Some articles about homelessness that are bopping around my head right now
And a couple of very unserious tidbits to balance out the heavy
Est. Read Time: 6 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
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Hello Sternal Journalists,
WARNING: This SternJourn is pretty heavy and gets into tragic loss of life that has occurred adjacent to the conversation around homelessness in LA. If you’re not in the mood for something heavy, go back into the vault to this true classic. Otherwise, proceed with self-care!
A few nights ago, I was at a gathering. A new acquaintance was lamenting the state of homelessness in LA generally, but also in their own neighborhood. Many questions were posed—why a local 7-11 had become a hotspot for unhoused people, whether or not Beverly Hills pushes its homeless problem across their boundaries into the City of LA1, and more largely, what can be or needs to be done.
I was answering the questions that I could (respectively: 7-11s tend to have security cameras and lights and are therefore safer places to be plus a kind person might buy you food; probably but who knows; a lot and a lot more) without trying to be like, “By the way, I do kind of actually know a bit about homelessness.”
One of my good friends present at the function, however did this for me when he said, “By the way, you should know, Julian actually is more involved in homelessness activism than anyone I know.”
I deflected by saying, “That’s a very low bar, of course.” Completely unnecessarily catty thing for me to say to a friend who was just trying to be nice and add context, but what are old friends for if not to be unnecessarily catty to?
I didn’t actually say it to be catty (that was an added bonus). I said it because, while I have spent a decent amount of time over the past five years volunteering homeless services organizations, it’s not the most time I could possibly be spending. It’s a part of my identity (which I know is both obnoxious in general and obnoxious to say), but it’s certainly nowhere near the only part of my identity2.
But the main reason I tend to underplay or pre-apologize or push back when it’s brought up is because I don’t want people to feel like they need to hide their feelings (more on this in a sec) or police their language, especially in a social setting.
While this particular conversation didn’t go that way, I’ve had a lot of conversations where I can sense the person on the other end feeling like they need start to hold back a bit. Holding back is obviously good if like you’re saying something really hateful. But if you’re just expressing your own actual emotions and experiences, I think it becomes counterproductive to understanding.
I bring alll of this up because there have been a few narratives (two of which are very tragic and one of which is pretty tragic) in the past couple of weeks that are all sitting in my head and I thought I’d welcome the new Sternal Journalists by whiplashing all the way from last week’s Matt Rife navel-gaze-unimportantness straight into some moral paradox existentialism. And I’ll probably sign off with one of two of my favorite jokes I wrote for the Comic Con Roast of 90s Television this week. So scroll to the bottom for that if you aren’t in the mood for heaviness (which is okay!).
Again, these stories are tragic and it is likely Monday morning for you and if you don’t want to process tragedy right now, that is alright! I promise things will be lighter next week!
The first two stories are: Hollywood Figure Killed Inside Home, LAPD Says and Suspect arrested in killings of three L.A. Homeless People. A man was killed in his home by an unhoused woman last Monday; and separately, a man was arrested after killing three homeless men in separate and seemingly random instances.
These are absolute tragedies. People are dead. I have no intention of rhetorically turning these lives lost into talking points on certain sides of a debate. And when events like these occur in the context of a community, they become part of the language of that community.
And in my experience, it’s worth striving for more grace and patience as we fold tragedies like these ones into our understanding of the world around us.
In my experience dealing with neighbors on my neighborhood council (I’m talking about past cases here), it is quite normal for a housed person to read about or hear about an instance of a crime committed by an unhoused person, and build that into their understanding of the world by then assuming that all (or many or most) unhoused people are capable of committing crimes of that caliber.
This is not the typical reaction, but it is a typical reaction. It’s generally associated with what’s called a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), meaning in short “I’d like homelessness to be solved, but I do not want to see shelters or services near my house because I think they should be somewhere else.
I consider myself pretty staunchly the opposite of a NIMBY (we’re called YIMBYs), but my stance on this NIMBY reaction has grown as I’ve faced it multiple times.
There are two truth at play here:
You must not condemn a whole group for the actions of an individual
It is okay and reasonable and human to be rattled and/or scared when a tragic and scary event hits close to home.
For a relatively long time, I was very loud on Truth #1 without giving as much consideration as I think I probably should have to Truth #2. By not acknowledging that it is okay to be scared when a life is taken in your community, and that also we do not think the clearest when we’re scared, I thought and discussed with far less empathy than I might have in the past. This empathy is pretty vital to a conversation not turning into an impasse.
There’s another archetypal conversation that can occur when you fold in the other story, the story not of an unhoused person committing a murder, but unhoused people being murdered: the back-and-forth of (1) a NIMBY person expresses negative feelings towards a homeless encampment because they fear being hurt by someone who lives in the encampment (2) a YIMBY responds by reminding them that unhoused people are far more likely to be the victim of a crime than the perpetrator.
Again, the fear being expressed is an honest fear. And the fact/context being responded with is true and valid. But if these points are just being flung at each other, it becomes a (completely well-intentioned and unintentional!) pitting of tragedies against each other. This dehumanizes the tragedies and brings everyone further away from preventing them in the future.
The final story I’ve been thinking a lot about is: I run an L.A. Homeless services organization. But I can’t afford to live in L.A. anymore. It’s an opinion piece from Nathan Sheets, the executive director of The Center, a really wonderful resource and drop-in center in Hollywood.
The people who work at The Center are actually the experts and the ones on the front lines (or one of the front lines) of all of this). The headline says it all, but it’s a quick read and I recommend checking it out. Basically, the executive director of this great organization whose express purpose is combatting homelessness… is being priced out of living in LA.
That is clearly equal parts sucky and ominous. But on top of the obvious, this is such a bummer because The Center is one of the organizations that does the work to close the gaps in understanding that occur when people are scared and/or too flooded with their own feelings to have space for empathy.
People like Sheets do the grunt work of getting people services and getting them as far down the road of housing as possible and, as is often the case, when that isn’t immediately possible, just creating a positive place for them to come to be and around others in a healthy and pleasant way.
I share aaaall this in the context of deflecting when someone builds up my service resume because I think people should be able to share their feelings when those feelings are earnest. People who dabble in advocacy (or are full-on in advocacy) have different appetites for hearing opposing views.
I’m in a place where I want to be able to have open conversations because I think oftentimes, the most important thing for someone who is feeling fear around a specific thing is to be able to name that fear (The worst thing can be for someone to immediately say that fear isn’t valid, regardless of its actual basis in reality). I’d like to be able to hear peoples’ actual fears rather than how they think I want them to feel.
As housing costs rise and even the people most equipped to steward the situation are being forced to leave the city and therefore the fight, it is absolutely vital that, when possible, we keep our cool and our respect and patience for one another whenever we talk about or work towards solutions on these issues.
And if we’re being honest, all of this could be solved if, instead of saying “I don’t actually do that much,” I say something like, “But please don’t worry about offending, I think it’s important to talk honestly about our feelings and worries around this.”
Wait, was this whole article just a roundabout way for me to give myself my own advice?
Typical Julian!
If you ever have questions or thoughts or are experiencing a paradox around the LA crisis, please feel free to drop me a line and I’ll always be happy to share whatever wisdom I’ve picked up (if any!)
And now as promised, whiplashing again, here is one of my favorite jokes I told at LA Comic Con’s Roast of 90s Television. I was dressed as Leonardo:
and was presently telling jokes about The Fresh Prince:
I can’t remember if the audience liked this one, but I had a great time through and through even though I did sigh and say “Think of me what you will” two separate times after quips didn’t quite land.
And HERE are the…
Recommendations!
We The Unhoused. Podcast. This podcast, hosted by Theo Henderson, activist and person with experience of houselessness (I recognize that I alternate between homeless and unhoused, but I believe “houseless” is the term Theo prefers and I advocate for deferring whatever term someone prefers when possible!) is relaunching this week (produced by podcast wizard Jamie Loftus) and I am very much looking forward to it.
Rocc Climbing. Song. I found this Lil Yachty and Remble song on TikTok in some meme about Dreamworks’ 2000 film, The Road To El Dorado. I have not gotten Remble’s last verse out of my head for more then 30 seconds since. I cannot stop saying “I done been block to block in Crocs and socks,” but I almost definitely should stop because I don’t really know what it means.
A Murder at the End of the World. Television Show. I just watched the pilot of this new show from The OA creators Brit Marling and Zak Batmanglij is shaping up to be Glass Onion if it was good and hadn’t tried so hard to be funny.
Trying the “push ChatGPT to its limits” meme. Activity. There’s a thing going around TikTok where people ask Dall-E (now available on ChatGPT) to portray something, and then continually ask them to make it more extreme. I did it and it actually works.
There are 8 more escalations after this, but I’ll share more next week.
Alrighty, that’s all this week!
Love,
Julian
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.
In case you are not an expert on LA geography (nobody needs to be), Beverly Hills is both a neighborhood within LA and its own city that is separate from the city. It’s basically a municipality landlocked by the city of LA.
It’s probably extra a part of my identity because my dad did this work my whole until he retired, so I was exposed to it at a young age and am therefore kind of a homeless services nepo baby.
Thank you for this, Jules. I hope a lot of people read this one.