There are many homeless people living on the streets in my southern California city, as I suspect there are in yours. This is a serious and long-standing problem that doesn’t submit to easy solutions. There are resources available here to help, but the problems are pretty overwhelming and sometimes intractable. The homelessness issue gets a lot of attention from many perspectives, from social welfare, public health, humanitarian, budgetary, and public safety points of view. Everyone has stories about panhandlers, loons, thieves, and vagrants that frighten and alarm us. Although homelessness is not a political issue per se, it is often pretty clear where the liberals and conservatives stand.
I saw the following post on our neighborhood message board this week.
“Close 7-11, Arco and Jack in the Box. I hate to say that but these places are feeding and supporting the posses of homeless, drugged out thieves that terrorize us when we sleep. Free refills of soda, $2 for 2 slices of pizza, $1 MENUS etc. They steal at night sell their goods in the morning then it's lunchtime and happy hour. Much of these establishments unwittingly support these clowns. I know it's not there [sic] fault but if they all closed lots of them would move on.”
The post got a lot of critical comments about its basic lack of humanity and its flawed logic (no one commented on its syntactic and grammatical errors), but a few supporters agreed with the basic sentiment. Yeah, the homeless are a damned nuisance, they’re dangerous, and wouldn’t we all be better off if they moved somewhere else. And a running undertone suggests that the liberals have exacerbated the problem by creating a welcoming environment that just encourages more homeless people to move in.
So I did a little research on homelessness in Los Angeles, and I learned that there are a lot of common misconceptions about homelessness. Putting a face on the homeless may go a long way toward generating solutions.
The city and county of Los Angeles perform an annual federally-mandated Point-In-Time Count using a HUD approved survey methodology, which is analyzed with oversight by USC statistical & demographic consultants. Perhaps the most important takeaway is that there is no universal generalization about homelessness that fits the data. The homeless come from all demographic groups and cite many different reasons for their situations.
In 2018, the Point-in-time count identified 52,765 homeless individuals in greater Los Angeles County. The 2019 PIT Count showed an increase to 58,936 individuals. At first glance it would seem that the homeless population increased by a little over 6000 people in Los Angeles in one year, which seems manageable. However, the same survey also showed that 54,882 people became homeless in 2018, so the total homeless population would have more than doubled, were it not for the fact that 48,711 people were placed in homes through public housing efforts in Los Angeles or found other exits to housing in 2018. There is both good and bad news in these numbers. It means that the efforts to find solutions to this problem do in fact have favorable outcomes, but the constant influx of newly homeless makes the problem seem intractable and Sisyphean.
Here are some facts about the 2019 homeless population in Los Angeles.
- 9% are children under age 18, 91% are 18 years or older.
- 31% are female.
- 15% are in family units (often headed by a single mother), 85% are alone.
- 16% are physically disabled, 84% are not disabled.
- 28% are chronically homeless, 72% are recently or temporarily homeless.
- 15% of homeless population have substance abuse disorders, 85% do not.
- 25% of homeless population suffers from serious mental illness, 75% do not.
- 7% of homeless population were victims of domestic/intimate partner violence.
- 34% of homeless population identified as African American - hugely disproportionate to the percentage of African Americans overall in Los Angeles County (about 8 percent).
And what about the damn liberals whose bleeding-heart solutions are costing taxpayers money and creating an environment that draws the homeless to Los Angeles like flies. Well, surprise, the vast majority of our homeless population are our former neighbors.
- Sixty eight percent have lived in Los Angeles for 10 or more years, 75% for 5 or more years, just 12% have moved to Los Angeles in the past year.
Here’s another inconvenient fact about the high cost to the taxpayers of addressing this problem:
Is it less costly to help the homeless get off the street than to leave them there? Weingart Center, in a 2015 interview with Fast Company, proposed that an "investment" of $10,000 can help a homeless person obtain housing, food, job training and ultimately a job, along with support services to achieve that end. On the other hand, leaving a homeless person on the street costs Los Angeles an average of $35,000 each year in medical and emergency services, mental health care, social services and law enforcement. Jailing a homeless person pushes that cost up by a third.
But why are all these people homeless in the first place, and why are so many new faces being added to this population each year? That information is a little harder to come by, but I’ve found the following to be the most important factors.
The number one reason is a lack of affordable housing in Los Angeles. Officially, housing is deemed affordable if your housing costs are less than 30% of your income. That means to afford the average apartment monthly rent of $2300 in Los Angeles, a family must have an annual income of $87,000, which is clearly a very high bar. Two working parents with full-time jobs, earning a minimum wage of $12 an hour, would generate about $48,000 in annual income. This means that they must find substandard housing in dangerous or overcrowded conditions, usually paying a far higher percentage of their income in rent than is affordable, which clearly puts them at high risk of a life event that forces them into homelessness. In 2018, 721,000 Los Angeles households were identified as severely rent-burdened, meaning those families are on the razor’s edge of falling into homelessness in the very near future. The number two and three reasons are cited as unemployment and poverty, which are directly related to reason number one.
Other cited reasons include mental illness or substance abuse and the lack of needed services. But to be clear, these are not the most important reasons, falling far behind the simple inability to generate enough income to pay for a rental unit. Seven percent cite domestic or intimate partner violence as the cause of their homelessness. And sadly, 9% of our homeless population are children under the age of 18, most of them in a family unit with at least one homeless adult.
Another post on our neighborhood message board this week gave me hope. I want to reproduce it here in its entirety.
“I went to the bank today and like every other day there was someone on the grass looking very sad and hopeless. I asked her if she wanted help. She answered like so many others, "yes please, I would like to admit myself to the hospital". She told me she needed her medication and was unable to get it. There was no one to take her as she needed to go to a specific hospital. I was able to get a [police] officer help me put her into a motel room, I will take her to the hospital tomorrow. I took her to the motel. There was a 19 year old girl with a 4 month old baby, both in tears. We asked her if she needed help and again "yes please". Because it was late, she would not be able to get help at the [social services center]. She has to be registered to get a referral. I paid for a motel room for them and will take them to the [social services center] to register and hopefully get a referral to [a homeless housing unit]. If we are all lucky I will be able to get both off the streets and pointed in the right direction. When I left them both the girl and her darling baby were smiling and safe for the night. . . I gave her a pack of baby wipes that were donated. I was grateful for the donations that allowed me to put her in the motel! I was able to negotiate a rate. She only had a small bag of belongings. The thought of a 4 month old baby sleeping on the grass broke my heart. She is young and NOT on drugs, just in over her head. The baby's father left her.”
So if you have a perception that most of our homeless population are drug-addicted grifters and thieves with mental health problems, if you believe that the homeless just aren’t trying hard enough, if you are convinced that the homeless enjoy being homeless and are taking the easy way out, well, you would just be wrong.