Homeless People

Los Angeles has made slow but significant progress toward ending homelessness, but the City Council is about to vote on a proposed law that could stop that momentum in its tracks. The Community Care Facilities Ordinance would threaten the well-being of thousands of people with disabilities, create a nightmare for property owners, cost taxpayers more, violate principles of fair housing and jeopardize access to federal funds. The proposed ordinance grew out of an effort to eliminate sober-living homes in residential neighborhoods.

Los Angeles has made slow but significant progress toward ending homelessness, but the City Council is about to vote on a proposed law that could stop that momentum in its tracks. The Community Care Facilities Ordinance would threaten the well-being of thousands of people with disabilities, create a nightmare for property owners, cost taxpayers more, violate principles of fair housing and jeopardize access to federal funds. The proposed ordinance grew out of an effort to eliminate sober-living homes in residential neighborhoods.

In a few months, the Los Angeles County Housing Authority will begin allowing rent subsidies to be granted to homeless ex-convicts on parole or probation. The move is controversial, with some critics complaining that it rewards criminals, giving them special treatment and moving them to the front of the line for the limited and much-sought-after subsidies. But that's shortsighted. Homeless ex-convicts, including many who committed only minor, nonviolent crimes, don't go away if they don't get housing aid. Although there are risks associated with the new rule, they're risks worth taking.

In a few months, the Los Angeles County Housing Authority will begin allowing rent subsidies to be granted to homeless ex-convicts on parole or probation. The move is controversial, with some critics complaining that it rewards criminals, giving them special treatment and moving them to the front of the line for the limited and much-sought-after subsidies. But that's shortsighted. Homeless ex-convicts, including many who committed only minor, nonviolent crimes, don't go away if they don't get housing aid. Although there are risks associated with the new rule, they're risks worth taking.

There's no mystery about it: Homeless people are homeless because they are very poor. "Only" a quarter of a million Americans lack any shelter at all, says Peter H. Rossi, a sociology professor who studied Chicago's homeless in 1986, but 4 million to 7 million others are so poor that almost anything can shove them over the edge: an illness, a fire, a rent hike, the snapping of already tenuous family ties.

When a civil rights group sued three of Southern California's wealthiest coastal cities last year, alleging police harassment of the homeless, the howls of indignation were swift and loud. Santa Monica city officials pointed to a long record of helping the destitute along its world-famous shoreline, including extensive social programs and a new and innovative homeless community court. Santa Barbara has a year-round homeless shelter and allows those down on their luck to sleep in city-designated parking lots, a program being replicated by other municipalities.

Jay, a homeless man sleeping near a Hollywood freeway onramp, awoke to the voices of police Friday morning. Los Angeles Police Department officers Julie Nony and Paula Davidson had rooted out an encampment of nine transients — including Jay — who were sleeping along the Highland Avenue onramp to Highway 101. Nony and Davidson were part of a team of roughly two dozen officers and sheriff's deputies who fanned out across Hollywood, trudging...

I was both pleased and dismayed by the article, "Homeless Languish in Liberal Laguna Beach," by Robert Schwartz (Jan. 30). The article was enlightening because it was about homeless people, who have been a long-neglected segment of our society. I was distressed because the article did not deal with the complexities of people being without a place of residence. The Episcopal Service Alliance has had to deal with misunderstandings about the homeless. For many reasons we had to close Martha House in Santa Ana in 1984.

A Los Angeles physician was arrested Thursday for allegedly prescribing pain medication to homeless people who didn't need the drugs, according to records and authorities. Dr. Zhiwei Lin is set to be arraigned Friday on five counts of illegally prescribing drugs, misdemeanors each punishable by up to a year in County Jail and a $20,000 fine, according to the arrest warrant filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Lin, 52, a board-certified neurologist, declined to comment.

When the Rev. Wiley S. Drake goes on trial this week on criminal misdemeanor charges of housing homeless people without a permit, the issue will be no less than religious freedom, he says. For the city of Buena Park, the issue is his alleged defiance of municipal laws.

A federal judge last year issued a preliminary injunction against the city of Los Angeles, effectively allowing anyone in the area around skid row to store personal belongings - including mattresses, overflowing plastic bags and shopping carts - on the sidewalks. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez was intended to protect the possessions of homeless and street people, and to prevent them from being mistaken for garbage and removed from the public sidewalks. As a predictable - if unintended - consequence of that ruling, hundreds of people have transformed the streets of skid row and surrounding neighborhoods into their personal storage facilities.

A crackdown on Venice Beach homeless encampments and renegade vendors is pitting longtime residents and merchants against homeless advocates and younger transients. The Los Angeles Police Department enforcement efforts, begun almost two months ago, were spurred by mounting complaints from waterfront residents and business owners who said aggressive, intoxicated transients and violent disputes over vendors' spaces had made the boardwalk an increasingly lawless, frightening place.

Jay, a homeless man sleeping near a Hollywood freeway onramp, awoke to the voices of police Friday morning. Los Angeles Police Department officers Julie Nony and Paula Davidson had rooted out an encampment of nine transients — including Jay — who were sleeping along the Highland Avenue onramp to Highway 101. Nony and Davidson were part of a team of roughly two dozen officers and sheriff's deputies who fanned out across Hollywood, trudging...

Now that the homeless are prohibited from camping overnight on Ocean Front Walk in Venice, many have migrated to other spots in the beach town. After numerous complaints about trash, city workers, accompanied by police, raided the new areas last month and confiscated unattended belongings, prompting a lawsuit from a civil rights attorney. According to the suit, filed on behalf of 11 named homeless people, employees of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Department of Public Works seized property found on 3rd Avenue in Venice that included birth certificates, food stamp eligibility cards, prescription medication, wallets with cash, and even laptop computers.

After a wave of killings of homeless men in the area, police said Wednesday that they are looking for a "serious, dangerous serial killer operating in Orange County. " Investigators believe that one person is responsible for stabbing three middle-aged homeless men in 10 days and have formed a task force of police from Anaheim, Placentia and Brea to investigate the incidents. "We believe these murders were likely committed by the same suspect and feel he is extremely dangerous to the public," Anaheim Police Chief John Welter said at a news conference.

Matthew Dunn, 34, flashed his best Popeye the Sailor grin as he boarded the van from Venice Beach to the Westside winter shelter. Julie "Julez" Arispe, 42, roused from a beer-induced slumber on the grass near Windward Avenue, clambered aboard with her guitar and bags of belongings and launched into an upbeat rendition of Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz. " With darkness bringing a damp chill to Ocean Front Walk one recent evening, both appeared relieved at the prospect of a hot meal and a cot inside the West Los Angeles National Guard Armory, about 7 miles inland.

During the next few weeks, 24 people who have been living in makeshift shelters will move into sturdy domes as participants in a pilot project to provide safer and more comfortable transitional quarters for the homeless. The 18 white domes, fiberglass panels bolted together to form 20-by-12-foot shells, will be set up at 9th Street and Golden Avenue, just west of a Harbor Freeway on-ramp.

One candidate for City Council was out on the streets every day this fall, but he wasn't looking for votes. Albert Phillips lived there. During the campaign, candidate Phillips said he usually slept on flattened cardboard boxes behind the Burger King on Beverly Boulevard. He pushed his few belongings around town in a shopping cart. He drank from discarded soda bottles. And he found his dinners in trash cans, using a coat hanger to pluck out bags of stale rolls and doughnuts, he said.

As cigarette smoke and the scent of burning sage drifted over the crowd at Occupy L.A., a young protester took to the people's microphone to give a rousing recitation of the group's "points of solidarity. " The crowd echoed his words back at him. "We are daring to imagine," 300 people chanted. "A new sociopolitical and economic alternative that offers greater possibility of equality. " The harmony was shattered by a woman shouting wildly. "Why don't we have a microphone?

Occupations such as those underway in cities across the country pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else: Where am I going to pee? Some of the Occupy Wall Street encampments spreading across the U.S. have access to portable toilets (such as those on the City Hall lawn in Los Angeles)