Reply #86: I used to work for a shelter.

[JDPriestly]

People need long-term housing. Transitional housing only helps people if they move from the transitional housing to long-term housing.

I have a friend who was homeless for a number of years. Finally, she qualified for a housing voucher. It changed her life. If you knew her before and met her now, you would not recognize her. Having her own place to live changed her completely. Her hair looks great. She buys second-hand clothes but dresses more elegantly than I do.

Just having your own place to live makes you a real person.

If you doubt this, try moving in with your parents or some other family member for a couple of years. Your entire personality will change -- and most likely not for the better.

In Los Angeles, many nonprofits try to buy old hotels to make into single room occupancy, often sober-living, housing. It's a great plan, but the downtown area has been gentrified in recent years, and it is getting harder to find appropriate buildings for the longer-term housing.

Another impediment to providing long-term housing for homeless people is the cost of the renovations of run-down properties into appropriate housing. You can't just provide rooms. You need bathrooms, cooking facilities, elevators, and of course the old buildings have to be renovated to meet modern codes and Americans with Disability Act standards.

Single room occupancy housing is enough for many of the homeless people. But there are enough (and probably also enough in the non-homeless population) that need other services like medical care, sober living counseling, mental health counseling, job counseling. And providing those services for people who have no incomes, no money, is pretty challenging.

Charities like to give money to projects that deal with health issues or feed people in foreign countries or help children. It is hard to raise money for adults who cannot take care of themselves often simply because they have fallen off the grid. (Trust me on this. I used to do the fundraising. I totally burned out.)

The percentage of people within the homeless population needing these social and medical services may be somewhat larger than that within the non-homeless population, but the difference is probably less than you would think.

Most people are homeless through no fault of their own although a share of homeless people abuse substances or have serious criminal backgrounds.

The most common cause for homelessness is lack of money. It is more unusual to find the child of a millionaire or even just a professional person on Skid Row than it is to find the children of impoverished parents (although anyone can become homeless).

Temporary shelters are not a solution for homelessness. They are depressing and can be dangerous. That is why homeless people sometimes refuse to go to them. In addition, shelters have a lot of rules, and I mean a lot of rules -- curfews, rules about who sleeps where, rules about what you can take in with you, rules about getting along with others. These rules don't sound unreasonable, but as adults, we don't enforce these rules against ourselves in our homes. It is demeaning to require adults to live under such circumstances.

We have lots of empty housing in Los Angeles right now. There is no excuse for the extent of the homelessness in our city.