For many Californians, reducing homelessness comes down to the encampment next door

This is both an admission and an observation: The ramifications of homelessness, for most people, are anecdotal.

Statistics don’t do much to convince people of the seriousness of the problem or persuade them much that it’s getting better or worse. What matters is how it brushes up against them directly.

I was reminded of this last week, when I passed an encampment that is a part of my everyday life in Los Angeles, an unsightly and vaguely threatening bundle of tents and trash beneath the 101 freeway, not far from my son’s Silver Lake apartment. When Mayor Karen Bass took office in 2022 with a promise to make reducing homelessness her central mission, I told myself I’d believe it when that encampment came down.

Nearly three years later, it finally has. At least for now.

I was leaving the area last Wednesday morning, when I discovered the onramp to the freeway was closed, fenced off while crews poured through the little strip of land beneath the freeway and bagged up boxes, shopping carts and the flotsam that gathers in and around these sad communities. 

By the next day, the tents were gone. Mountains of trash were piled a hundred feet from where the encampment once encroached on the road along the underpass. A few of the former residents of the tents were picking through the debris, searching for lost items. 

But most had moved along. The neighborhood felt different. 

And that’s a bitter truth about street homelessness and what it does to communities. It’s not fair to demonize poverty, to blame people for their illnesses or addictions, but it’s hard to live near these encampments. 

A neighborhood with and without tent dwellers

Driving through the area often means snaking through addled men and women wandering into traffic. Some beg for change, sometimes aggressively. Others wander, muttering to themselves and teetering on the edge of eruption.

The neighbors complain of stolen mail and uncomfortable interactions. The streets are dirty and strewn with trash. Human feces dries in the hot sun.

This is not a high-crime neighborhood by most standards, but it’s made grimmer and grittier by the presence of this knot of tents and their inhabitants. That creates a kind of compassion fatigue. 

It can be easy to forget that these people are suffering and that their plight should trigger our sympathy — not our revulsion or fear. But that’s a difficult feeling to hold on to when your mail is stolen, the sidewalk is blocked or a wild-eyed man approaches you on the street, sputtering with incoherent rage.

With the encampment suddenly gone, life in the surrounding neighborhood felt lighter, easier. On Sunday, I dropped in at the Target a block or so from where the encampment had been. The security guard at the entrance noted that the store and neighborhood were “calmer this week.” The store, which locks up many items behind plexiglass barriers, had a smattering of customers shopping for groceries and home supplies.

On the next block, the local liquor and convenience store was quietly busy as well, and the clerk there was relieved at the relative serenity in the area.

The homeless people who congregated outside the store affected business, he said. The place relies on foot traffic. When sidewalks are impassable or clogged, customers shy away. This morning, a few patrons formed a line, picking up cold drinks and snacks. 

It’s risky to make political judgments based on personal experience, but homelessness encourages it. It matters far less to most people that the mayor can point to data showing progress when their daily lives are impacted.

So yes, Bass can rightly say that street homelessness has declined in back-to-back years, even as some cities have seen an increase. She is right to express pride in a 17.5% decline in the number of people living on Los Angeles streets. Those results, as she noted in July, are more than just data points. 

“They represent thousands of human beings who are now inside, and neighborhoods that are beginning to heal,” she said at the time. 

When homelessness feels worse than it is

She’s right, and it should hearten those who care about unhoused people and the impact homelessness has on the broader city. But until people feel those gains directly, until they sense that healing for themselves, it can be hard to internalize.

In that way, homelessness is different from some of the other pressing issues of our day. For instance, it can be hard to gauge the full scale of inflation or unemployment. It’s hard to know whether a person’s experience is typical, and so many voters rely on what their leaders say about data. 

That’s why it’s easy for President Trump to lie about the data, to announce glibly that gas prices have dropped below $2 a gallon (they have not) or to proclaim the United States has “no inflation” (it does). His supporters — even those facing high prices or lacking jobs — imagine they’re the exception, that the economy overall is doing well because the president says so.

Those are data-driven debates, subject to lies, as Trump well knows. 

Homelessness is an experience-driven debate, where voters are less likely to trust numbers and leaders. But it’s vulnerable to a different kind of misunderstanding: the distortions of our own experiences. 

Homelessness isn’t worse just because I have a bad run-in with an unhoused person, but it feels like it. And it isn’t better just because the encampment near my son’s apartment is gone for the moment. 

But I have to admit that it seemed better. 

And, what’s more, the measure of progress on this issue is not just personal, it’s also ephemeral, more a feeling of respite than of resolution. Even as my son’s Silver Lake neighborhood enjoyed the calm of last week, there was an air of resignation in the community, a near-certainty that the encampment, though dispersed for the moment, would eventually form again.

When I drove through there Tuesday, one tent had returned beneath the freeway. As the weather turns colder, more may follow. With that will come the bracing reminder that healing in this area is hard to assess and hard to hold on to.