| TL;DR: Even in environments where the community makes a very aggressive attempt to tackle homelessness, the problem persists. I live in Santa Monica, CA. I've been her for 10-15 years and it's always had a bad homelessness problem. If you're not familiar with the area, the weather is basically great year round, we're a popular travel destination, lots of money flows through the city & by any definition, its a place that embraces social liberalism. I used to live in downtown SM. It's upscale but you pass a lot of homeless people. I went from giving people change when I had it, to bills, to buying people meals. I eventually moved out of the downtown area to buy a house & start a family. I figured since I was putting down my roots here, I should from applying bandaids to trying to help in a more systematic approach. I got in touch with a lot of the existing organisations. They all needed help, but I was surprised to find that outreach wasn't one of them. Long story short, if you're on the streets in Santa Monica it's more or less because you want to be. [Side note: before people jump to the conclusion that means they don't need help, the deserve to be there, it's okay to forget them, etc. -- that's NOT the case and that's NOT what I'm saying either.] I recently volunteered for LavaMae, who spun up an instance in Southern California. This was in Venice, so not the same people, but also not far from downtown Santa Monica (maybe a mile or two). You have time to wait to clean the showers & I got a chance to talk with a few people. I didn't want to pry, but if someone was forthcoming on their story, I asked a few why not hit up one of the shelters. My sample here is obviously tiny but I got a variety of reasons -- freedom of the streets, not wanting to wait in line, not able to bring alcohol, concerns about theft, etc. It's a pretty tricky problem. The presence of homeless isn't a sign of apathy on the part of the population or a lack of trying. |