Our National Disgrace: Homelessness in the City of Angels

About this book

Homelessness in Los Angeles has burst its traditional borders. These days downtowns Skid Row is only the ugly epicenter of a staggering problem that radiates outward for more than one hundred miles. Homelessness has spread to gloomy underpasses and dark side streets to parks libraries and subway platforms so that there are now more than 50 000 people who lack a regular place to sleep in Los Angeles County. From Long Beach to Hollywood to Beverly Hills to Lancaster no Angeleno can credibly claim to be unaware of the squalid tent cities the sprawling encampments or the despair and misery displayed there. In March 2018 the Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times published a powerful six-part series describing the problem in this cityone that is mirrored to one degree or another up and down the West Coast from Portland to San Francisco to San Diego. The editorials explain who LAs homeless people really are and how they got there call for changes in policy toward the mentally ill and urge weak-kneed politicians to be leaders in the struggle to provide housing for the homeless. All six editorials have now been bound together into a single vital and disturbing book.