by Michael Douglas Carlin
When I was 5 my grandfather came to live with us. My mother called him "Dad" and we were told that he was our grandfather so we called him "Grandpa Dad". His given name was Clarence Ferdinand Jewell. Every morning he would pick me up and set me on the counter right next to the stove. He would make pancakes and tell me stories about his childhood.
Grandpa Dad struggled with alcoholism his entire life. Mostly he was a functional alcoholic. When he was involved in an automobile accident his skull was crushed. He nearly died and when he recovered he had a severe case of Epilepsy. The drugs that were used to treat the Epilepsy did not mix well with alcohol. From that point on when Grandpa Dad would drink he would disappear for a few months at a time. I remember driving around Skid Row in search of Grandpa Dad. A few times we found him and loaded him into the car. He would clean up and sober up for a few months at a time and then disappear again. The accident had changed his life.
Do you think bad things can never happen to you? Many people that are homeless in America right now thought just the same thing. We all need a safety net! An Emergency Preparedness Kit, Insurance, Automobile Club, a nest egg… If you don’t have these things in place then you better think about getting them in place.
What about those already affected by homelessness? We all want to turn a blind eye to them hoping the problem will just go away. But the problem isn’t going away. In fact, the last decade it is estimated that the Los Angeles Homeless population has grown three fold to 100,000 people on any given night and over 250,000 people a year. Solid figures don’t exist because homeless people move around, they sleep in cars and they sleep in hidden places. Homeless people that get assistance might check into a hotel occasionally and might not be homeless on a given night. The statistics might be hard to track but there is little disagreement that a problem exists and that a solution is needed. Each one of these people is someone’s "Grandpa Dad".
Ed Edelman, Homeless Czar in Santa Monica and former County Supervisor says, "If we don’t help people when they need help it becomes more costly to the taxpayers later on." City Hall, Sacramento and Washington D.C. may be ill equipped to deal with the problem but they are paying large sums of money that are consumed by the homeless.
Take healthcare, homeless people don’t get preventative treatment. They don’t even get treatment when they are mildly sick. Homeless people get treatment when their condition has grown so grave that they collapse in the middle of the street. Police are called out and then the paramedics. They are brought to an Emergency Hospital via an ambulance. They receive Emergency Room Treatment and a hospital stay. They are receiving their healthcare at the highest possible cost in a system that is already clogged.
In an effort to curb homelessness law enforcement has developed a strategy of writing tickets for camping, feeding the birds, bike riding on sidewalk, defacing a hamburger, public urination, shopping cart, and many others. The tickets are written knowing full well that no court appearance or payment is coming. The court system is clogged with these virtually meaningless tickets that are most assuredly going to warrant. The cost of all of this paperwork and time spent is staggering but it leads to yet another cost.
At a time when our jails are overcrowded many of the homeless are walking around with warrants and are arrested and sent through the system for these minor violations. The cost of housing a prisoner was estimated by JP Morgan to be $43,700. Some of the homeless are criminals and need to be culled from the non-violent/non-criminal homeless that make up the majority of homelessness.
An article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell illustrates the point. The title of the article was "Million Dollar Murray." Murray Barr was tracked for 10 years and in that time he racked up over a million dollars in hospital and other social services costs. That’s $100,000 a year.
America is obsessed with laying blame! When something goes wrong we want to assign blame and punish those we feel are guilty even if they have no responsibility in the matter. Any given day we can find a clash of interests. We can find a situation gone wrong and somebody to blame.
Any given day on Skid Row we will find the police rousting the homeless at dawn. Waking them up and asking them to "move on". When the homeless ask "but where do we go?" There might not be a good answer. "I don’t know but you can’t be here" might be the response. The police are clearly just doing their job. They didn’t create the homeless problem. They have a responsibility to keep neighborhoods safe. With more development of housing in Downtown they are going to accelerate the cleanup of these neighborhoods.
We could probably blame the developers. We could make the case that developers are insensitive - wanting to develop properties that have sidewalks occupied by the homeless for decades. But developers have as their business model the transformation of underutilized properties into higher uses. They are just doing their job.
We can blame parents, society, natural disasters, divorce, drugs, Ronald Reagan, alcohol, lost jobs and a myriad of other causes for homelessness. But assigning the blame will never move us toward a solution to the problem.
Arriving at a solution must come from time spent gaining an understanding of the barriers to getting the homeless back as productive members of society.
The homeless adhere to a code…a primitive law of the streets. It might be a highly dysfunctional community but at some level it functions. There are rules. There is a pecking order. Many that have been homeless over a protracted period of time are able to impart wisdom to the newly homeless. Survival on the streets often depends upon this information. Inherent in the problem is the solution. Those with the most insights into homelessness are the current homeless and the previous homeless.
Clearly we are paying huge sums to ignore this problem. It is time that we faced the problem and dealt with it head on. I go back to my 20 year friendship with humanitarian, Ed Artis, and his prescription for dealing with need in war and natural disaster torn regions.
Food
Shelter
Clothing
Healthcare
Education
Livelihood
All leading to HOPE!
Ed Edelman has some ideas about solutions that are currently working in other cities. In Santa Monica there is a Homeless Court that deals strictly with the issues of homelessness. The judge is sympathetic to each person’s plight giving them a waiver or punishment as he sees fit. The punishment might include a broom to clean up the streets or other appropriate productive tasks. The court can liaise with other public entities, or private non-profits to help people solve their problems.
I recently met Tadd Sutton from the Weingart Center downtown. He gave me a tour and showed me the various programs that the Center has created. Many of the employees of the center are former homeless. They have housing in place, healthcare, education, counseling, and job placement. Theirs is a comprehensive system that takes an individual that is ready to make a change and gives him/her the tools that they need to make the trek back to becoming a productive member of society. They have the ability to expand their operation but funding is difficult. Many of the Grandpa Dads of this world who want to make the trek back will not have that opportunity.
In my own childhood we went a couple of years without seeing Grandpa Dad. We moved away and became busy with life and school. He simply faded from our lives. I woke up one morning at age 14 and decided that I was going to find him. I called the County Jail, County General Hospital, and the Midnight Mission. They all had records that he had been there…but the trail had gone cold about six months earlier. The final call I made was to the County Morgue. Three months earlier Clarence Ferdinand Jewell had died down on Skid Row. It was too late for him to make changes and reintegrate back into society. He probably consumed hundreds of thousands of dollars of social services but on December the 15th, 1976 he was dead. Rest in Peace Grandpa Dad…your death might yet have meaning.
