When I moved from my hometown Seattle to Los Angeles in 2012, one of the things that most horrified me, was the painful disconnect between the shiny, happy, image of La La Land blasted billboard to billboard and the bleak truth of its streets.
In fact, the day we moved to LA, I stepped out of our downtown Airbnb rental (which cost $150 a night by the way) and into a puddle of urine. I almost knocked over the man letting it loose on the building and stepped over his sleeping bag as we moved past.
There are more than 66,000 homeless in Los Angeles County. Sidewalk tents and park encampments are as common as parking meters. County beach boardwalks become veritable cities of their own when the sun goes down. Sleeping bags roll out from backpacks, plastic tarps pop up, and faucets used to spray the sand from tourist feet during the day turn into full on showers for the people who bed down here at night.
That man in front of our rental? Where else should he go? There were not enough public toilets to serve the homeless in Los Angeles back when I almost bumped into him. There still aren’t. And local businesses sure don’t make potty breaks easy — they literally lock their bathroom doors to keep the street people out.
I’d never seen anything like the homelessness I saw in LA.
At least not in the United States.
And certainly not in the Emerald City.
I admit that despite it being practically impossible not to see this crisis all around me as we settled into our SoCal life, and despite being a social justice junkie, I found myself numbing to it. After the first year or two, my bleeding heart felt worn out by the constant panhandling and less and less moved by yet another food truck passing burritos out to the homeless.
Still, even as I desensitized, I never seemed to have enough one dollar bills to relieve the guilt I felt about the privilege of my own life in Tinseltown. That fact was I was protected and sheltered and by an extremely generous and financially secure domestic partner.
So, instead, to assuage my guilt, I started normalizing the homelessness around me. And I’m sure I started making up distortions about them that made me feel better.
At least it’s sunny outside, I told myself.
At least there are showers on the beach, I placated.
I’m sure a lot of them want to be out there, I stretched.
Funny what the mind does when it doesn’t want to be hit by the truth any more -- or feels at a loss as to what to do about it.
As I packed up my bags to return to the Pacific Northwest, I felt relieved. At least it’s not that bad up there, I told myself. I mean, in terms of homelessness.
Turns out it is. That bad.
Tonight there are nearly 12,000 homeless people living in Seattle/King County, up from 8,800 back in 2012 when I moved away.
Half of them will find shelter — with friends maybe or in short-term temporary housing or in bricks and mortar emergency shelters. If they land in a shelter, they’ll likely place their belongings into plastic bins stuffed under metal bunk beds, cover themselves with thin blankets, and lay their heads on lumpy pillows broken down by hospital-grade laundry machines.
Shelter workers will offer them packaged snacks or maybe microwaved meals. In some shelters, workers will be required to sit outside bathroom stalls and showers to make sure no nefarious activities take place. In most, staff and volunteers will try to have conversations with the people they are there to serve. But it will be hard. The homeless are used to being invisible, not engaged. They are used to people avoiding eye contact with them. And some of them don’t want to talk.
Volunteers at shelters tonight will try to make homey what can’t be made home; they will try to offer a sense of safety to people whose lives are inherently unsafe due to their lack of permanent housing. The homeless will be asked to leave these shelters around 8 a.m. tomorrow morning.
At the same time tonight the other 6,000 homeless people in King County will grab what sleep they can in doorways or under bridges, on sidewalks or in parks. If they have a car they may find a spot in an RV lot or a Walmart parking lot or in my neighborhood.
For the record, while there are many mentally ill people living on the streets, the majority of the homeless are not mentally ill. There are drug users among them, but most are not drug addicts. The majority are not alcoholics, criminals, and/or violent. And, a lot of them have jobs -- those jobs just don’t pay enough to cover the rent. We need to debunk the myths we carry about the homeless. Look there’s mine, right in the middle of the list: They prefer the freedom of life on the street.
Why am I writing about this now? Well, today, Posie and I took a rainy 5-mile walk through the northend of downtown Seattle. We walked by tarp and shopping cart rain shelter, and passed a kind of lean-too under a tree on First Avenue. We moved by several tents erected on the sidewalk. We rounded through Denny Park, which has become a mini tent city.
It is that bad in Seattle. Just as bad in fact: .66 percent of LA County’s population is homeless. Seattle/King County is close behind at .53 percent.
Of course, “something like'' the homelessnes that shocked me in LA was always here in Seattle. I just didn’t see it like I do now. I’m not going to beat myself up about that. I was overwhelmed with other things, my own difficult things, and so the homeless didn’t linger in my attention. I’m not going to harang myself because I was too busy working or raising my kids to have time to dive into this particular issue. There were other social justice issues that called to me and to which I responded. I am not sorry.
But it has my attention now.
I think homelessness wants me to look at it in the face. It wants me to acknowledge it. As if to wake me up, homelessness has made my hometown almost unrecognizable to me in less than a decade. That and all the shiny new luxury apartment buildings and tech company blocks riding up all over town (many of which boast homeless tents just outside their doors.)
Homelessness needs me to do something. I may be that it needs you to as well.
Maybe just some small thing.
I realize that our small things will be a drop in the ocean of a terrible systemic wrong. Our small things won’t stop homeslessness from staying, and growing, in our community. The only thing that would stop homelessness would be a seismic collective shift in the conscience of the American Dream. We would have to decide as a country that the rich no longer have a right to get richer at the expense and expansion of the poor.
Not only would we have to cap Jeff Bezo’s income and give whatever his company makes beyond that to the public good, Americans would have to kill the dream of becoming the next Bezos. The truth is, we have enough money in this country to end homelessness, we just keep giving it to those already have far more than enough. I don’t hate Jeff Bezos. But no-one should be worth $185.7 billion dollars. Or everyone should be.
I have extra time on my hands these days so a couple of weeks ago I started giving it to a young adult shelter. On Friday evenings, I go in and spend two hours wiping down surfaces — counters, mattresses, doorknobs, toilets, those storage bins under the steel framed bunks I mentioned — with Clorox.
That’s it. My small thing. And, yes, I still try to keep dollar bills in my pocket to give when asked. I know, I know maybe in doing so I’m supporting a drug habit.
But probably not. Probably the person asking just wants to eat.
I’m not sure why I needed a pandemic to remind me that there are no guarantees. But there it is. There are no guarantees.
As Posie and I walked by a true, real, crisis in the rain today, I understood as I haven’t before John Bradford’s truism “There, but by the grace of God, go I.”
Our drops in the ocean won’t change the tide. But doing a small thing is something even if it only ripples out to one person in need.
I’ll even make it easy for you.
Donate to the shelter that I wipe down on Fridays.
And let me say in advance, thank you.
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