Tough Days for Some

The weather where we live is decent year round, and the housing costs are fracturing the base of citizens worse than most places. This leads to an extraordinary amount of homeless folks.

I read two separate articles, one from a free magazine that comes with the Sunday LA Times called California Sunday, and another from the Times itself highlighting different aspects of this difficult reality facing many people. The magazine article was about a growing population of homeless and car-living people: college students. In this country there are sixty-thousand college students who self-identify as undomiciled in some way. 60,000.

Does anything capture the end result of the times as much as the idea of young people burying themselves in debt to get to a position that's only arguably better off than otherwise, but having to live in their car and shower at the rec center to do it? I wish people went to college to get educated instead of "gaining skills to get a nicer job," but really, this is where we are.

The Times article was about the so-called "middle-class homeless," or, people who live in their cars. The people highlighted are all people who stay in their cars in a special parking lot in Santa Barbara, a highly affluent city halfway between here and SLO. It appears the people living in their cars are families, college students, and working class people forced out their home for whatever reason and unable to find anything else.

I bring this up because here in Long Beach the homeless generally lived on the grounds of Lincoln Park, which surrounds City Hall. They were harmless pot-heads and former heroin addicts, some meth folks, but not really the crazy-crazies.

But in the last few months they've begun construction on the new City Hall for Long Beach (which should be nice), which means that they've boarded up the grounds of Lincoln Park and City Hall, effectively evicting three to four hundred people. Those folks have dispersed throughout the neighborhood in all directions, many setting up shop on some of our broader sidewalks.

We don't quite have the tent-city-sidewalks like DTLA, but some of these folks are getting ingenious.

We're trying to teach the Boy compassion, so we always say hello and wave and acknowledge the people as people, but there's really only so much we can do.

We had a house-sitter while we were in Texas for Thanksgiving and he made food. After we returned he didn't take the food when he left, and I eventually ran it across the street to a group that has set up their digs on the sidewalk of the north-side of our street. They've never been anything but nice and friendly to me and Cass, but I have seen the cops called on them before, which has to suck for all involved.

It's not illegal to be homeless, but you're not allowed to block the sidewalk. The bourgeois people just want the dirties gone, but where will they go? And if they're not blocking the walkway of the sidewalk?

Here's a picture from my apartment:

They do seem to be blocking the sidewalk here...

 A close friend of mine is also having a tough time, and by "tough time" I mean he's been living in his car for a few months now, just loving the opportunity to crash on a couch, or a floor. It puts things in stark, stark perspective.

Oh your job sucks? Are you going to go sleep in your car?

Traffic's a nightmare? Are you heading to park to get some sleep?

It appears things can always get worse.

My friend said this, and it gives me hope for humanity: "Damn, Pat, I mean, at least I have my car. There's some people that have it really rough out there on the streets."