A homeless man walks along a street lined with trash across the street from LAPD Central Community Police Station in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, May 30, 2019. The union that represents the LAPD is demanding a cleanup of homeless encampments in the city after one detective who works downtown was diagnosed with typhoid fever and two others are showing similar symptoms. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
The City of Dreams has become the stuff of nightmares lately. The homeless crisis has become untenable and reaches far beyond Los Angeles. Few communities remain untouched by the vagrancy epidemic, but Los Angeles is quickly becoming the filthy symbol of a problem that has gone from inconvenient to dangerous.
The outsider’s view of the problem tends to be that California’s homeless crisis is really an affordable housing crisis. California does have an affordable housing problem, but the homeless issue is way beyond that at this point. What we have now is a complicated cocktail of disastrous policies, addiction, untreated mentally ill and the criminally insane.
I explain the situation in detail on the latest episode of my podcast Just Listen to Yourself.
But no matter how many words one uses, it is hard to describe the depth of the problem here in California, or the level of frustration felt by the public. One Instagram account uses the platform to expose L.A.’s growing horrors and shame the politicians who continue to feed the problem instead of solve it.
@Streetpeopleoflosangeles posts videos and pictures of the insanity from around the city. Tent cities, filthy streets, and sidewalks, open use of crack and heroin, human beings passed out literally in the middle of the sidewalk as they sleep off their high…it’s a nightmare scenario befitting of this day we call Halloween.
Unfortunately for Los Angeles, this is everyday life.
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES AHEAD