Los Angeles leads national rise in homelessness

By one count, there are 48,000 people living on the streets of California's largest city, 6,000 of them veterans. The New York Times reports that in response, "a task force created by the Chamber of Commerce and the United Way of Greater Los Angeles has stepped in with a plan, called Home for Good, to end homelessness here in five years. The idea is to, among other things, build housing for 12,000 of the chronically unemployed and provide food, maintenance and other services at a cost of $235 million a year."

"Part of the impetus for this most recent flurry of attention is concern in the business and political communities that the epidemic is threatening to tarnish Los Angeles’s national image and undercut a campaign to promote tourism, particularly in downtown, which has been in the midst of a transformation of sorts, with a boom of museums, concert halls, restaurants, boutiques, parks and lofts."

"The gentrification has pushed many of the homeless people south, but they can still be seen settled on benches and patches of grass in the center of downtown."

"Neil J. Donovan, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said he believed that, after years of decline, there had been a slight rise in the number of homeless nationally this year because of the economic downturn, and that Los Angeles had led the way."

"And Los Angeles is a place where people drive almost everywhere, so there are fewer of the reminders of homelessness — walking around a sleeping person on a sidewalk, responding to requests for money at the corner — that are common in concentrated cities like New York."

Though not explicitly cited in the Times article, the idea that Southern Californians have been slow to act because they aren't often brought into close contact with the homeless recalls an argument made by Richard Sennett, a writer and academic known for his studies of social ties in cities. Sennett, author of The Uses of Disorder (1970) and other books, insisted that society would be more just if all kinds of people lived close enough together to be made aware of the condition of others.