Santa Monica's homeless - Time to Throw the Bums Out
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My gorge rose yesterday as we tried to eat lunch on the Santa Monica Promenade. The place was crawling with stinking, lurching bums and crazies. Oh, excuse me, "the homeless."
Santa Monica has gained fame/infamy on Harry Shearer's Le Show as "the home of the homeless." But bleeding-heart charity-pimping seems to have blinded everyone to the fact that the city's own PC generosity has infested its beaches, business districts and outdoor restaurants with a shambling, reeking army of alcoholics, schizophrenics and chronic losers. One in every five or six people on the Promenade around lunchtime yesterday - no, I am *not* exaggerating - appeared to be "homeless."
Oh, wait - they're not all addicts or mentally ill? I sound like a ranting, heartless, elitist bigot? Read on ...
I know just a bit about homelessness, mental illness and alcoholism. I covered the first two issues as a reporter for the L.A. Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I won a national journalism award at the Inquirer for reporting on dangerous treatment of psych patients.
I've visited homeless encampments, shelters and food pantries in Ventura. I've sat in on schizophrenics' group counseling sessions, interviewed homicidal psych patients, watched Simi Valley cops collar mentally ill people for "5150." I covered the murder trial of a young schizophrenic who stabbed a 92-year-old woman to death.
I watched one of my best friends - a talented, razor-witted musician who wouldn't listen to anyone trying to help him - spend 25 years slowly, relentlessly poisoning himself with booze and drugs until he smashed head-on into another car last winter - I believe intentionally - and killed himself. And I watched two of my parents' friends cheerfully drink themselves straight into the grave.
I know from crazy and drunk - at least from a witness' point of view.
I also know that hard knocks, a bad economy and cruel tricks of fate and bureaucracy can shove sane, sober folks out of their jobs and homes and onto the streets. I've interviewed young mothers who were laid off and lost their apartments, broken men whose careers dried up or marriages fell apart, leaving them nothing, kids whose parents kicked them out with nothing. For a short time back in the '80s, that almost happened to me, so I'm sympathetic.
But look around at the people who wash up in Santa Monica - particularly when the weather warms up and the welfare checks just got cashed.
It's not the clear-eyed, honest, hard-striving homeless you see lounging on the fountains in shitstained clothes, rummaging in the trash, cadging coins and smokes from tourists or waving hand-lettered signs. The truly homeless are much less visible; they're out taking advantage of job counseling, working directly with caseworkers, and using services offered by city and state to bootstrap themselves out of the hole.
They're giving the ones giving the bums a good name.
Ever since Santa Monica opened its arms to the homeless back in the 1980s, it's gained a reputation as a safe haven for the down and out.
City workers serve lunch daily on the City Hall lawn. The Homeless Liaison Program, lists an impressive array of services for the homeless: public washers and lockers; legal aid; job training; soup kitchens; addiction counseling; disability casework; medical and health care; mental health services and spiritual guidance.
Plenty of bonafide homeless Santa Monicans are using those services with an earnest desire to get off the street and back among the working stiffs.
But the vast majority are enjoying the free ride - partying on the beach, nesting in the shrubbery around the Main Street/10 overpass, sunbathing by the Reed Park tennis courts or staggering around the business district arguing with their "voices."
Okay - so now it's plain I'm griping about two brands of homeless people - the mentally ill and the chronically drunk - and a vast number who are both.
For the first (and the last), there is little hope beyond Santa Monica's good will. God's evil joke is that mental illness wipes out two vital keys to effective treatment - acknowledgment and resolves. If you think you're not ill - or your illness makes you mistrust the shrinks - you'll never stick with the medication and counseling that can quell your demons and keep them down.
Ever since the deinstitutionalization movement emptied the psych wards at Camarillo and Patton in the 60s, 70s and 80s, mental illness has been shoved farther and farther from the public eye in California. Funding for treatment centers has rotted slowly to skeleton status, and its future seems none too rosy under the Schwarzenegger administration. The few valiant psych workers left are overworked and underfunded.
And under Section 5150 of the Health and Safety Code, no one can lock you up and treat you for being mentally ill until they can persuade the cops and courts that you're a danger to yourself or to others.
So in short, there's little hope for the mentally ill. Those who can't see the way to sanity along the tightrope of publicly funded care are doomed to walk the streets. And many of them walk to Santa Monica, where they seem to be allowed to walk a little freer.
About 18 months ago, the city tried a tough-love measure that outlawed sleeping in doorways and on sidewalks, and limited the amount of aid charities could give. It's helped SMPD keep the doorways clear at night but in the end, the city's still home to an estimated 2,700 homeless . That number is rising.
The one class of "homeless" people who definitely don't deserve the charity are the hardcore alcoholics and addicts. All the help in the world doesn't seem to have moved them to do what it takes to get clear of their need, so why bother trying to help them any further? Bottom line, either they gave up on society and they'd rather stay drunk and live outdoors, or they're doubly cursed - too sick with the physical and mental disease of chemical dependency to ever find the way out.
Solutions? I'm open to suggestion - and criticism from anyone who disagrees with what I've been laying down here - but I doubt the state is:
"Hey Arnold - how about putting some money back into mental health care, paying psych workers what they're worth, and sinking all that money for new jails and prisons into treatment programs instead?" Fat chance - he's too busy finding the most politically expedient route out of hock without acknowledging that all the taxes he's cut actually covered important needs - and that the bailout plan is just screwing future generations of Californians for the sake of looking good today.
It's said that you can't begin recovering from alcoholism until you hit bottom.
No chance of that in Santa Monica. It's warm. It's friendly. There's free food. The cops don't hassle you much. It is definitely the home of the homeless.
The question is, when will Santa Monica itself hit bottom? When will it see that opening the umbrella wide to cover even the most irredeemable boozers and losers is hurting the quality of life for anyone working or shopping in the business district?
Get out of City Hall and walk around town some time with the eyes of an average citizen - How enjoyable is it to live and work in a city where you can't sit down to lunch without enduring a curse-filled shouting match at the next table, without being hit up every 30 feet by a drunk with a bullshit sob story and the glint in his eye that says he's really just looking for the last quarter needed to grab a bottle, without smelling disinfectant that barely covers the stink of weeks-old piss in every corner of the public parking garages?
Note to the city - You may be racking up the kharma points and saving a few dozen honestly homeless people who need a leg up. But you're not doing the vast majority of chronically homeless any favors. You've only succeeded in making them dependent on the sweetest drug of all - charity.
It's like ignoring the signs at Yosemite and feeding the bears. They hang around, they rip the place up, they're belligerent and demanding and they take anything they can get from society without giving anything back. Sooner or later, somebody's going to get bitten.
Posted by: mack_reed on Monday, May 17, 2004 - 10:28 PM
My gorge rose yesterday as we tried to eat lunch on the Santa Monica Promenade. The place was crawling with stinking, lurching bums and crazies. Oh, excuse me, "the homeless."
