Do Santa Monica Streets
Belong to Fewer People?
By Frank Gruber
On Friday when I logged onto The
Lookout around lunchtime I saw the
"NEWS FLASH" headline announcing
an upcoming story about how Santa Monica's
homeless population had dropped, and this
caused me to swing into action.
No lie, but a few weeks ago I came to
a realization as I walked on the Promenade,
which I do nearly every day inasmuch as
my office is on Fourth Street north of
Broadway, that I was seeing fewer homeless
people than I was used to.
I started asking friends if they agreed
with me, and no one seemed to have a definite
opinion. So I told myself I should do
my own survey. But I never got around
to it.
Until Friday. After lunch, around 2:30,
I took a walk all the way up the Promenade,
from Broadway to Wilshire, and as I walked
I counted the homeless people I saw. Who
did I count?
My criteria were the traits we know so
well that identify the down, out and lost
-- the leathery, sunburned skin; the bags;
the ratty clothes; the vacant stare; etc.
I didn't count panhandlers, unless they
had other indicia of despair, because
I've learned that beggars are not necessarily
homeless.
I was looking for classic spaced out,
mentally ill or alcoholic homeless people,
and I counted eight. There was one about
whom I wasn't sure. He wore nice clothes,
and was clean and well barbered, but he
also had an old cardboard box and a sleeping
bag attached to a luggage carrier with
bungee cords, and he was sitting on a
bench looking aimless. I included him
in the eight.
I never did a "before" count,
but I've been walking those blocks for
years, and I estimate that I would generally
see in past years, on a sunny afternoon,
at least eight lost souls on each block.
Sometimes nearly eight around one cluster
of benches. I would also see runaway teenagers,
and they were all gone.
So what's happened? One interesting sign
was that a social worker was interviewing
one of the homeless people I counted,
a man bundled up in many layers of clothing
who sat on a bench just off the Promenade
on Santa Monica Boulevard. The reason
I knew the woman he was talking to was
a social worker was that she was young
and earnest and she had a clipboard, and
I overheard her tell the man that she
could give him an "outreach form."
They had a long conversation -- they
were together when I walked north, and
still talking about fifteen minutes later
when I returned. I thought that was a
good sign.
My count and my impressions are not scientific,
and, when you get down to it, there are
similar problems with the official homeless
counts. As Julie Rusk, who is in charge
of the City's homeless services, pointed
out (see
story), the drop in the Santa
Monica's homeless population the County
has reported may not have been a drop
at all, but instead may be the result
of a more comprehensive count that relied
less on projections.
But I trust my impressions, and there
is also the data that since the City initiated
its Chronic Homeless Progam four years
ago, 78 of the most hopeless homeless
people on our streets have been placed
in housing. Seventy-eight out of the seven
or eight hundred who might be sleeping
on the streets on any given night may
not seem to a lot, but I don't doubt that
I used to see many of those 78 on the
Promenade.
I also attended the October 5 presentation
by New York City's Common Ground organization
to city officials and service providers
that Anita Varghese reported
on for The Lookout. I don't
have much to add to that account of the
meeting, but I'm still mulling over some
of what I learned there.
First there was the point that when it
comes to housing the homeless, it can
matter more whom you house than how many
you house. We who go somewhere else but
for the grace of God tend to look at homeless
people as some alien race, but of course
they are people with their own ways and,
if you will, culture.
When Common Ground first started applying
"housing first" methods pioneered
in London and other places to the Times
Square area in New York, they found themselves
housing people but not making a dent in
the overall number of homeless in the
area. The reason was that they were housing
the newcomers to the area, not the chronic
homeless.
The chronic homeless people -- "anchors,"
the social workers called them -- who
had been sleeping in the same nooks and
crannies for years, signaled safety and
acceptance to newcomers, who looked to
them for guidance to find good places
to bunk down. It was only when Common
Ground focused on the hardest cases did
they see an overall decline in numbers.
It appears that Santa Monica and its
service providers have learned the same
lesson. But while they may have had success
in downtown Santa Monica similar to that
achieved by Common Ground in the Times
Square area, there is little hope that
the L.A. region will be able to replicate
the success New York and London have had
in reducing homelessness throughout their
cities.
The reasons are politics and money. Both
New York and London have centralized governments
that can act decisively. Here, we have
a distant and ineffective county government,
with no political will to solve the problem,
and scores of cities mostly trying to
avoid their responsibilities.
Santa Monica is one city that has stepped
up to the plate, but so far its efforts
to get other cities and the county to
do more, symbolized by its hiring of former
County Supervisor Ed Edelman, have not
produced results.
Then, of course, there is money. Or,
more accurately, there isn't money. New
York has built or has in the pipeline
36,000 units of permanent housing for
the formerly homeless, while L.A. County
is barely building 2,500.
So there is good news -- it is possible
to house even the most lost homeless souls
-- but the bad news is that most politicians
-- and probably most people -- in the
L.A. region are willing to continue to
enable homelessness.
I suspect it has something to do with
the weather. In New York, there is a "right
to housing" law because in the winter
people will die if they don't have shelter.
In L.A. they just get wet. |
