. All we can do is to minimise the number of kids who get broken in early childhood by parents/family/neighbourhood, giving them a chance to avoid the same destiny. Having said that, helping does work for the maybe 80% who hasn’t yet become completely broken.
[+] [-] drc500free|3 years ago|reply
The first person is an addict who chops up stolen bikes. The second person has untreated mental health issues. The third person came to LA with no money or employment because the weather was nicer.
They've all had struggles and we need better support for all of them, but nothing surprising here. It is nice to get a more individualized and personal background on each, it's easy to dehumanize when you're walking by and afraid of who is the 1-in-100 that's dangerous.
[+] [-] jvanderbot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluefirebrand|3 years ago|reply
I don't blame people for keeping their distance. "only 1 in 100 is dangerous" is very cold comfort when you encounter hundreds every week.
[+] [-] throw93232|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lookalike74|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rdubs333|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] changoplatanero|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AussieWog93|3 years ago|reply
[1]https://rwoodall.com/
[+] [-] hattmall|3 years ago|reply
A minimum wage job will get you at least $900 a month.
You can get an apartment for $500. Health Insurance is $30, utilities $200. You can get a minimum of $50 per week in food stamps. You will get about $1000 in EITC each year.
That is with bare-bones, $7.25 an hour minimum wage and the lowest level of assistance.
With a tiny bit of advancement you can afford much more.
[+] [-] xt00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukeschlather|3 years ago|reply
In order to permanently get people to leave you need to build semi-permanent camps. But these camps do need to be in somewhat desirable areas because the people in the camps need to live near where they can find work (many don't have cars.) You put them out in the boonies they're just going to come camp in the city because there's no jobs in the boonies and they are mostly normal people who want to find work and not have to camp in tents.
Obtaining land and permitting such camps is hard. The more expensive option is building permanent housing. The most expensive option is prison.
[+] [-] id|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] guerrilla|3 years ago|reply
Then there's also Invisible People which has been interviewing homeless people for even longer. [3][4][5]
1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCvcd0FYi58LwyTQP9LITpA/vid...
2. https://www.softwhiteunderbelly.com/
3. https://www.youtube.com/c/InvisiblePeople
4. https://invisiblepeople.tv/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_People_(organization...
[+] [-] moralestapia|3 years ago|reply
>$197.95 a month after 7-day free trial
Holy cr*p! I mean, it's a free market, but that's steep.
Edit: Oh, it's $197.95 on the local currency, thought it was USD. Thanks to others who pointed out it's $10USD.
[+] [-] firefoxd|3 years ago|reply
Right across the street, someone camped on the empty lot at the intersection. They chose this spot because of the outlet that powered the christmas lights. Few days later, the whole thing caught on fire, including the tent. Few weeks later, the city cleaned it up and installed plants and a fence so no one could live there. Well, someone moved on the other side of the road and ran a daisy chained outlet that went over the intersection and into the plug... It also caught on fire.
I was there when the police came in the middle of covid and destroyed all the tents and kicked everyone out. It took a long time, but eventually someone installed a single tent by the library. Then someone else joined. Now there is an entire community that lives there.
Venice is the most confusing place in the world, it has million dollar homes with homeless people tents surrounding them. It's really hard to decide what is the right thing to do.
There was a man that slept right in front of the door of our building. Sometimes when I'm leaving work in a hurry, I'd stumble on him. I got used to it and didn't report him or anything. But then, he started pooping on the stairs. As terrible as that is, it's not my building. But, the owners have found a cruel and effective solution. They installed sprinklers on the stairs and in the parking lot.
These stories resonate with me because those are the people I see outside right now. When you struck a conversation, this is what you hear. Someone who has lived a whole life just to end up here. Young men that look like surfers living the life, they are stuck here. Young ladies wearing fancy clothe and make up, but live in a honda fit. You don't need a mental illness to be homeless here. You can't afford anything anyway.
[+] [-] mmckelvy|3 years ago|reply
The reality is this encampment, like many others, is pretty close to hell on earth. It's a site of abject misery, squalor, and violence. People regularly get stabbed, beaten, and raped there. The people in the camp set fires, scream wildly at all hours of the day and night, fight with the fire department, consume hard drugs openly (i.e. meth and fentanyl), and destroy the surrounding environment with an astounding amount of trash and human waste. The park they occupy as well as the nearby library are now unusable by the general public.
[+] [-] dymk|3 years ago|reply
It's a complex issue, and people tend to talk about different things when discussing the homeless problem. As far as I can tell, there are two groups of people - able people who have been displaced due to financial, medical, job-related reasons and are now homeless, who need social support (in the form of cash) to get out of the poverty hole and not fall back in.
And then there's the second group, for whom living on the streets is preferable to entering shelters or rehab facilities due to a crippling drug dependency. This is the group that makes the headlines, mainly because they're the ones making public spaces unsafe (there's a headline every day about an assault in Seattle where somebody gets attacked unprovoked by someone in this second group of people).
What do you do with the repeat offenders who refuse to go to rehab and stay clean? Public spaces should be usable by all.
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ng12|3 years ago|reply
I don't mean to paint with broad strokes here: there are many kind, honest homeless people who really just need help finding a way to live. There are also a lot of shucksters who will tell you exactly what you want to hear.
[+] [-] LouisSayers|3 years ago|reply
I mean the guy Coconut looks like he's holding a meth pipe - and personally I wouldn't believe a thing he says. Tells you his ex RAN away with the kids, that his daughter wants nothing to do with him along with his sisters who send him money. He also likes to play games where he lies to people and sees what they'll believe. Seems to take zero responsibility and tells grand stories of the things he's done...
Still sad about the others, but yes some actual journalism would be nice!
[+] [-] dehrmann|3 years ago|reply
> If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have moved to Texas because things there started taking a turn for the worse.
A few sentences earlier, he said
> After Michelle, I met my second wife, Kristy, in rehab.
I'm not making light of his situation or addiction, but things had taken a turn for the worse long before Texas.
> How do I get money to pay the dues? I build electric bikes and choppers. I get parts from different places.
"Different places." Smoothed-out, indeed. It makes me suspicious of profiles that weren't published.
[+] [-] entwife|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guerrilla|3 years ago|reply
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31561597
[+] [-] clairity|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_only_law|3 years ago|reply
Oh god think of the property values /s
[+] [-] oh_sigh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] searealist|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kleer001|3 years ago|reply
Now, don't get me wrong, it looks awful and I don't want unnecessary suffering. And most of all I bet a lot of those people could slot into housed productive lives if there was a smart and well funded platform for them. That's what I'd love...
But I want to see a survey of :
Criminal status. Health issues. Drug use. Mental Health. Education. Age. Sex. Gender. Marital Status. And then aptitude tests in English and Math. Maybe even an IQ test. But most of all a Big 5 personality test.
Many of those answers could lead towards to matching a person with substitutes or hopefully even a job.
My fear is that a majority can never be self sufficient. Who would that be? Low intelligence and low agreeableness. With or without attendant health issues those two dimensions make for a life of pure misery without a rich support network.
[+] [-] avgcorrection|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stevesearer|3 years ago|reply
There are many steps involved to qualify for housing or to apply for disability benefits and it can be pretty overwhelming to navigate.
One person needed a birth certificate to get ID, they born in a state on the other side of the country, you had to mail forms to apply for the new birth certificate and then you needed an address where it could be sent, and there was a fee for a new one.
My dad’s approach is to not worry about solving Homelessness, but instead to partner with someone and help them solve homelessness in their situation.
[+] [-] CivBase|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|3 years ago|reply
Is this a representative sample? The article/title certainly suggests this, but the cynic in me thinks that only the interesting stories get published.
[+] [-] stmfreak|3 years ago|reply
They don’t say it directly, but woven throughout all these sad stories is a lifetime of abuse.
[+] [-] miralize|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|3 years ago|reply
Homelessness is a national problem that manifests itself in places where we take care of the homeless.
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|3 years ago|reply
But there were a number of profiles involving people, usually outsiders, who made decision to come to southern California because they wanted to live near the beach (on a $600/month social security check) or they wanted to break into show business or the music industry.
One young couple from Detroit had a friend of a friend of a friend who was a producer, bought a one-way ticket to LA and when that connection didn't pan out were stuck on the street. Even Lopez, who has done a lot to document the human tragedy on the streets of LA, seemed a little exasperated by these cases which had their origins in unrealistic assumptions about making it big or leading some sort of dream life in LA ... and the burden put on the already overwhelmed system to help people in need.
I also recommend viewing some of the "Invisible People" interviews all over North America and sometimes Europe:
https://www.youtube.com/c/InvisiblePeople/videos
[+] [-] Stevvo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cvccvroomvroom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbrodersen|3 years ago|reply