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?

@Sonex

Yes that's my takeaway from SanFran too. So much wealth and such dire poverty cheek by jowel. I didn't feel afraid, although two people were shot outside my hotel one night, but the stark contrast between the haves and the have nots has stayed with me.

DH was in San Fran a few months ago and was shocked at the homeless cities that are thousands strong, he said it ruined his trip as they kept coming up to him, as his hotel was right near it. He just couldn't believe how bad it had got. He travels the world so isn't sheltered.

As for the medical discussion, half of Americans now carry medical debt, up from 46% in 2020. But so this thread isn't USA bashing, this lovely America Doctor wiped £650k off cancer debt off his book...

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-doctor-medical-bills-cancer-b1782667.html

So that's nice!

Someone up thread described the situation in the US as Religiosity, which is a better description. Nor is it likely to be ordinary Catholics, it's more likely to be the Fundamentalist Right, who can be any denomination.

I was surprised when 30 years ago an American friend came to stay and brought a copy of his local newspaper with him. It had about 4 pages printing the coming Sunday's sermons. I can't imagine any UK paper doing that.

@onlychildhamster

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...

NY (Manhattan) doesn't currently have tent cities but Midtown (one of the large tourist areas.. ie 42nd street, Theatre district, Empire State Building,Chrysler building, Grand central station... has turned into a bit of a dangerous pit due to Hotels/Restaurants/offices shut down/derelict due to the pandemic. This area is very conspicuous in its absence of tourists and office workers and it currently reminds me of the early 90's before Mayor Giuliani's 'tough on crime' stance cleared up and transformed the city including the 'no go' Central Park. A few of the Hotels I believe were used for the homeless etc.during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 in order to get people off the streets to help stop the spread of COVID. Personally I would leave it a while if you are planning to stay in Midtown but Brooklyn and Williamsburg outside Manhattan and Soho/Greenwich village and the upper east side seem much the same when I was there a couple of weeks ago... depends what your plan is.

@mathanxiety your post about the American Protestant work ethic is the most interesting and eloquent thing I've ever read on Mumsnet (and I'm including the entire Cutted up Pear thread when I say that). I actually find this whole thread so fascinating. And horrifying, obviously. Oh, and agree with everyone else that yes London has homeless people but there are hardly tent cities (I've lived here for 20 years) and it's clearly not on the same scale as the US.

@DottyHarmer

Why do you, as a middle-class person, have to address what’s going on? Surely what most people do is try to live their life in a crime-free, decent neighbourhood and earn enough to get by. The Americans I know are not super-rich - eg teachers - they are just normal citizens.

Just the same as here - the city centre nearest me is vile now. It didn’t use to be. Of course I care - but I have seen that unlimited funds is not going to get people to come off drugs. They won’t even go in the homeless shelter beds (of which there is a good supply) as they are not allowed to use drugs/alcohol in them. So “normal” people quite understandably ship out of the centre (including younger people) and it gradually becomes a dump and then a no-go zone.

Change policy. Middle class voters are a huge mass-vote if they get going, and despite left/right leanings tend to prioritise similar financial and social policies when an ‘issue’ is raised- this is how policy changes can happen quickly (take some countries responses to gun-incidents, quickly bringing in new gun-control laws- this can happen because middle-class voters support sudden change in these ‘emotive’ circumstances- how the media reports plays a big part)

Yes there is medicare in the US, but people seem to get turned down all the time for healthcare and have to fight for it. An acquaintance in the US has biopolar. She was very stable on medicine. Medicare decided she was no longer eligible. She ended up living on the streets, couch surfing and in and out of mental hospitals as a result of having no medication. A relative helped her challenge the decision and won. She is back on medication, working, renting and stable again.
We see in the UK how people with severe mental illness can easily go into a downward spiral if they have issues with benefits. But at least they never have to fight to get their psychiatric medication paid for. In the US people do have to fight, which means those who are too unwell to fight can end up in a downward spiral.
And lots of people with psychosis see frightening visions and self medicate with drink and drugs.
Mental health care is bad enough in the UK. In the US unless you have money, it is terrifying.

Tories are actually the ones who introduced the NHS in the first place

now this really lost me

The conservatives tried to resist the creation of the NHS, they categorically did NOT introduce it. This is a similar level of worrying ignorance as the LA graduate thinking the entire world used the dollar.

Some US cities used to be bad in the 70s/80s. In fact I first went to SF in 1992 and freaked out when the homeless outside a central tourist-area hotel touched and pulled at you. It was very scary.

NY had quite a bit of gun crime and you wouldn’t have hung around Times Square for long: prostitutes, strip clubs, petty criminals etc. And the subway was pretty dire - graffiti, pickpockets, steaming gangs etc.

THEN there was the famous “broken windows” campaign in NYC which made every single trivial crime a crime - working from the bottom up. NYC was revolutionised - Times Square became a tourist destination, the subway was fine, much of it was gentrified (not so keen on this last bit myself!). This method was adopted in other cities across US and so came the halcyon days of tourism of the 2000s.

Now, I don’t know what’s gone wrong but it seems overwhelmingly to be drugs and wishy-washy administrations. The pandemic accelerated the rot.

There are no tent towns in London @SandysMam

The closest it gets is people living in the big parks, which has taken place for centuries.

Currently the inhabitants of my nearest central London Park are 10 per cent homeless/addicts who can’t live in houses (some homeless can never go back to accommodation after too long on the streets) and 90 per cent imported illegals. In crim terms, The homeless are mostly ok, the illegals not so much.

I’ve learnt a lot this morning. Thank You for the information.

Also many younger people in the UK don't seem to realise that in the early 70's we didn't used to see street homeless people, or it was very rare. I lived in a poor city and only knew of one man, an alcoholic, who slept rough. I was horrified by this, but lots of people had talked to him, and he didn't want a bed. There must have been some deep issues there.
You did get runaways sleeping rough for short spaces of time, or longer if they were underage and trying to avoid the police. But street homelessness was extremely rare. And I knew young people at the time who were street homeless, so I am not talking from some privileged perspective unaware what was happening.

In 1979 with Thatcher in, suddenly street homelessness exploded with the change to housing benefits. I remember going to London and being shocked at how suddenly there were lots of young people sleeping in the streets. That was a new thing.

I say this because street homelessness is largely not inevitable. You will always get a tiny number of people with deeper issues or young runaways, but street homelessness should be absolutely tiny and shocking.

In my city in the first lockdown when all street homeless were offered a bed and encouraged to take it up, I saw only one person continue to sleep on the streets. As soon as that initiative was stopped the numbers went way back up again and are continuing to climb.

We are nowhere near LA levels, but we are also not doing anything to tackle our own street homelessness problems.

@RubyFakeLips

People referencing tent cities in the UK are so wrong. As another poster said, there are small encampments. This would include the old set-up at Waterloo. You could walk the perimeter in a minute or two of even that. Skid Row in LA is 2.7 square miles! Probably, could fit nearly 1000 football pitches into that area size.

Admittedly, I have encountered human shit on London streets, but not frequently enough to feel it’s a real problem. Same with being approached for money or encountering addicts/mentally unwell. It has increased in recent years but not dramatically. For context I live in London and do Central London walks up to zone 2, at least a few times a week. Was daily during COVID.

DH was in SF in November for work. Said it was disgusting, and much worse than he’d ever seen it before. Solid rows of tents and people sleeping rough. Like me he is a life long Londoner, and agree the two are just not comparable.

Yes I think people are not realising the scale when they refer to London

I went to NY in the eighties and have never been back. It was scary as hell. And I have lived in some very rough places.

@YourenutsmiLord It's really not a Catholic thing.

@julieca i have been to NY in 2003 and found it ok. honestly the scariest place for me is Rome. I found the pickpockets scary. I am a Londoner and I lived quite happily in camden as a student (though I live in the burbs now).

I visited Manhattan in 1989 where they'd cleaned the subway of its intricate graffiti but I was warned not to go to the Port Authority Bus station and indeed biugh a rail ticket instead!
So it was in the process of cleaning up from its slump.

@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.

Fuck. Ing. HELL 😱

I was in SF in 2016 and it had got bad, but not this awful. I was still ok to walk/cycle around on my own without feeling too nervous, though was properly alert. And in 2016 it was noticeably much worse than during my previous visit in 2007.

It really does sound like a dystopian film. What a sick society, and getting sicker

There's no tent-cities in London FFS. There just aren't.

I went to LA about 15 years ago...I thought Beverly hills was the most beautiful place I had ever set foot in. So glamorous and beautiful it felt like a dream.

I went to Manchester a few years ago and was truly shocked by the levels of homelessness and drug taking...It's was horrible and depressing.

London doesn’t have vast tent cities but there is a lot of homelessness and people on the streets or in set back areas which has definitely increased in the time I’ve been there and was really shocking. Finsbury Park there are people living in tents under the bridge, Whitechapel I walked past what must have been about 10-15 homeless men living in the abandoned front of a shop - most of them seemed to be Eastern European and I remember feeling really shocked and saddened that they must have traveled to England for a better life and now we’re homeless and probably going to struggle with applying for citizenship after Brexit. Bethnal Green, I don’t think they were homeless but living in a halfway house and used to congregate on the corner to buy/smoke crack - this got significantly worse during lockdown, they also lived in the park at night time. Nobody ever bothered calling the police because where would they go, plus it was just really sad. There was also another area that I can’t quite remember (maybe elephant and castle but somewhere with a big station and lots of exits) - walking through there in the evening I was actually scared, again lots of homeless men definitely living in the station, camped out with cardboard and tents and quite a few very visibly strung out or passed out from drugs and asking for money. I normally do always give money or a hot drink but I was really shaken and couldn’t believe how many people were living in conditions like this. I’m sure nothing like America here you have streets set up with fires etc. but although London on the surface seems better, when you look around there is normally always someone and definitely hidden pockets.

@onlychildhamster yes NY is supposed to be way better now. It was seriously scary on the 80's, Just put me off going back even though I know it has changed.
I have lived in a lot rougher places in London than Camden ;)

unname from my understanding the US opioids crisis is unique in that it pretty much was one pharma company, Perdue, who worked to create a ‘new market’ for prescribing opioids, where they were given anyone with mild/moderate pain rather than just those in palliative care, cancer patients etc. Before the creation of OxyContin most physicians would never have prescribed opioids for long/mid term pain. Oxy was specifically marketed as non addictive (which was a massive whopper and they knew it). I’m not saying other companies didn’t jump on the bandwagon and market similar drugs. The tragedy of it is that so many Americans who would never have encountered opioids were hooked, through absolutely no fault of their own, meaning they didn’t seek out to do illegal drugs. I think it will go down as one of America’s darkest periods. The number who have died and the havoc it wreaked on society.

@user1471462428

We do have tent cities in the UK. Castlefields in Manchester has had a tent city for a while now and Piccadilly gardens also has a huge homeless problem. I grew up in the late eighties/early nineties and very rarely saw a homeless person.

How did you not see any homeless people, did you have your eyes closed? Cardboard city was known about all over the UK, But even cardboard city was nothing compared to the situation in LA.

I thoroughly recommend Simon Reeves episode on the Americas it truly shocking how LA has just accepted the situation as unfixable.

This is a really interesting thread. He's not for everyone, but Joe Rogan talks about this problem quite a lot on his podcast, especially with Bridget Phetasy and he recently had Michael Shellenberger on to talk about it - he's written a new book called San Fransicko about the homeless crisis.