LOS ANGELES | Downtown Project Rundown 4.0

[LA/OCman]

Originally Posted by LAofAnaheim

When you're just blocks away from the largest homeless encampment in the nation, it's hard to control. Los Angeles - for the reasons we love, has marvelous weather. If you are homeless in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, where would you go to survive on the streets? Los Angeles. During the "great white flight" of the '60s and '70s, cities like Glendale, Pasadena, Hawthorne, etc.. who didn't want to fund homeless shelters sent the money to Los Angeles and thus inadvertentedly created the USA's largest homeless shelter. It's something LA is trying to reverse and making those cities keep their own funds and building their own shelters. Unfortunately, it won't change night/day.

As a resident here, the "homeless problem" has gone down. I use to walk 7th street on Friday/Saturday evenings and would get asked for change way more times last year and years before. Now, it's probably 1 or 2 people. It could be like 5 just four years ago.

Will homelessness go away? Nope. Never. Will the beggars go away? Nope. Never. But, it will be drowned out by the more people who start living on our streets as homeless would have more people to ask for money instead of just the few that walk the streets. There's homeless in New York, but they have way more people to ask for change compared to the streets of downtown LA as our pedestrian traffic is significantly less.

If people are scared of downtown LA because of the homeless, don't live in an urban area. It can happen everywhere. I've been spit on my homeless in Paris, France. This is not an LA problem..it's a world problem.

Actually, the numbers lately contradict your statement. If you have been by skid row, you will see that things have gone back to where they were years ago. The latest count on the numbers living on the street Downtown..during the past 12 mos, the numbers have risen from 888 to 1662. Sadly we had made progress from 2005 to 2010 where homelessness dropped Downtown from 2000 to 600. The homeless population in NY is a fraction of Los Angeles....but the good news is the LA has a slightly lower percentage of homeless on the streets than Portland, OR!