(note; I’m attempting to write about an issue so large and complex that it almost seems silly to tackle. In fact, I have spent a lot of time debating whether or not I should. The following is but an eyelash in the larger discourse on the topic, one that is often better covered by others more qualified than myself. That being said, I continue to hear the same rhetoric over and over with an increasingly punitive tone, shifting away from empathy. The following fails to address many of the nuanced elements such as racialized groups, rising fascism, political partisanship and a fracture in critical thinking / dialogue… or reality for that matter. Either way, I feel compelled to say something, for whatever it’s worth. And for context I was educated in social work, political science and philosophy for six years, most of which was centered on addictions, mental health and the justice system.)
In 2018, I started a series of frequent round trips to Los Angeles to visit Ashley. I noticed the issue of homelessness and poverty stretching into every corner of the city. We’d wander past underpass tent cities, avoid certain areas at night. I came from Toronto, lived in Hamilton, and grew up with my fair share of unhoused folks, but LA is different. There is a claim that nearly a third of unhoused folks in the US live in California, with many of them congregating in the LA area. You can certainly feel it.
Since COVID hit, I’ve noticed a stark turn. It seems like the population on the streets has exploded. We moved to Santa Monica, and pre-pandemic you would see the occasional soul struggling, but by the time we arrived, a large portion of the Pacific Palisades park was full of tents. Since then, they have been removed, likely utilizing inhumane practices, but it’s evident the problem hasn’t been solved. Perhaps just shifted or pushed somewhere else.
Because it’s an issue we all see and hear on regular basis, it is discussed often amongst Socal folks. I find that many coffee talks, couple dates and family events usually touch on the issue at least once during a conversation. Typically, it’s a discussion about crime, the generalized fear of physical or material safety, and hey, fair enough. Within a week of living here our car was broken into, items scattered around the car port, but the same thing also happened in Hamilton, Ontario within our first week - it’s not a unique geographical problem. We have had boxes stolen from our porch, but that also happened back home. Regardless, the swell of poverty touching most of North America and beyond needs a critical and empathetic eye right now, perhaps more than ever.
The problem can’t only be examined through the lens of the good guys vs. bad guys. We can’t moralize poverty, it is too complex a nexus of interpersonal histories, trauma, illnesses, privilege and a decaying mode of production centered around entertainment, personality and brand. The financialization of housing has been sinister and continues to produce horrific results. What’s staggering to me is that when folks talk about the unhoused, and typically link it to crime, there is barely ever a discussion of how or why. Even worse, they forget the personhood of each individual living at the heart of this scourge.
So let’s ask a couple questions…
How?
“How can it be that we’re allowing all these unclean homeless people fill backpacks with stuff (shoplift), not even bothering to enforce rules and laws.”
That’s a fairly common question that I hear over dinners. In fact I think I heard those exact words at a meet up with some new couple friends in our neighborhood early last year. In response I ended up blabbering out some retort that failed to land. It didn’t land because it wasn’t centered on the underlying problems, I was just trying to discuss human behavior, and I could tell from the cold nods and uncomfortable shift in conversation that I failed to penetrate. It can be daunting.
So before I totally dig into the ‘how’ I want to line up one caveat… maybe two.
First, I am no fan of two party politics (or party politics in general for that matter). I feel the current political system is woefully unprepared to deal with any of these complex issues, and in fact, I feel both major parties are not only allowing it to happen, but are complicit. There is no money to be made in helping unhoused folks or families in poverty. If there is no profit model, it isn’t worth the time and resources - isn’t that what capitalism tells us?
You know what does make money, and lots of it? Mass incarceration. Jail construction contracts, law enforcement contracts, new courts, court staff, jail supplies, food, cheap labor, uniforms, guards. If you don’t believe me, look up the history of groups trying to stop FOR PROFIT youth incarceration. Then dig even deeper. It is sickening.
Then look up how many people are incarcerated in the US vs. other first world nations. Ask how. Ask why.
Homelessness is never a single factor issue. If you live in a society as individualistic as this one, it’s considered in many ways a personal and professional failure to be homeless. It’s a lack of character, a mistake, a laziness, a breakdown and deficiency of personhood. Those people just “don’t want to work.”
No one sits in kindergarten, crayons in hand, and draws a picture of their future selves as a person filling a backpack with goods. No one graduates high school (if they are so lucky) and decides, well here begins my petty life of crime. It is not an edifying feeling having to stoop to that position, that level of indignity. It is not the hope and dream of any single person, it is a forced position, something done out of horrific need and desperation.
What fascinates me is that most of the people who decide these positions over cake and cocktails, and furthermore the politicians who make decisions that impact these lives, have failed to ever really sit with anyone in those populations and learn about their lives. I’m not talking a hand out or a photo op in a soup kitchen line, I’m talking look someone in the eyes and talk for a couple hours about what your combined experiences on this planet is - to name and to know.
More often than not you’ll see a pattern that afflicts all peoples experiencing this plight. It’s a story as old as time, but unless you are forced to rub shoulders with those who have had different life experiences, you’re likely to judge them from your own personal lens. There is no chance in hell you could possibly understand the unique factors that formed that human being, and yet you probably have some sense deep down in your ego that you know what’s up. It’s OK, that’s a natural human condition, but now it’s your choice to transcend that program and dig deeper.
It’s time to contemplate outside our small boxes.
Here are some patterns that we can start to shift our thinking around, identifying some of the reasons as to how people ended up in this position;
You come from a family past that is fractured, often lacking parents, or functioning parents, and you had no chance at achieving stability in your life.
If you’re looking at people on the street and expecting them to have had the same life as you, and that they are maybe just lazy, you’re already so far off, it’s going to be very hard to crawl your way back to reason. So please for a moment consider; what trials and tribulations, traumas and horrors have these individuals experienced, likely as children, that may possibly be hindering them from competing in the marketplace for a job, any job. Trust me, it wasn’t your experience… it’s very different.
To deny that, is simply unreasonable and a fiction.
I worked with many of these broken youth in a group home that typically housed teens without parents, called Crown Wards in Canada. Every single one of these kids had experienced horrors in their lives that you couldn’t begin to imagine if you came from a typical lower middle to upper middle class life. Sure, behind closed doors there are all levels of abuse, toxicity, and chaos, and the middle class has its fair share, but these kids had experienced levels that don’t even make it into screenplays or crime shows. It’s just heavy.
There were kids that were used sexually as drug currency in an exchange set up by their parents, kids who were used as mules for drug transactions, and those who had seen parents and siblings die in conflict or terrible accidents. There are levels of shame, guilt and torture you can’t summarize. Now add to that lack of access to formal education, nutritious food, and any semblance of a structure that teaches you the mores and language of acceptable culture. How do these kids even have a chance? Those kids grow up. They struggle. They are only (barely) supported for so long, and then we expect them to function the same as the quarterback of the high school football team, or the girl that won the science award? Come on.
The institutional problems and errors such as a punitive justice system, the embarrassing war on drugs and the woefully unregulated / underfunded social service industry is adding to the problem.
Author Richard Rohr talks a lot about the sins of the institutions, and I think we need to spend more time contemplating this. Everyone can recognize that many of our institutions are slowly decaying, bloated, inefficient, unnecessary. Like most bureaucracy, they begin to have to justify their own existence, and find ways to dig their claws in. We are funding so many things that are unnecessary, while failing disseminate and use data to apply solutions where they are needed.
We send people off to jail (those broken children mentioned above) where they attain the master status of “criminal” or “ex-con” which in turn has two outcomes; they join a group of people that becomes like a family, further entrenching into a world we all try to shove away and pretend that it doesn’t exists, then we fail to support or re-integrate them into society with a sincere set of policies and protections.
A master status is a sociological term; it basically means that what you do or who you are, typically in regards to career, is who you are known as going forward. We tie a lot of weight, good and bad, to these titles. The obvious positive statuses would be; that doctor, or that fire fighter guy you know, or that teacher you liked. The “bad ones” are usually pejorative; that prostitute, or criminal, or junkie. People tend to have a very hard time shaking this status once it has been leveled upon them. They fail to have the resources and support to rise above it. It’s a personal sentence that they may live with for the rest of their lives, regardless of how hard they try to change.
Unless we are willing to start seeing people as people, and move past these lenses, we’re doomed to continue to segregate people based on their pains, problems and past.
Further, while I am the first one to champion the social service field, we need to re-examine where funding goes, have clear transparency, and ensure that every agency isn’t staffed with 20 executives making six figures, while the front lines are understaffed and under-supported.
There are workable positive models out there, that work in this country and beyond. We just have to stop complaining and seek them out.
We need pro-active, preemptive approaches, catching issues faster. We need to find ways to educate, redirect, and create opportunities. We have to stop looking it at a they problem, and start looking at it like an us problem. It is too hard to afford school for most now. It is too hard to afford decent housing now, in spite of your background. These are the issues our leaders and parties should be discussing, not culture war bullshit that fans the flames of idiocy and dunking on each other through memes and other garbage. Grow up. Seriously.
If we don’t grow up quick, and get past our personal misgivings and grievances, we are all doomed to one day wake up considering a tent or a van, instead of a brick and mortar home. If you think the cliff of poverty is that far away, think again. The monetization system is overinflated and broken. The boomer generation is seeing their retirement funds evaporate. They were sold a lie that pensions weren’t necessary, you could save yourself and have a bigger return. Then the excess funds were siphoned away, into the pockets of… well you know who.
Where will you be at if the current rate of inflation and precarious market continues to crumble? One bad geo-political move away from going bust? The amount of North American’s that are a paycheck away from oblivion is staggering, again, look it up. And it’s not just the “poor,” it’s the lifestyle creep, credit over-usage, and intense costs that have even those making well into the six figures laying awake at night. Those making 400k a year are worried. It’s untennable.
There isn’t enough of a safety net, because no one sees it as necessary for themselves until they need it. What if you or you loved one does need it one day?
The word burden has been weaponized by us all, preying on our base human instincts, separating us as a whole. It has been used against us.
Scams in the market left a generation foreclosing on their homes in my lifetime, and barely anything was done. Those same schemes and loopholes are causing banks to collapse again around 15 years later.
When I first visited LA, the dope surfer dude who’s place I was renting pointed at a side of the road area where tons of RV’s and vans were parked. He commented on how they were never parked there before the 2008 crash, and suddenly it was flooded. Do those people deserve to lose their homes over the games of a few suits on Wall Street? Seems rigged.
No one was justly punished for games that left scores of people homeless and destitute. Yet we wonder why they might possibly steal out of desperation.
Finally, on this point, I want to state clearly that I am not anti-law enforcement, but it is an area that needs such a high level of non-politicized deep work, that I have really no idea how it will be fixed until we can begin to agree on some common reality again. There are a few things worth saying though.
When I was a social worker, we reluctantly had to rely on the police in many of the jobs I worked. We simply had to have their support or else our own lives and well being would be at risk. Sometimes they were necessary to protect clients from each other. In the same breath, I know social workers who have first hand accounts of law enforcement beating up street teens for fun. I have seen them be merciless and overreach on several occasions. I have also seen them as the last line of defense. As I said, it’s complex as hell.
The shift towards militarized policing is nonsense, a hold over from the failed war on terror (and drugs), which was really just used to justify obscene police spending, and prop up the grotesque industries that create the armaments. It creates a type of police force that seems itself as combatants fighting against comic book level villains.
When it comes to policing, I do believe that sometimes you need a bad guy to stop a bad guy. I think there is something spiritual about it. It’s a messy job and a dark space. The problem is that while there is real evil out there with malicious intent, we have this cartoon version of morality and bad guys that ends up grouping a bunch of people together. We throw the police at everyone and everything that is “wrong” or “bad” and expect to get meaningful results. Is it working? Look where we are.
Ask any cop, they don’t want to deal with mental health and addiction stuff, yet we force them into it. They are too tired, too understaffed, and too busy going after the actual dangerous stuff. We need programs and diversion that leads people away from enforcement, and allows cops to do their jobs. We need to re-evaluate hiring criteria and practices for building forces. We need to not set them up to fail, while also being proactive in how we approach pain in our society.
I could go on, but that system is broken, we all see it, and I hope to god we can figure it out.
The current drug ecosystem is unlike anything we’ve ever seen, and if we don’t start looking at people with empathy and implementing human centered solutions, it’s just going to get worse.
There are cocaine addicts that will admit that there is still some deep down spiritual choice in partaking in usage. You can watch John Mulaney and Theo Vonn speak about it on a podcast. Addiction is a complex brain process that is psycho-social. It affects everyone in different ways for good reason, and I could never sum of the totality of what it means to be addicted to drugs, but I can say a couple of things from reading, relationships and observation.
The current opioid family of drugs have been found to be so highly addictive to the human brain, in a way that basically supplants any ability to fight it. With heroin or coke or similar drugs, there are always those who through brain chemical processes can use them once or recreationally, and never dive into full blown addiction. With new classes of opioids, that just isn’t the case. They are manufactured to hook you. Literally made to pull you under and keep you floating in the depths below.
It is by design.
They knew it, they pushed it, and we’re now seeing the consequences. Hundreds of thousands have died from overdoses, with many more just barely making it. There are countless documentaries and books about the scourge of these drugs, yet we fail to contextualize the sheer battle each brain has against billion dollar drug companies who knew they were going to hook generations of people.
So take the three patterns above, and think, how do people get to the place where they are so desperate, so wounded, and so regressed, that they could walk into a store, blatantly balking at all social norms and start risking their life and limb to steal some shit. I know, some of these people are probably bad apples and assholes, but in many cases, did we give them a choice? What are they up against, where do they come from? What loving voice or outstretched arms ever whispered wisdom or lessons on how to make it in life. They are deprived a wholeness many take for granted.
There are entire generations that have raised entire generations that merely survive the onslaught of this world. Living under the brutal idea that you can just pull your bootstraps up, if you have been tortured your entire childhood. If you grew up in a burnt out city with food deserts and shit education. Why can’t we see it for what it is - a human condition, one that could be altered if we started seeing it for what it was.
So let’s talk a little more about the…
Why?
Well, why not?
I say this in jest, but if you haven’t ever had the chance to socialize normally, and integrate into society with the help of stable guardians, why wouldn’t you push the limits?
Your job in this life is to survive right? Your instinct is to secure the resources (salary) in order to secure security and sustenance (a home and food) so that you can carry on. Well, what if your experience, trauma, lack of access to institutions and general vibe prohibit you from those things. You steal shit.
Better yet, you find other people that went through the same stuff, and you band together in a group. See where I’m going with this?
I feel kind of silly writing this out, it all feels so self-evident, but truthfully, based on nearly every discussion I’ve had on the topic, it’s not so obvious. So I’m going to keep going.
The cost of living has gone up at such an unfair and artificial pace, that now the average two income family has trouble keeping up. In Los Angeles, if you make $70,000 a year, you are considered low income. This crept up on us QUICK, and it’s not getting better any time soon. Do you really think people in charge are interested in slowing this slow slide into poverty, that is impacting us all?
Look at CEO pay, look at hidden costs, look at concert tickets, look at egg prices, look at the ‘everything needs a subscription’ model, look at taxes on taxes, look at the profiteering on post-secondary education (schools knowing some of their programs fail to ever land kids jobs, then taking thousands), look at student debt, look at families bankrupted by medical bills, look at sporting events, look at anything made with quality ever (if you can find it).
I could go on.
It’s like we all woke up and shrugged our shoulders and went, damn, shit’s expensive. And then carried on.
So if you’re reading this, you’re likely at least middle class, educated, or from an era where you didn’t need to be in order to land a decent job. If you’ve made it this far, you like reading, so you have a good grasp on language, reading, writing. You’re probably a professional with enough resources and spare time to read a Substack in the first place. And yet with all those factors, you’re probably sitting there thinking, yeah, shit is expensive. This is hard.
Now what about all those that don’t have those skills, advancements, opportunities, etc. How is anyone doing any of this, anymore?
I’m not going to write all the statistics about what a house cost in the 70s vs. now or whatever. It’s all out there. It’s not the same. It’s not even close. No wages have risen close to the rates that cost has. But what is the same is this strange individualist religion of creating a private island for yourself and your nuclear family. The one that is barely holding it together between visits to the therapist, swim practice, Xanax, raising your kids, taking care of your parents. The scramble. The late nights and early mornings. Vacation? Never heard of it. The nuclear family itself is barely holding on.
I read something once about how the fabric of social society splitting apart can be measured by the decline of bowling alleys (If someone remembers where it’s from, comment below). It basically suggested that people used to do mundane and fun stuff like the bowling alley. Meet up with pals, drink beers, shoot the shit, hit some strikes - weekly. Do you see your homies weekly? Back in the day, you had the time, resources and security in order to be able to do these things.
Now you work side gigs, late nights, drive Uber and start Substacks (ha!) to make ends meat.
And all this while white collar crimes (and even loopholes not considered crimes) lead to poisoned water, missing resources, child labor, sweatshops, retirement funds stolen, ponzi-schemes, mortgage crises, banks failing, PFA’s in rain water across the planet, hidden scandals and institutionalized abuses. These guys rarely get a slap on the wrist, and few sit around cocktails and buffets lamenting the greedy moves of elite criminals - because it’s harder to see and name. It’s usually the scary poor people that get the blood flowing.
Yet those crimes can cost the lives of thousands. They can leave entire groups of aged people helpless and poor. Sick or worse.
This is still connected to shoplifting, I swear.
So to land this existential plane, I’ll end with where we should all start; Empathy.
Now I know it’s hard. Putting yourself in someone’s shoes and understanding them is the key here. Sympathy is feeling pity, while empathy calls us to take one step further and truly try and learn about someone’s circumstance.
How do we do this? Several ways.
Start asking more critical / deep questions and seek out materials that aren’t just click-bait headlines.
Get to the why. Why are people driven to act like this? Move beyond the talking points, the news debates, the experts blabbering on the nightly news. Read books about it. Books that contradict, books that agree.
If someone tries to make it political, remind them it’s not a political partisan issue, it’s a human issue, and they are being manipulated. Doesn’t matter what party. The parties need to be reimagined. Yesterday.
The talking points are killing us.
Watch a documentary on these topics. See a complex web or causality form. Each thing impacts another. I recommend starting at Push, a fantastic documentary about housing. Then watch something about opioids. Then about mass incarceration.
Get a subscription to a trustworthy news source and pay for it. It’s worth the money. Knowledge is valuable and all the free sewage flowing out into the internet is driving us into mass psychosis. People believe in a prophet named Q. That the earth is flat. That lizards are in control.
PAY. FOR. MEDIA.
And just ask more. Ask people you don’t know. Beware of fear mongers. Beware of those who will use scapegoats. Beware of those who divide humans into groups of those who are worthy and those who are not. Beware of those who decide who “real” citizens are or not. Don’t play these twisted games.
Be open. We need openness more than ever. Our very lives depend on it.
Our flourishing depends on it.
Get to know people that are different from you, and may be the ones who are stealing right before your eyes. You’ll learn more than you can imagine.
I don’t recommend striking up the conversation in the act while standing in Target.
I do recommend volunteering, community outreach, bag lunch programs, food banks and sitting with the aged population.
Learn someones name. Look them in the eye. They aren’t just a sex worker, or a homeless guy anymore. They are Sarah, or Matt, Steve, Corey, Tricia, Diane.
Once you know a name, there is a spiritual magic in that. The master status starts to crumble and they are flesh and blood. They are the glory they were always meant to be. They can be loved back from the brink, sometimes only to an extent.
You can be a part of someone healing. Someone being welcomed back to our collective human experience.
It is a gift and privilege. And elixir for the soul.
There are thousands of programs you can sign up for and hop right in. It will be uncomfortable and weird. It will be hard and sketchy sometimes. It will change your goddamn life.
It will be like an ice bath to your slumbering soul and you will reconnect with the whole of humanity in a way you were always meant to. The way we should have always been. The way we were written to be. The way we will be once again, one day.
Rub shoulders with those who are different, disagree, dirty, clean, richer, poorer. Get off the timeline and back into your life. You only have one, and you will be rich for it, in a way no bank can ever contain.
Do a ‘one for one’ approach to discussing heavy shit.
Yes, I’m making a rule to ruin family parties and other get togethers.
But seriously. I fail to speak up about any and all of this for many reasons. I don’t want to be the downer. Nuance takes time. Maybe I’ll be wrong about something. Maybe I’ll alienate someone.
But if you come at things with openness and compassion, and a willingness to truly discuss, then you can follow a simple rule.
If you’re anything like me and hate small talk and repetitive no-where conversations, try this (I am). For every heavy, critical, world ending, ‘everything is garbage’ conversation, I challenge you to always bring up one affirming, life-giving, positive topic as well. It’s really easy to tear down and complain. It’s really easy to pick sides and battle it out. The real work is in finding what is redeemable, beautiful, worthy. The third way. Things we can be grateful for. Things we can be proud of. Shine a light on those things. Lift up the little parts of people they don’t see in themselves. It will lift you up as well.
It’s about balance, and our world has so little right now. Maybe ever. Maybe we bring the balance in when we are honest about the hard things, and quick to speak about the beautiful things.
Everyone is carrying a heavy load right now. It seems to get heavier each day. Make it lighter with words of comfort, wisdom, admiration and love.
My therapist once said that a large part of their job is to help adults who’s parents never told them the truth about themselves. The things they were good at, the qualities that made them unique, the stuff that made their faces come alive. In fact, many parents do the opposite; they lie to their children. They try to force, control, manipulate, suppress. Out of fear, pain, intolerance, ignorance. Out of their own unrealized dreams or insecurities. These lies last a lifetime until someone comes along and pulls the thread. You can help with that. It takes little effort to affirm others. Start now.
Those people who you are scared of, grabbing things arbitrarily off the shelves. They were lied to, in many ways. So many ways. They were lied to about who they are, who they can be, what this world hopes and wants for them. They were lied to about their beauty, their future, their past.
You can tell them the truth. You can live out the truth.
Don’t be afraid and make the would a more beautiful place.
Our lives depend on it.