UFO lands in Los Angeles?

I wrote earlier this year about how land use planners participate in a professional conspiracy to prevent a solution to the problem of homelessness (read the blog here). I repeat my direction in that post to “Go to any city planning commission meeting right now and you will hear planners act as surprised to find homelessness on their doorstep as if they found aliens disembarking from a newly arrived space ship”. If you cannot get to a city planning commission meeting watch the CNN video on “The (latest) Big Find of Homeless” people. (watch the video here). The video describes how an area under an I 10 overpass in Los Angeles had been converted into a shelter by a community of homeless people and was now being cleared by the California State Highway Agency, Cal Trans. One of the homeless people, a woman named “Mib”, while watching the workers shredding all (belongings of homeless campers) they found under the overpass as if it were from outer space, bursts into tears, saying “all this stuff is just here”with the implication that it was just what people anywhere need to live-bedding, mattresses, and food!! She also said that “we’re not even recognized, we’re just swept under the carpet like trash”. That echoes the truth, sometimes whispered in land use planning circles nowadays, that proper planning is an anti-poor practice based on the goal “Move out the trash to make the city clean and green”. Up until the World Planners Conference in 2006 this goal was never even mentioned, because the word trash is being used to refer to the poor. Now, since the adoption of the Reinventing Planning resolution (more) at that conference, this goal is only whispered. You will rarely hear it spoken out loud, and certainly never at a planning commission meeting.

It’s not only in California that you will find homeless encampments hidden along freeways and bridges. Freeways everywhere provide the thread beside or under which homeless camps can “be found”. (more).

For the record, freeways are not the only place you will find homeless camps. In fact individuals who have as a primary residence any public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings abound throughout the USA, as they do throughout the world.

So why is helping the homeless with housing so difficult? It seems to be a nobrainer. There is a clue in the tone of journalists reporting on the homeless people being “found” throughout the country. They seem to insinuate that housing is the last thing the homeless need! Nope- public opinion wants to “clean them up”, “stop them reading pornography”, and “stop them ‘probably’ using drugs”. In fact reporters on the Los Angeles “find of the homeless under the freeway” highlighted the evidence they found of “drug use” and “pornography”. That was after they had barged in unannounced on the camp. I guess it did not occur to them that if they invaded the privacy of any housed person they might find similar evidences. Only the poor are held up to ridicule for behavioral nuances that are tolerated everywhere in society. (more). Instead of being offered an opportunity to house themselves, they are judged, and then swept away like trash!

In Home Grown Food Network, through the many interactions we have had with people of all ages and professional backgrounds, we are discovering that most human beings have in mind a few shreds of the happiness that comes from having a home. Every human being can create a shelter when given access to the land and simple building resources to do so. That’s the real message of the “discovery of homeless encampments”. Instead of responding as if we had just found aliens in our midst we should be providing sites and utilities for them to build on.

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network.