Readers React: The tents in L.A.’s neighborhoods

To the editor: Regarding your article on homeless encampments in South Los Angeles, the trouble with the homeless crisis is that it’s a national problem that everyone expects cities to solve individually.

People cannot get jobs that pay enough anymore, if they can get jobs at all. Drugs have deeply harmed many communities.

When people run out of options, the only place left to go is somewhere where a person can sleep outside in a tent all year long. Expecting the city to solve a national problem is never going to work. Homelessness is collateral damage in a corrupt system that concentrates wealth at the top. Los Angeles and other warmer places make the results of the corruption visible to all.

As the government destroys every New Deal institution that kept people from destitution and turns toward a mafia system of government, the $29 dome tent becomes many people’s last best hope.

Diane Soini, Santa Barbara

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To the editor: I was glad to see The Times publish its first article starting to acknowledge the burden of the 60,000-strong transient community borne by normal, everyday citizens of the Los Angeles area. Yet even then the wording tries to frame the homeless crisis as a humanitarian tragedy with no clear origin or end, rather than what it actually is (in most cases), a total abdication of responsibility of the part of law enforcement, public health agencies and municipal services.

Phrases like “ease homeless crisis” and “vulnerable homeless population” are merely dodges, convenient for a distracted mayor and detached City Council who wring hands and appeal to the public for empathy. We’re over this. Fix the problem. Do your jobs.

Daniel Cooper, Oak Park

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