This past week, Q-line asked: What should be done to improve the homeless situation in and around the city?
Here are your responses: “THE HOMELESS SITUATION IN THIS CITY has gone way beyond tolerable and manageable. We do not have the money nor the facilities to cope with the thousands we have all over town. Large facilities and institutions need to be established outside the city limits and residential areas. With the associated help available: Drug and alcohol counseling, health care and live-in facilities for the ill. The freeloader bums need to be sent back to the countries, cities and places they came from. We have no more housing for these out of towners. We have way too many [homeless] as it stands.”
“THE SANTA MONICA DAILY PRESS should stop trying to deceive people about the homeless as being somehow special. The Santa Monica Daily Press should stop demonizing homeless people. It should consider that they are human beings and should stop trying to whip up hate against them. The Santa Monica Daily Press is the biggest source of hate for poor people in this city.”
“WHY BE AS KIND AS POSSIBLE WHEN answering? Many of us are sick and tired of the homeless. The facts are in and a lot of them are not just down and out, but they are criminals with criminal records. What a shame that the citizens, tourists and police have to deal with this daily. We should lock all the trash and recycle bins and use the money from the program and not raise taxes. Wow, what a concept. Of course, we all know that the City Council has no intentions of fixing the problem.”
“I THINK WE DO QUITE A BIT FOR THE homeless. But I think we should do more to fix the city’s streets so people like the homeless can live more safely on the streets.”
“STOP TOLERATING IT. THE HOMELESS should be arrested. Let’s clean up this city, we are an embarrassment to the country.”
“OFTEN THE ONLY THING THAT SEPARATES a homeless person from anyone else walking down the sidewalk is the homeless person’s unkempt appearance. A shave and a haircut or a perm would make a big difference unless the ACLU finds fault in it. The various branches of the military has surplus clothing. This surplus clothing is suitable for wearing once washed and ironed. The city of Santa Monica should research the availability of surplus clothing.”
“THE QUESTION CONTRADICTS ITSELF. Either be kind or do something about the problem. Well, we can’t do both. The only thing to do is run a few of them out of town. Clean them up and put them on a one-way bus to Florida. It’s nice and warm there. Let Florida deal with it.”
“YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LIKE WHAT I SAY Santa Monica. We have a rule that we’re not allowed to hose down the sidewalks, but this is one thing we could do about the stinky, sticky sidewalks. Clean the sidewalks with very strong bleach. I love what they did at City Hall. They cleaned it with strong bleach and it seemed to work. People are always complaining about the stinky sidewalks, but hello people, you can’t use water on sidewalks in this town.”
“THERE NEEDS TO BE A CENSUS OF THE homeless population in Santa Monica. Those who are just down on their luck and who need some sort of subsidy to find an apartment should get a subsidy paid for by eliminating all the city’s subsidies to private entities. As for those who don’t want housing, they should be turned over to professionals to see if they need help.”
“THE COUNCIL HAS TAKEN A MINOR problem 20 years ago and turned it into a huge problem today. To use a bad analogy, bums are like cockroaches. Feed and keep them warm and they will multiply. Enlarging the homeless by city council social engineering results in high-paying managerial jobs at homeless shelters. Cheap moral platitudes by religious socialist leaders don’t help. All tax payer donated money should go to fund the Salvation Army and Los Angeles Rescue Mission. They provide a higher morale stability than most services. Time for the city council to stand and deliver. Make hard decisions and do something to help Santa Monica for once.”
“THE CITY SHOULD START ENFORCING the laws they already have on the books and take the lead of other cities by not allowing people to sleep in public. Take these people in and put them in a shelter. Find something to make them work. They shouldn’t be allowed to just loiter around. The city shouldn’t be enabling this kind of behavior.”
“ONE SOLUTION TO THE HOMELESS problem would be to stop free feeding programs. We should provide an alternate place for them to go.”
“DESPITE OUR BEST EFFORTS TO DEAL with the homeless in Santa Monica, we are about to be swept under a tidal wave of now homeless people thanks to two events. First is the gentrification of Skid Row in Los Angeles which is disbursing a flood of homeless people to outlying communities including ours. And the Iraq war which will attract tens of thousands of veterans to the VA center in Westwood. If only there was somebody in our community that has connections to the governor. It is shame that we don’t have anybody in our community with those sorts of connections.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 14, 2007. Read the original PDF.