There Are 76-Thousand Homeless In Los Angeles. I Spent The Last Five Years Investigating. I'll Show You How Outreach Failed, City Hall Failed, How Billions Were Wasted AND What Actually Works.

For the last five years, I’ve been investigating the failure of the social safety net in Los Angeles, where there are 76 thousand homeless people living on the streets (Source: 2024 LA PIT Homeless Count). And, if experts are correct, LA is on target to reach 100K homeless in just three years. Also, LA may already be at 100K homeless (Source: Rand Corporation). You see, city officials and the outreach agencies are terrible at collecting data and awful at managing and tracking money.

Oh, and there’s also a metric ton of corruption in the private sector of the Homeless Industrial Complex, which the FBI is currently investigating.

Skid Row is made up of 50 square blocks in downtown Los Angeles. It’s been called a containment zone for the 4000 homeless who live there.

When I began work in the spring of 2021, I had three big questions:

1. When did those of us with homes become comfortable with homeless people asleep or passed out quite literally, in the street?
2. How do the outreach agencies, City Hall and the rest of us, continue to fail the most vulnerable among us?
3. What happened to the 24 billion dollars invested in the last five years to fight homelessness?

Saige spent months living in Westchester Park. — Saige, in Westchester Park.

Almost five years later, I have found answers to those questions, and many many more, like:

Does giving homeless people food disincentivize them from finding work?
Does everyone have a mental illness? Drug addiction? PTSD?
How do the homeless deal with loneliness and isolation?
Should I give money to homeless person? What if they’re using it for drugs?
How long are people waiting for permanent housing?
When will there be enough housing?
Do people with severe mental illness “get better” living alone in a motel room located under the highway, adjacent to the train tracks at the far edge of town?
Are outreach workers properly prepared for the vital work they engage in?
And dozens more.

Big picture: the outreach agencies are poorly run, and I’ll show you some of the ways. City Hall routinely makes things worse because they have bad ideas, and allocate money based on politics. They also gaslight people through social media posts that boast about successes that are not successes, and, I’ll show you that, too. The rest of us (with homes) have also failed the homeless: too many of us incorrectly believe that homelessness is the result of bad choices. It’s not. Too many people believe that a person’s value to society is based on what they contribute. Doctors are more valuable than janitors, as the thinking goes. That’s not true either. Too many people are frightened of the homeless. That isn’t necessary. Too many people think there’s nothing they can do. There is.

The day I found him, Alonzo had been lying on the sidewalk for five days, in front of the Bridge Housing in Venice where he lived for the previous 9 months.

When this project began in 2021, the number of homeless people who died on the streets of Los Angeles every day was five. Four years later, that number has risen to seven. Seven homeless people die on the streets of LA every day. At the end of the year, that’s 2,555 homeless people who just died on the streets.

When LA mayor, Karen Bass, says that she has reduced homelessness, what she’s not saying is that if there’s any reduction, is mostly from people dieing.

Those 2,555 people and the 76K other homeless are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, or someone’s cousin, neighbor or friend. Most of the homeless I met are people with severe, complicated and chronic mental health issues, and other long term illnesses. They have drug and alcohol addictions. They’ve been broken by the streets. They’ve been lied to for years by the same people offering them help. They have been largely forgotten by family, friends, and the rest of us. Oh, and one other thing. Among the homeless are genuine American heroes, too; first responders, combat veterans, purple heart recipients. There’s also wonderful artists, fantastic musicians and people of genuine and profound wisdom. Trust me, I know. I’ve hung out with them.

That’s me at an encampment along the LA River, near Centinela Ave and the 91 freeway.

Your Chance To Help:

Below, are 16 versions of posters for the film. The titles vary. Can you look at them? The streaming services all have dozens of documentaries, I need a poster that grabs you, shakes you and demands your attention. Then, in the comments tell me your top three favorite posters. The posters are numbered, so your comment could like like: 2, 9, 12 if you liked the number 2 poster the most, followed by 9 and 12. Also, please feel free to make comments or ask questions.

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