This is an issue causing great harm to the communities adjacent to the Lower Reach of the Parkway—due to the invasion of large scale illegal camping over the past several years—who are unable to use their part of the Parkway in fear for their own safety.
It is difficult to sort out individual feelings around this issue but the fault line may be between personal choices and responsibility versus being taken care of.
The founding blocks of this country are solidly built on personal initiative and the responsibility resulting from the choices personal freedom allows us to make.
Given the overwhelming availability of work and housing options available to the low income—made abundantly clear by the estimated 20 million illegal immigrants who have come here to work and most finding it—and the virtually universal availability of innumerable services to help those down on their luck bring their life back on track, there are very few reasons for being homeless for any length of time in this country.
Yet we find a fairly large segment—the chronic homeless—who resist any and all of these benefits in order to maintain their lifestyle of choice, which in our community often means living along the Parkway and receiving food and supplies from the local homeless facilities who ask nothing from the homeless in return for services, which serve mostly to allow them to remain homeless.
Fortunately, there are other homeless service programs who do ask that the homeless begin to make improvements in their life along with reception of program services and they are to be greatly commended and strongly supported.
As this following story notes, the legal strategy over the past several years has been to make public sleeping a legal right, so that society will continue to take care of those who have largely chosen to not take care of themselves, at continued harm to the community, seen most directly to that done to this community, whose historic inability to restore the downtown area most astute observers attribute to the prevalence of the homeless wandering the streets often aggressively asking for money or frighteningly acting out their demons, and keeping people who do not have to be there, from wanting to come there.
Settlement nears in skid row lawsuit
City Council meets in closed session to discuss its ban on sleeping on sidewalks.
By Steve Hymon and David Zahniser
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
October 10, 2007
The Los Angeles City Council appears to be on the verge of settling a long-standing lawsuit over an ordinance that prohibits sleeping on sidewalks and has been used to roust the homeless from downtown's skid row, City Hall sources said.
Six homeless people sued the city over the law in 2003. As part of the settlement, the city reportedly has agreed to enforce the law only between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. and to apply it equally citywide.
Most important, the city has agreed that it will enforce the law at night only after it has built or added 1,250 units of supportive housing for the homeless, with 50% of those units downtown, an initiative that will probably take years.
