By Weldon Berger Your column here
I’M HOMELESS. IN EFFECT, THE CONDITION means I’m breaking some law or another simply by existing: I loiter days, and at night I trespass or camp illegally, or both. There are times when nature, like an iconic tele-marketer, calls at the most inconvenient moments. Unlike with telemarketers, though, one can’t hang up or join a no-call list. The result is illegal.
Sorry about that. Dignity is often an early casualty of life on the streets.
Like many homeless people, I’m dealing with some relatively serious mental health issues.
Like the overwhelming majority of homeless people, I’m not violent or dangerous to anyone other than my sad self. Like most of us, I don’t panhandle (some of us lack the capacity; I lack the disposition). To this point I’ve been relatively successful at navigating the maze of organizations and programs offering services to people like me, but it’s an exhausting and very nearly full-time job to do so.
When you see homeless people who are hopelessly grimy and smell bad, there’s a fair chance that they’ve simply been ground down too far to continue making the effort to find and keep decent clothes, and to shower and do laundry.
I’m not trying to paint a noble savage portrait, although there are those among us who would qualify.
I do, however, wish that those SMDP readers who purely hate people in my situation would give a little thought, actually a lot of thought, to the other side of the equation. Very, very few people are homeless by choice. Mental illness, substance abuse and sometimes a native incapacity to function play large roles in funneling people to the street.
The demand for services, including psychiatric, medical and a universe of counseling specialties, is very high and the supply is low.
The odds of getting off the street decrease the longer one is on it.
There is, of course, a glaringly obvious solution to the problem of homelessness: Give us homes, and give us the help we need to stay in them.
Oh, I know it goes against the grain; after all, why should someone like me get an apartment for little or no money when everyone else has to pay?
Well, setting aside any moral dimension, how sick are you of seeing me and my legion of companions sleeping in the park or at bus stops, or panhandling on the promenade? Wouldn’t you just once like to be able to walk down an alley without smelling urine? I know I would.
Wouldn’t you feel safer knowing that the transparently lunatic fellow you’ve been shrinking from, or just cordially despising, is neatly tucked away somewhere other than a hideously expensive public institution, and getting treatment that might make him less of a burden upon society?
Wouldn’t it be nice if the grimiest among us only had to drag themselves a few feet from bed to take a shower, and a few more feet down to the laundry room to wash their clothes?
You’re actually paying for us already anyway, and several studies have shown that you’re paying more to chase us around the streets than you would to plant us in apartments.
You’re paying for a considerable amount of police time, and you’re paying for court time when we show up to deal with homelessness-related tickets that are either dismissed or result in jail time, the latter of which is also expensive.
You’re paying for the property management teams zipping around downtown in pricey golf carts at all hours rousting homeless people from their concrete beds, and for the additional cleanup crews who mitigate the messes we make.
You’re paying when we go to the emergency room instead of a physician because so many of us don’t qualify for MediCal or Medicare, and are caught up in one or another social services purgatory.
In other words, you’re paying a lot of money to keep us in your face. To me, that seems self-destructive; it’s the kind of thinking, and poor decision-making, that ultimately leads to homelessness. For your own sake, act now.
Get us housed before we bankrupt your city and in the process drive you off your rocker and into the street.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 29, 2008. Read the original PDF.