I recently had occasion to drive down to LA's skid row, which squats literally in the shadow of City Hall. I must say that, outside of the Congo and Haiti, I had never seen anything like it. There are hundreds of people living in tents, cardboard boxes, and sleeping bags on the sidewalks, with all the pathetic panoply of garbage, rats and squalor that one might expect. But it was the sheer sprawl of it, the horrid spectacle adjacent to government buildings and luxury hotels, which stunned me. It is an alien sub-city, a reeking alternative universe of hopelessness the fetid depth of which I had not expected.
Now, I have no rosy illusions about the homeless. Those well-fed, well-housed Hollywood liberals who insist that we are all just one paycheck away from homelessness, and that many if not most of the homeless are down-on-their-luck fathers, mothers, and children, are, as usual, complacently out of touch with reality. That may be true in the Third World, but in Los Angeles, the homeless are, for the most part, chronically broken people - drug addicts, alcoholics, and mentally ill, the inevitable driftwood of humanity on the shores of affluence.
But whoever they are and however they got there, we still have to decide what to do about them. No decent, civilized society would allow so many people to live out their days in such despair. But that we do is a scandal of proportions that dwarf Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Russian collusion. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, every waking moment of every day; and the fact that the municipal authorities are not merely brands them as heartless incompetents, incapable of even the most rudimentary compassion. Nothing like skid row should be allowed to exist in a city like LA, with its cults of wealth, celebrity, and glamour.
I have recently seen reports of low-cost, small-scale housing invented by very clever architects and students, which could easily be installed (it is pre-fab and does not even have to be constructed) on the many vacant lots in and around skid row. The units are not very expensive and are easily transported, and in some cases can be interlocked to form entire apartment blocks. Alternatively, empty buildings owned by the city and allowed to decay might quickly be converted into shelters for the homeless, at least to get them off the streets and under cover.
Again, I operate under no illusions. What the skid row squatters need in the long run is health care, psychiatric attention, rehabilitation for drugs and alcohol, and psychological and occupational counseling. And all that ought to be possible given the wealth and putative caring of our city's population. But in the short run, we simply must get them off the streets. It is not only a blight on our society, it is a source of disease and crime which must be removed. And that means providing even the most desperately deficient of them the basic rights of a place to live and decent food to eat.
Of course, temporary shelters will also harbor various categories of crime, from assault and rape to drug-dealing, and even murder. But the solution to that is to arrest anyone who commits a crime in temporary housing, put them in jail, and then determine whether and what sort of rehabilitation they require. The others, those who simply lack shelter, may find some purpose and motivation in their new homes; temporary housing may become a breeding ground not for crime but for hope.
Surely among the wasteful and fatuous spending that goes on in LA, or any big city, funds can be found to get these people off the streets. Instead of building a new stadium, or new art museum, or new entertainment complex, we ought, as a civilized society, to devote such resources as we can marshal to addressing the shame of skid row, and guaranteeing to what the Gospels call the least of our brethren the fundamental right to dignity and shelter.
