The Working Unsheltered

By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief

Once upon a time, maybe back in the Progressive Era of the 1890s, there was a great moral debate about the working poor:

People who worked hard and still could not escape the poverty trap that stymied social mobility and put the American Dream of bettering your family in jeopardy.

Since then, or at least since the 1960s, massive social changes such as the rising divorce rate and wave after wave of drug epidemics have not eased the problem.

But the latest research on homelessness in Los Angeles suggests that the working poor may be lucky: It’s the working homeless, one rung below, who are in even more dire straits.

These are the many untouched by drugs or bad family issues, who are not mentally ill or socially inadequate.

These are the quiet people who sleep in their cars and RVs, in ditches and shrubbery. And still get up in the morning, or at dusk, clean their teeth with tap water and go to work.

I have been speaking with a middle-aged white guy who sleeps in his Prius—“because no one busts anyone in a silver C-series”—who used to drive from a parking spot near The Highlands to a grand downtown hotel earning $75 cash for a 10-hour shift washing dishes.

He got the job because he has the paperwork—he is documented, but the address is his ex-wife’s. She kept the apartment after the divorce. When he fell, he fell fast. Today he cannot afford the $2,000 deposit for a rent-controlled, one-bedroom he saw recently in Pico Rivera.

He is considering “buddying up” with two others to share the 600-square-foot space, but one
has been a “user.” And he does not trust junkies. “They don’t work,” he told me.

Also, there are the credit and references questions.

So, he parks at night around the Palisades, because it’s physically safer than anywhere closer to downtown. He reads thrift store paperbacks by the light of his pay-as-you-go mobile phone.

His car makes him invisible, although he is used to parents crossing the street to avoid him.

There used to be much talk about the “Great Society” and the social contract: You work hard so you can marry so you can raise kids.

Now we have a generation of lost people who pass every morality test. People who work hard, who avoid drugs, who avoid criminality. And yet they are still homeless.

If we are helpless after a century to uplift the working poor, what can we do to help the working homeless? This could be the future.

Working hard, living on the streets, it’s enough to drive
you mad.