A 36-year-old college graduate spends her nights sleeping in her Toyota Prius and her days working for the ridesharing company Uber, she told CNN. "I usually wake up a few times, just tossing and turning," Lauren Kush told the news network. She can't afford to rent an apartment in Los Angeles, where the median rent was $1,376 between 2014 and 2018, according to the U.S. Census. So Kush sleeps in her car, like the more than 16,000 other people in Los Angeles County who live in their vehicles. But on most of the city’s streets, that's illegal and dangerous. "I was harassed constantly," Kush told CNN. "People were screaming or there was a fight."
One option for people in Kush’s situation is the lots coordinated by the nonprofit Safe Parking LA, which arranges for security guards to monitor lots in which homeless people sleeping in their cars can park. There are few others for many homeless Californians.
While 29 states and the District of Columbia saw a drop in homelessness in 2019, the West Coast, particularly California and Oregon, experienced “significant increases in unsheltered and chronic homelessness,” the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a press release Friday.
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On a single night in January, 567,715 people were homeless, representing an overall 2.7% increase over 2018, HUD reported. "As we look across our nation, we see great progress, but we're also seeing a continued increase in street homelessness along our West Coast where the cost of housing is extremely high," said HUD Secretary Ben Carson. "In fact, homelessness in California is at a crisis level and needs to be addressed by local and state leaders with crisis-like urgency." Talk that talk, Carson. Just as a reminder, he’s the former neurosurgeon who seems to want to chip away at what would have otherwise been a brilliant surgical legacy and instead nestle himself under President Donald Trump’s capitalistic arm.
While Trump has laid poverty and crime at the feet of Democratic leaders in many major cities, such as Baltimore and Chicago, he's now reportedly planning to crack down on homeless camps in California. Two government officials who spoke anonymously to The Washington Post discussed ongoing conversations in the White House about destroying tent camps for the homeless and both creating and renovating existing government facilities. The discussed plans would give the federal government more control to oversee housing and health care for residents, the newspaper reported. That might be reassuring if a reality TV star weren't currently president and seeking another term in office.
But with Trump as president, it’s a chilling thought. Not to mention that, historically, when the federal government has decided to crack down on a problem, that usually translates to arresting people of color without actually addressing the root cause of the problem. I won’t even go into President Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs.”
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San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a statement to the website CityLab that she'd welcome more support from the federal government regarding the city's current investments in affordable housing and navigation centers. “The decline in federal resources for affordable housing has been significant, and cities can’t do it alone,” she said. “But simply cracking down on homelessness without providing the housing that people need is not a real solution and will likely only make the situation worse.”