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PATH PartnersIt sounds like the plot of a Michael Crichton novel. A deadly strain of tuberculosis infects thousands of people in a large metropolis, the vast majority of whom are homeless individuals living on the streets.
I wish this scenario was a work of fiction. Unfortunately, it’s not.
Sometimes creating solutions to difficult problems just requires a bit of common sense. If you need to reduce credit card debt, design a personal budget where you spend less than you earn. If you want to lose weight, create a diet where you burn more calories than you consume. On a national level, the same [...]
In the past, national leaders working to address homelessness in America looked at Los Angeles’s feeble efforts to house its homeless population with disdain. Some of that judgment was justified, given that Los Angeles has the highest number of people experiencing homelessness in the country, and has even been labeled the “homeless capital” of America.
The recent Aurora, Colorado massacre, and the senseless deaths and mayhem it caused, has placed a sobering cloud over our country. In the wake of this devastating tragedy, many may have missed the news of another human calamity that occurred in the greater Los Angeles area. A man from Santa Barbara, California, hunted down people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles, stabbed them with a hunting knife, and placed a typed death warrant on their bodies.
Fortunately, in this case, no one died.
The activity in downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row reminds me of a creepy Michael Crichton sci-fi novel, where people wearing hazmat suits that make them look like Michelin men spray jets of steamed water on the sidewalks below.
But what Los Angeles is doing to its downtown sidewalks, and concurrently to its homeless population, is certainly not fiction.
When homelessness touches a community, polarized stakeholder camps battle with each other like it is a high-stakes presidential campaign.
The businesses and homeowners admonish local politicians by threatening to withdraw their financial campaign support, while advocates for the homeless use their vote-getting potential to insinuate they will support a leader who sympathizes with their cause to protect people on the streets.
There is a different sort of fear permeating the homeless streets of Southern California these days. Not the fear of temperatures dropping in the middle of the night, especially in this balmy winter weather. Nor worries of going hungry on these streets where a faith group feeds the homeless on practically every other corner or park.
If you are homeless in Orange County or its adjacent county in Los Angeles, there is a frightfully valid concern of being stabbed in the middle of the night.
The LA Times featured a pieces about efforts in Los Angeles to house chronically homeless persons. A group of community members and non-profit organizations conducted a survey of over 400 people living on the streets, applying the vulnerability index method popularized by New York based Common Ground. Even though the group originally lacked funding to [...]
In the midst of the “great recession” and all the preaching about how small business is the heart of the American economy, why not expand our investment beyond traditional brick and mortar businesses? We should rethink small business to include really small business, like the up and coming crop of entrepreneurs working in the informal [...]
