Central City East : Downtown Los Angeles

Homelessness is the state of living in which you have no home to hang your hat in. People are homeless for a myriad of reasons ranging from extreme poverty to drug addiction to mental problems. Urban sprawl over a hundred miles of coastline has concentrated the homeless problem into a very small area where they are tolerated. Greater Los Angeles is a huge population center in a state where mental care funding was cut under then governor reagan. Drug addiction is treated only as a crime and not as a disease and thus the war on drugs has created self-imposed internment camps for the hardcore addicts.

Obviously not every homeless person requires the same kind of help. Some need mental health care / medication and counseling, others need drug counseling and rehabilitation, many just need help finding work and affordable housing.

Homelessness is even more of a problem because of the ethos that's developed through the years that everyone and anyone, no matter how self-destructive and/or mentally ill, has a right to do his or her own thing. If that includes a person who wants to stand out in the middle of the street, smeared with feces while howling at the moon, so be it. Therefore, how dare you, the cop or social worker, even think of escorting such an individual against his or her will and relocating him or her elsewhere----be it to a clinic or sanitarium or some location down the block! You'd be violating that person's civil RIGHTS!!!

Homelessness is even more of a problem because of the ethos that's developed through the years that everyone and anyone, no matter how self-destructive and/or mentally ill, has a right to do his or her own thing. If that includes a person who wants to stand out in the middle of the street, smeared with feces while howling at the moon, so be it. Therefore, how dare you, the cop or social worker, even think of escorting such an individual against his or her will and relocating him or her elsewhere----be it to a clinic or sanitarium or some location down the block! You'd be violating that person's civil RIGHTS!!!

The biggest problem with our society in my opinion is that we've dropped our standards so much, nobody wants to take responsibility for their fellow man, their society, their city, themselves, etc.

In dealing with the issues of homelessness, we need to raise our standards. Society needs to hold itself to a higher standard for how low we let people drop. Obviously, there are those who are misguided and choose the life, but so many people have simply lost everything, and we need to provide the services for all these intersecting communities, including the mentally ill, the drug-addicted, the children, the unlucky, the abused, etc.

On the other side, I agree with the last poster, we need to have a basic standard of behavior and conduct. It needs to be a contract, that society needs to commit to an drastic increase in services, including beds and food, counseling etc. to those that need it, while at the same time society should be able to expect people to not stand in the middle of the street, harass passers-by, sell crack out in the open, etc. While I know somebody "howling at the moon" most likely needs to be in an appropriate treatment program, that can't continue to be an excuse to allow people to act like that.

It's not just a matter of taste. Such behaviors "infect" all those in the community. The prevalence of drugs in the area makes it that much easier for those non-addicted people to get addicted, thus compounding the problem. Also, being around aggressive folks that yell and fight will make the rest of the people aggressive, because you have to be to not get picked on. These people like drug dealers and violent offenders need to be quarantined from the "recovery community", by whatever means necessary, because otherwise it's practically impossible for any sort of recovery to take place for everybody else.

Part of recovery is wanting to recover. Those that don't want to recover cannot expect to be able to do whatever they want.

Hopefully Mr. Villaraigosa will find a way to get the money to take care of Skid Row, money for a drastic increase in money for social services, in combination with a general crackdown on both high- and low-level crime in the area.