Visit ‘Ground Zero’ in the world’s homeless crisis, The City of Los Angeles (LA) in California. It’s an encounter that every city with a homelessness problem should consider undertaking — virtually at least. LA is one of the largest cities in the state of California which runs a $31 billion surplus annually. The state and its major, homeless-infected cities could buy their way of this crisis IF they had any desire to do so, and IF they are prepared to agree it is indeed a crisis at all.
in LA, there are currently more than 60,000 people without ‘homes’ in ways society has been accustomed to thinking of homes. The scope of its supposed problem might well be viewed as an early warning system for every city (in North America at least) that will be faced in the near future with either eliminating the problem — a crisis to be cured, or by rethinking the structure of a city in some manner that integrates the problem — a crisis to be managed.
Two articles linked below discuss two radically different approaches.
The first, an article from The Guardian, treats LA’s efforts to ‘cure’ homelessness as an ongoing failure to create suitable housing to contain the homeless. The article’s trigger was the recent resignation of of Heidi Marston, the top official at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. On exit she slammed LA for its quick, cosmetic fixes that perpetually relocate homelessness (encampment sweeps) out of sight somewhere, anywhere, else. Otherwise the city is doing little to provide the homes that are needed to permanently solve the problem.
The second article, even more extensive than the first, proposes a radically new way of thinking about homelessness — as an endemic social problem to be managed rather than ‘solved.’ The key to this thinking assumes that the financialization of housing has become an unstoppable force that generates homelessness, which then must be handled as a normal, inevitable condition, rather than eliminated.
The author of the second article argues that management is already well under way in LA. It requires criminalizing people who are homeless, in turn stripping them of the social and political rights enjoyed by ‘homed’ citizens. Businesses and homeowners will partner with the police to ensure the suitable incarceration of homeless criminals WITHIN the city (no remote watch-tower surrounded gulags fenced by razor wire!)
This incarceration system is being built in LA as a growing collection of rule-based, not rights-based, sheltering mechanisms that will enforce cooperative behaviour on a permanent underclass.
So what follows are, two extensive articles, helping to make a case for or against two futures:
First, one in which the homeless are collectively rehabilitated as home inhabiters, if only various forms of government are prepared to finance the housing necessary. Read more in The Guardian: ‘We hurt those already hurting’: why Los Angeles is failing on homelessness
The second article, explores how Los Angeles is (successfully?) managing homelessness. That means stripping citizens of their human rights, even those guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. With a title that touches on a business/corporate view of managing increasing homelessness, read more in The New Republic: Inside LA’s Homeless Industrial Complex
