Homeless People

Eight years ago, as I watched a building near my work be converted from vacant offices into lofts, I couldn't stop thinking about it. If I lived there, in that beautiful old building, I could walk less than a block to work. That micro-distance was important: Any farther and I wouldn't have felt safe walking home after dark. There were no streetlights on the block back then. Homeless people curled up in doorways and under cardboard boxes. On the sidewalk was a row of public outhouses, which I soon realized were "owned" by drug dealers.

Homelessness on any given day in Los Angeles County has decreased about 3% in the last two years despite the lingering effects of the recession, according to a new survey released Tuesday. But the number of homeless veterans, including younger men and women, grew. The study, conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority in January, put the homeless figure at 51,430 in L.A. County, including 23,359 in the city of Los Angeles, which saw a 9% decrease. Michael Arnold, executive director of the authority credited the overall reduction to local efforts to prevent homelessness and rapidly re-house people.

Los Angeles has more homeless people than any other city in the nation, and among them, more homeless veterans — an estimated 7,000 on any given day. The city also has a sprawling Department of Veterans Affairs treatment facility for former servicemen and women, located on a 387-acre compound in West Los Angeles. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union has gone to court to force the VA to put more of that acreage to use for homeless veterans. In a class-action lawsuit filed Wednesday on behalf of four homeless veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments, the ACLU claims that the department is violating the property's deed by not providing the combination of housing and treatment that battle-scarred vets need.

They call him the "Godfather. " For 14 years, John Watkins held supreme authority over the homeless encampments deep in the Hollywood hills. So it was with some trepidation that volunteers armed with clipboards picked their way up a rugged trail to his mountain hideaway one morning, hoping he would answer questions about his health and housing situation. Their goal: to identify and find homes for the 20 people at greatest risk of early death if left on the streets of Hollywood.

The flower is fake, the puppy belongs to a 24-year-old homeless woman and this strip of dirt under a highway overpass that Ray Polk is trying to turn into a sacred ground of sorts is surrounded by nothing but concrete and tattered tents. But Polk wears a warm, gap-toothed smile watching the puppy, Mercedes (the name means mercies), tussle with one of the plastic flowers on his memorial to the homeless who have died here. "You got yourself a friend there," he tells owner Christina Calkins.

Cities have tried many ways to move panhandlers and vagrants out of prime shopping districts, but Santa Barbara believes it has a new angle ? 90 degrees. Using $50,000 in redevelopment funds, the city is planning to turn 14 benches perpendicular to the State Street storefronts they now face. The idea is to make it more difficult for beggars to establish contact with passersby, officials said. "They'll be sitting with their backs to half the people coming and going on the sidewalk," said Marck Aguilar, a supervisor for the city's redevelopment agency.

Not every runner wants to take on a marathon. Relay races are a nice alternative  -- particularly when you're part of a team running nonstop from Miami to Key West. That's what Orlando Sentinel staff writer Wesley Alden and nine others are doing in a long-distance event called the Ragnar Relay . Here's what she says about her progress on the paper's Fitness Center blog: "So far we’ve run past many dead animals, had homeless people help us with directions, been cheered on by other teams and received many strange looks from bystanders who can’t figure out what the heck we are doing.

Cheryl Terry coughed sharply as she stepped into the homeless shelter's crude medical clinic: a cinder block room with folding tables and plastic tubs of medicine. Her doctor was pressed for time. He had just two hours to see more than a dozen patients at the crowded Culver City facility on this rainy December night. "Cheryl, I'm Greg. What's going on?" Dr. Greg Yesensky asked. "My chest ? coughing ? it's bright, yucky yellow," she said. A quick exam revealed bronchitis.

Concerned about high winds, Stephen Boswell, 59, grabbed a sandbag and lugged it over to the edge of his tent near the Anaheim Street Bridge in Long Beach, where he has been living for two years. "My weight should keep the rest down," Boswell said. "Hopefully I won't get blown away. " Like many of the 48,000 homeless people across Los Angeles County, Boswell is bracing for what is shaping up to be a cold, wet winter. Many living near the bridge and along the Los Angeles River have begun doubling up on blankets and jackets, occasionally starting small fires to keep warm.

Until a week ago, Veronica Long was wondering how she was going to explain to her four children that Santa might not make it this year. Her husband, Jonathan, used to make a good living as a music engineer and producer. But when the economy tanked two years ago, work dried up and he was forced to pawn his equipment. For a while, the family rented a room from a friend in Corona. But when the friend was evicted earlier this year, they suddenly were homeless. They are now staying in a room at the Union Rescue Mission on downtown Los Angeles' skid row. Last week, the shelter converted its chapel into a Christmas store where parents could pick out free toys and books for their kids.