From the "Life is Hard" Files

Life can be hard. For a variety of reasons, things don't go the way people want. Combining bad luck and circumstances with a propensity for bad decision-making can yield terrible, life altering results. Sometimes bad decision-making doesn't need to be part of the equation, sometimes all you need is bad luck mixed with circumstances and a lack of close-knit, family-style support.

In this country, the results seem to increasingly yield:

The shanty-towns have increased in the last few years. I see these on my drive to work. Occasionally, but not so recently, during the drive home police will be working to wipe them away, to move people on and toss the belongings of these unhoused folks.

In some "neighborhoods," the people have started to grab wooden pallets and other solid structures to add a sense of permanence that could prove fleeting in the end:

Years ago I planned on a series of posts, or just a single long post, I was going to title "Under the Bridge." I may have written about it in the ensuing years. My idea was to hang out in the tent cities that were situated under the freeway overpasses and interchanges near the LA river in Long Beach.

Then I broke my femur and by the time I was healed, those communities had been dealt with by the authorities, having been wiped away from their unmoored moorings.

Tents do make up many of these dwellings in many of these communities, but often tarps pulled over rectangular solidness produces the same effect:

Civic pride can exist in such an environment, as evidenced by a lady sweeping the entrance area to her spot:

I'm always curious about how long these areas will remain set up. The last time I saw the fuzz taking apart one of them there were multiple groups of authorities: police, dumpster trucks, obvious social workers, and healthcare workers. The number of people they were displacing was maybe a dozen. The tent city was on a major thoroughfare, and it seemed like once they set up shop a few days later around a corner, off the major street, they were mostly left alone. That specific community is seen in both the first picture here and the last, a developed tent-city off a major road, down a side street.

What we can do for these, and the very, very many communities just like them all over American metropolises, remains to be seen. Well, that's not true, right? We know what works and what we can do (put them into houses). LA Mayor Karen Bass is still fighting with working these solutions out.

While we basically know what works, the real question is: Will we ever have the stomach to actually do what works? Are we as "America" really as helpful and altruistic as we tell ourselves we are?

Much evidence points towards NO.

Anyway, I still want to go take a walk in these communities and have a chat with the people who are making the spots home. Ask them their stories. Listen to them. Because who else does? Who unconnected to the social safety net system or public radio has dealings with unhoused Angelinos?

I just want some perspective...