our mission
There were plenty of others
By romona kivett
Iranian Author and artist Marjane Satrapi wrote of her first time being homeless on the street that “It’s incredible how quickly you can lose your dignity. I found myself smoking cigarette butts, looking for food in trash cans. I, who before couldn’t even taste from others’ plates.” Having been sent to Europe by her parents at just 14 to escape the escalating conflict between Iraq and her home country, Satrapi struggled from place to place until finally, out on the street, she was thrown off of buses, forced to hide in dark corners and eat food out of the trash. In her comic Persepolis, Satrapi remembers that “There were plenty of others.”
Homelessness is an evergreen story. We see it every day. We see it in the facades of freshly erected apartments, their modern architecture and big glass fixtures screaming gentrification and expense. We see it in our paychecks each week, carefully adding up the hours toiled to ensure we can keep our beds. We see it in the classroom, people of all ages investing in an education worthy of a more secure lifestyle. And, of course, we see it on the streets. We see the neon green and orange tents, we see the billowing blue tarps.
Homelessness is not invisible. Count yourself lucky if you’ve never been fearful of becoming homeless, but none of us can pretend we are blind to its pervasive, ingrained nature.
Photo by Logan Bik
Homelessness continues because we allow it to. A system of compliances and regulations work to make the problem less intrusive, less of an eyesore. City workers perform sweeps on camps and communities, trying to scrape away the grimey homes of the unhoused but giving them nowhere to go. Lawmakers pass regulations that prevent them from living in the relative safety of a locked vehicle on the street, all in the name of ensuring your morning commute isn’t marred with the 4-wheeled homes of your neighbors.
All of this happens because we keep treating the homeless as criminals, failures, their own gravediggers. For decades, the plight of the unhoused has been accompanied by a narrative of failure, addiction, laziness and mental illness. A story of how the supposed lowest and worst among us end up. Parents motivate their teenagers to start working by asking them “Do you want to end up on the street?” the assumption being that the unhoused exist because the mistakes they’ve made have led them here. There’s no one to blame but themselves.
It’s a simple story, easy to understand and repeat.
But it’s not really true.
In the past few months, we the 2020 Scene Magazine staff have met with dozens, if not hundreds, of unhoused people, the activists working with them and the nonprofit organizations attempting to change the situation. What we’ve found are stories of trauma, of being outcast, of human beings tossed out like trash. If that doesn’t kill you inside, just remember that millions more of us are one missed paycheck, one medical bill, one car accident away from being homeless, too. There isn’t a single community this issue doesn’t touch.
As COVID-19 divides us still further, threatening our jobs, homes and lives, the uncompromising and isolated experience of being unhoused becomes that much clearer. How would you make it through the pandemic without a place to stay?
There are an estimated 550,000 unhoused people in the United States. Los Angeles county is home to at least 60,000 of those souls. Not one of them one chose to become homeless. No one opts out of comfort and security, of a bed and a shower, to live on a park bench or under an overpass.
It’s once you’re out there that things begin to take shape. One unhoused man told me that everyone has an opinion on homelessness. But you don’t understand until you’re there. This was echoed by numerous folks I spoke to about their lives on the street. As one unhoused woman told me, to be homeless is to be completely socially destroyed, with nothing in the way of support. Another simply said “Once you’re on the street and you have to zip up that tent, there’s no way in hell you’re staying sober. It’s a predatory situation.”
That makes sense when you think about it. You can’t keep a job if you’re constantly worried about where you’re going to sleep at night, if you have to stay awake all night to protect yourself, if your hands freeze up from the rain and wind. Without the stability and safety of a home, there’s no climbing out of this. “You lose your mind out there,” one woman said.
Our hope, as the ushers of this issue of Scene Magazine, is that each of you reading this will come away with a different narrative on homelessness. One that depicts the struggle as told by the people who have lived it, one that explains just how easy it is to become unhoused, one that recognizes that it could just as easily be one of us in their position. We believe this is the first step to changing the narrative on this issue entirely, a path that will lead to this issue being stamped out for good.