On the Streets of Los Angeles
The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted how vulnerable the homeless population is.
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Ms. Bujalski is a photojournalist and co-founder of The Mirror, Mirror Project, which uses art to connect working artists and homeless people.
The coronavirus has infected over a million people around the world. As the pandemic sweeps across the country, tens of thousands of people are living on the streets of California. Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California warned that as many as 60,000 homeless people could be infected with Covid-19, overwhelming the state’s health care systems. In Los Angeles County, where roughly 60,000 people are homeless, there are at least nine confirmed cases of coronavirus among unsheltered people.
Shelters are nearly full, and the places where many can find food, shelter and a bathroom, like libraries, gyms, and soup kitchens, are closed. The county has started setting up emergency temporary shelters in city recreation centers, and deployed portable toilets, hand-washing stations and mobile shower services at some encampments. But this will not be enough to stem the spread of the virus.
Organizations like Safe Parking LA and The Shower of Hope provide a safe and stable place to park a vehicle overnight, remain compliant with local laws, and have access to restroom facilities.
I grew up in Geneva, Ill., a small suburb outside of Chicago. In 2012, I moved to Venice, Calif., to intern with a photographer that was working on a project on wealth inequality. Before I moved to L.A. I had never seen so many homeless people. On the Venice boardwalk near my apartment, there were people living in tents or in makeshift shelters. I began to approach them and talk to them about their lives. Eventually I began bringing my camera and recorder along.
Over the years, I visited homeless communities in Echo Park, Hollywood, Eagle Rock, the San Gabriel Riverbed and downtown Los Angeles. I’ve met people who live on crowded communes because it was the only affordable option, families living in R.V.s parked on streets in Berkeley and Los Angeles, and entire communities of people living on makeshift boats in Marin County.
For the homeless, something as essential as finding a clean bathroom can be a challenge. I first met David Busch in 2013, when he was petitioning the city of Los Angeles to keep the bathrooms on the boardwalk clean and accessible. He wore a small cardboard sign hung around his neck with the words “More Love” written in black marker. We talked about dissolving the stereotypes that exist around the homeless, and finding that human connection that binds us all.
In December 2019, I ran into Mr. Busch on Venice’s “Skid Rose,” just down the street from Google’s office in Venice. He was giving the leaders of the Care Program, which provides sanitation and hygiene services to the homeless, a tour of the encampments in the area and advising them on how to best connect with the community.
“A big thing we are seeing is encampment scattering, where the city literally picks up people’s tents and throws them away in order to ‘clean up’ the mess,” he told me.
“These cleanups are ignoring the bigger issue at hand,” he said. “The fact is, we need more housing here in Los Angeles. And in the meantime, before the housing gets built, we need safe zones for people to live on the streets to end this chaotic disorder throughout the city as quickly as possible.”
“We want to be together but there are no shelters that offer coed living spaces.”—Dallas, 22
A 2019 report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing studies found that California has the highest share of households spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, while 42 percent of Californians are struggling to make ends meet. For the poorest Americans, affording adequate housing has long been a challenge, but even the middle class are struggling.
Last year, I got to know Isabel and her 1-year-old daughter, Natalia. Isabel is employed full time as an office cleaner, and yet she doesn’t make enough money to secure an apartment. They sleep in her car when she exhausts the motel vouchers that The Shower of Hope, an organization that provides homeless people with mobile showers and a safe place to park their vehicle for the night, gives her.
Rose and David Cantu met 20 years ago through a mutual friend. They were evicted from their apartment in December 2018 and were living out of their car. With the coronavirus outbreak, it had become harder for them to find a public bathroom to use. Mr. Cantu passed away on Monday. Ms. Cantu fears he may have been sick with Covid-19.
David Pyle moved from Indiana to Los Angeles in 2017 to support his son Jax, who is occasionally employed as an actor. He’s one of the many homeless people I met who came to Hollywood to pursue their dream to be an actor, only to wind up on the street.
“Because we are labeled homeless, we are unseen. We could sit here butt-naked and still no one would look at us.” — Calvin Shorts Jr.
Living on the streets or in a vehicle is not what most of these people prefer. It’s a situation they fell into and are often actively trying to overcome. Almost everyone I met spoke about wanting to have a place to call home. But the fact is that there isn’t yet enough housing to accommodate every homeless person who needs help.
The median price for a house in Los Angeles is over $600,000 — more than twice the national level. The state has four of the country’s five most expensive residential markets — Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego — with Los Angeles being seventh. California accounts for 12 percent of the U.S. population, but a quarter of its homeless population. How did this happen?
Simply put, bad government — from outdated zoning laws to a 40-year-old tax provision that benefits longtime homeowners at the expense of everyone else — has created a severe shortage of houses. While decades in the making, homelessness has reached a critical point for state officials, businesses and the millions who are straining to live here. Things have been bad for a long time. The coronavirus pandemic has now highlighted how vulnerable this population is, and how we have all failed them.
“People will honk their horns on purpose really loud under the bridge to hurt our ears.”— Xavier Cain, 48
This critical moment is an opportunity for us to do better. Forcing people from place to place and into shelters are not viable long-term solutions. Under normal circumstances it provides no protection from catching a sickness let alone a virus. The government must create more affordable housing, and it’s up to us to hold their feet to the fire. If we start now, maybe we can protect our unhoused neighbors in the first place instead of scrambling at the last minute.
Rachel Bujalski (@rachelbujalski) , a photojournalist, is a co-founder of The Mirror, Mirror Project, which uses art to connect working artists and homeless people.
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