The Tattered Fabric of Our Society
Do you know anyone who has experienced or is experiencing homelessness?
Last year, I joined the board of an LA-based social services organization called The People Concern whose mission is to end homelessness through permanent supportive housing. When asked "why" as I went through the interview process, I was driven by my own personal narrative. My mother worked as an intake coordinator for a homeless shelter in New Haven when I was young and my father experienced homelessness after he ran away from an abusive foster home that he endured for about a decade. He dropped out of high school and chose the streets and the kindness of strangers for 18 months (that's how long he was homeless) to escape a hell he didn’t create nor deserve.
Without that early exposure, I might be left to believe what I often hear about people experiencing homelessness finding their way there through some fault of their own. I won’t give these excuses any merit. If you answered “no” to the original question, it may be this lack of exposure that has led to our society lacking a meaningful path forward. My parents came to visit me in LA in September 2019. Despite the fact that both had been exposed to homelessness on a different level than most, they couldn't relate to what they saw in LA.
In LA, there are over 66,000 people experiencing varying degrees of homelessness. When I asked my dad about his experience, it wasn’t nostalgic, but he didn’t look at those years as a tragedy because he could rely on the kindness of other people who seemed to understand that hard times can happen to any of us (There is a reason that FDR made special provisions in the New Deal for hard times). My father often had a couch or a spare bed to sleep on because people offered. It was not cool to let people sleep out in the cold and that generosity is what eventually led my parents to meet. My mother’s brother met my father downtown and after they hit it off, invited him to stay over instead of on the street. That’s how my parents met and my mom eventually married a man she first met as homeless. The fabric of our society in the ’60s, as chaotic as things were for so many reasons, wasn’t completely tattered because people were doing what the government was not by ensuring that people weren’t discarded. My father was still worthy to become a husband, GED recipient, father, and the superhero I first looked up to and still admire as someone whose story includes a period of homelessness.
However, my father didn’t see his reality in LA. He told me that what he saw here was “a humanitarian crisis, not homelessness”. My father, who lived 18 months as a high school dropout on the streets of New Haven in the shadow of an Ivy League institution looked at what’s going on in 2019 in Los Angeles as something he’d reserved for fiction or a dystopian future, not as the intentional outcome of a free and democratic society. How can we live our lives when 66,000 of our fellow citizens in Los Angeles are living proof of a broken system? These are not 66,000 individuals who made bad choices. Many people experiencing homelessness are doing so because of mental health issues, economic crisis, aging out of foster care, returning as veterans and not receiving the necessary assistance, and coming out to one’s family as LGBTQ+ and facing rejection. And here’s what’s even more troubling but not surprising: although less than 10% of the residents of LA are Black, close to 40% of those experiencing homelessness are Black. Certainly with all the discussion happened at a national level around racisms long grip on America, we can see this for what it is (and before engaging in a senseless argument about all the other groups experiencing homelessness, a society that can discard a group of citizens is willing to discard any of its citizens and everyone should care because we are all affected).
After my parents' trip to LA, they went back to CT to find their apartment completely overrun with mold spores. It destroyed their furniture and clothes and rendered the apartment unlivable. Their landlord held them responsible for it (because she could) and withheld their security deposit and went through the trouble of not providing a positive reference. Meanwhile, it was evident that the mold had been there in the walls long before my parents left for a week to come to California, but because they’d never been anywhere overnight, they always used the AC in the warm months. Seven days without it caused the mold to grow, but the landlord didn’t need to see it that way and after the four-day hotel stay she provided was exhausted, my parents were facing homelessness. I was able to help them get situated in a hotel for 2 months but even living in a hotel disrupted their lives and their mental well-being.
Now you may be thinking “that’s how it should be, family looking out for family”. But there should be something done about a system that allows for working-class people to be consistently taken advantage of. And what about the working-class family that doesn’t have a child or relative who can help. Most families don’t have that and I’m not here and able because I planned to be. A lot of things went well in addition to a substantial amount of luck. More importantly, it's not only working-class families that are susceptible. Many of the reasons I listed above are class agnostic.
If you’ve read to this point you may be asking yourself “so what”? If this reality bothers you or has you asking yourself what more can be done, send me a message. As a board member of The People Concern, I am working to get a series of dinners on the books to discuss ways that businesses and business leaders can be a part of the solution. I don’t think we can or should rely on politicians and government officials. The proof is in the 66,000 people who are experiencing homelessness. While the population of LA county over the last decade increased about 2.5%, the number of people experiencing homelessness in LA County during that same period increased by 69% (Los Angeles Almanac). What I do believe is that businesses and business leaders have always had significantly more impact on our society than our government and politicians do. When businesses want to solve a problem, consider it solved. This is a problem.
Who among you in my network wants to solve this problem?
Who among you is tired of seeing our fellow citizens cast aside?
Who can look at the people on the streets of LA experiencing homelessness and instead of saying “what did they do wrong” ask “what can we do differently”?
I’m planning for the first dinner in July but I expect it’s going to take a lot of brilliant minds and a lot of dinners to make a dent in this problem. The fabric of our society is tattered and we don’t get to claim that we are part of something so great and wonderful when so many of us can fall through the holes. A system that can see so many of its citizens cast aside is not safe for you and me and if for nothing more than self-interest, you should want to make it better. I’m tired of waiting for someone else to figure it out.
Join me and let’s repair the fabric of our society, one stitch at a time.
