Social Issue: Burgeoning Homelessness

A prevalent and ever-growing social issue in my community is the problem of homelessness. According to the federal government’s annual report on homelessness, the number of homeless people in America has recently increased for the first time in eight years. The West Coast, with its warmer climates, tends to have greater homeless populations than elsewhere in America. Even though the economy in the nation is booming more acutely, the cost of housing continues to rise, and more and more people simply can’t afford a place to live (McEvers, 2017). In southern California, there isn’t a city where this is more vividly represented than in Los Angeles, on skid row. While skid row isn’t my community, southern California is, and skid row reflects the core of this social issue. The homeless tend to congregate there, and in greater downtown Los Angeles, and for good reason: this is where several missions are located, which provide shelters, meals and temporary housing, sometimes even permanent housing for some (McEvers, 2017).

The problem in Los Angeles is even more exacerbated, as the area where homelessness is most acute, downtown Los Angeles, has experienced a surge in development and a general boom in luxury housing. This has caused tensions to rise even higher as the city struggles to balance the rights and needs of the homeless against the rights and needs of the tax-paying residents who have to walk around the homeless and their many encampments, with the smell of urine and sometimes feces in the air (LATimes, 2018). Los Angeles, a warm urban metropolis, has always had a homeless problem, like so many major cities. However in recent years its gotten far worse, and this paper will examine why.

Extent and Longevity of the Problem

In the last six years, the number of people living in streets, doorways, and in shelters of Los Angeles expanded from 32,000 to 55,000—a 75% increase (Holland, 2018). Los Angeles has a problem that is specific from the rest of the nation; in fact, if you removed the city of Los Angeles from national homeless statistics, the number of national homeless people would have dropped last year for the first time in a decade (Holland, 2018). This is largely a result of the fact that the economic recovery has left behind the homeless: young professionals have... In previous years, the homeless might have found more low-income housing, but all of those options have all but dried up given how many evictions and renovations have occurred all over the city. Many argue that this social problem has only gotten worse since Mayor Garcetti took office half a decade ago and the Democratic hold took control of the County Board of Supervisors: more and more homeless people have emerged in tents in neighborhoods around the city (Holland, 2018). Los Angeles lags behind the rest of the nation in its efforts to provide free or low-income housing. If the problem continues to expand at the current rate it is in danger of becoming completely unmanageable.

Solutions and Anti-Solutions

The current problem that Los Angeles is facing in this regards is that the city is attempting to arrest their way out of the homelessness problem, something which is futile and a waste of city money, and even something that one could argue, exacerbates the homelessness problem. For example, if a police officer sees someone sleeping on the street, they can issue a citation for a fee of around $300, something that most homeless people simply cannot pay. The homeless person then needs to appear in court to address this citation, something they often never do. Experts have found that the increase in the number of arrests and citations generally is something that follows an increase in the number of homeless people (LATimes, 2018). Using arrests and citations, as a means of thwarting the general homeless problem in Los Angeles is completely futile and something that undermines all viable solutions. For homeless people, having arrests or citations on their record is something that can prevent them from getting jobs or appropriate housing. There are better, more humane efforts to address this problem, as one scholar writes, “For starters, officers need to have the resources to offer a homeless person an alternative to a citation or arrest on the spot. If they're not accompanied by an outreach worker to help persuade a homeless person to accept services and temporary housing, they need to have a phone number for one” (LATimes, 2018). Anything other than what is described here is just a callous, narrow response that only adds to an exacerbating problem.…