Lopez moderated a panel on why, despite years of discussion, people continue to live on the streets—and what can actually be done to change it. He was joined by L.A. County Housing for Health director Marc Trotz, UCLA psychiatrist Kenneth Wells, Ocean Park Community Center executive director John Maceri, and Christine Margiotta, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs alumna and vice president of community impact at United Way of Greater Los Angeles.

The group agreed that while progress has been made, there’s still a long way to go. Obstacles ranging from skyrocketing housing costs and insufficient state and federal funding to social stigma are sending greater numbers of Americans onto the streets in cities.

“Outreach is not organized well enough in L.A.,” Trotz said. “I work on Skid Row, with the largest homeless population anywhere, and on any given day I walk out and don’t see an outreach worker. The scale that’s necessary isn’t there.”

Margiotta illustrated the extent of the problem by pointing out that while Los Angeles has made a major push to increase affordable housing, the homeless population is still outpacing what’s being provided. In the past two years, 7,500 veterans have made it off the streets, yet the net count of homeless veterans has only gone down by 300 people. “A tremendous amount of people became homeless in that time,” she said.

Maceri described an 82-year-old woman named Betty whom he found hunched over, “almost catatonic” on a Santa Monica park bench in the middle of a rainstorm. “Why, in the richest country in the world, with such capacity for innovation, have we set the bar so low that we can have mass encampments in our streets and leave senior citizens to fend for themselves?” he asked the crowd. “I have a godson who just graduated form high school, and he has never known a country with anything other than large-scale street homelessness. It seems like the bar is so low that it has become the new social norm.”

Lopez encouraged all the panelists to share their personal experiences interacting with people on the streets. Lopez’s book The Soloist tells the story of his friendship with a schizophrenic double bassist named Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, who attended the Julliard School before having a mental breakdown and ending up on L.A.’s streets. Ayers refused housing even though Lopez continued to try to help him find it.

“One advantage of being out there is that you’ve got nothing to lose,” Lopez said. “To play by somebody else’s rules, that’s a terrifying, terrifying thing, especially in the case of someone dealing with a mental illness.”

Wells had a realization 10 years ago that he needed to do something to help the people around him in need when he was walking down a street in San Francisco with his son. “He asked, ‘Why are you passing all these homeless people without talking to them like humans?’” Wells said. “So I started working in South Los Angeles to bring communities together.”

Wells expressed the common sentiment among the panelists that for real change to take place, whole communities need to get involved—“parks, barber shops, clinics”—to address the needs of the homeless people, and to prevent homelessness in the first place. “Knowing how to engage people who have special needs, depression—it’s the front-line worker who knows how to take that small step before a person falls into homelessness,” he said.

What other solutions exist? In addition to simply continuing to provide more housing, which all the panelists agreed is necessary, “it really begins with outreach and engagement,” Maceri said. “That basic human connection is really the foundation of the work. And we have to acknowledge that the work is messy, and not linear. You have to meet people wherever they are and walk with them in their journey to wherever they want to be.”

He added that housing should never be looked at as a “reward” for good behavior: “It should not be the end game. It should be the beginning.”

Trotz emphasized that cities like Los Angeles need to seize the resources available to them. “This is a wealthy region. In city and county government, there’s a lot of money spent every day that doesn’t get the solutions we want. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars locking people up, use that money to house people. For the cost of one emergency room visit, we could house someone for a month.”

Margiotta encouraged the crowd to challenge the status quo when it comes to how we deal with the homeless—and to never lose a vision of a better future. “It’s critical that we keep talking about ending homelessness,” she said. “It’s true that it may not happen in the timeline we want, but we can’t lose that will and belief.”

The post Homelessness Is Not Inevitable appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

While this number is lower than it was during the recession, homelessness is still on the rise in many of the country’s major cities. New York City’s homeless population jumped 10 percent over the past year; L.A.’s jumped 12 percent. With housing costs continuing to skyrocket in these cities, there aren’t signs of this trend changing anytime soon.

Has progress been made? Or are more Americans simply bound to find themselves without a bed? In advance of the Zócalo/UCLA event “What Keeps the Homeless Off the Street?”, we asked people who study, write about, and are deeply engaged with the homeless: What have large American cities done that has successfully reduced the number of people living on the streets?

The post Don’t Give the Homeless Your Sympathy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Shortly after, I learned how presumptive that statement was. James slept in a variety of places, like the police station lobby, a breezeway next door to a nightclub, and the entrance to a nearby credit union. But none of these could be described as “home.”

James started telling me more about his life outside the library. After a few years, he told me he was finally old enough to start receiving Social Security checks and had enough money to get a small apartment. During this stage of transition, James approached me at the reference desk and asked me how to get a checking account; he didn’t feel safe with his money on him.

It struck me how vulnerable he was, and I recommended that he immediately sign up at the very credit union where he had once slept. After he moved into his place, a fellow librarian delivered a bit of furniture. Another of my coworkers helped him locate a bed.

Since encampments were banned in Fresno, tents cannot be permanent. In the morning, police make sure those whose who spent the night on the streets pack everything up.

I wondered how many other people knew the personal stories of those, like James, who didn’t have a permanent home. So in the summer of 2014 I began working on a short documentary to shift public conversations from one about “the homeless problem” to one about diverse individuals who don’t have housing. I wanted to encourage contact and understanding between Fresno’s housed and unhoused. The resulting film, Our Lives: Surviving the Streets of Fresno, will have its premiere at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fresno on April 10, and be available at the library for home viewing.

To get started on the documentary, I had to identify potential interview subjects. By then, James was no longer a daily visitor and didn’t want to return to a painful chapter of his life. So I started with Dre, another library regular who lived on the streets. Dre didn’t want to be interviewed himself—he mentioned a lawyer’s advice, which I’d never expected—but he did have some great ideas. He pointed out that nobody was going to open up with some white lady who looked like a social worker; I needed to find someone who was trusted on the streets and could introduce me to interview subjects.

Dre introduced me to Yellowfeather Noriega. For many years, Yellowfeather lived in downtown Fresno’s encampments—makeshift housing structures made of scrap wood, located on streets or vacant lots. Local homeless advocates funded port-a-potties, and for a while the city even offered trash pick-up. Yellowfeather became homeless in the early 2000s on account of her addiction to meth, and while living in the encampments she dealt drugs to support her habit.

The encampments hosted many of Fresno’s homeless people until late 2013, when the city stopped providing basic services, posted eviction notices on each of the structures, and then tore them down. At this time, the city was at the midway point of its 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, with a strategy of putting resources into housing programs instead of maintaining the encampments. In practice, there are not enough resources to house everyone on the streets, so step one for the housing authority is assessing those deemed most vulnerable (literally, those who are most likely to die on the streets, if nothing changes). Those with the highest ratings are put in apartments, almost rent-free.

When I met Yellowfeather, she was about one year into sobriety. She was living at Dakota EcoGarden, a small, environmentally friendly alternative to traditional homeless shelters. It features a house with rooms for rent and common areas, plus spaces for tents in the backyard, but it is a homeless shelter all the same. Yellowfeather passed a sobriety test to live in one of the tents.

Yellowfeather Noriega

Yellowfeather joined me and several others (including library staff and additional representatives from the homeless community) at a film-making training at Fresno’s Community Media Access Collaborative. Soon afterwards, she recruited several people she knew from the streets for two days of interviews at the library. By this time, I had decided it would be better for Yellowfeather to ask the questions I’d prepared instead of doing this myself. As I stood behind the camera and listened to the warm exchanges she had with her friends, the stories hit surprisingly close to home.

Jesse was a man once in the same drug rehabilitation program as Yellowfeather, and was very open about his continuing methamphetamine abuse. When he talked about suffering from bipolar disorder, I thought of my own sister-in-law’s most recent manic episodes. She has disappeared more than once. What would her life look like if she didn’t have loved ones who got her help? How would Jesse’s life be different if he had had the same?

Nolan, another interviewee, knew Yellowfeather from the main homeless shelter in downtown Fresno. But drugs and alcohol weren’t Nolan’s problem—he just didn’t have a place to stay after his grandmother died. After finding out he had “problems with his memory” and being placed in special education in high school, he’d had several entry-level jobs while living with his mom. When his mom died, he took care of his grandmother. When his grandmother died, family members in other parts of the state connected him with local services and the local homeless shelter has been home ever since.

A few months have passed since we completed filming. Yellowfeather secured an apartment with government assistance, in part because the city has deemed women to be among the most vulnerable on the streets. She is now a personal friend. We play Words With Friends on our phones, share book recommendations, and discuss interior decorating options for our respective homes. She is active in her church, helps her mother get through chemotherapy, and carries pictures of her daughter, who is serving in the military.

Chronic homelessness was just a part of Yellowfeather’s story; she had a life before she became homeless and she is starting a new one now that she’s got a roof over her head. This is true for all who sleep on the streets.

I’m hoping that Yellowfeather will join other interviewees featured in the film in a panel discussion after our first screening. But life is complicated, even when you think you’ve put homelessness behind you. Because Yellowfeather had drug charges from her time living in the encampments, she still had warrants out for her arrest when she got sober. She was supposed to start community service in lieu of jail time last month, but she has to pay a fee of $10 a day for the community service. It may seem like a small amount, but she can’t keep up with the payments since she hasn’t found a job yet. She is turning herself in for the jail time at her next court date.

Yellowfeather gets to the heart of the misguided attempts to solve the “homeless problem” when she says, “It’s going to take an effort of the community to erase homelessness because you can’t erase people. We are not going to disappear.” The shantytowns are now gone, but Fresno is nowhere close to ending homelessness. In fact, according to the most recent grand jury report on Fresno’s 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, the overall number of people on the streets is projected to grow by as much as 25 percent as veterans from recent wars return. Fresno still lacks a short-term temporary shelter for men. Nationally, the Fresno area has the highest percentage rate of chronically homeless still sleeping on the streets rather than in shelter beds.

For too long, we’ve just averted our eyes when we see homeless people. My hope is that the film will, at least, get us to look at our fellow Fresno residents, and strike up a conversation.

The post Who Are the Homeless People in My Library? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.