The City of the Homeless: Humanitarian Crisis on the Streets of Los Angeles
A City Within a City
The City of Angels, as most anyone here will tell you, is many cities in one. Traveling from Westwood to West Adams or from Silverlake to Skid Row, you’ll find nothing less than a microcosm of the United States: one hundred and forty nations’ worth of cuisine, language, culture, and architecture, all of it kissed by the same sun and all of it Los Angeles. But if Los Angeles is a city of many cities, that doesn’t mean that we all live in the same Los Angeles. And nowhere is that fact more striking than in one of the fastest growing cities in the metro area: the City of the Homeless.
By California terms, the City of the Homeless is neither large nor small. With a population of about 36,000 in 2019, it is slightly larger than Beverly Hills and slightly smaller than Claremont. But it is experiencing a population boom: according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), Los Angeles saw a 16% increase over the last year in the number of people experiencing homelessness. As a point of reference, during Los Angeles’ own population boom of the 1920s, it was growing by about 8% per year. If the City of the Homeless continues to grow at this rate, by the time the Santa Anas arrive in 2021, more than 1% of Angelenos will be experiencing homelessness.
It is no exaggeration to describe the City of the Homeless as being in the midst of a humanitarian emergency. People experiencing homelessness are dying in record numbers. Members of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color are disproportionately affected, as are women — many of whom have resorted to homelessness rather than continue to live with abusive spouses. But perhaps no single statistic sums up the gravity of the situation like this one: if the City of the Homeless were its own country, it would have the lowest life expectancy on earth:
The dominant narrative around who is living on the street — and why it is so difficult to help them — is that people experiencing homelessness are all drug addicts and/or severely mentally ill. This damaging narrative dehumanizes people experiencing homelessness in a cynical attempt to justify inaction. But it is also factually incorrect: according to recent figures, roughly 70% of people in the City of the Homeless have neither a severe mental illness nor a substance abuse disorder. Though the LA Times recently challenged that figure, they did so by massaging the data in ways that broke with sound scientific practice, something I have written about elsewhere.
Where, then, are the numbers coming from? Since 2015, the number of people experiencing ‘chronic’ homelessness has not changed much. Nor have the numbers of veterans or people with traumatic brain injuries. Some of the largest changes have come from two groups: (1) people fleeing domestic violence and (2) people with chronic medical conditions.
Huge numbers of people — primarily women — are fleeing violence. The obvious next question is: has domestic/sexual violence increased recently? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the California Attorney General’s Office, last year, the incidence of rape in Los Angeles County was at its highest rate since 1991. And nationwide, rates of rape, domestic violence, and intimate partner violence have all increased over the last few years. This works to push women out of stable housing. And because only a small proportion of dedicated beds for people experiencing homelessness are in women’s-only shelters, once women are on the streets their futures grow rapidly darker.
In addition to the above are economic forces, such as an increasingly dire lack of affordable housing. This creates a pressure that the majority of Angelenos are familiar with, and that is exacerbated by the increasing use of the Ellis Act to evict rent-controlled tenants. Working in combination with rising medical costs and stagnant wages, that pressure is increasingly forcing people not into poverty, but into homelessness. Here is a piece of data to back up that assertion: 63% of this population are experiencing homelessness for the first time. And most of them have lived in the area for years. These are not strangers; these are the people you see at the grocery store, at school, and around town.
There are two basic sets of approaches to address the humanitarian emergency on our streets. One approach is to treat the symptom — in other words, to get homeless people into homes. Towards this goal, the city is working to place homeless people into either interim or permanent housing. In the last year alone almost 22,000 people were placed in permanent housing. This is a heroic achievement, but one that clearly falls short. Moving forward, about 1400 units are slated to open between 2019 and 2020, and about 10,000 total are in the pipeline. But those numbers are not enough to cover the year-to-year increases in our homeless populations.
Unfortunately, accelerating our rate of commitment to building requires more political will than many city politicians are willing to stomach: it remains deeply unpopular to housed residents to build low-income or bridge housing in their areas, much less shelters, for reasons that include the belief that it could impact traffic congestion, property values, or local safety.
The other approach to solving our humanitarian emergency is to address the root causes of the emergency, such that people don’t become homeless in the first place. We do not need to divine over a crystal ball to understand those root causes. People on the streets are already telling us what’s happening:
They’re being physically and psychologically abused to such an extent that they think their chances are better on the streets.They’re being thrown out of their homes by landlords and developers, who are using the Ellis Act in record numbers to evict tenants from rent-controlled units. They’re being painted into economic corners by a city transit infrastructure that restricts access to economic and educational opportunities by making it dangerous and difficult to get around by any means that is not a car. They’re struggling to stay above water as the cost of living and the cost of being sick increase, without a concomitant wage raise. In 2019, a minimum-wage earner in this city will need to work 79 hours per week in order to afford a median one-bedroom apartment.
In short, these forces can conspire to build a vicious feedback cycle, in which existing at the margins becomes itself a force of further marginalization.
We need to treat both the symptoms and the root causes. Doing so will require an upwelling of public support, a reorientation around how we see the homeless, and a refusal to accept a city that permits its residents to live in suffering and to die en masse. We need to prioritize the lives of Angelenos, and we need to hold our elected officials accountable if they fail to do the same.
For each of us, this may eventually be a personal matter: shield our eyes as we might, many of us are one medical emergency away from being on the streets ourselves. And this is what we’ll find: a city in which 918 people died on park benches and sidewalks last year. And a city in which, over the last couple months alone, several people experiencing homelessness have been burned alive.
Los Angeles is a rare and beautiful thing, a city of cities. For the sake of the soul of this city of cities, we have to acknowledge that we’re faced with a bona fide humanitarian emergency. And we have to understand that while we may not be the ones lighting the matches, by our inaction we’re letting our city burn.
