On Oscar night, 82,000 will be sleeping on the streets of LA, the nation뭩 epicenter of homelessness

marmar

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Sat Feb-26-11 09:37 PM
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On Oscar night, 82,000 will be sleeping on the streets of LA, the nation뭩 epicenter of homelessness

from The Nation:

Homeless in Hollywood

Richard Pollak
February 24, 2011

Winter뭩 Bone, one of ten nominees for best picture at the Academy Awards, is not likely to win. It deals with a drug-addicted father who abandons his poverty-stricken family, leaving them on the edge of homelessness뾱ubjects that rarely, if ever, prevail at Hollywood뭩 annual exercise in self-congratulation, where less troubling features like True Grit, The King뭩 Speech or The Social Network are favored to take the top prize. And when Hollywood뭩 haut monde arrives on waves of couture on February 27, it will not be fretting much about living in the nation뭩 뱈eanest� city in treating the homeless as criminals.

Los Angeles earned this distinction in 2009 when the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty surveyed 273 cities in the country. They based their report, 밐omes Not Handcuffs,� on the number of anti-homeless laws in a city, the enforcement of those laws and the general political climate, among other factors. Los Angeles emerged on top because of its strategy of ticketing, arresting and occasionally brutalizing or just ignoring many of its homeless뾲actics that local social service agencies and civil rights leaders had been decrying for years as not only inhumane but also financially counterproductive.

The so-called 밪afe City Initiative,� for example, assigned a police contingent of fifty to tackle crime on Skid Row, a fifty-square-block area east of downtown that has been a homeless domain for decades. This crackdown cost an estimated $6 million a year, at a time when the city was budgeting just $5.7 million to serve the homeless. As 밐omes Not Handcuffs� reports, 밃dvocates found that during (an) 11-month period 24 people were arrested 201 times, at a cost of $3.6 million for use of police, the jail system, prosecutors, public defenders and the courts.� By some estimates, that money could have provided housing for 225 people.

Politicians have made the usual promises to furnish more housing and services for the homeless, and some progress has been made since the 2009 report. But LA remains the homeless capital of the country, suffering certainly from the national economic travail but perhaps more from a continuing lack of urgency on the part of many well-housed and well-fed local and state officials. Last year, some 254,000 men, women and children were homeless in Los Angeles County (population 10 million) at some point, and 82,000 were on the streets on any given night. Not surprisingly, almost half of them were African-American, though blacks constitute just 9 percent of the county뭩 population; Latinos make up 47 percent of the county and 33 percent of its homeless. As many as 75 percent of people on the streets are not receiving the public benefits to which they are entitled. Some 20 percent are physically disabled, 25 percent mentally so. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/article/158838/homeless-hollywood