Downtown Los Angeles is in the midst of a renaissance. (Partly because I live there, but I can’t claim all the credit.) Amidst the high-rises and cultural institutions, residential building is booming, bringing restaurants and nightlife along with it. But the vibrant core of Downtown is just a few blocks from the epicenter of homelessness in LA: Skid Row. This compact area (official six square blocks) is a magnet for poverty and dispossession, and intentionally so: the city has concentrated services for the homeless near Skid Row, in an attempt to provide relatively easy access for the city’s itinerant population. But the neighborhood is by no means a pretty sight: the vision of small tents and ratty cardboard boxes stretching along the streets is an indelible one. And reports continue of local hospitals and mental-health clinics simply giving up on their worst cases and dumping them on Skid Row to fend for themselves.
Ideally, you don’t want to contain homelessness in a tiny area, you want to eradicate it completely. (The condition, not the people who suffer from it.) One step toward that goal is a better understanding of actual conditions in the region: who the homeless are, how many of them are on the streets, how they live and move through the city. Eric Richardson, who writes the excellent blogdowntown covering everything about Downtown LA, as part of his day job at Cartifact has been working to map Skid Row’s homeless population. (Cartifact is also responsible for an interesting interactive map of Downtown.)
It’s an impressive project, described here, and the most recent update has just come out. The data come from regular counts undertaken by the LAPD; systematic uncertainties will, of course, be as much of an issue here as in any data-collecting process. By clicking on the lower left corner, you can see the maps change as a function of time, or run through an animation of all the maps for the last several months. The good news is that the most recent count is the lowest yet; this is much more likely to represent a seasonal fluctuation than a long-term trend, but it’s still heartening to see.
Interesting post. I think it would be a good thing to have a better understanding of the homeless. Better than the “oh they are just lazy” garbage which gets us nowhere. I have a great respect for people who try to work with the homeless.
This reminds me of a method of crime reduction that was enacted in the televison series The Wire. A lieutenant (Bunny Colvin) decides to send all of the drug traffickers to a somewhat abandoned (by industry, commercial business, and residents alike) area of west Baltimore. Essentially, if dealers sell outside of this
‘Hamsterdam’ they will be brutally punished, but within this drug district, dealers can sell their product without police interference.
As a result, bedlam within the district ensues. Theft among the various dealers is rampant, and death via overdose is not uncommon.
However (and most importantly), outside of this district, crime is reduced dramatically. Residents no longer have to concern themselves with pushers on their doorsteps and junkies crawling on the sidewalks for their next score. Crime is dramatically reduced in these drug-free areas and the residents are all the more happier.
However, the difference between centralizing drug dealers and the homeless is huge. The homeless will on occasion commit crime to obtain money, but most of the time this is not the case. Instead, it seems that in L.A., the homeless are horded into small areas so as to not inconvenience the voters (who of course have homes) who live in the more opulent parts of town. But then, the question remains: how does this help the homeless?
I’ve worked in homeless shelters before when I was an undergrad, and other various programs throughout my life.
I sorta came to the conclusion a long time ago, that there was no real solution.
For instance the majority of homeless in say NyC suffer from mental disorders that usually range in severity from bad, to untreatable (various schizophrenia’s and the like). Basically the conundrum mental health facilities face is what to do with these untreatable patients. They can keep the very violent ones away from society, but by and large they let the other safe ones go. They tend to filter back in and out of these hospitals over time, but the patients themselves invariably want out after a certain time (I wouldn’t blame them either, the state of the hospitals is deplorable for myriad reasons).
Throwing money at the problem doesn’t work, even shelters and so forth are typically under capacity until the weather gets bad. You can give the homeless food stamps and so forth, but I kid you not, we’ve seen some of them basically trade the stamps, so they can go out and buy 50 pairs of shoes.
Ultimately, its a no win situation, short of a cure for mental illness.
Malcom Gladwell wrote a fascinating article for The New Yorker a year ago about homelessness and its solutions. There are two populations of homeless: the permanent, pathological homeless, like Haelfix mentioned, and the people who are truly temporarily down on their luck. What I got from Gladwell’s article is that the system does work, more or less, for the people down on their luck: the most common length of stay in a homeless shelter is one day. Gladwell argues that it would be cheaper, in the long run, to just provide subsidized housing for the permanent homeless, than the current system (or lack thereof). Along the way he talks about power law distributions and how common yet counter-intuitive they are to a public used to thinking of bell curves.
In Holland there are some plans to deport homeless people from cities to farms in rural areas. The law has to be changed first so that it is illegal to live on the streets.
As Healflix pointed out, most homeless people suffer from mental illness. The law currently only allows forced treatment of people if they are a threat to themselves or to others. So, if you only suffer from relatively mildly from a mental illness, the authorities can’t do much to help you against your will.
What with the expectation on the part of the Federal Reserve that up to two million citizens are in significant danger of losing their homes this year (due to balloon payments on those “easy” equity loans), and three major subprime lenders already requesting bankruptcy protections, i am sure the best solution is to immediately hide the homeless somewhere way-far-away and out-of-sight. That way those that have, can feel free to continue their lives, without necessitating giving even the slightest bit of attention to the problem. So much better that way, you know.
Perhaps running daily buses out past Victorville towards Barstow would work eh?
this isn’t tackling the major problem of homelessness, but as one who has spent a lot of time in downtown LA, Sean, you’ve got to check out the pool bar at the Hotel Figueroa. Very cool without being pretentious!
Thats why the homeless are connected with the small area called skid row, they are dumped there by hospitals and other agencies looking to hide them. Lets face it, homelessness is an invisible problem. We purposely do not want to see them, so we confine them to specific areas such as Skid Row.
If the funds spent on this study were instead to have been deposited in a trust fund and used to feed these homeless, you have to wonder if things might have improved a little for the subjects of the study.
But since this is relentlessly practical suggestion, it is doubtless churlish of me in extremis.
Homelessness is well known to have resulted from the paradoxically humanitarian impulse to empty the “snake pit” mental institutions of the 1940s and 1950s and discontinue some of the more problematic “therapies” for mental illness, including insulin shock and electroshock. It turns out that some patients suffer extreme effects from electroconvulsive therapy (in some cases including lifetime short-term memory loss, complete disorientation, and subsequent lifetime institutionalization) while most patients appear to suffer no lasting debilitatation. The problem is that it’s impossible to predict which patients will be totally debilitated by ECT or other shock therapies. Of course, ECT has changed a lot since the 1950s, with lower voltages today and other changes which make it far less dangerous than it was then.
The advent of modern psychotropic medications in the 1950s led to a laudable effort to empty out mental hospitals in the 1960s of all but the most dysfunctional inmates. The vision during the 60s involved creating a network of halfway houses together with outpatient medication using the then-new psychotropic medications to control outpatients’ symptoms.
Of course, this being the real world, the vast network of outpatient clinics never got built, courtesy of funding problems. And of course it turns out that people with treatable symptoms of mental illness tend to forget or simply dislike taking the medications, often because of the tardive dyskinesia and other highly unpleasant side effects.
The net effect is that we now have streets full of homeless people, most suffering from some form of nominally treatable mental illness, but in practice existing outside of society. As a practical matter, rent control is also strongly correlated with homelessness, as are high property values.
The puzzle?
Why no one has bothered to raise a hue and cry about it and do anything about it since the problem erupted in the 1970s. You’d think one politician somewhere would run on a platform of helping the homeless and mentally ill who live on the streets. Apparently not.
Some commentators have remarked that Americans get the government they deserve. That’s a chilling thought.