Ive never met Larry Rice, even though St. Louis is my home town and my sisters and I have had lunch at his homeless-run St. Patrick Center restaurant. This piece makes me think long and hard about where it says that homeless people gather downtown because thats where the services for them are. That may be true for St. Louis, but here in Long Beach we have a clot of homeless people sround our downtown Civic Center where, except for a few scattered food programs located as far a mile away and the nearest shelter a 1.5-mile hike away, there is only one social services provider (The MHA Villages IPA) within a mile radius of City Hall. The citys 14 core services agencies are located in the Multi-Service Center (MSC), far-afield from downtown, beyond the I-710 and across the LA River over 2 miles away. This is all to say there arent substantial services in our downtown sufficient to explain why the population is always there. Another way to look at it is that if there were such attractive services, wouldnt the problem already be solved? After all, this is the often-heard argument: Long Beach has terrific homeless services, and hoards of broke and tired homeless people show up here from thousands of miles away so they can enjoy them. Oddly, our terrific services arent doing a terrific job, so they cant really be THAT good, can they?
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 08:08:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015