Posted on 07/10/2025 2:36:46 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
As a teenager in the late 1970s, Steve Richardson was sweeping and stocking shelves at a toy store on the edge of L.A.’s Skid Row when he noticed the first signs of a monumental change in the city. Day after day, workers, hired from the surrounding streets to unload trucks full of toys, would take the empty boxes and transform them into makeshift shelters where they would spend the night.
“They were called cardboard condos,” said Richardson, a Skid Row leader now known as General Dogon. “They went on block after block.”
At the same time, Los Angeles Times columnist Art Seidenbaum wrote about the shock he experienced when, for the first time, he saw a man scavenging for food out of a garbage can on a downtown sidewalk. L.A., he concluded, had a problem with “winos — or, more politely, homeless men.”
Until then, the term “homeless” most often referred to people who had lost their homes in natural disasters or wars. But things were beginning to change in the 1970s, when a sequence of seemingly unrelated events conspired to drive people into the streets.
Today, homelessness feels as inevitable a part of the urban landscape as traffic jams and strip malls. Los Angeles has more people living on the streets than any other city in the United States, which almost certainly makes it the homelessness capital of the developed world.
There are 15 counties in California whose total populations are smaller than the homeless population of L.A. County, which exceeded 75,000 people in 2023. If you filled Dodger Stadium with all the county’s homeless people, you’d have enough left over to fill Crypto.com Arena downtown.
But homelessness is not innate to Los Angeles like earthquakes or Santa Ana winds. It is the predictable result of....
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
It’s the climate.
Paywall.
POT.
Sorry folks, other than the rare truly displaced, the “homeless” are what we used to call bums, hoboes, transients, and those who want no part of civilization. Now they are mostly druggies.
Vagrancy is subsidized in California by the California taxpayers. Losers can apply for welfare of some kind and get it.
This writer seems to ignore all the street living of the 60 and early 70s in L.A.
Yes, I also believe paywall created the homeless crisis:)
Homeless problem in California is a big business for the California government. Hundreds of jobs for the useless leftists degree folks. They make huge salaries and can never solve the problem. Liberal ideas all fail.
A Chicago judge was caught offering bus tickets for criminals to leave his jurisdiction. The destination?? Arizona and California.
The liberal term is “Un-housed”
In the 1980’s, NYC’s new mayor, Rudy Giuliani, used common sense to show how to deal effectively, humanely, and decisively with the homeless problem that was plaguing NYC. By the end of the 1980’s, Central Park was clean and bright and the city was once again relatively safe.
Homelessness is only a problem when the weak and equivocal Leftist powers that be won’t do what is necessary to clean up the problem.
Amen.
Back in the 90’s it was not uncommon for people to live out of their cars and have a gym membership to take showers. They had jobs, but couldn’t or didn’t a home expense.
Also, the mentally ill. And some find the chaos of street life appealing as a way of being spontaneous and free, with weed, pills, and powder always on offer.
Tell us what the author claims.
It’s the climate.
Yep. Homeless in Chicago in the winter and you may die of the cold. In LA, not so much.
The "idea" is to keep as many as possible dependent on "benefits" thus guaranteeing the "staff" serving the homeless have a purpose.
Back in the 1990s, after Welfare Reform and Welfare To Work were implemented, I worked for a private FOR PROFIT company that obtained a FIXED TERM contact to work with the unemployed and homeless. As part of that contract, we used an small, empty office in the County Welfare Building. From day one, we received scowls from the regular County staff. As each client fell off the unemployment roles, the "staff" had a reduced case load.
In the 1960s they were called winos, and they stayed mainly around Skid Row, east of Downtown.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.