The Ripple Effect in L.A.: Increased Homelessness

A few days after Sept. 11, a former homeless man was honored at a breakfast in Santa Monica for managing to get himself off the streets. In his remarks, Nehasi Ronald Lee said that every person who lives on the streets of America can recall “the date, the day, the time and the event” that triggered his or her homelessness. He asked us to pray for the new homeless who will doubtless emerge from the terrorist attacks we all watched in horror on the day we all will now remember with the same kind of specificity.

The generous outpouring of money raised in relief efforts to be distributed to families who lost loved ones in the attacks is heart-warming, but other lives--lives that are a step or two removed from the immediate tragedy--also stand to be harmed.

In Los Angeles, we see the evidence already. The L.A. Alliance for a New Economy estimates that potentially thousands of service workers at Los Angeles International Airport will lose their jobs. Those layoffs will mean losses of millions of dollars in family income. This is all but certain to erode recent progress made in Los Angeles toward ensuring self-sufficiency for these unprotected and underpaid workers.

Just a few weeks ago, L.A.’s fight against poverty was gaining some traction. A county food emergency had been declared. An unprecedented fund-raising effort on behalf of the city’s poor was days from being formally launched.

Now nearly all local charitable dollars are being redirected to the victims of the terrorist attacks. An intern at the L.A. office of the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now told me that she’d been going door to door last week but couldn’t raise a dime.

A true estimate of the damage of the attacks also would need to address the fragile gains recently made for fairness and justice. Racial profiling, a no-no just two weeks ago, is suddenly being embraced. The efforts of President Bush and Mexico’s President Vicente Fox to address the status of millions of immigrants--many of whom pick our produce, bus our tables, prune our trees, clean our houses and, these days, sell U.S. flags on our street corners--are now indefinitely deferred.

The precise number of people killed on Sept. 11 will eventually be known, but the true scale of the damage may never be calculated. For millions of Americans, including millions of Los Angeles-area residents living in poverty or teetering at the brink, the attacks could imperil what few gains were made during our country’s years of unparalleled prosperity.