US cities remain clueless as thousands go homeless

Mental health issues

At least 3,000"vulnerable" homeless people in the city who suffer from mental health problems live on the streets and can often be seen living on subways.

The plight of this group, known and monitored by the city, came to the fore this year after Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man, was choked to death on May 1 on a train by Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old former US Marine.

Eyewitnesses said Neely had been shouting and complaining on the subway that he had no food. The Michael Jackson impersonator had been homeless for numerous years after his mother was killed by her boyfriend. He had been on drugs and was in trouble with the law after being arrested 42 times.

Last month, Penny was indicted on second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. His case has divided opinion between some who think he is a hero and others who believe he "lynched" Neely, such as Yusef Salaam, a politician.

Hayes said: "It's so important that people remain compassionate (toward the homeless). As homelessness grows due to housing shortages, geopolitical crisis and climate change, we've found people become less tolerant toward those experiencing homelessness.

"They see more people on the street and have less compassion for their situation, feeling that the person must somehow be at fault."

Thousands of kilometers away on the West Coast, Los Angeles is known worldwide for its opulence, celebrities and sunshine. However, it has another side — the homeless. In some areas, along backstreets, hundreds of tents form makeshift cities where hundreds of people sleep.

Last month, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the city's preliminary figures showed that the number of homeless people living in a tent, car or temporary homes in Los Angeles County was 75,518 as of January, up from 69,144 the previous year.

"The challenge before us is vast, but we will continue to work with urgency to bring Angelenos inside," Bass said. "Lives depend on it."

Overall, homelessness has increased by 9 percent in LA County and 10 percent in the city of Los Angeles last year.

This is despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on housing the homeless, said a report by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. It has not decreased the camps full of homeless people on the streets.

In January, volunteers carried out a count of the homeless. Compared with a similar count done in 2015, the number of unhoused people had increased by 80 percent in the city and 70 percent in the county.

Homelessness in Los Angeles is often spurred by people losing their jobs and not being able to pay their rent, like New York, a study by researchers at the University of California San Francisco found.

Benjamin Henwood, a professor of the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California, told China Daily, "A lack of affordable housing is the primary driver of homelessness in LA, which is a result of decades of underinvestment in affordable housing and insufficient urban planning for the population growth experienced in LA and California more broadly."

The areas in LA with the highest homeless population include South LA, Westside and Harbor areas, the Los Angeles Times reported last month. Unlike New York, the number of people in shelters was just 20,000 county-wide, but the number of those living on the street out of shelters was more than 55,000.

The COVID-19 pandemic was challenging, but homelessness has been bad for more than 10 years and continues to soar, Henwood said.