The situation in LA

[Cheesefiend36]

www.nytimes.com/2021/12/12/us/los-angeles-mayor-race.html

I've been reading with interest that LA has had a terrible time of it since Covid and new anti prison sentence laws which has seen crime go up. I follow somebody who was in LA for a holiday last week and vowed never to go back after seeing the amount of poverty, homeless camps in tourist places, crime rates and a general feeling of not being safe. Lifeless bodies on the side of the road is apparently the norm with no body batting an eyelid

LAPD have recommended that tourists stay away because they can't keep them safe

Is anyone there right now or has been recently that can share their experience?
So much wealth there, how can this be happening?

There were a couple of Instagram accounts - Santa Monica Problems and LA Homeles - that really detailed the problems. The former was from the perspective of residents, the latter was an incredible account run by a guy who used to go and interview homeless people and ask them about how they were doing/how they'd ended up there. I can't seem to find either of them on Instagram any more (SM problems I remember had recurring issues with being shut down - I'm no conspiracy theorist but Santa Monica is LA's tech hub and I do find that suspicious since politicians hated it https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/josh-brolin-flexes-social-media-muscle-feud-between-city-council-member-watchdog-group-1250623/

Anyway here is another Instagram account documenting crime and homelessness in LA. I don't think there is anything comparable in the UK https://instagram.com/streetpeopleoflosangeles?utmmedium=copylink

Can confirm i see human shit on the pavement at least once a week. Tottenham. Crack den in the immediate vicinity. Lots of troubled people wandering around in a disconcerting state all hours of the day or night. May not be on the same scale as LA (never been) but the description resonates.

Finsbury Park certainly had a veritable tent village beneath the railway bridges a couple of years back. Haven't really been through since so it may have been cleared up in March 2020, and I'm sure it wasn't on the scale of US 'tent cities', but it was tightly packed and awful to witness. Not a great place to walk around, even with million-pound houses on the side streets nearby; same story of inequality IMO.

I definitely see small encampments in London of 5 or 6 tents - especially in small stretches of woodland on the edge of the suburbs. But nothing like a tent city that stretches on for miles. I'm not excusing it - the inequality here is enraging.

@Sonex

The number, and type, of homeless in LA and SF is way, way worse than anything I've seen or heard about in London or any European city. I don't think you can appreciate how bad it is unleed you've been there recently, in the last few years. Its not just 'same but on a bigger scale' . The opioid crisis and, dare I say it, legalisation or marijuana probably, have taken a massive, massive toll on these places and the people caught up in it. Watch the Simon Reeve documentary on California, it's very good on this. Also Dopesick on Netflix.

It's not just about poverty. It's the drugs. I saw tech guys on the streets passed out early in the morning. One guy drove up in a Tesla, parked on the street, sat on the pavement next to some wasted people, received something and slumped to the floor a few minutes later. The floor was the pavement, in a puddle of urine. I have to repeat that I saw all this, as a tourist, straying into tenderloin at 11.00 on a weekday morning. We also say a wasted older guy step out off the pavement into the road and get hit by a car. Car continued. Volunteers came out and picked unconscious (or dead/dying?) man up and propped him up against a wall and went on by. Another guy wa bleeding heavily, we asked a volunteer if we should call an ambulance. He told us the fire brigade was already on the way. We asked why the fire brigade, not an ambulance and were told ambulances won't come out for these people as so out of it and no insurance. Fire people arrived, picked him up, put him on a stretcher, wheeled him over the road and dumped him in a shelter. Literally tipped up the stretcher and poured him in the window.

I really don't think we have this level of whatever it is in the UK.

I believe you. We don’t see this here to that extent

@Sonex I was actually going to start a thread about dopesick. I’ve read a lot about the opioid crisis in the past but there’s something about seeing it dramatised with relatable characters that’s really got to me. This should have changed the way the world thinks about addiction. If you’re going to pump a whole nation full of highly addictive opioids you’re going to create a nation of addicts and all that comes with it. How certain people aren’t in prison for this is beyond me. Obviously a for profit health system is largely to blame too. Opioid overdoses are topping 100,000 per year in the US. It’s just staggering to me and thank Christ Europe blocked these bastards from flooding our healthcare system too.

The ones stats seem to suggest that the number of rough sleepers hit a peak around 2017 and started to fall gradually and then there was a significant drop in 2020 with the pandemic and a drive to find housing.

But they talk about the huge difficulty in collecting good data so it's hard to say much beyond general trends.

I think with the cost of living crisis ahead of us, it's good to have an idea of what's been actually been happening in case it gets worse. If the general perception is that things are at their worst now and people are happy to conflate a handful of tents to a tent city then this is ample cover for the government if things do escalate.

Ones = ONS

@DingleyDel thanks for the reminder to watch Dopesick.

Just to say that I had the most amazing holiday in California in 2019 in both LA and San Francisco and driving between the two. I can believe conditions are much more difficult since Covid and I certainly saw some severe poverty in SF in particular. However, nothing like as bad as New York in 1990, which was an improvement on NY as it had been, but was still pretty wild to me. And the only times I've seen real tent cities in the UK was when I started work in London in 1992, when I used to walk through the Waterloo underpass and worked on Kingsway opposite Lincolns Inn Fields. Political choices were made then (by the Major government at the time) to end this extremely visible manifestation of poverty, drug policy and disadvantage. Similar choices were made during lockdown. This is at least partly because of the visuals in terms of attracting investment to London, and also political shame, which can be quite positive - people don't like presiding over such an overt breakdown in society.

I would say that American and UK politics don't map simply onto each other. Sanders represents Vermont so is very pro-gun for example. It's incredibly arrogant to think that x group of people in a different society should do Y like us and then everything would be fine - it's one of the problems with communism just as much as libertarianism that they market themselves as universal solutions.

I'd certainly say if you're considering a holiday in California, heck, go, it's amazing. Don't be like Fox News and not go to Birmingham because of Muslim no go areas or whatever it was they said.

I honestly see nothing that amazing in California nowadays. The scenery is still lovely of course and you can build a holiday around some good high points. But the urban areas even the posh bits just leave me cold.

@Doubledenimrock

Yes Manzana...a Labour Health Minister called Aneurin Bevan introduced the NHS. Honestly read that post in utter disbelief..outrageous lies

Nye Bevan is my all time history crush. I almost spat my cornflakes out when I read that post!

I had a colleague a while ago who landed his dream job with a tech giant in LA. He quit in under a year. He said that he just couldn’t go on witnessing that level of poverty and hopelessness on a daily basis. He tendered his resignation the day after he saw a filthy and dishevelled woman wailing as she walked down the middle of the road. She was completely naked. Nobody batted an eye.

Yes Dopesick was an eye opener, I didn't realise the whole sorry mess was actually pretty much down to one pharmaceutical company's bad practice. And yes thank f they didn't get in here much. I think the Fentanyl thing is becoming more of a problem though, apparently comes in from Chinese labs.

There's another interesting dramatisation of the opioid crisis called Hightown, don't know if you've seen it? The Simon Reeve California documentaries also touch on it and are very good.

I wouldn't go near anywhere in the USA these days. It's near collapse. People working three jobs still can't pay their rent...entire middle class households living in pay by the night hotels..in one room.

Then there's the scenes in the neighbourhoods where crack and meth is rampant and it literally looks like night of the living dead. Shocking.

Oh I see a poster mentioned Santa Cruz. It was my dream to be a student there at one point in my life. Went for about five minutes last time. 🤷

I live in London and I have never seen any tent cities.

Is New York like this? We are planning a trip to New York. I have been before and I didn't remember any tent cities...

„ The overall impression I got was that Americans do not realise quite how bad it is themselves, largely because they have nothing to compare it to.“

Many of the so-called right wing press have been talking bout it for a long long time. They know. The people on the ground (residents) know. But there’s a clear split in how reporting occurs, based on political leaning. It’s been glossed over repeatedly- it’s just so bad now that the leaders can’t hide it anymore.

There‘s a YouTube comment video of a Chinese Woman who lives in the USA comparing how chin and the US support the homeless. Im not going to suggest China has a perfect system, but compared to the US it’s gold plated.

No it doesn't have a perfect system. But very good propaganda.

@Sonex

Yes Dopesick was an eye opener, I didn't realise the whole sorry mess was actually pretty much down to one pharmaceutical company's bad practice. And yes thank f they didn't get in here much. I think the Fentanyl thing is becoming more of a problem though, apparently comes in from Chinese labs.

There's another interesting dramatisation of the opioid crisis called Hightown, don't know if you've seen it? The Simon Reeve California documentaries also touch on it and are very good.

I’ve not seen those. Will definitely give them a watch. Yes I suppose as Oxycontin became more restricted it created a market for heroin and subsequently fentanyl, which sounds horrendous. I think a lot of people moved over to street drugs as they were cheaper than getting a prescription. Mind boggling.

There is an interesting youtube channel called soft white underbelly, where the guy interviews people living on Skid Row and other similar places

www.youtube.com/c/SoftWhiteUnderbelly/videos

DH watches it regularly and he says it's absolutely heartbreaking what these people have been through and how they live

Lol at the idea of the Chinese Communist Party doing much better at supporting people than California. Good luck with that.

I do remember the biggest change i noticed in CA between 1990 and now was of course legal marijuana.

Reading that post I sound like a dick. Logging off for a bit. Sorry.

Yes the legal marijuana imo tipped the pteviously "laid back" communities into something overtly bleak.

There is a really good Ted talk by Jan Radar about the hammer blow to her community that came with the opioid crisis.