News & Commentary

When the City of Lancaster and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department banished J. to the Mojave Desert, she came close to paying with her life.

For most of us, Governor Newsom's order to stay home during the COVID-19 pandemic is a potentially life-saving inconvenience. For people who are unhoused, it could be deadly, especially when local officials are massively expanding shelters and forcing people into them.

After she became homeless, Callie Rutter entered Bridges at Kraemer Place, an emergency shelter that promises to "connect participants to housing as quickly as possible." For her, however, the shelter has been a bridge to nowhere.

Philip Alston, the​ United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, travels the world to investigate horrific living conditions. On a recent fact-finding trip, he found people barely surviving in vermin-infested homeless encampments, a devastating scarcity of affordable housing and municipalities that make it a crime to be homelessness, as if that could be a cure. He even spotlighted the fact that dental care was so scarce for the poor that he saw people who had lost all their teeth.

Driving to work every morning, I’ve watched as the homeless encampment along the Santa Ana River and the 57 Freeway has mushroomed. I know its days are numbered.

The following was first published in the Voice of OC