Compassion for the Homeless ... and For the Rest of Us

HOMELESS RIGHTS CONSIDERED-Compassion is often an emotional and spontaneous act, but it need not be an action divorced from reason or prolonged debate.  There's a fine line between compassion and enabling bad or unsustainable behavior and we keep crossing that line in the City of the Angels, and in the State of California. 

A timely op-ed from Mark Ryavec of the Venice Stakeholders Association reports that Venice has learned the hard way some of the painful lessons that Santa Monica has also learned with respect to "homeless rights": 

In short, love and support of the homeless and mentally disabled is not the same as enabling public urination, crime and a sharp curtailing of the rights of those law-abiding property owners and dwellers who have to put up with that element of the homeless ... particularly that element of the homeless who've amply demonstrated that they need a little bit more "tough love" than they've had in the past. 

Of course, the mentally-ill and veteran and economically-unfortunate among us deserve our help.  It will cost money--taxes, private charitable donations, and other legal/political outreach to those elements of our fellow human beings that we just can't leave behind. 

Halfway homes and group homes cost money, but they must be done right--those who can be helped must be recognized as much as those who refuse help, or who abuse our help.  And both groups definitely DO exist. 

Mar Vista and Westside Village, which are represented by the Mar Vista Community Council, have suffered from the blight of the campers and RV's clustering along public thoroughfares, and from the growing health and safety hazards posed not only by those in the campers and RV's (particularly those who've clustered along Sepulveda Blvd. between National and Pico Blvds.) ...  

... but by a LA City Council and City Attorney's office who are either legally, fiscally or politically unempowered and/or unwilling to resolve this issue.  No one (certainly no reasonable person) is really out to get that poor homeless person sitting on a bench or on the sidewalk and bothering nobody...that person needs our help (provided he/she really wants it). 

That said, when the LAPD and workers from the City of Los Angeles ask dwellers of those RV's and campers to be part of homeless and job outreach programs, and they refuse, the rights of the citizenry as a whole must be considered.   

Ditto for those homeless guilty of public urination/defecation, and of both defacement of public/private property and threatening residents--mental health is a touchy thing, and count me in as a physician who's all too aware of the two-thirds recidivism rate among the mentally ill.  Monitoring is both mandatory and unavoidable to be performed on an ongoing and never-ending basis--either by the family of the mentally ill, or by society in general. 

Scream all you will (perhaps with some truth and merit) about the late President Reagan's defunding of mental health from a federal angle, but his argument was NOT to defund it but for states to step up and pay for it as what he maintained was a Constitutionally-mandated state responsibility.  Whether it's the City or County of Los Angeles, the State of California, or Washington, D.C., the need to take care of the mentally ill is expensive but necessary. 

Ditto for cities, counties, and states to do their fair share of funding roads, sewers, parks, schools, police, etc.--it's a fine and worthy debate to determine which entity should do more...but SOMEONE must do it. 

And the rights of the majority must be considered, both because lawfulness is deserving of support and because the majority will inevitably be paying for the homeless, the mentally ill and (if/when necessary) the incarceration of those who are a threat to society in general. 

A silly and sad bill, SB 608 (the "Right to Rest" bill introduced by State Senator Carol Liu), is being considered by Sacramento and being labeled as a bill to allow the homeless to move freely, rest, sleep, pray, and be protected in public spaces without discrimination, as well as the right to occupy a legally parked vehicle and the right to share food and eat in public. 

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Unfortunately, the meme that the homeless are being mistreated and abused isn't as simple or even truthful as its promoters would like the rest of us to believe, and the glossing over at how the overwhelming majority of law-abiding (and taxpaying, and charity-donating, and compassionate) citizens are being mistreated and abused by failed homeless policies is similarly inappropriate. 

Placing more homeless vets at the VA and creating low-down payment, low-interest home loans are ideas that are part of the answer. So are the halfway homes, both publicly and privately funded.  Ditto for the homeless being protected by the police when they're minding their own business--they already have the right to pray, eat, live, rest, etc. without being abused or threatened.

But there is no right to illegally park, to publicly urinate, defecate, dump one's sewage into the drains and pipes that lead to our oceans, or to either block traffic or threaten the safety of the rest of us--who pay a great deal of money to live without such abuse. 

If State Senator Liu and others want to promote the false truth that California is a compassionless state, and ignore the reality that many of our legal and political approaches to homeless have been hamstrung by knee-jerk and unrealistic projections of a fantasy world that does not exist, that is their right. 

But just as it is our responsibility to take care of our fellow humanity who cannot take care of themselves, it is not the right of Sacramento, some detached federal or state judge, or anyone else to demand we have to live with and enable lawlessness and breakdown of basic civil rights for the greater citizenry. 

Let compassion from our hearts be matched with conviction from our heads when it comes to addressing the rights of the homeless, and to promoting civil rights and economic opportunities for all.

 

(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the  nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]   He also does regular commentary on the MarkIsler Radio Show on AM 870, and co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.)

-cw

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 21

Pub: Mar 10, 2015