By Brian Timm Culver City
I have been reading with a certain bemusement the letters from your readers regarding local homelessness. Thanks to my mom, a resident of Santa Monica for over four decades, I receive her clippings, like the recent letters from Stephen Baker and Josh Epstein, expressing their alarm at the homeless problem and the city’s fecklessness at addressing it. An uninitiated reader might get the impression that this is a recent phenomenon affecting the town. But let’s get honest about it — the homeless problem is a quarter-century in the making, the unfortunate result of Socialist politics combined with a bureaucracy designed to enforce “tolerance,” even toward criminal behavior. (And let’s understand that such “tolerance” is really a cover for a proportionate “intolerance” toward the law-abiding citizen. But I digress.) I have fond memories of growing up in Santa Monica, but that city has been replaced with something vulgar and embarrassing. I now avoid the Cesspool-by-the-Sea at all costs. I left some years ago, and now reside in Culver City, which has managed to retain much of the middle-class charm and sense of community that Santa Monica once had, but lost somewhere back in the 1980s. It’s also where the police and city hall take their jobs seriously, and dole out the tolerance on a sliding scale, giving very little to those who don’t deserve it. I can only hope that Santa Monica can regain some of what it lost after its leadership experimented so tragically with policies that have left the city with such a rotten reputation. It’s a glaring example of how good intentions can go so terribly wrong.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 31, 2006. Read the original PDF.