Most people wouldn’t give a second look to this encampment where Big Mama lived in a collection of ragged tents. But life was about to change.
The homeless crisis is rewriting the history of Los Angeles. Can the city meet the challenge?
Homelessness had become a crisis of historic proportions. It destroyed lives, consumed civic discourse, threatened political careers and exhausted public patience. Social services struggled to keep up. If successful, Encampment to Home could serve as a model for future efforts as the county began to undertake a massive relocation program that few cities in America have attempted.would be frantic and frustrating, and the program’s results would be hard to measure. As much as homelessness is the absence of housing, it is much more than that. It touches upon mental illness, addiction and physical ailments arising from a life of poverty.
Skid row became her home: the Los Angeles Mission and the Anne Douglas Center for Women. At first, street life was a party. She and her friends called themselves the Downtown Girls. After two years, the scene soured in a cycle of betrayal and violence. Leneace Pope, Niecy for short, lived beside them. She had moved to Broadway Place four years earlier when she was 29. Niecy had lived on and off the streets since 2004. A large woman, she could take care of herself.
that attributed its cause to “racism, discrimination and unconscious bias in our public systems and institutions.” This bias, as the report argued, has extended into housing and employment, two crucial factors affecting an individual’s ability to get off the street. Big Mama tugged at a brace cinched at her waist around a gray paisley track suit. She knew the streets were no place to recuperate, but she missed her friends and believed that she was needed here.“Why should we have to live this way, having to throw our feces into the sewer?” she said. “They bring us cold food and used clothes. What do they think we are? They give us a tent once a year. We deserve better.”Then she stopped and looked up.
Top Shelf, left, and Big Mama enjoy themselves outside their tents on Broadway Place near 39th Street in Los Angeles. Later that evening, the pair helped a young man named Xavier as he walked past. The timeline for Encampment to Home was ambitious and meant to coincide with the opening of two apartment buildings, located at El Segundo Boulevard and the 110 Freeway and designed and built for low-income residents.— focused on housing the most vulnerable individuals, rather than entire encampments, and typically took up to a year.
The answers were compiled into a numerical ranking. Typically the highest numbers, those in the greatest need, would have been given a priority for housing, but for Encampment to Home, no one would be refused. The mandate was to clear the streets. She and Top Shelf were feeling good, their moods lightened by an afternoon of drinking and smoking. The lights of downtown Los Angeles looked close enough to touch.
Police cruisers blinded them with their spotlights. Cars raced a few feet from their beds and spun doughnuts in a nearby intersection. Punks shot paintballs at them. Our businesses suffer both financially as customers shy away from them because of the condition they have to walk through to get to them and physically as fires erupt at encampments and our homes lose value due to these issues. Our community looks like a garbage dump and a scene out of a Walking Dead episode, and services are not available to fix the problem.
Big Mama struggled to empty her tent. She filled a shopping cart with black plastic bags containing her clothes. Top Shelf angled wooden pallets against a wall. Niecy, who had fallen out of favor with her friends, lived a block away.“Can y’all come and help me with my mattress?” Big Mama shouted.
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