God help me, but L.A. needs to be more like San Francisco

Part 1 of 2

On the right, San Francisco getting it right; on the left, L.A. continuing to get it wrong

David Zahniser, a senior staff reporter over at what’s left of the Los Angeles Times, must be exhausted. He’s written more or less the same story about the city’s and region’s homelessness crisis dozens of times at this point. Maybe hundreds. I wonder if he has a boilerplate on his computer that he pulls up whenever his editor tells him there’s another story to cover. He must be exhausted, and maybe bored.

He wrote another one today, about how Mayor Karen Bass’s signature “Inside Safe” homeless outreach program has fared in South L.A., specifically along a half dozen streets that parallel the 110 Freeway.

Spoiler alert: It’s not going great.

The cliche is that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. It’s not strictly speaking accurate, but in the case of the homelessness crisis in L.A., and more broadly in California and the western U.S., it applies. 

Zahniser writes, “According to records obtained by The Times, outreach workers carried out Inside Safe operations 25 times on that one-mile stretch during her first three years as mayor, returning again and again to bring people indoors.”

Again and again, the same thing, over and over, expecting different results. It may not meet the clinical definition, but by any reasonable standard, what Zahniser describes is insane. We’ve reached the point in L.A. that we have crazy people trying to help crazy people. No wonder none of it is working.

Further along in the story, he reports that “[d]uring one operation, Inside Safe brought 42 people inside. A month later, 54 more people came indoors. On other occasions, progress was measured in single digits: two people during one visit, five on another, eight on the next.”

Bringing people indoors a few dozen at a time over a period of months is never, ever going to work. We’re putting used band-aids on a burst dam. And we’re spending billions of dollars to do it.

Meanwhile, residents in the neighborhood report “crime, fires, prostitution, open-air drug use and other problems.” These things are endemic to illegal homeless encampments. In other breaking news, water is wet.

Yet the political class continue to insist, against a Mt. Everest of evidence to the contrary, that the people living in these squalid hellholes of their own creation are “our unhoused neighbors.”

(Warning: profanity ahead, because it’s fucking justified)

It’s time Angelenos call bullshit. The asshole creating his own personal shithole in a neighborhood of working class families, who arrived in L.A. a couple of years ago from Minneapolis or Nashville with nothing to his name but a bag of meth and a sense of entitlement, is not a neighbor. He’s a threat. He’s a menace. He’s here to live as he damn well pleases, secure in the knowledge that most of the asshats who run this berg will do little more than an occasional clean-up while otherwise bending over backwards to enable his chosen existence.

Not your “unhoused neighbor,” a violent criminal

Unhoused neighbors” are still neighbors. An illegal homeless encampment full of human waste, garbage, stolen goods, and drug paraphernalia is no different than the homeowner who allows his property to decay while trash piles up in all corners.

At a certain point, compassion becomes enablement and tolerance becomes encouragement. Los Angeles, like many liberal west coast cities, is well past that point. We’re so far past it we can’t see the line we crossed years ago.

To be clear, there are people who genuinely have fallen on hard times, either through bad luck or bad decisions. The young woman who’s living in her car or on a friend’s couch to escape an abusive partner, the young man who’s never done drugs but nonetheless is in the throes of a mental health crisis his family has no idea how to deal with. The combat veteran with demons from Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam devouring his mind.

The people Zahniser describes as partying all night and trashing the neighborhoods they decided are theirs are different. They’re assholes. Some of them probably do have rough histories, but guess what? It’s possible to be a domestic violence survivor or veteran and an asshole at the same time. The former doesn’t excuse the latter.

I’ve written before about a homeless man I’ve encountered over the years in Santa Monica, Brian. I first met Brian when he decided my block was the perfect location to post up for what I came to think of as his “5 o’clock meltdowns.” He would stand on the sidewalk right outside my front windows screaming all nature of profanity, at maximum volume. I confronted him after a few days when it threatened to become routine.

Brian is schizophrenic and has Tourette’s. He’s an alcoholic and habitual marijuana user. When he’s medicated, he’s actually a pretty docile guy. He’s also kind of a dick. He’s nice to me because I’ve helped him out with meals and clothes over the years. I’ve seen him interact with other people. He’s not so nice to them. He has a criminal record that includes hate crimes. Someone who treats people differently based on what he can get from them is pretty much the definition of an asshole.

Admittedly, when it comes to Brian my generosity is largely a matter of self-interest. A few sandwiches and t-shirts buys my block peace. Maybe that makes me an asshole, too. I don’t care; it helps keep my block peaceful.

Which is where the insanity of L.A.’s approach to homelessness reaches its apex. One night a few weeks ago I took my dog outside to do business before going to bed. I discovered a homeless woman had set up camp in my front yard. She wasn’t doing any harm, in fact I may not have noticed her had I not heard her sleeping bag rustle (yes, I have the worst guard dog in history; I don’t care, I love her anyway).

She wasn’t doing any harm, she wasn’t ranting and raving or tearing up the rose bushes (as another homeless guy did a few months ago, the motherfucker). But letting her stay wasn’t an option. California is in the midst of a particularly brutal heat wave. One errant cigarette or cook fire could send the entire neighborhood up in flames. Homeless people are responsible for at least 75 fires every single day in Los Angeles County. I know people whose homes have been damaged and destroyed by homeless fires. I’m not playing that game of roulette.

I asked her to leave, and she did, without protest. As she shuffled down the sidewalk, I felt like a complete and total asshole. She thought she’d found a cool, quiet, safe place to sleep, and I took it from her. I realized when I woke up the next morning that I should have called 311, but at the time it was late, I was tired and groggy, and I didn’t even think of it. My feeling of being a jerk was compounded by another layer of guilt.

That’s the position L.A.’s insane approach to homelessness puts us all in. It makes assholes of all of us, homeless and housed alike. It forces us to do the work that we pay taxes for professionals (in theory) to do. The city’s and county’s failure to handle the situation puts individuals in the position of protecting their own property and personal safety. It’s unfair to everyone.

The insanity takes still other forms. Zahniser interviewed Mayor Bass, who pointed to examples of what she called Inside Safe successes. One example was a vehicle and RV encampment that was cleared on Washington Boulevard adjacent to Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. “To keep people from living in their cars at that location, city crews turned a stretch of Washington Boulevard into a no-parking zone.”

An AI generated representation of L.A.’s approach to homelessness

There are several small businesses along that stretch, including a popular chicken restaurant, a flower shop, a mini market, and a pop-up theater. I attended a film screening at the theater a few years ago. To remove the disruption of the encampment, which had illegally occupied those street parking spaces, the city took away the spaces permanently. That’s called success in L.A. Elsewhere, Bass pointed to a block where the city had paid to install planters to deter camping.

When a city reaches a point at which it has to physically alter itself to deter illegal behavior, the people in charge have well and truly lost their minds.

Look for Part 2 of this post, focusing on solutions, on Tuesday