Twitter provides this video showing us some of 100+ people's cobbled together living spaces, doing the best they can to survive in a moment, and it shows us some homes of the hundreds of neighbors surrounding this former city park and adjacent streets turned into a shanty town. The lack of garbage collection and the lack of attention by the city are all apparent. LA has garbage trucks, and LA has a lot of expensive social services established to help people when they fall into this situation. This city has touted its miraculous successes in housing people just blocks away, yet here we are.
The City of Los Angeles has seen Centennial Park, located outside the Venice Beach Library, become a refugee camp for folks who can't find their way in our screwed-up economic system. While the City and County worked together to provide housing to a large swath of unhoused people that had congregated into a large encampment on the beachfront boardwalk, disrupting the treasured business of selling cheap sunglasses and "Someone has to eat this ass" tee-shirts to international tourists, the library seems to be less important to them.
There is a parking lot a few blocks away that could be converted to a safe camping and parking site, but it seems there is a lot of controversy about that too.
It does not seem coincidental that mass efforts to house folks only appear to occur when the blight is too much for the tourism trade to bear. People get temporary housing around the Superbowl, Marathons, big beach vacation season, and what not to get them out of the public eye, but when folks congregate in places that are less likely to make the national headlines, like a library, communities lose libraries.
