Tag: Vagrants

Where Have All the People Gone?

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It has been some two and a half years since the pandemic began, and somehow it is sort of (not) over. In that time, since March 2020, America has been in a slow-motion meltdown, proceeding quickly, an epoch unlike any other with riots, lockdowns, and a lunatic who would not and will not accept that he is no longer President.

There was always Santa Monica for me. 

Since I came here in 1994, that always cooler place near the ocean was a destination for dining, drinking, shopping, biking, and hiking. It was where you took out-of-town guests, where you went to show them, half truthfully, that LA was just as walkable, vibrant, urbane and enjoyable as New York.

I went down there yesterday to cool off and what remains on Third Street is deserted. Gone are the crowds, and gone are the stores: J Crew, Banana Republic, Bloomingdales, Barneys, Barnes and Noble, Old Navy, and Levi’s.

The sun still shines brilliantly. The buildings, for the most part, are well-kept. But the life and the crowds are absent. Benches, outdoor dining, storefronts, are lifeless. There are “for lease” signs everywhere. 

In some ways it feels as if the clock has spun backwards before gentrification, when Third Street was awaiting revitalization, when JC Penney was the big store. 

We walked, expecting to come to that fancy outdoor mall with the wine bar on the floor and Bloomingdale’s, the blowout salon, Jonathan Adler, Starbucks and CB2, but all of it was gone, shuttered, closed down, papered over windows and nothing. All the jobs, all the merchandise, all the interactions between people and goods, work and profit, and millions in tax revenues for the City of Santa Monica, wiped out.

This is August! This the height of tourist season! This is when thousands of families come to Santa Monica to partake and enjoy everything this city has to offer! And hardly anybody was there on a Saturday morning! Except for the Farmer’s Market.

The low point for me was May 31, 2020 when mayhem and looting destroyed many businesses, the murder of George Floyd acting as irrational justification for mass robbery, fires and stealing. I remember the BMWs and Audi’s pulling up to Vans, the broken glass, the fat, young, tattooed trash in black leggings, with boxes of sneakers getting into their cars and driving off. I saw the mobs work their way up the street and hit everything they could get their hands on. 

And now Santa Monica is a quieter and dying version of its pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd self. Will it come back? Detroit, Newark, The South Side of Chicago, Watts, 1965, 1967, 1968…are they somehow the ancestors of Santa Monica’s fate? Or does Santa Monica belong with Beverly Hills, often assaulted, but easily available to afford plastic surgery, police protection, and investment capital?

Will Santa Monica slowly fade off the way so much of Los Angeles has, all the places that once held joy and nice stores and nice memories: Miracle Mile, Westwood, Bullocks, 7th Street, Van Nuys Boulevard, the May Company?

Los Angeles is fickle, people dispose of anything inconvenient or unpleasant if it does not offer amusement or distraction. A destination without anything to offer is DOA.

The Folks Who Moved in Next Door.

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For about five years, an encampment of vagrants, with cars and trucks full of bikes, shopping carts, electronics, blankets, and various junk, spread their filthy circus along the corner of the Vanowen and Kester.

There were men and women in parked cars, and drugs, and women in the back seats of the vehicles. The sidewalk was taken over by them. They had complete autonomy and seemingly the blessing of the city to live outside.

Our senior lead officer, whose name I don’t care to name, cleared them away. He appears monthly on a Facebook chat room to brag about the latest clearance. “Happy to say they are gone,” he will say on Zoom.

But the camp of tramps always comes back.

They next set up their junk show on Lemay, in a quiet residential area, where they lived along the parking lot that borders the Casa Loma College.

Day and night they sat out on lawn chairs or slept on mattresses behind trees. One man danced with his dick out for an 8-year-old girl who rode her bike past. Complaints flooded LA311. Ms. Nury Martinez, Latin-X Councilwoman, got letters, emails, phone calls. LAPD Van Nuys was called numerous times. Yet the trash camp endured.

Outdoor urination, pot smoking, liquor, prostitution, dumping, disorder, noise, none of it mattered. It stayed in place, just like the homeless circus that has played on for 3,000 days and nights at the NW corner of Gault and Sepulveda. 

Gault and Sepulveda. Another long running blight on the neighborhood ignored by government officials.

After six months, their crap was cleared. 

Two weeks later the tarps and the shopping carts went up along Lemay near Norwich. That took dozens of calls to remove. Then it was gone.

Then they came back to Saloma and LeMay. That lasted a few months.

Now they have reappeared along Columbus Avenue across from the grammar school. While it’s doubtful anyone is actually learning grammar in that one-starred rated school, what’s certain is that the garbage camp is illegally set up in full view. 

When people wonder what drives Angelenos mad, it is this: there is no control on the disorder and criminality of this city and state. 

San Francisco, true jewel of the west, has gone to hell.

Los Angeles, costume jewel of the west, has followed suit.

And when mayoral candidates go on podcasts and talk ad nauseum about their humane and expensive solutions for the poor people who are homeless, you want to scream!

Why should the suffering of private persons, their addictions and mental illness, be allowed such a prominent and destructive place in the lives of all law-abiding citizens in the State of California?

“One of my proposals is to create a $1 billion revolving private equity fund with which to build permanent supportive housing. That’s housing that’s been costing $600,000-800,000 a unit. That can be cut to a third of that cost using a private equity model that has worked on the streets of Los Angeles,” says Mayoral Candidate Mike Feuer.

Is anyone knocked-up on drugs and alcohol going to sober up in a new, unsupervised housing unit?  

Here’s an idea: use the billions in homeless funds to send $100 Visa gift cards to legally housed residents, home owners and renters, who report trash camping in their neighborhoods. Top off the yearly payments to those who report the vagrants at $2,000. Thousands of Angelenos, short on money for gas and groceries, would be impelled to report vagrancy and clean up dumps that have destroyed our city.

Do the people burning down parks and sleeping under tarps on bus benches care to move into a new studio apartment? 

Trash camping?

Don’t permit it. Don’t allow it. Don’t normalize it.

Burning parks, setting fires along freeways, camping out on public sidewalks and streets. This is the state of California, the most technologically advanced region on the planet.

So much money, so much talk, so little results.

Letter From a Homeless Man

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  • Hollywood Freeway Offramp, Western Av., Homeless, 2020
  • Old Post Office, Van Nuys.

From the LA Times article, “Garcetti’s A Bridge Home Homeless Problem Has Mixed Results.”

A formerly homeless addict refutes all the tolerant and feel-good ideas that are bandied about by Garcetti and other enablers. Here is what WEHO LIBERAL said in a letter to the LAT:

“I’m someone who once was homeless multiple times, but always stayed in shelters no matter what. NEVER, ever camp outside! It’s a dead end and that behavior is only for people with serious behavioral problems, alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness. If you lose your housing? You do NOT camp outside. Period.

I’ve posted multiple times about homelessness on LAT over the years. The last time I did, Nita Lilyveld (not sure if I spelled her name right) wrote about 2 young homeless people in their early twenties that I reached out to offering support and even to take them to dinner. After 2 or 3 texts between one of them where they kept saying they’d follow up with me, they flaked. No more texts. They didn’t follow up or stay in touch.

I am done with this nonsense. And I say that as a liberal Democrat who supported all of these shelters being built. Enough is enough. My mother was mentally ill her entire life and constantly refused treatment.  Even when I was struggling with my own addiction, I ALWAYS made sure I had shelter.

I live in Hollywood.  You see these people every day.  I see them sitting or lying around their campsites when I leave for work. I come home from work and they’re still there, doing nothing but eating, urinating, defecating, some listening to the radio or watching TV on their phones. But they are always there and they make zero effort to change their lives or better their situation.

They ask me for cigarettes, they ask me for money. Their laziness and refusal to change infuriates me. I was homeless, multiple times. I’m sick and tired of LAT columnists like Steve Lopez and Nita Lilyveld pleading to help people who simply do not want to help themselves–or in the case of Lopez, only interested in finding a charity case that they can champion in press and on TV for his own ego.  No, I do not care to hear about how hard Nathanial Ayers’ life is when he refuses to take his medication that would help save his life and better his living situation. My own mother refused treatment for years so I have zero sympathy for people like him who literally are victims of their own refusal to simply do what could get them housed and improve their lives.

Look, being homeless and living in either a shelter or housing provided by local government was no picnic and no fun. I was miserable. My addiction was my responsibility and I deal with it and take responsibility for it. But Lopez, Lilyveld and others like them have their own faults and shortcomings, too.  It’s morally right to have compassion for others, absolutely.  But people who refuse to help themselves even when others try to help them and move Heaven & Earth to do it are not worthy or deserving of compassion.  They are not money pits; they are emotional black holes who will drain the time, energy and resource of everyone around them because they refuse to do what they need to do.

I’m living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yes, I’ve been lucky and yes, I have white male privilege. But as an incest survivor and an HIV+ positive drug addict in recovery, I no longer buy what Lopez, Lilyveld, LAHSA and others like them keep preaching. It is infuriating and it’s becoming obscene. I tried to help 2 homeless young people less than half my age last year after reading about them here.  For God sakes, I offered to feed them more than once. They kept making excuses and then just stopped reaching out to me.

I am done with supporting this policy and their behavior. We all need help sometimes. God knows I spent years exhausting people and it took me a long time to get my act together. But sooner or later, you have to reach deep down inside yourself, confront your problems and change your behavior as much as possible to save your own life.

I am not perfect and all of my problems are not solved. But as someone who sees homeless people every day who sit around all day doing nothing, my compassion for all but a select few is pretty much drained and gone.”