
Fire at a homeless encampment sparked Bel-Air blaze that destroyed homes - kyleblarson
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-skirball-fire-cause-20171212-story.html
======
DoreenMichele
Maybe we could do something crazy, like bring back SROs, instead of de facto
as a society acting like we think it is better for people to sleep in a tent
than have "sub standard" housing. Because tolerating rampant homelessness
while turning our noses up at modest rentals basically amounts to the nation
saying that is exactly what it thinks.

 _Miner said she was skeptical of the proposed campaign to educate homeless
people about fire risks._

Yeah. A homeless person making a cooking fire is probably hungry and probably
has no other viable option. Trying to "educate" the homeless about fire risks
sounds like "Honey, we don't care if you starve. Just make sure you don't burn
down any mansions. Kaythxbai."

~~~
GarrisonPrime
I don't disagree, but I will point out that many homeless people want to be
homeless, if being housed means submitting to questions and forms. Autonomy is
a powerfully strong motivator.

~~~
DoreenMichele
The vast majority of homeless do not want to be homeless. If we provide enough
affordable housing -- at market conditions, with no more forms and the like
than other rentals -- you will be left with a much smaller number of quirky
hobo-by-choice types. Shrinking the problem is very worthwhile.

~~~
TheCoreh
Don't rentals require a credit score, a stable source of income, and usually a
guarantor?

~~~
DoreenMichele
Yes. But I am trying to make the distinction that most poverty relief programs
are much more invasive and bureaucratic than most market based solutions.

I am thinking of low cost rentals where they require you to live there and
won't rent it to well off people looking for a weekend getaway that is cheaper
than a motel. But other than that, I don't want a lot of extra requirements
tacked on.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
I think you're very misguided about "market based solutions". The homeless
don't have money, therefore they have limited/no exposure in the "market". I
don't know if you've been present before about why companies don't form around
low income or homeless segment - there's no market in them. No money = no RoI.

You cater to people who have money. You're describing something that price
discriminates and doesnt at the same time.

> I am thinking of low cost rentals where they require you to live there

Forced to be there X amount of time. This is a reduction of freedom, which
sounds like reinstating the bureaucratic nightmare you talk of.

> and won't rent it to well off people looking for a weekend getaway that is
> cheaper than a motel.

Means-testing. The homeless aren't going to have the paperwork to show lack of
means. Remember, these people probably have no ID or anything. The census
allows them to highlight landmarks where they "frequent", along with voting
homeless allowed similar.

> But other than that, I don't want a lot of extra requirements tacked on.

And what you stated is already too much.

What needs done: if you're homeless, you get a small room. It's yours. It
won't be much. We can at least afford that as a population.

~~~
DoreenMichele
The homeless are not some other population. They are people who currently lack
housing. With enough affordable housing, some people would never land on the
street to start with. They would move to an SRO temporarily, get their act
together and return eventually to more conventional housing.

I am not talking about a homeless service. I am talking about policies that
shrink the problem in part by preventing homelessness to begin with.

I will add not all homeless are completely penniless, and I have formally
studied the subject.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
> The homeless are not some other population. They are people who currently
> lack housing.

True, however not having housing then brings on a host of other problems.
Basic sanitation and food are just 2 of those big issues - and the food issue
is why the fire happened in this place.

> With enough affordable housing, some people would never land on the street
> to start with. They would move to an SRO temporarily, get their act together
> and return eventually to more conventional housing.

Or, they would do like what we see happen in China and Japan - where the
prices keep going up and up and up, and those people never leave the SROs.
That's also a market eventuality, and a noted fact in those areas. This idea
that SRO's are some "gift" to homeless and that they'll clean right up is a
farce.

> I am not talking about a homeless service. I am talking about policies that
> shrink the problem in part by preventing homelessness to begin with.

I have a completely curveball outfield suggestion: We the government/people
build SROs. If you're homeless, you can have 1. End of discussion. Because
shoving this on "The Market" is how in part why they became homeless. So yeah,
splatter more "market". It's about as true as trickle-down theory (aka:
getting pissed on by above).

> I will add not all homeless are completely penniless, and I have formally
> studied the subject.

Yeah, so did I. I _was_ homeless. You researched it for a single sociology
class. When I was homeless, we met _lots_ of students from the local
university. The homeless epidemic has gotten nowhere but worse. But hey,
there's some papers published reaffirming time and again the same things.

------
kurthr
What's not really mentioned here is that these sorts of encampments are
usually build along CA freeways because those are policed only by the state
(Caltrans / CHiPs) rather than the locality (city/county). Even when there is
an obvious hazard (garbage buildup and drift into the road, visible fires
burning, throwing objects at cars, walking/crossing the highway or on/off
ramp) nothing is done. Typically, it takes a call to your CA state senator to
get any action (caltrans doesn't respond to messages within a month).

~~~
tiredwired
Yes, there is one between my complex and a highway in San Jose. There was a
big fire there last week. No news coverage. We were lucky it did not burn our
homes down. These people have been offered help in the past and refuse it. The
area gets cleared out and they return. They harass women in the neighborhood
and steal everything they can get their hands on. They have to go.

~~~
zxcmx
Go where, though?

~~~
tiredwired
The arsonists and thieves can go to jail. The rest can take advantage of the
existing programs and stop refusing help.

------
pizza
_When I first got to Baltimore there were a lot of studies on cities, and I
became very involved in the problem of housing -- housing finance, housing
collapse in the inner city, housing conditions in general. I was fascinated to
do a series of reports for the city, and also for other agencies, about how to
approach the whole question of urban regeneration, which is very much on the
agenda there._

 _It was extraordinary to me that some of the ideas I got for that came out of
reading Engels 's famous saying on the condition of the working class in
England in 1844; and also the housing question where he says the bourgeoisie
had only one way to solve its housing problem: it moved it around. When I
started to look at what some of the proposals were, they were about
gentrification, which, in effect, would displace people and just simply move
the problem around._

 _So I made a big pitch in these reports, saying, "If you're going to address
this question, you can't address it in a way that simply moves it around. In
order not to move it around, we have to deal with basic questions about income
distribution, wealth and the like, and, also, of course, racism, and housing
markets and so on." This was a very important principle that came out of
reading Engels, and then importing it. I put it into these reports; I didn't
cite Engels. I didn't cite Engels, and everybody thought this was a fantastic
insight, and somebody said to me, "Where did you get that from?" I said, "From
Engels," and they said, "Who is he?"_

 _" Tom Engels, the local congressman"!_

 _" Does he work for the Brookings Institution?" or something like that. It
was funny. But this was how I would sometimes find myself using this stuff in
factual ways, and it resonated with people. I got a lot of encouragement to
stay with this framework, that when you actually laid it out, used it in this
way, using these kinds of concepts, people understood what you meant. The only
time they turn around and walk the other way is when you tell them where it
came from._

[http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Harvey/harvey-
con2....](http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Harvey/harvey-con2.html)

------
pizza
Heard of the quote "You don't hate Mondays - you hate capitalism" ?

I doubt the urge to scapegoat the homeless will become a widespread one, but
I'm sure that some (ie land grabbing developers..) need to hear this:

"you don't hate the homeless - you hate how they serve as a reminder that you
can _always_ face ruin. The more you make, the harder it gets to empathize
with a guy with a sign, or even to look him in the eye for more than a
glance...

~~~
crankylinuxuser
I hate the fact that we have involuntary homeless. We have more than enough in
this country to fix that. It's a choice of the voting public and the
politicians that scorn and hatred and blame is pushed on them.

------
s0rce
Seems like we are going to be seeing more of this with drier conditions and
ever growing homeless camps across California. There are numerous fire code
violations at these camps and these were devised for a reason. Not sure what
the best course of action is but clearly something needs to happen.

~~~
ajross
Devil's advocacy: must "something happen?". The point to allowing semi-
permanent homeless camps is that people were being forced into hiding,
sleeping in ditches and eating garbage. That's a serious social ill (no, I
don't have numbers, but would be interested if someone does), and one that was
trivially solved by allowing them to pitch tents and cook food. It's still not
a great existence, but it's a whole lot better and it's something that lots of
people will legitimately choose.

And if the cost of that is some non-zero number of burned homes? Dunno, but my
gut says that's a worthwhile trade.

Not that I'd argue with running power to those camps and paying for some hot
plates either, of course.

~~~
s0rce
I agree that a tent does seem to be a step up from a ditch but I'm not sure
you can say the issue was trivially solved. At least in the bay area many of
the camps are in parks. This seems like a very controversial opinion but I
really enjoy walking around parks and this really isn't possible with
bustling, trash filled homeless encampments occupying the neighborhood parks.
I don't have a solutions but I don't think tent camps are the way to go
either.

------
jlgaddis
That seems a bit ironic.

------
vorotato
People are either a liability or an asset, and how California responds to
their housing crisis will ultimately play out in the consequences.

------
sitkack
I have a modest proposal.

------
imgabe
Well if that's not some kind of social commentary, I don't know what is.

------
sunstone
Can you say, "False economy?". See, I knew you could.

------
chrissnell
Mayor Garcetti has been very soft on the homeless and refused to enforce laws
targeted at these encampments:

[http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-garcetti-
homeles...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-garcetti-
homeless-20150630-story.html)

~~~
pizza
Look...maybe you have a low opinion of him.. maybe you see him as slacking off
from his Mayorly duties or decrees or whatever he should, in your eyes, be
doing, fine... and I'm sorry for this wall of text but I just cannot allow a
comment like that to not bear my scrutiny.

But just the !!insane!! rate of growth of the homeless in _the last two years
alone_ completely changes the game. It appears that, no matter where you look,
all throughout the city of Angels is that housing is fucked expensive and in
fucked supply.

> The startling jump in homelessness affected every significant demographic
> group, including youth, families, veterans and the chronically homeless,
> according to the report. Homeless officials and political leaders pointed to
> steadily rising housing costs and stagnant incomes as the underlying cause.
> [0]

I beseech you to be receptive to the idea that the problem goes far far far
beyond simply flipping an "enforce preexisting laws" switch, or hiring more
blue-suited hardasses that'll shine flashlights into the eyes of the homeless
as they weather every night's accompanying total lack of guaranteed
security...

Your 2015 article is by Gale Holland -- now compare the urgency of her
writing, from earlier in 2017. The title alone is enough to alarm the shit out
of you...

Headline: L.A. County homelessness jumps a 'staggering' 23% as need far
outpaces housing, new count shows [0]

> Even the homeless veteran population jumped in 2017, marking a backsliding
> of the gains made last year by city, state and federal programs that slashed
> the number of homeless veterans by a third. With the number of veterans
> placed into housing slightly down, the count of 4,828 homeless veterans was
> up ___ 57%. __ (emphasis mine, but holy shit!)

> “There's no sugarcoating the bad news,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said
> at a news conference Wednesday where the Los Angeles Homeless Services
> Authority released its report. “We can’t let rents double every year. I was
> particularly disappointed to see veteran numbers go up.”

> Garcetti called homelessness a problem that has persisted “through
> administrations, through recessions,” adding, “Our city is in the midst of
> an extraordinary homelessness crisis that needs an extraordinary response.
> These men, these women, these children are our neighbors.”

> The Homeless Services Authority linked the worsening problem to the economic
> stress on renters in the Los Angeles area. More than 2 million households in
> L.A. and Orange counties have housing costs that exceed 30% of income,
> according to data from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies
> included in the report.

> According to the nonprofit California Housing Partnership Corp., median
> rent, adjusted for inflation, increased more than 30% from 2000 to 2015,
> while the median income was flat.

\--

Assume a plain-Jane compound interest growth formula (it's just a sketch,
right?), use the rule of 72 with that 23% figure, and bam -- if that's how the
process plays out, 3 years will be all it takes to double the number of people
out on the street. That can't just be a linear issue of the number in bad
situations either - it seems like super-linear complexity headache, with
respect to the n = the growing number of disenfranchised people..

\- How will you pay for the massive influx of cops necessary to address the
doubled homeless population?

\- What about the impact on the small businesses or cafes or corner markets
and shit that will have a slowly-but-surely drying up of customers?

\- Add to that, the ensuing evaporation of taxes funding the city..

\- How much you wanna bet we won't have saved up enough to not hurt ourselves
in the process of splurging on the whole 2028 Olympics extrava-freakin-ganza.
Surely it'll be one of those hyper-spectacular moments in this boring dystopia
of ours :)

\--

And, once again, because it damn well bears worth repeating -- _LA 's homeless
population jumped by 23%... IN THE LAST YEAR ALONE_. AND _The year prior had a
20% growth rate!!!!!_ And when they go homeless, it's more often the case of a
gradual, year-long descent because of inability to pay, rather than a
pinpoint-able, spontaneous event that made your home suddenly unlivable or
irretrievable.

Look up the ancient Latin concept of the exiled man, _homo saracer_ \- a man
whose life is worth so little that he may be murdered, freely and without any
and all repercussion. Someone who is totally bereft of even being empathized
with...

How can it be that the society can discard people to such _tsunamic_ extent
that we barely bat an eye at the fact that these slums share zip codes with
the ultra rich and yet live worlds apart. Right at this very moment you are
reading this sentence, dozens of wanderers - blacks, whites, latinos,
disabled, boys, girls - extremely cautiously stepping along the highway.
Petrified by how instantly their bones could be crushed into dust when you
share a lane with any of the hundred thousand or so totally fucking insane
drivers that live around here. To live like a dog, to be defenselessly curled
up to rest their weary souls. To have nowhere to go except for the side of the
road where tipsy assholes toss their empty sodas out their passenger side
windows...

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-
count-2...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-
count-20170530-story.html)

