Homelessness in L.A
Part 1
By: Sebastian Rendon, Geovanny Garay, & Steven Flores
Los Angeles is supposed to be the land of opportunity, where people make their dreams of becoming a movie star reality, but the only reality here is one filled with cold nights and growling stomachs from the colossal amount of bellies that are struggling to make ends meet. What was once seen as the city of angels has become the city of nomads.
Everyone with eyes knows that Los Angeles doesn’t have the best reputation for its homeless population, as a matter of fact, that reputation continues to worsen where according to the LA Times the percentage of those lacking in housing and resources has increased by 4.1% from 66,436 in 2020 to 69,144 in 2022. Angelenos are seeing more and more people on the streets each year and the problem hasn’t stopped although efforts are being made to counter the growth. Why is that? Well, it’s hard to point a finger at one specific variable and title that as THE problem for the increasing number of unhoused people. This inability to find a main source is one of the biggest reasons why this unfortunate reality is such a never-ending nightmare for those who are living under these circumstances and those who are witnessing it and trying to help.
Over the next several issues, we plan on presenting an in-depth investigation of four crucial variables that contribute to the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Our hope in this, the most intensive reporting The Neuwirth Times has tackled to date, will help to educate students more about the issues and hopefully engage us all in becoming more aware and active in our community. The four variables that have stayed constant are racial inequalities in housing and other resources, mental health, drug addiction, and high cost of living.
Race is a topic always being brought to the discussion whenever any inequality is acknowledged and it’s not an unwarranted response especially since race is what determines almost every aspect of one's life. Race can often determine where one lives, how one lives their life due to different expected experiences, and it can even determine the reason for one's death.
Many seem to believe racism is a thing of the past and that its ugly effects bear no fruit in today’s age, but even if racial discrimination isn’t as brutal or obvious as in the past its effects and presence still linger and hold its foundation in the way America is structured. The housing crisis is no stranger to this discrimination. Looking back to January of 1865 during the Civil War, one can see one of the first promises made to Black Americans that will change their lives for the better. This change should have set forth generations of stability and equality in America which was for so long dreamed of seeing as Black individuals during this time weren’t even seen as people. But the actuality of the promise turned out to be nothing but empty words.
The promise made was the 40 acres and a mule proposal which was part of Special Field Order No. 15, a wartime order created by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and was later approved by President Abraham Lincoln. This promise was supposed to take 400,000 acres of land which was a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John's River in Florida, including Georgia's Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast, and give it to the emancipated newly freed enslaved people once the war was over. But after Linconln’s assassination, the promise was overturned by new President Andrew Johnson who then effectively returned the 400,000 acres to the very people who declared war against America. This decision that was made almost 160 years ago is one of the factors that shaped America’s racial gap in success. Land and housing are lucrative and key to having generational wealth and by taking this opportunity away, Johnson has effectively created a system that has been keeping people of color down for generations.
Of course, being able to see from the future, today’s Americans know this was not the last time the government has placed these racial barriers upon Black and brown citizens. To skip ahead to 1933, during FDR’s Presidency and order of the New Deal, the Federal Housing Administration subsidized builders to create a great quantity of suburbs under the condition that they would be sold to white people only, which then forced black individuals and families to urban housing projects and poor inner-city neighborhoods. The justification for this discrimination was the claim that the presence of a black family would damage the value of the neighborhood and thus redlining became another hurdle minorities and especially Black Americans had to overcome. Redlining is when lenders refuse to give financial services, including denying mortgages, insurance, and loans based on a resident's race. The name itself comes from charts created color coded to different geographical locations; green sections being populated by the white and rich as well as a great place for investors to be, blue sections were more likely to hold blue-collar workers, and those that investors deemed safe enough, yellow sections were held by the working class and investors would still part take in business there not commonly though be it, and lastly, there were the red sections which were never or very rarely ever touched by investors and was populated by those labeled as “detrimental to society” which were Black Americans and other minority groups. Though it was outlawed in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act (whose primary advocate was NAACP's Washington director, Clarence Mitchell Jr.), those three decades of unjust discrimination were not reconciled; all the damage done was not reversed. Over those 30 years, 98% of FHA loans were only given to white individuals and only 2% was given to all minority groups combined. Along with that, since many minority families were denied the to live in suburban areas (although being fully capable of affording it) they never were able to capitalize on the suburb household appreciation which during the 60s many of the households doubled in value. This means that even after redlining was made illegal, many of the families became unable to even afford to live there and still can’t till this day since those houses now go for 6-8x the national average and the average Black household only earns half as much as the average White household.
Racist ties to homelessness don’t stop at housing, mass incarceration is another big factor that goes unnoticed. The rate of incarceration has inflated monumentally through the years where as of now it has grown about 5x’s higher than it was historically, where previously the rates were 100 for every 100,000 now it is 500 for every 100,000. Black Americans and other minority-labeled citizens have drawn the short straw when it comes to incarceration rates, by simply being born Hispanics, 16% of people are destined to be imprisoned. Not county jail or detained, one will be sentenced to federal prison. This percentage escalates to 28.5% for African Americans, so as soon as a Black baby is born on U.S. soil the land of the free, they have a 1 in 3 chance of seeing the cells of a federal prison. One factor of this mass incarceration is the problem of over-policing in color-populated neighborhoods. From 2011 to 2018 people of color in L.A. County neighborhoods were stopped and arrested 3x’s more often than White or Latino Los Angeles residents. Incarceration is such a huge factor in homelessness because once a person enters prison, the worst thing they’ll have to face won’t be other inmates or even the prison itself. The worst thing an inmate will have to go through is the process of job hunting once released. When it comes to ex-inmates, employers often reject hiring ex-offenders because of legal liability issues and if an employee commits a crime, the company has the possibility of being held partially or fully responsible. This inability of finding a steady income often results in one returning to a life of crime, seen as 82% of the people incarcerated in state prison were arrested at some point in the 10 years following their release. If prison is supposed to be a space for rehabilitation to turn these convicts into contributing members of society, why are the inmates returning?
It is hard and feels almost impossible to escape the clutches of a system that is designed to keep a group of people down. Day by day hundreds of people are forced into a situation that they had no say in, created by the decisions of people of the past. Where actions made hundreds of years ago still hold a grip on the lives of every person and carry the ability to decimate the lives of people unaware of such an existence. How is it that a government can function and carry on knowing that people that make up only 13.6% of their population make up 38.4% of their population that is imprisoned? And their majority makes up 75.8% of the population, yet only accounts for 57.6% of inmates? If one were to take people by random, unbiased to who they are, the percentages wouldn’t be so overwhelming. A change must be made.