LOS ANGELES (AFP) – Tents, makeshift shelters and dilapidated campervans line the streets of Skid Row as Mike Murase and his team tally the exploding population of homeless people in Los Angeles.
In the United States’ second biggest city, the unhoused huddle by small fires, trying to keep warm on one of the coldest nights of the year.
Homelessness is “an intractable, stubborn issue that the politicians and agency leaders have not had the will to try to solve,” 75-year-old Murase tells AFP.
Murase and his colleagues crisscross the dozen-or-so roads they have been assigned as part of a three-day effort to count the number of people living on the streets.
Figures from 2020 -- the last time the survey was carried out -- showed Los Angeles city alone had more than 66,000 homeless people, up more than 13 percent from the year before.
Everyone expects this year’s number to be much higher.
“During Covid, there were so many jobs that were lost, you know, restaurant workers or laborers,” says Murase.
“A lot of these people were unable to pay rent for maybe two, three months. They get kicked out and they have no family or other relatives to go to and they end up on the street.
“I think there is a misconception that they’re mostly criminals, or addicts, or mentally ill people.
“There’s a large number of people with those conditions, but there are (also) families, children.”
Visitors to Los Angeles often express shock at the sheer number of people living on the streets of one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest state of the wealthiest nation on the planet.
Tents and tarpaulin shelters clump next to Hollywood tourist spots, or string out along embankments next to the city’s freeways.
Rusting mobile homes with broken windows line the roads of Venice Beach, where multi-million-dollar houses glower down at them.
Obviously ill people wander through traffic, railing at unseen demons, or picking at their grimy clothes as they mutter into greasy beards.
Others rummage through trash cans, or lie dazed on thoroughfares, the smell of urine a fug that pedestrians pick their way distastefully around.
Some of the unhoused are new to the streets, victims of the pandemic economic crush, but others have been there for years.
Homelessness comes easy in the United States, where the welfare safety nets of other developed countries are largely absent, and the uninsured or under-insured can be a hospital bill away from a missing rent check and the resulting eviction.
In California that problem is exacerbated by skyrocketing real estate prices that have pushed the average purchase price of a home to around $700,000 -- twice the national figure.