Invisible in plain sight | Homelessness and the pandemic Homeless, homelessness, pandemic, Los Angeles

HERE'S WHERE THE HEADLINE GOES

Sometimes it can feel like driving through the Great Depression. Only, it's Southern California in the year 2021. Homeless encampments — modern-day Hoovervilles — are steadily spreading across the vast sprawl of Los Angeles. The scenes evoke John Steinbeck’s classic novel “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Homeless encampment near LAX.

“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”

– John Steinbeck

“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”

The 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count indicated that more than 66,000 people in Los Angeles County were experiencing homelessness. Some are living on the streets of L.A., hunkered down in dilapidated campers, tents, or makeshift hovels of cardboard, wooden pallets and plastic tarps. Trash piles up beside skeleton frames of shopping carts and bicycles.

In 2016, voters approved Proposition HHH, the sale of $1.2 billion in bonds to help finance thousands of units of housing for homeless and low-income people in Los Angeles. In the four years since the first bonds were issued, only seven projects with a total of 489 units have been completed and occupied. Project sites cause anxiety and animosity with neighbors.

Dorothea Lange said the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera Lange worked with the Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression in the 1930s. Her historic images of displacement and poverty are again materializing all around us today.

(Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress)

Migrant mother image, March 1936 in Nipomo.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”

– John Steinbeck

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”