Homelessness, Just a Symptom or More

“[When Ronald] Reagan was elected President in 1980, he discarded a law proposed by his predecessor that would have continued funding federal community mental health centers. This basically eliminated services for people struggling with mental illness… He made similar decisions while he was the governor of California, releasing more than half of the state’s mental hospital patients and passing a law that abolished involuntary hospitalization of people struggling with mental illness. This started a national trend of de-institutionalization.

“In other words, if you are struggling with mental illness, we can only help you if you ask for it… But, wait. Isn’t one of the characteristics of severe mental illness not having an accurate sense of reality? Doesn’t that mean a person may not even realize he or she is mentally ill?

“There certainly seems to be a correlation between the de-institutionalization of mental health patients in the 1970s and early 1980s and the significant number of homelessness agencies created in the mid-to-late 1980s.” Joel John Roberts writing for PovertyInsights.org, 10/14/13. 

Dumping the mentally ill onto the streets, many winding up behind bars in prisons dramatically underequipped to handle them (30% of those in jails and prisons have serious mental issues), may have seemed like a good idea in the 1970s and 80s, but we are definitely paying for that today.

States with the largest concentrations of homeless people relative to the total population are also often those with the highest cost of housing, states like New York and California. The problem with dealing with homelessness is the variety of causes combined with the fact that building housing takes years and NIMBY reactions make dealing with the issue horribly difficult. 

Looking at the U.S. as a whole: “A total of 552,830 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2018. This number represents 17 out of every 10,000 people in the United States. HUD’s Annual Point-in-Time Count, the only nation-wide survey of homeless people, provides this data and other useful statistics.

“Most people experiencing homelessness are individuals (67 percent). The remainder (33 percent) are people in families with children. Public policy has put a focus on additional subpopulations.

“One of the subpopulations is youth who are under the age of 25 and living on their own (without parents or children). This group is 7 percent of the total homeless population. In recent years, coordinated efforts at all levels of government have also targeted veterans (7 percent of the total homeless population) and chronically homeless people (18 percent). This last group consists of people with disabilities who have been homeless for an extended period of time or repeatedly.” EndHomelessness.org. 

California’s struggles with its vast homeless population (130 thousand or 33 out of a thousand) are drawing headlines across the United States, particularly Los Angeles County where in November of 2016 voters authorized the creation of a $1.2-billion fund to finance as many as 10,000 units of housing for chronically homeless people in the city of L.A. But to date, the resistance to allowing such housing “in my neighborhood” has resulted in not one new unit of such housing being built to date.

Good weather and liberal attitudes mix with the high cost of living: “California’s wealth, in a way, is driving its poverty. The coastal-city empires of commerce can’t function without the support of those who teach our children, take our blood pressure, deliver our mail and fix our cars, but those hardworking folks are barely hanging on in this housing market while tech execs count bonuses and drive the cost of shacks into the millions.

“One-third of the county’s residents are paying half or more of their household income on rent as the distance between an apartment and a tent continues to narrow. And we can’t pass a housing bill or deliver more protection to renters?” Steven Lopez writing for the June 6^th Los Angeles Times. 

Cadres of homeless people set up their tents under bridges and overpasses all over LA County. Lacking bathrooms and sanitary facilities, these amalgamations of homeless people often generate the stench of that reality, compounded by rats and insects that propagate and migrate to neighboring houses and apartments. The “not in my backyard” cry is stronger here. Crime and drug use is high. 

Local vagrancy ordinances, bans on sleeping in public places and angry neighbors fighting back make a bad problem much worse. Police used to drive the homeless out of these haphazard communities, confiscating the dregs of property of the hapless residents, but courts continually step in to try and instill some level of protection for human beings in dire straits. Still the ordinances are passed and enforced. More than one homeless person has purposely and openly committed a crime in plain sight of the cops… to get a bed, medical attention and three meals in the local jail.

It’s not as if LA County is ignoring the problem, even as it gets worse. “In L.A. city and county, [local residents] taxed [themselves] to do something about it, and last year alone $619 million was poured into housing and services… But statistics released Tuesday [6/4] show that the number of homeless only grew — a 16% increase in the city and a 12% jump in the county — to a staggering total of nearly 60,000 people without homes.

“It’s fair to wonder what happened, and how it’s possible to spend all that money only to see the misery multiply and extend deeper into the Westside and the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys… More than 20,000 people were brought indoors, so it’s not like we got nothing for our investment. But tens of thousands more spilled onto the streets or took up residence in vehicles, shelters and parks.” Los Angeles Times, June 6^th.

The numbers throughout Southern California, granted in a area with some of the worst homeless statistics in the nation, are downright depressing: “‘Overall, the service portion of the effort on mental health, substance use, the issue of housing, rent subsidies, those are important and we should stay the course,’ [LA County Supervisor Mark] Ridley-Thomas said. ‘Where we have to work much harder is in the area of affordable housing.’

“Without the flow of new dollars for services, [Peter Lynn, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority] said, the point-in-time count would have been worse and more closely resembled the dramatic jumps in neighboring Southern California counties and in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Orange County changed the way it conducted its count and recorded a 43% increase from its last count in 2017. Ventura, San Bernardino and Kern counties reported increases of 20% or more… Lynn pointed to two vulnerable groups as proof that resources work. Even though nearly 3,000 more veterans were reported homeless last year, there was no noticeable change in the number of homeless veterans on the street. Families experiencing homelessness grew by 8% with nearly 8,000 families being provided homes.

“One of the largest increases, however, was among people 18 to 24 years old. Lynn said a 24% jump was partly the result of a change in the methodology of the count. But still, he said, ‘there was a significant increase, many more unsheltered. We were able to house more youth this year than last year, but this is an overflow population.’

“Also exceeding the county average was a 17% increase of the chronically homeless population — people with a mental or physical impairment who have been on the street or in shelter for more than a year… Lynn said the dent made in that population by transitioning nearly 5,000 people into permanent housing was overshadowed by the phenomenon of people ‘aging in’ — those who were counted last year but, at that point weren’t ‘chronic’ because they had been homeless less than a year.

“The growth of homelessness was also uneven across L.A. County. The Westside experienced the largest increase at 19%, following a year in which its numbers were down by even more. The San Gabriel Valley was close behind with a 17% increase, marking the second consecutive year its homeless population had grown.” LA Times. 

But even as the California State Legislature mandates local governments to allow great concentrations of people per dwelling, particularly in areas near local transportation hubs, local communities resist. They see their home values dropping and their taxes rising.

The United States really hasn’t experienced this level of economic dislocation since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is the clearest evidence of the worst income inequality in the entire developed world. Not only is income inequality widening, as we pass tax cuts and deregulate to the virtual exclusive benefit of the richest in the land, but the bottom end of that polarized reality is living a life that would seem more appropriate to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or the slums in Mumbai… not an area in the immediate vicinity of Beverly Hills. We just cannot continue to exist with this widening gap… and expect to survive as a nation. How is homelessness impacting the community where you live? What do you think you can do to help?

              I’m Peter Dekom, and when we think that solving this problem is charity to others, perhaps we need to remember that our entire society will inevitably collapse from the same problems giving rise to homelessness.