- Homes for the hardest of the hard-core homeless, By Christopher Goffard, August 1, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “The searchers carved skid row into quadrants and advanced in small groups, aiming flashlights into the cold. They moved between nylon tents and cardboard lean-tos in the Toy District, where junkies had stripped the streetlights and left whole blocks in darkness. They roused the human bundles scattered around the tumbledown hotels and freshly painted lofts on Main Street, wasted faces blinking into their flashlights. They looked in the eastern section called the Bottoms, around the big missions and flea traps, and around the neighborhood’s forbidding eastern edge, a zone of industrial warehouses and razor wire known as the Low Bottoms, where even now, hours before daylight, the crack trade was brisk. The searchers, a couple dozen volunteers and Los Angeles County workers, had orders: Interview everyone living on these streets. Find out how long they’ve been homeless. Ask about their addictions, their mental and physical health…”
- Dogged efforts hit stubborn patterns of homelessness, By Christopher Goffard, August 3, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “Bobby Livingston couldn’t sleep. The indoor quiet was unnerving, the softness of his mattress all wrong. For weeks after moving into Room 216 at the Senator Hotel, he found comfort only on a hard tile floor that felt reassuringly like the pavement. Horses and dogs flitted across the ceiling of his room, but he described the visions as familiar and untroubling, like the voices in his head. Sometimes the dead visited him full-bodied – long-gone family from the red clay roads of South Carolina – and he asked Jesus why he wasn’t yet among them. To rescue the 50 people deemed most likely to die on the streets in skid row, Los Angeles County had a pragmatic plan: Give them an apartment and all the help they’d accept, requiring little in return – not sobriety, not meetings, not psychiatric drugs. Livingston and a handful of others posed the most extreme test of Project 50’s premise. Merely living among others, with a modicum of structure and social rules, was proving a steep demand, considering what accompanied the hardest cases indoors: untreated mental illness and ferociously solitary habits formed by decades in the city’s dope dens…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty