Homeless

At 5 weeks old, with a crown of dark hair and big blue eyes, Anastasia Garcia is one of the newest faces of the economic crisis. She was born homeless. "When we are lucky enough to be settled, we will tell her that things were not always as easy as you may think," said Angela Garcia, 26, laying the infant down in a crib at the Broward Outreach Center in Pompano Beach, Fla.

More than three years into L.A.'s crackdown on patient dumping downtown, officials have reached settlements with four hospitals and collected millions in payments. But although enforcement has been aggressive, much less has been done to address the problem at the heart of the issue: If patients can't be left on skid row, where should they go?

The number of people who died on downtown L.A.'s skid row has declined by 36% in the last four years, according to city records, the latest sign of major changes on what for decades has been the city's epicenter of homelessness and drug-dealing. Excluding murders and suicides, 60 people died in the skid row area in 2008, according to Los Angeles Police Department statistics. In 2005, there were 94 such deaths.

The capital's tent city sprawls messily on a grassed-over landfill beneath power lines, home to some 200 men and women with nowhere else to go. It has been here for more than a year, but in the last three weeks it has transformed into a vivid symbol of a financial crisis otherwise invisible to most Americans. The Depression had Hoovervilles. The energy crisis had snaking gas lines. The state's droughts have empty reservoirs and brown lawns.

Mark Horvath, a documenter of homelessness who was once homeless himself, was touring a tent city in Sacramento when he raised his cellphone to take a photo of one man's ingenious shopping-cart storage system. Suddenly, another man rushed at him, screaming, with a knife. Horvath was terrified, he said, but not so scared that he stopped sending photos and text messages about what was happening.

County supervisors Tuesday unanimously approved a $5.6-million plan to house and provide health services for the 50 most vulnerable homeless people on skid row, as identified in a survey last month. Organizers of "Project 50," must report back to the supervisors at least every 90 days, and board members directed county staffers to review the project's budget. Outreach teams of social workers and other homeless advocates are scheduled to return to skid row next week to begin encouraging the at-risk homeless individuals to move into county-funded apartments.

City officials in Laguna Beach voted unanimously Tuesday night to repeal the city's anticamping ordinance, which banned sleeping or camping overnight in public parks and on beaches. A lawsuit against the city brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in December decried the policy as "harassing" and "intimidating" to the homeless. A city committee is examining whether to pass a new ordinance governing sleeping outside. Police have not enforced the ordinance for about a year, according to city staff.

It was, back then, a joke Luis Pinto shared with his Army buddies in Iraq. As they were all eating food out of tin cans, living out of rucksacks, moving constantly from place to place, Pinto cracked, "If I become homeless, I'm ready." But five years later he didn't actually expect to find himself sleeping in alleys in Whittier or in friends' cars, too busy getting high to hold down a regular job. A suicide attempt on March 16 was the shock he needed to start putting his life back together.

During the last year, the homeless in Los Angeles County have been set on fire, stabbed, shot and beaten with baseball bats in attacks. Advocates for the homeless say the incidents have become more violent but until now no one has tracked such crimes countywide. Los Angeles County supervisors on Tuesday unanimously recommended that sheriff's deputies, prosecutors and the county Human Relations Commission start tracking and reporting attacks on the homeless as hate crimes.

Two Santa Monica police officers approached a woman as she knelt under a bush one sunny morning near City Hall, "looking for my dead son." Within minutes, Officers Jacob Holloway and Dan Smith had learned her name and age (Gloria Breslin, 55) and phoned her 17-year-old son (alive and well in Venice), who said his mother was a longtime methamphetamine addict.