Bicycles. The answer is bicycles. If you haven’t noticed, the homeless problem in Los Angeles is completely out of control. Aside from a massive enclave of people who can’t even get seated at The Cheesecake Factory (a low bar) located on Skid Row, every single side ramp and underpass is littered with tent cities.
It’s disturbing to Norwegian tourists, Republicans who screw their golfing buddies in country club locker rooms, and ineffectual Democrats who yearn for a transgendered daughter alike.
As a liberal libertarian type of dude, I don’t believe in prosecuting homeless people simply for being homeless. In fact I wrote an article for LA Weekly about this very topic. If you, for some reason, choose to sleep on the street and not work, that should be your call.
Many people feel sorry for the homeless, but not for guys living in bachelor apartments full of roach infested cereal boxes. There are countless miserable people living in this world and you shouldn’t really concern yourself with it, unless your dad worked for Halliburton and you harbor a lot of guilt because you don’t deserve that Range Rover.
The problem is, it’s become a public health crisis, so I have to cede my libertarianism in favor of the greater good, which is basically what libertarianism is – do whatever you want, unless it infringes on my freedom.
Well, we’ve come to that point, because these people are spreading diseases at an alarming rate. Typhus, hepatitis A, and Tuberculosis rates are skyrocketing because a ton of dirty people are living in close quarters to one another and the general public.
For the purposes of breaking down my solution, I’m going to separate the homeless population into four separate categories, in order of least common to most:
People who have Fallen on Hard Times. This group is nearly nonexistent. You don’t lose your job and become homeless. These news stories never mention the fact that there’s something called unemployment benefits, which the government mandated for this very scenario. The dirty little secret about homeless people is that they are all assholes.
Let’s just say I had no family and got evicted from my house today. I would call a few of my best friends and arrange to stay with them until I got back on my feet while I applied for jobs. They would also lend me some money.
I would have these opportunities afforded to me because I have always been an upstanding friend to dozens of people and have never behaved like an asshole and haven’t ever stolen anything from any of my friends and haven’t backstabbed, freeloaded, or burned enough bridges that I suddenly found myself on a park bench.
There are plenty of social programs to assist these people. Yes, rent is expensive in major cities. If all else fails, move back to where you came from. Frankly, this group is entirely hypothetical and doesn’t really exist. They’re all crackheads with a fake sob story.
People who Choose Homelessness as a Lifestyle. This group is also mostly nonexistent. Still, there are a few lovable paupers out there who ride boxcars trade jugs of wine for amusing yarns, and have made a conscious decision to trade the comfort of a home and dental health for the freedom that the road affords them while not being tied down to a job. Keep them away from your kids, but they’re totally harmless for the most part and don’t pose any problems to society as far as I’m concerned.
The Severely Mentally Ill. These are people who see Jesus in their macaroni and will never be able to hold a job. It’s a genetic wild card. Every other halfway decent country in the world provides resources to house and treat these people.
It should be relatively simple for a trained social worker to quiz a dude in a hospital gown who is howling at the moon, determine he needs assistance, and have him committed. There’s a catch though – I don’t believe it should be an easy task to have someone placed on an involuntary psych hold, and I think the laws for this are in the right place. It’s purely an issue of priority.
For example, I know a guy who is a successful restaurant proprietor and is also a huge alcoholic. A while back he got real fucked up at a bar, was walking home muttering nonsense, and was approached by some police officers to make sure he was okay. One thing led to another and they determined this guy was out of his mind to the point that they placed him on a two day psych hold.
This was a well dressed guy, who showers, and has a job and a family. Explain to me why he was taken to get assistance and not the guy who screams about murdering passersby on Crescent Heights. The reason is that there isn’t enough funding for mental health programs, and the lazy cops who took him had been covertly instructed to target people who have health insurance so our broke ass state will be reimbursed and they can pretend they are doing something.
I’m also not in favor of relaxing the psych hold criteria because I recently dated a woman who was a vindictive conniving bitch and I’m fairly certain that she would have had me picked up by the authorities just to make my life a living hell.
It’s purely a matter of funding and selected enforcement. Take ten percent of our stupid defense budget, target the most disabled people, and this problem would go away almost instantly.
Tweakers and Crackheads. These people make up, from my estimation, 75 percent of the homeless population, and I hate them. They’re the super entitled drug addicts who beg for a dollar, but with a chip on their shoulder. You can tell one by the lines in their face, their clothing which sports about five obscure logos per square inch, and the fact that they ride BMX bicycles on the way to your mailbox.
These people are total douchebags. They’ve stolen from their families and friends to support their drug habits, have been given several chances with all of these people, and have turned out again and again to be narcissists who only care about themselves and getting fucked up. Being a drug addict doesn’t make you a bad person. Breaking into someone’s car does, and that’s what these people do.
Rehab will not solve this problem. These people have made a conscious decision to live a hedonistic lifestyle and leave behind them a mountain of shame, trash, and piss buckets.
Again, I don’t believe in locking people up for being homeless or for drug possession. What I do believe in is locking people up who steal from other people.
All of this group, literally all of them, are thieves. They rationalize it in their own pathetic minds, and I am done caring.
Here is the crux of my entire point:
I had my bike stolen once when I was a kid. It sucked. My family was not wealthy, my parents bought me the bike, I loved the bike, and I stupidly left it in the front yard once and some crackhead asshole stole it. This put a financial strain on my parents, who did eventually get me a new bike, but I felt like shit for letting it get stolen, and, on top of that, my social life suffered because I didn’t have a bike for a while and all of my friends rode bikes everywhere and I could have missed out on meeting my future girlfriend. Who knows.
All of these crackheads have three to ten bikes at their camps. All of them are stolen. Don’t prosecute them for being homeless or possessing drugs, prosecute them for stealing other people’s shit. Aggressively prosecute them. Find any obvious crackhead who is riding or hoarding bikes, and ask them where they got it. (Especially target the crackheads who have stolen so many bikes that you see them riding one bike and piloting a freshly stolen bike by the handlebars. This is an obvious tell.)
Now, if you’re a civil libertarian like myself I know exactly what you’re going to say: You can’t just walk up to someone and demand proof that their bike isn’t stolen. True.
But what you can do is compile a massive database of police reports of stolen bicycles. You can then go check out these homeless camps, and match up the descriptions of various stolen bikes to the bikes to those that are sitting outside of street tents. Start with the most obvious. A ten year old’s Haro was stolen. It had a Taylor Swift sticker on it. Call them and have them come down and ID their bike. They probably have a photo of them on the bike. At the very least it will match the description in the police report. Arrest the crackhead. Word will spread. (For this reason, if you are a bike owner or a parent, you should have yours or your kid’s bike registered with the DMV.)
At this point, if it wasn’t painfully obvious, it will become so that all of these people are harboring stolen property. Once you bust the one guy for the stolen bike, you have probable cause to ask all of his crackhead tent dwelling neighbors where they got their bikes.
If they can’t provide proof, and their bikes match the descriptions of recently stolen bikes in the area, arrest them too.
This will quell the homeless issue.