L.A. Considers Ban On Feeding Homeless People In Public

L.A. Considers Ban On Feeding Homeless People In Public
 

 
 
By Sarah Rae Fruchtnicht, Tue, November 26, 2013
 
The Los Angeles City Council is considering a proposal that would ban the feeding of homeless people in public due to complaints from homeowners.
 
The Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition has been feeding the homeless from a truck each night for 27 years. Two members of the city council proposed the measure after nearby homeowners complained.
 
The city has the second largest homeless population in America, which has increased by 27 percent in the last year, ThinkProgress reported.
 
“If you give out free food on the street with no other services to deal with the collateral damage, you get hundreds of people beginning to squat,” actor Alexander Polinsky told the New York Times. “They are living in my bushes and they are living in my next door neighbor’s crawl spaces. We have a neighborhood which now seems like a mental ward.”
 
The director of the National Coalition of the Homeless says restricting public feeding just drives the homeless out and doesn’t fix the problem.
 
“It’s a common but misguided tactic to drive homeless people out of downtown areas,” said Jerry Jones.
 
More than 30 cities have public feeding laws, including Philadelphia, Seattle, Orlando and Raleigh, N.C.
 
“This is an attempt to make difficult problems disappear,” Jones said. “It’s both callous and ineffective.”
 
City councilman Tom LaBonge, one of the members who introduced the resolution, says there are two sides to the story.
 
“There are well-intentioned people on both sides,” LaBonge said. “This has overwhelmed what is a residential neighborhood. When dinner is served, everybody comes and it’s kind of a free-for-all.”
 
There are 53,800 homeless people in L.A. County, many of whom rely on these meals to survive.
 
“They are helping human beings,” wheelchair-bound Debra Morris told The Times. “I can barely pay my own rent.”
 
“People here — it’s their only way to eat,” said one homeless man, Aaron Lewis. “The community doesn’t help us eat.”
 
“There are people here who really need this,” said Emerson Tenner, while waiting in line for a meal. “A few people act a little crazy. Don’t mess it up for everyone else.”
 
Ted Landreth, the founder of the food coalition, said they faced similar complaints in 1990. Back then, the organization was ordered out of Plummer Park in West Hollywood.
 
“The people who want to get rid of us see dollar signs, property values, ahead of pretty much everything else,” he said. “We have stood our ground. We are not breaking any law.”
 
Sources: ThinkProgress, New York Times

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/la-considers-ban-feeding-homeless-people-public#

Los Angeles Considering Proposal To Ban Feeding Homeless People In Public
 
By Scott Keyes on November 26, 2013 at 11:02 am
 
 

A homeless man and his possessions in downtown Los Angeles
CREDIT: AP
There’s a perpetual yuppie belief that society’s true failing isn’t the fact that half a million residents don’t have shelter, but that some do-gooders have the audacity to give homeless people food. The latest epicenter of this thinking is Los Angeles, where the City Council is considering a ban on feeding homeless people in public areas after complaints from nearby homeowners.
 
Los Angeles has the second highest homeless population in the country, at 53,800 individuals, according to the 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report. And although the number of homeless people went down nationally over the past year, it increased by 27 percent in Los Angeles.
 
For a quarter-century, the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition, a group of community members who strive to meet homeless people “on their own turf, talk to them, and listen,” has served meals to the hungry every evening. On any given night, volunteers will hand out as many as 200 meals.
However, the group is now facing a backlash from locals who don’t like the presence of homeless people near their homes. The New York Times quotes one such man, an actor named Alexander Polinsky, who lives nearby: “If you give out free food on the street with no other services to deal with the collateral damage, you get hundreds of people beginning to squat. They are living in my bushes and they are living in my next door neighbor’s crawl spaces. We have a neighborhood which now seems like a mental ward.”
 
As bad as Polinsky thinks he has it, it’s safe to assume that any one of the 100 homeless people lined up for a meal would, given the chance, switch spots with him without hesitation.
 
But complaints like those from Polinsky are beginning to fall on sympathetic ears among City Councilmembers, two of whom have already called on the city to ban groups like GWHFC from feeding homeless people in public. One of them, Councilman Tom LaBonge, called the charities “well-intentioned” but said the effort has devolved into a “free-for-all” that “has overwhelmed what is a residential neighborhood.”
 
But GWHFC and other charities are critical for the homeless who rely on these meals to survive. “People here — it’s their only way to eat,” said one homeless man, Aaron Lewis, who lives on the sidewalk outside a 7-Eleven. “The community doesn’t help us eat.” Another man, Emerson Tenner, agreed: “There are people here who really need this,” he said while waiting in line for a meal. “A few people act a little crazy. Don’t mess it up for everyone else.”
 
The proposal will need to pick up more support among the 15-member Council in order to become law.
If passed, though, Los Angeles would join a growing number of other cities that have banned or passed significant restrictions on charities attempting to feed the homeless, including Raleigh and Orlando.

LINK http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/11/26/2995011/los-angeles-homeless-meals/

Monica Almeida/The New York Times
A security guard from the Business Improvement District keeping an eye on a food truck operated by the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition.
 
As Homeless Line Up for Food, Los Angeles Weighs Restrictions
 
 
LOS ANGELES — They began showing up at dusk last week, wandering the streets, slumped in wheelchairs and sitting on sidewalks, paper plates perched on their knees. By 6:30 p.m., more than 100 homeless people had lined up at a barren corner in Hollywood, drawn by free meals handed out from the back of a truck every night by volunteers.
 
But these days, 27 years after the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition began feeding people in a county that has one of the worst homeless problems in the nation, the charity is under fire, a flashpoint in the national debate over the homeless and the programs that serve them.
 
Facing an uproar from homeowners, two members of the Los Angeles City Council have called for the city to follow the lead of dozens of other communities and ban the feeding of homeless people in public spaces.
 
“If you give out free food on the street with no other services to deal with the collateral damage, you get hundreds of people beginning to squat,” said Alexander Polinsky, an actor who lives two blocks from the bread line. “They are living in my bushes and they are living in my next door neighbor’s crawl spaces. We have a neighborhood which now seems like a mental ward.”
 
Should Los Angeles enact such an ordinance, it would join a roster of more than 30 cities, including Philadelphia, Raleigh, N.C., Seattle and Orlando, Fla., that have adopted or debated some form of legislation intended to restrict the public feeding of the homeless, according to the National Coalition of the Homeless.
 
“Dozens of cities in recent years,” said Jerry Jones, the coalition’s executive director. “It’s a common but misguided tactic to drive homeless people out of downtown areas.”
 
“This is an attempt to make difficult problems disappear,” he said, adding, “It’s both callous and ineffective.”
 
The notion that Los Angeles might join this roster is striking given the breadth of the problem here. Encampments of homeless can be found from downtown to West Hollywood, from the streets of Brentwood to the beaches of Venice. The situation that has stirred no small amount of frustration and embarrassment among civic leaders, now amplified by fears of the hungry and mostly homeless people, who have come to count on these meals.
 
“They are helping human beings,” said Debra Morris, seated in a wheelchair as she ate the evening’s offering of pasta with tomato sauce. “I can barely pay my own rent.”
There are now about 53,800 homeless people in Los Angeles County, according to the 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development last week, a 27 percent increase over last year. Only New York had a higher homeless population.
 
The problem is particularly severe here because of the temperate climate that makes it easier to live outdoors, cuts in federal spending on the homeless, and a court-ordered effort by California to shrink its prison population, said Mike Arnold, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, an agency created by the city and county in 1993.
 
All told, about $82 million in government funds is spent each year on helping homeless here, Mr. Arnold said.
 
Tom LaBonge, one of the two City Council members who introduced the resolution (the other, also a Democrat, was Mitch O’Farrell), said food lines should be moved indoors, out of consideration to the homeless and neighborhoods. “There are well-intentioned people on both sides,” Mr. LaBonge said.
 
But, he added: “This has overwhelmed what is a residential neighborhood. When dinner is served, everybody comes and it’s kind of a free-for-all.”
 
Ted Landreth, the founder of the food coalition, said his group had fought back community opposition before — it moved to this corner after being ordered out of Plummer Park in West Hollywood in 1990 because of similar complaints — and would do so again.
 
“The people who want to get rid of us see dollar signs, property values, ahead of pretty much everything else,” he said.
 
”We have stood our ground,” he added. “We are not breaking any law.”
Communities that have sought to implement feeding restriction laws have faced strong resistance. In Philadelphia, advocates for the homeless won an injunction in federal court blocking a law there that would have banned food lines in public parks. Even before the court action, religious groups had moved in and began setting up indoor food lines.
In many ways the agonies of the national battle over dealing with homelessness are etched into this four-block-square section of Hollywood, where industrial buildings, including the Cemex cement factory, film production facilities and the stately former headquarters of Howard Hughes’s enterprises, sit two blocks up North Sycamore Avenue away from a middle-class neighborhood of Spanish Mission homes. Construction in the area is bustling, reflecting the gentrification that is taking place across this city.
 
The coalition’s truck, a Grumman Kurbmaster, arrives every night at 6:15, drawing as many as 200 people from across the region.
 
The other night, men and women lined up for firsts and, if desired, seconds. Some were quiet and grateful, and a few were loud and agitated. “You all right?” Mr. Landreth asked one man who was shouting to himself
 
Just up the street, 75 people filled a living room, anxiously exchanging stories about what many described as a neighborhood under siege, and demanding help from local officials.
 
“You guys have had your fill here — we know that,” Officer Dave Cordova of the Los Angeles Police Department told them. “And the food coalition doesn’t help. Where do all these guys go after they get something to eat?”
 
Peter Nichols, the founder of the Melrose Action Neighborhood Watch, which helped organize the meeting, said there has been a steady increase in complaints about petty crime, loitering, public defecation and people sleeping on sidewalks.
 
“While it sounds good in concept — I’m going to pull up to a curb, I’m going to feed people, I’m going to clean up and I’m going to leave — well, there are not restrooms,” he said. “Can these people get a place to sleep? To clean up? We want there to be after-care provided every day they do the program. But they don’t and they can’t.”
 
What Mr. Landreth described as the most serious threat in its existence — a powerful combination of opposition from homeowners, businesses and city officials — is stirring deep concern among the people who come here to eat most nights.
 
“I know because of the long lines, a lot of times we have trouble and confusion,” said Emerson Tenner, 46, as he waited for a meal. “But there are people here who really need this. A few people act a little crazy. Don’t mess it up for everyone else.”
 
Aaron Lewis, who said he makes his home on the sidewalk by a 7-Eleven on Sunset Boulevard, chalked up opposition to what he described as rising callousness to people in need.
“That’s how it is everywhere,” Mr. Lewis said. “People here — it’s their only way to eat. The community doesn’t help us eat.”

LINK -- http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/us/as-homeless-line-up-for-food-los-angeles-weighs-restrictions.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&

so the homeless are now in the same status as the animals in Yellowstone park

I was down in Charleston SC last week and saw people lining up for a meal at lunch and then for supper at the same vacant lot. I could not believe it. There were maybe 45 to 50 people.I have never seen such a thing in Canada. My first thought was why don't they feed them inside were they can sit at tables and use washrooms.
  There was a church just down the road that could be used so I went there. When I got there they were feeding people too.  IT was a shocking experience.
  I then went with my business partners and had a great meal of seafood and as I eat I thought those volunteers are creating dependence.Those poor people should get a job. Yea right, who is going to hire them? Most of them were middle age to seniors.
  It's OK I can go back to Canada and forget about them but I can't forget about them.
There is no easy solution.

Well on the bright side, at least they can get obamaCare.....