Woman sues L.A. after being struck by car on a street where tents block sidewalk

We can not allow homelessness to exist because it makes public spaces unsafe like you mention. Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.

This has specifically been a huge problem in cities with expensive real estate like Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is why the free market approach to fixing the housing crisis doesn't work. The land is so expensive that it doesn't make financial sense to waste it on low margin affordable housing. Developers realize this, snatch up the current options for housing of last resort like SRO buildings, knock them down, and build luxury condos. Supply of the bottom of the market is decreased in favor of supply at the top of the market and this new construction often is less dense than the housing it replaces. People argue that the new supply will eventually trickle down, but that new supply is always snatched up by people moving into the city leaving the people who used live there with no place to go.

There needs to be regulation to force the construction of affordable housing in these markets as the free market has shown it won't be built otherwise.

You are heartbroken that public spaces can't be used by all, but you aren't heartbroken that so many people have no other options other than to live in those spaces.

Your compassionate solution is to bring back slums, flop houses, and chicken wire hotels (I actually had to look that up), so that you can get back to using your precious public spaces free of those less fortunate.

No, it wasn't. It was “solved” (or, at least, those afflicted were encouraged to keep a low profile so as not to disturb “decent folk”) by government through actual and de facto imprisonment, whether involuntary and abusive institutionalization of those with mental health problems or criminalization of vagrancy.

I have seen well intentioned social workers walking through these tents cities trying to bring people in for treatment. They do not want to go.

Should we force people into facilities they cannot leave so that they can be treated?

It is a similar story for homeless shelters. The issue isn't the availability of beds - it is that the homeless do not want to stay in the shelter.

Homeless people should be interviewed and those with mental illnesses treated by the state as they are objectively sick people in need of help. Homeless people under 18 should be taken into care. Homeless people over 65 showing senile ageing conditions should be asked if they want to go into retirement homes.

Outside of this homeless people should be treated with decency and respect as adults capable of full agency. They should face the consequences of their disregard of the rules. Punishments should be scaled but society should not feel sorry for drug addicted homeless people and actively enable them to keep ruining theres and others lives. This provides an easy scapegoat for homeless people who have nothing wrong with them.

-Unknown

I'm 42 and I recall Florida doing this over 20 years ago when I was in High School.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

For many years I lived in Beverly Hills (near Los Angeles). They have very few homeless so it's nice but the rest of LA (Los Angeles) is a disaster right now.

It's not just cities with Good Weather though because Seattle has one of the worst homeless problems. Although I don't have any stats it feels like it's mostly just a West Coast problem as I never hear about this from the middle of America or large East Coast Cities.

Article is paywalled, but presumably she doesn't want them thrown out. There are, in fact, other solutions to homeless encampments...

I agree it’s a bit weird though. She’s definitely not a pedestrian who just happened to be inconvenienced by the tents, but actually sought them out. Should make for some interesting legal arguments.

She would probably prefer them to be housed, not "thrown out".

The reductionist vitriol is common, but unhelpful for a productive discussion.

> Todd’s lawsuit accuses the city of allowing the encampment at the 101 overpass on Gower to remain for a “substantial amount of time,” creating dangerous conditions for pedestrians and drivers. The city also did not post signs warning drivers that there would be “excessive foot traffic” in the street due to the encampments, the lawsuit said.

She might be hoping that the city will move the homeless people elsewhere, put up signage, or possibly even come up with their own solution.

The encampment has taken over one of the lanes of southbound traffic, and when you hustle to make that left, unless you overcorrect on the turn and slow down, you are going to run into the encampment. It was a very difficult turn to make pre-pandemic when there was maybe 1 or 2 tents on the sidewalk underneath the highway; now that it's the sidewalk plus a lane of traffic, it is only a matter of time before someone gets run over.

As a very-short-term fix, the city needs to move some of those people to the encampment on El Centro, a couple of blocks away.

On edit: Google streetview from February, you can almost see how the encampment takes over a lane of traffic -- https://goo.gl/maps/dySMxTxFmgx43uNj7

Whatever the motivation of the lawsuit, the blocking of sidewalks is a legitimate complaint that has come up in other cities such as Portland. Disabled people can’t easily just go around a blocked sidewalk, and anyone else blocking a sidewalk like a homeowner or construction firm would be fined a great deal (like the city did to the federal government last year over fences by the courthouse, up to $500 a day).

I strongly suspect that this is absolutely the wrong place to ask.

I do remember a time without homeless people however.

Basically, it's a problem of hygiene and grooming. To apply for just about any job, a given homeless person would have to take several baths, get a haircut, shave, and get into clean clothes.

Somehow, that is an insoluble problem.

Secondly, some of these jobs pay so shitty that if you've figured out how to live homeless, they are not worth your time. Your life won't be any better.

Can you imagine the hassle? Okay, now you have a job and have to come clean there everyday, and stay there for hours. Where do you clean up if you don't have a home? Who will guard your unsecured belongings while you are away from them? Suppose you get a home: oops, there goes all the pay. So now you live in some shitty home that sucks up most of your pay just so you have a place to take a shower to go to your shitty job. Man things were so much better with no boss, no landlord, under the fresh, open sky! The streets are calling your name, ...

Employers will never post it publicly but basically everywhere screens for the homeless.

Landlords also screen for the homeless so even if you have money you’ll have trouble finding a place.

One cause that you will probably not see highlighted is the devaluation of autonomy and personal responsibility, and it's absolutely devastating effect on the human spirit to progress.

[0]Either illness/addiction, or accumulation of factors e.g. car broke down, fired, then evicted, then no address, etc.

Perhaps it's due to the difference between CoL and working wages in a given city. Even if someone who is homeless does start working, that doesn't mean they can afford rent in the city. That also doesn't mean they'll get healthcare or other necessary benefits for their continued survival. You also have close to no protections in the US, so you don't really have stable employment in the same way other countries do. So at the end of the day, they may think "whats the point?".

I've also seen a fair number of homeless people who are disabled, mentally or physically. Perhaps that bars them from some jobs. (The ADA disallows barring people from jobs if their disability does not impair them from doing essential work, but I'm unsure about what is considered essential and what isn't.)

These are just my 2 cents. I imagine there's at least some research on the topic.

    Germany......79
    UK...........46
    Sweden.......36
    Canada.......36
    Netherlands..23
    France.......21
    USA..........17

It's mostly that the US homeless population concentrates in very few areas.

> How do you reconcile that with the fact that there are so many simple jobs with open positions everywhere?

I have friends who have tried to hire homeless for help with moving because her movers did not show up. The experience did not go well. She basically had to babysit them to the effect of "Ok, pack up that box. Now take it and come with me. [he follows without box] No, lets go back and get the box..." But for everything.

Even among the set of homeless who want to do jobs, many need extraordinary supervision, and most places are not staffed well enough to handle that.

For folks living on the street, you absolutely cannot earn enough from a minimum wage to house yourself. At best, you could barely get by sharing housing with a few folks. Assuming you have addiction issues that lead to anti-social behavior, you will have difficulty maintaining relationships in share living spaces and maintaining your employment.

I think we would have a dramatically different situation with our homeless, if someone could reasonably afford a small one-bedroom or studio apartment at 25%-40% of the prevailing minimum wage. As it stands, in Los Angeles, median one-bedroom seems to be about $2,362/month, and a minimum wage job there, before taxes only pays $2,462 per month.

Thus, a minimum wage job, even if the person magically paid nothing in taxes cannot even come close to covering the median unit, by a factor of 2-4. In addition, that median unit likely requires further assets like a vehicle in order for a person to be able to access employment.

Because of this American development pattern, it is nearly impossible for people to even begin to earn enough money to maintain any sense of private living space.

If you’re not a custodial parent, you get food benefits and Medicaid potentially, but are effectively locked out of housing and long term benefits.

If you have a child, you’ll get a subsistence level of living. If not, you hang in for awhile until you get hurt, and eventually fall off the path.

And the hiring processes themselves are usually absolute shit. "Give us your resume, then type your entire resume into these boxes, then randomly 6 months later after you have done that to 100 different places you get a call to interview the next day on short notice, come in with a paper copy and looking clean and fresh, pass a drug test since you certainly wouldn't have dared smoke some weed while being poor or homeless, "Okay thanks we might call you but probably not because we are interviewing 60 people for this position", ect.

So, my suggestion would be to look up your local rescue mission, or homeless shelter, and ask there. While you're at it, take some time or money to support them.

I know my local rescue mission has some very effective programs that get people off the streets permanently. So I'm sure they'd know what they're talking about if you ask them.

First that guy offering the job is choosy, so he wants someone showered, with clean clothes, who doesn't look like they have major health problems or drug habits, they need to have an address, and transportation to get to work.

So for the homeless, they need: a place to stay, an address, access to a shower and laundry, they need clothes in good condition, they need some money to buy their first uniform, they need someplace safe to store their belongings, and access to enough food to get through their shifts.

That said people who are living on the street are frequently deeply alone in way that can be hard to understand. Substance abuse problems. Mental problems. Sure all of that. No place to live too.

All of that's a huge burden. On top of that the jobs that get listed are frequently not going to be offering 30 hours or less a week.

So the way to think of people in that place is that they've got a job. - getting alcohol or drugs. They might have another job - having an incomplete view of reality. On top of that and I would say this most of all, they are frequently alienated from any friend or family.

It's hard in that place to say find 20 or 30 hours (if you're lucky) a week to bring in extra cash. It's doubly hard when your expenses are basically everything you have and everything you can get your hands on.

As I said earlier I'm not on the Left. I think there's an established view that says the problem here is mental problems of one sort or another leading to homelessness and unemployment. It's not that I think that's untrue but that the description is incomplete. It looks at a profound loss and describes a physical situation - even when talking about substance abuse and mental problems there's a clinical view that will help no one. In my opinion at least. Certainly I'm out of step.

One is that if you are living on the street, any possessions are likely with you at all times. What do you do with them while working?

Another is that if you are living on the street you may have involuntary hygiene issues relating to lack of access to water, clothes washing etc which may make you unhireable.

There are real phase changes between "couch surfing", "living in your car" and "utterly homeless" and hysteretic effects that often mean that if you cross a threshold "downstream" it becomes almost impossible in many cases to move back.

There are other issues in the US as well, e.g.: unlike countries like Japan or most EU countries, a lot of people with psychiatric issues are homeless (converse isn't true -- most homeless people do not have psychiatric issues, but the ones that do exacerbate the problem). Also because of weather and services, the homeless population is concentrated in a few discrete areas. Ironically that makes it harder to get support for them as most people don't actually encounter truely homeless people except in the movies.

I’ll see people doing lots of things like picking up recyclables, selling drinks, handyman type jobs, knife sharpener, shoe repair, mobile tailor, etc. Very seldom see homeless in Asia or Mexico (I don’t stay in tourist areas). People there hustle one way or another (I mean the positive hustle, not the negative hustler type hustle). But we seem lazy in contrast.

Sadly, I saw this attitude in a relative. Out of a job, this one would refuse to take a job at the Home Depot or the like. No, that was not their kind of work. They would rather mooch off friends till one of the friends gave them an easy job they could drag their feet at all day. This relative is perfectly healthy and has no physical problems. But would actually rather sleep on the street on occasion rather than get up and show up to work on time on a schedule. Amazing!

From my spending time with homeless people in the US (I lived on the streets for a while) it's a combination of mental health/checked out/drugs, or more often, a feeling that being on the bottom of the social totem pole is no better/actually worse than taking part in "the system" (per the book I recommended).

It's important to note that even the very large visible encampments in cities like SF and LA are the tip of the homelessness iceberg, there's a much larger group of people who are living on friends/relatives couches, in their cars, or in shelters. A lot of these people have some level of employment, but housing affordability (a result of ~50 years of very restrictive land-use policies making it hard to build new housing) means that this level of employment can't afford them their own permanent home. For example, prior to 1970 it was much more common to see "boarding houses" where you'd share a room or share a bathroom, and especially unmarried low-wage workers would live there, but these are illegal to build in most cities these days.

Most of this homeless-but-not-on-the-street population is transient - it is common eg to be temporarily living in your car after a job disruption or sudden emergency expense, then to find another job and find a place to live after some time. In other words, they will do exactly what you are suggesting and lock down a new job quickly. And this group is a majority of the group of people who spend any time homeless in a given year.

But a portion of of this transiently-homeless population doesn't solve their job situation quickly, will wear out their welcome with friends, or will lose their car for a variety of reasons -- and end up falling into street homelessness. Once you are homeless and living on the street, you are at extremely high risk for developing a mental health and/or substance abuse problem even if you didn't start out with one. It also becomes much harder for you to get one of those available jobs, for a number of reasons, some as basic as not having transportation to work or not being able to present yourself well for an interview.

In short: land-use policies cause homelessness, the majority of the people who experience any amount of homelessness do get a job quickly, the street-homeless you see are the small fraction (of the frighteningly-large homeless population) that got stuck for some reason, and their situation is a feedback loop making them even more stuck.

(also: the 'we will hire you on the spot!' thing is a weird 2021 artifact of the pandemic, it taking time to ramp back up, and the super-generous unemployment benefits program that will be expiring very soon. the hiring market won't be like that next year)

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/12/10/...

A lot of people simply don't want to work.

Would rather spend the day on the sidewalk than have obligations.

A lot of homeless have mental illness (bipolar, depression, drug addiction, etc.).

This isn't necessarily more common in the US than any other country; the US in general provides fewer public services. So you'll see more of them on the street.

(And of course SoCal has excellent weather; there's more homeless there than in Maine. LA is kinda extreme.)

If you are homeless, you might not have access to a shower or laundry facilities. You might have to rely on public transit (which is unreliable in many American cities), or you might not be able to afford public transit, so it might be hard to arrive on time. All of which will put you at a strong disadvantage compared to any other applicant.

If you do go to a job interview you might have to leave all your positions in the street where without you watching over them, they could be stolen. If you have a pet or a child, there might not be anyone trustworthy willing to take care of them while you are away.

If you pass the first round of interviews, you might need a phone number where they can call you for a follow up. But what happens if you can't afford a phone plan? Or if you have a phone, but don't have easy access to a location where you can charge it?

Finally day after day of living on the street, having very poor nutrition, not getting enough quality sleep, dealing with extreme stress, can all cause mental health issues.

There are lots of obstacles to getting a job when you are homeless. And the longer you go without a job, the harder it is to get a new job.

The "actually show up" part is a combination of the fact that people who, as a personality trait, have trouble showing up to work, tend to cluster at the bottom of the employment market, and people without steady, fairly high income have a lot more challenges securing reliable transportation and otherwise arranging their lives so they can get to work on time and consistently (childcare, for example, or unexpected, sudden needs to care for or assist other relatives, or illness of their own) even if they have the best intentions and are reasonably responsible.

Part of this is probably that minimum wage needs to go up quite a bit and/or these employers just need to pay more, but I don't think that would entirely solve the problem.

[EDIT] source: I once worked on an app in this space, and had some visibility into the feedback & concerns of employers of this sort (not with the app, but generally with hiring in that market) and that was consistently something they talked about, at length, usually with tons of sad or amusing/surprising anecdotes—hire someone, then they just never, ever show up, or they come for their first shift then ghost after that, or you call them 30 minutes after their shift is supposed to start and they're like "oh yeah, that, I'm not coming in today, I might be in tomorrow, I dunno yet", or their car's always broken, obviously-high candidates in interviews, all that sort of thing.

If you are unemployed in another country you could easily stay with some family member - cousin, uncle etc

This is not the case in the U.S

I can think of two reasons:

1. I doubt those people lining up to flip burgers fall under the same definition of homelessness. I don't doubt they need a job and might not have enough/any income, but that's not a "choice" as evidenced by the line up.

2. Homelessness in developed countries is not necessarily due to a lack of job opportunities but a lot more about a lack of basic job/communication skills sometimes associated with mental health issues.

At least that's what I've realized when comparing the poor/rich countries where I've lived.

1. Places like San Francisco have temperate climates, and cops not under orders to actively chase homeless people out. A good place to move if you're homeless, right? But San Francisco also has ruinously expensive housing, so the money one can make in an entry-level job won't go very far.

(American cities have a long tradition of "solving" homelessness by putting homeless people on buses to other cities. Officially, this is to "help them reunite with their families" but we all know what's really going on)

2. A bunch of things when you're poor are self-compounding. Lost your access to a stove and a fridge? You're going to be spending more on food. When you lost your home, probably you fucked up your credit rating too. Now the landlord wants a bigger deposit, and the electricity company wants you on their prepaid tariff which happens to be the most expensive one - and so on.

3. I've heard it said you don't become a rough sleeper when you spend your last dollar; you become a rough sleeper when you exhaust your last social connection. If you've lost your home but you still have sympathetic friends and family members you can become part of the 'hidden homeless' sleeping on a couch.

If factors like drug addiction or untreated mental illness, have exhausted the hospitality of friends and family, those same factors will also make employers reluctant to hire you.

What's more unique to the U.S. is that for large swathes of people, their family has totally washed their hands of their responsibility. Compared to poor authoritarian countries that's probably because in those countries, families know their loved ones will die if they are left out on their own with no help. Compared to Europe, it's because large segments of the population have broken family units (e.g. 72% of black babies are born to unmarried mothers, who by nature have much more difficulty providing resources / shelter to an adult child who moved away to another city and is homeless there. And this is definitely impacted by historic racism, and even modern-day racism, but is independently now a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty and broken families and crime).

I'm going to be downvoted but I've worked in homeless shelters, for public outreach, for jobs programs, and the problem is incredibly challenging. The idea that society can replace family is inane. What you see on HN is some white liberal dude who grew up in an upper-middle-class family, makes $300K a year waving their fingers over a keyboard but thinks they're financially oppressed so votes for Bernie Sanders, and just repeats some stuff they read on reddit or some shitty NPR story, but who has never bothered to truly spend time doing public health outreach, has never truly interacted with the homeless for an entry-level job, has never really assessed their ability to complete even basic tasks. They think it should be an easy problem to solve with just a few more resources, which they vote for (obviously without getting themselves dirty in the process), and then see it as evidence of an unjust society while wondering why SF is getting shittier every year.

1.) A lot of the visibly homeless population suffers from either mental illness, drug addiction or both. The statistics I’ve seen for cities on the west coast put it at approximately 40% for mental illness and a similar percentage for addiction. These are self reported numbers, so they are probably under reported.

2.) Related to #1, good mental healthcare is very hard to come by in the United States, especially if you are poor. In the 80s the federal government cut funding drastically, leaving it up to individual states to cover the gap. Most didn’t and have continued to cut budgets even further in the ensuing years.

3.) Related to #2, the Deinstitutionalization movement successfully fought for the rights of the mentally ill, but there were unintended consequences. Right now it is extraordinarily difficult to convince a judge to commit someone to long term, in-patient psychiatric care unless they present an immediate threat to themselves or others. In practice, this turns out to be very difficult to prove. In most cases, if the person can’t be proven to about to commit murder or suicide in the next few hours, they won’t be committed against their will.

4.) Most states have closed all but a one or two state psychiatric hospitals, which is where people with severe mental illness used to be housed. The theory was that states would build community integrated outpatient care facilities, but many of them didn’t. As a result, many long term psychiatric patients were turned loose with nowhere to go, and became homeless. Also, now that those facilities are closed, when a judge does decide to commit someone, there’s often nowhere for them to go. In the state I live in, the only remaining state psychiatric hospital hasn’t had an available bed in years.

5.) Related to #3 and 4, jails have become our defacto mental health treatment facilities because there’s nowhere else available. As a result, a lot of people who should have been take into care end up with a rap sheet, which shows up on background checks, and makes it difficult to obtain housing or jobs. The same is true for people who are not mentally ill, but have drug addictions.

6.) There’s a lot more supporting infrastructure necessary to allow you to go to work than you’d think. At bare minimum, you need an alarm clock to wake you up in time, you need some basic hygiene and grooming capabilities, and you need to feel reasonably confident that when you walk away from your home to go to work, your things won’t be stolen. A person living in a tent has none of those things. A person living in a shelter might have some of them, but if they leave their stuff unattended it’s almost certain to get stolen. They may be able to take a shower or wash their clothes, but probably not on the same day, and not more than once a week. Regardless of when their shift starts, most shelters have strict curfews, which means that a person staying there can’t work non-traditional hours. Space in the shelters is often first come first served, so if you miss the bus and don’t make it back to the shelter on time, they’re likely to be full and you’re back on the street. It’s very difficult to establish stability using the shelter system.

Finally, you asked why people who don’t have jobs don’t live with their families. A lot of the time it’s because they have untreated or poorly treated mental illness that makes living with them incredibly difficult. Nobody likes to talk about it, but families who have severely mentally ill members in the United States are often forced to make the heartbreaking choice between their own sanity and the wellbeing of their family member. The same is true for people suffering from drug addiction. Sometimes you have to choose your own sanity, or you’ll be on the streets too.

Hopefully that helps you understand what you’re seeing better.

First, the name "homeless" or even "people experiencing homelessness" implies that the lack of housing is the only problem with these individuals, who are, otherwise, perfectly normal and functional human beings.

Then, there is a motte-and-bailey game with "Look at Pedro, he has a wife and children but lives with his in-laws because he lost his job and is looking for a new one, Pedro is homeless, do you want to put him in a mental institution just for losing his job, you heartless bigot?" and "Yeeep, people doing drugs in the open and harassing the passersby are homeless, just like Pedro, you have any problem with Pedro, bigot?".

Then, there is a "solution", always involving real-estate ("abolish zoning!", "build affordable housing" etc.), which is as sane to me as if they'd called the meth-using vagrants "toothless" or "people experiencing toothlessness" and proposed to build more dental clinics to fix the issue.

In my opinion, nobody has problem with people who don't own property as long as they do not impose on the society. For all I care Elon Musk is homeless at the moment as he sold all his properties in CA and lives in a company house. I have absolutely no issues with this. On the other hand, I have a problem with people who shit on the street, scream, and go through my garbage every night regardless of their property ownership. For all I care they are all retired Hollywood producers who own 100s of millions worth of RE in Malibu, still they should be taken to jail for vagrancy.

"We will immediately house the unhoused. It’s simple. No house? We will provide a roof over their head."

Well, that was easy.

Obviously there are homeless and there are homeless. Looking back in time, any plan that doesn't involve being mean to some of them won't work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Paffrath

I could be wrong, of course. Perhaps you'd care to explain how you see his National Guard deployment or other proposals working.

When your #1 qualification is YouTuber, you probably ahve no businesses holding public office.