It’s lunchtime at the oceanside bistro Ivy at the Shore. You don’t need a clock to know this. A high bright sun and lineup of Range Rovers and Mercedes SUVs at the valet stand informs you.
Customers pour in from famously rich surrounding locales such as Pacific Palisades and Beverly Hills. Somewhere in the area sits a penthouse owned by Britain’s new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, known for his enormous wealth as much as his mental acumen.
But there is also something those inside the restaurant are not inclined to talk about over their $40 salads: fellow humans curled up in the fetal position under filthy blankets, clad in tattered, dirt-stained clothes. They can be found almost everywhere in Santa Monica.
For all its wealth, California has not been able to meet the challenge of homelessness, which grows worse by the year. It is everywhere, including wealthy enclaves like this one. The problem is even worse in neighbouring Venice Beach.
During the early stages of the pandemic, a homeless encampment that stretched almost two kilometres sprung up along the town’s famous boardwalk. It was taken down last summer and almost 200 residents were placed in shelters or temporary housing. Others moved to grounds near the local library until that site was shut down. Many of those folks moved back to the beach.
This whack-a-mole approach to the homeless situation is playing out almost everywhere you go here.
California is a big, sprawling state of nearly 40 million, with an inviting temperate climate. If you expected a homeless problem anywhere in the U.S. it would be here. The last count in 2020 pegged the number of homeless at more than 66,000. On any given night, however, 113,000 people sleep outdoors, according to a 2020 analysis by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
It is an enduring crisis for several reasons.
It is impossible to build enough housing and shelter space to accommodate demand and the pandemic only worsened the problem. There is lots of social housing on the books but it won’t be built for years.
In 2016, voters passed Proposition HHH, which raised US$1.2-billion through higher taxes to construct 10,000 new apartments for the homeless. So far, only 3,357 units have been built at an average cost of US$600,000 each.
Now, inflation is increasing costs and throwing more people on the street. Programs and services to address mental health and addiction, huge drivers of homelessness, are grossly insufficient.
Consequently, we are witnessing an almost dystopic situation, with sometimes barely clad people in deep mental distress wandering the streets, looking for drugs or a garbage can to go through for food. Unsurprisingly, this has led to tensions in towns like this one and Venice Beach, where residents and merchants are pressuring authorities to do something.
They want the homeless cleared from their areas! They want to feel safe walking their streets again! Not exactly outlandish requests but sadly what they really want is a return to a world that existed 20 or 30 years ago. The great irony, of course, is one of the biggest reasons housing for the homeless stalls is because of resident resistance: no one wants an apartment building for the homeless in their neighbourhood. This resistance is killing proposed projects all the time. (In Canada too.)
So is political infighting and warring factions of government.
There may not be a bigger issue in the midterm elections here than the homelessness crisis. It has compelled Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who is up for re-election, to get more aggressive on the issue. The state recently passed into law a new civil court system designed to build treatment plans for those homeless people with the most complex needs, including debilitating psychosis.
Those who refuse to enter treatment can be held in psychiatric centres involuntarily. This marks a paradigm shift, a crossing of a line public officials have been reluctant to breach. While most people with mental illness are not dangerous, studies suggest those with psychosis, especially untreated, are at a substantially elevated risk of violence.
Here in Canada, particularly in Vancouver, we have mostly stayed away from dealing with these poor souls. Politicians have been wary about trampling on their personal freedoms for fear of community backlash and inciting civil rights litigation. But at some point, this approach puts innocent lives at risk and leaves those in desperate need of care to die prematurely.
What we are witnessing in California is what happens when society fails to grapple effectively with a huge, difficult problem. Now, we will see if it has been ignored for so long that it has reached the point of no return.
Gary Mason