Los Angeles Confronts a Spike in Homelessness Amid Prosperity

LOS ANGELES — Construction cranes dot the sky from Century City to the Sunset Strip. Once-downtrodden blocks downtown and in Venice are bustling with restaurants, coffee shops, sparkling new condominiums, theaters and office construction. The unemployment rate has dropped to almost half its double-digit high of five years ago. Much of Los Angeles these days seems the portrait of prosperity.

But a sweeping census of the homeless population in Los Angeles County released last month came as a jolting rebuke to the charities and officials who have proclaimed a mission to end the region’s stubborn problem of people living on the streets. Their numbers spiked 12 percent in two years, cementing Los Angeles’s reputation of having the most intractable homeless problem in the nation. It is a place of unsettlingly stark class contrasts, on display every day with a staggering number of people living around the clock on the streets, without the extensive network of temporary overnight shelters provided in cities like New York City.

The urban transformation has helped fuel some of the highest housing costs in the country. (PS Such as hipster plagued areas like Venice, thanks Google!)



http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/us/los-angeles-confronts-a-spike-in-homelessness-amid-prosperity.html?_r=0