california

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1457835

Days before a federal court was set to consider whether to hold Los Angeles County in contempt for failing to fix problems inside the Inmate Reception Center, U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson has approved a settlement agreement under which local leaders are promising to make broad changes to improve jail conditions.

In addition to permanently setting limits on how long detainees can be held in the reception center and how long they can be handcuffed to benches, the settlement also includes provisions designed to help lower the jail population by diverting hundreds of people into mental health treatment. The hope is that, with fewer people in jail, conditions there will improve.

“This is a watershed moment for the ACLU’s jail and prison decarceration movement,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project, said in a news release. “This is the first time in the country a jurisdiction that we or other advocates have sued agreed that the cornerstone to addressing abysmal jail conditions and overcrowding is to reduce the number of people coming to jail in the first place.”

In an emailed statement Thursday afternoon, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department also lauded the agreement.

The county echoed that sentiment in an emailed statement, praising the “hard work of multiple departments” to “swiftly and efficiently” put in place the broad changes that made the settlement possible.

“This work continues to be a top priority,” the county added.

The agreement is the latest development in a lawsuit first filed in the 1970s targeting persistently poor conditions in the Los Angeles jails. Since that time, the county has never been able to fully comply with court orders to fix the problems behind bars.

In September, after years of legal wrangling, the ACLU filed a motion raising concerns about deteriorating conditions at the Inmate Reception Center. New detainees in the downtown L.A. facility — most of whom had not yet been convicted of a crime — were reportedly forced to defecate on the floor and in food containers, were handcuffed to benches for days at a time and were routinely denied needed medications for mental illnesses.

In response, Pregerson signed a preliminary injunction ordering certain changes to address those problems. Specifically, the county was banned from keeping anyone in the reception center for more than 24 hours or chaining people to benches for more than four hours. The injunction also forbade keeping people in holding cells or cages for more than 12 hours at a time and required everyone to be held in sanitary conditions.

But in February, the ACLU filed a 27-page motion alleging that the county had flouted the court’s order by tethering inmates to benches and gurneys for hours at a time, locking people in cells covered with trash and feces and leaving them to sleep on crowded intake center floors with nothing but plastic bags to keep warm.

“We are treated like animals,” one inmate wrote in a court filing at the time. “People shouldn’t live like this.”

The civil rights organization asked Pregerson to sanction the county and levy fines for any future violations of court orders. The judge was expected to decide whether he would do that following a contempt hearing scheduled for next week.

Then, late last week, the county and the ACLU announced that they’d come to an agreement. On Thursday, Pregerson finalized it with a signature, negating the need for a hearing and bringing an end to the ACLU’s request to hold the county in contempt.

Though both parties lauded it as a step forward, the settlement order does not end the overall lawsuit. Instead, it makes permanent some of the time limits and required conditions outlined in the preliminary injunction ordered last year.

Under the new agreement, the county also agreed to continue a number of other corrective steps that had begun in recent months, such as creating a “robust” cleaning schedule, hiring new janitorial crews, improving mental health staffing levels and creating a new tracking system to make sure no one stays in cages or chained to benches for longer than allowed.

But the piece of the order most celebrated by inmate advocates was the creation of new alternatives to incarceration, including more than 500 noncarceral beds for people found incompetent to stand trial and nearly 1,700 for other people with mental illness.

In a statement Thursday, Michelle Parris, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s California office, explained the importance of that move.

“A key piece of this agreement is building out more than 2,000 beds to divert currently incarcerated people into community-based mental health treatment, something community members have demanded for years,” she said. “While it should not have required litigation to see movement, this settlement is an opportunity for the county to finally build the robust, decentralized system of care Los Angeles needs.”

As officials work toward bringing those beds online, the county will have to provide quarterly reports to the court detailing progress toward compliance with Thursday’s order.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1456230

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1456223

California is partnering with Mexico to help find professional boxers owed pensions from a little-known state retirement plan, with two dozen former fighters located in recent weeks and pledges to identify more.

The efforts follow a Times investigation that found most boxers owed benefits from the California Professional Boxers’ Pension Plan were unaware that the 40-year-old program existed or had little information about how to apply.

The California State Athletic Commission, which administers the pension plan, said it estimates that at least a quarter of the 200 boxers currently owed benefits had a last known address in Mexico.

Officials with the Consulate General of Mexico in San Diego and Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said they are helping California locate boxers using identity documents filed in Mexico and abroad to ensure those entitled to money receive it. The World Boxing Council, which is in Mexico City, is also working with the athletic commission to find boxers who are owed pensions. So far, the groups have helped the commission find 23 boxers, four of whom have since been paid.

Among those is retired Mexican featherweight José Refugio “Cuco” Rojas, who unknowingly has been owed nearly $17,000 in benefits dating back almost two decades.

Rojas, 67, said he was unaware California had a pension when he boxed between 1976 and 1990, logging a 35-17-1 record that included many fights in the state. Rojas said he was grateful for the unexpected money.

“A lot of us do need it,” Rojas said.

At a recent news briefing, officials said Mexican boxers who fought in California may be owed a portion of the $2.5 million in pension benefits.

“It’s a titanic task, but we are all doing what we can,” Mauricio Sulaimán, president of the World Boxing Council, said through a translator. “Even by word of mouth we’ve been able to reach out to some.”

The boxers’ pension plan, which is funded through a ticket fee, was created in 1982 to provide a “modicum of financial security” to retired fighters, according to the state statute. To date, the plan has paid 240 retired fighters a pension, with most of those within the last decade. The average pension is a one-time $17,000 payment.

The Times’ investigation identified many boxers, including some from Mexico, who are currently living throughout California and did not know the state owed them thousands from their careers in the ring. Roughly 200 boxers could have claimed a pension last year, but only 12 of them did, according to a Times analysis of commission records.

“We want former boxers who are due a pension to have that check in their hand,” said Vernon Williams, vice chair of the athletic commission. “They fought for it and earned it. These former fighters dedicated countless years to the sport of boxing, showcasing their passion and their talent while entertaining fans and inspiring future boxers.”

California’s boxer’s pension is the only state-administered retirement plan of its kind.

The plan offers pensions to any professional boxer, regardless of residency, who logged at least 75 scheduled rounds in the state with no more than a three-year break. At age 50, a boxer can claim their pension, which is determined by how many rounds they fought and the size of their purses. Boxers can also claim their pensions early for medical or educational purposes, and families of fighters who have died are eligible for the benefits on their behalf.

Critics said that for too long the commission failed to develop an adequate system to inform boxers about their benefits despite years of complaints from lawmakers and state auditors.

“They never made any effort to contact me or send me information,” said Hector Lizarraga, 56, a retired featherweight from Mexico who moved to the United States as a teenager. Lizarraga received his $39,000 pension last month.

Part of the issue, retirement experts told The Times, is that the athletic commission waited until a boxer turned 50 before attempting to contact them for the first time about their pensions. By then, the vast majority of addresses the commission had on file were no longer current.

After The Times’ reporting, the athletic commission said it will begin sending annual statements much earlier — when a boxer first meets eligibility requirements — and that it has brought in state investigators to search for fighters with unclaimed money.

“It’s a shame their communication has been so poor,” said retired Bakersfield lightweight Gonzalo Montellano, 65, who first learned from The Times in February that he is owed a $20,000 lump sum boxing pension.

Montellano said the commission recently told him he can expect to receive his pension next month.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1446022

The Supreme Court on Thursday dashed the hopes of the Navajo Nation for more running water.

The justices threw out a 9th Circuit Court ruling that held an 1868 treaty confining Navajos to their reservation came with an implied promise that they would have access to water.

The Navajo reservation in Arizona and New Mexico is the nation’s largest, the justices said, and it is desperately short of running water.

But Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing for a 5-4 majority, said the 19th century treaties that established the reservation “did not require the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the tribe.”

He said the tribes should look to Congress, not the courts.

“Allocating water in arid regions of the American West is often a zero-sum situation,” he wrote. “And the zero-sum reality of water in the West underscores that courts should stay in their proper constitutional lane.... It’s not the judiciary’s role to update the law.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett cast a key vote for the majority, while Justice Neil M. Gorsuch dissented with the court’s three liberals.

The cases are Arizona vs. Navajo Nation and Dept. of Interior vs. Navajo Nation.

Looming over the cases was the drought-stricken Colorado River and the need to reduce the volume of water taken from the river by California, Arizona and Nevada.

Writing in dissent, Gorsuch said the Navajos were merely seeking to have their water rights seriously considered.

“Today, the Navajo Reservation has become ‘the largest Indian reservation in the United States,’ with over 17 million acres, and over 300,000 members,” he wrote. “Its western boundary runs alongside a vast stretch of the Colorado River. Yet even today, water remains a precious resource. Members of the Navajo Nation use around 7 gallons of water per day for all of their household needs — less than one-tenth the amount the average American household uses. In some parts of the reservation, as much as 91% of Navajo households lack access to water. That deficit owes in part to the fact that no one has ever assessed what water rights the Navajo possess.”

Washington attorney Shay Dvoretsky, representing the Navajo Nation in a losing cause, had argued the court did not need to consider the Colorado River at this stage of the case. “The Nation asks only that the United States, as trustee, assess its people’s needs and develop a plan to meet them,” he argued.

For more than a decade, the Navajo Nation has been fighting its water rights claims in federal court. It won a preliminary victory in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021, which said it had a claim for breach of trust, noting that the 1868 treaty referred to agriculture.

“The Nation’s right to farm reservation lands ... gives rise to an implied right to the water necessary to do so,” the appeals court said. However, it stopped short of deciding whether this included “rights to the mainstream of the Colorado River or any other specific water sources.”

But last fall, the Supreme Court agreed to hear appeals from both the Interior Department and Arizona that sought to toss out the 9th Circuit’s decision.

U.S. Solicitor Gen. Elizabeth B. Prelogar argued the 1868 treaty said nothing about water and established no specific duties for the government related to water. Moreover, the Navajo Nation has been given water rights from two tributaries of the Colorado River, including San Juan River in Utah, she said.

Lawyers for Arizona, joined by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said the high court’s decrees have allocated the waters from the lower Colorado River, and it is too late for lawsuits that seek new rights to the same water.

Full Artical won't fit.

How do you create a convincing span of nature over one of the state’s busiest freeway corridors so wildlife like L.A.’s famous, ill-fated cougar, P-22, can cross unscathed?

First you build a nursery and collect a million hyperlocal seeds.

This is not hyperbole. After Katherine Pakradouni was hired in January 2022 to grow the plants for the upcoming Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Agoura Hills, she spent much of the year combing the hills within five miles of the crossing, collecting — yes — more than a million seeds from native plants.

Before she went collecting, she had to build a special nursery near the north side of the crossing, where she and her team are planting those seeds to grow trays and trays of the native flora that will fill the crossing when the concrete superstructure is completed late next year.

Those girders are scheduled to be installed over several weeks, starting this fall, between midnight and 5 a.m. The freeway will never be closed completely, Rock said. Using precast girders means the span can be constructed first on one side of the freeway and then the other, so traffic can be diverted in the wee hours to other lanes.

Once the drainage system is completed and the soil is brought in, planting can begin. The $92-million project — split 50/50 between public money and donations to the National Wildlife Federation and its Save LA Cougars fund, including $26 million from Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation, its largest contributor — is scheduled for completion at the end of 2025.

When Republican Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida bused and flew migrants to Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., and other so-called “sanctuary cities,” they might have envisioned they were exporting the same chaos as border states have experienced as they grapple with a historic number of migrants. They wanted leaders in these cities to admit they were wrong about their immigrant-friendly policies.

Earlier this month, Abbott sent migrants on a bus to Los Angeles. And DeSantis has admitted he dispatched migrants on two chartered flights to Sacramento a few days earlier, luring them with false promises of housing, shelter and legal help.

But Abbott and DeSantis are mistaken if they think they are teaching cities with sanctuary polices any lessons with their inhumane political stunts or causing their leaders to rethink their commitment to not treating migrants as criminals.

Those governors and their political allies also seem to be confused about what it means when cities have sanctuary policies. Though policies vary, providing sanctuary means not turning migrants over to federal immigration authorities simply for being in the country illegally. It means treating them like humans in need rather than pawns.

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That’s what leaders in Los Angeles, Sacramento and other “sanctuary cities” did as buses and planes dumped dozens of tired and often confused migrants on their doorsteps in recent months. They rallied attention and resources, while religious and other nonprofit organizations stepped up to welcome the migrants with shelter, food and clothes. In some instances, these migrants have even found temporary jobs, illustrating the need for their labor.

Abbott and DeSantis may also not realize that sanctuary policies were designed to help law enforcement keep communities safe. Sanctuary policies were developed because police in many cities such as Los Angeles were frustrated because undocumented immigrants were not reporting crimes or stepping forward as witnesses for fear of deportation.

Critics say these sanctuary cities have laws and policies that shield criminals and obstruct federal immigration policies. But cities with sanctuary policies have lower than average crime rates, higher household incomes and lower poverty rates, according to various studies.

Local authorities did not refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement, as critics claim. They simply limited the role of local law enforcement in immigration cases, for example, by not using local police to do immigration checks or by not holding an undocumented immigrant in custody for a few extra days to serve federal authorities’ schedules.

Los Angeles is in the midst of transitioning from a “city of sanctuary” to “sanctuary city.” The difference is more than just semantics. The former designation is little more than a statement by city leaders in 2017 that they opposed then-President Trump’s dehumanizing anti-immigrant policies, which included separating young children from their parents. Some of those children have yet to be reunited with their parents years later. Earlier this month, the City Council voted to strengthen the policy by banning city personnel or resources from being used for immigration enforcement.

It’s true that the transports of migrants by the Texas and Florida governors have been inconvenient to cities such as Washington and New York, which have had to scramble to find housing and other resources. But they haven’t done a thing to undermine the foundation on which sanctuary policies were built.

This year, Angelenos were invited to start discarding potato peels, chicken bones and other food scraps in the green yard waste curbside bin rather than the trash can.

But it’s not exactly optional. A state law passed in 2016 requires every city and community in California to divert 75% of organic waste from landfills and to recover and redistribute 20% of edible food before it can be thrown away by 2025. Those that don’t comply can be fined up to $10,000 starting next year. Even individual households and businesses can be fined for noncompliance.

It’s a heavy lift, so to speak. Food scraps, food-soiled paper products, lawn clippings, tree trimmings and other organics typically make up about half of the 41 million tons of waste California sends to the dump each year. Or at least they did before the law went into full effect this year, though it’s not clear how much is being diverted quite yet. When organic waste rots it produces methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas that traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. Composting is an important tool to fight global warming.

California has already missed the law’s first deadline to divert 50% by 2020. Worse, the amount of organic material going to the landfill increased between 2014, which is the starting point to calculate reductions, and 2020. Now it is looking like the state will blow the 2025 deadline as well.

That is at least part of the reason the bipartisan Little Hoover Commission has called for the 2016 law, Senate Bill 1383, to be temporarily paused. In a report released earlier this month, the commission, which is composed of members of the public and legislators, wrote that “significant changes are needed if the state is to meet its target of reducing the amount of organic material going into landfills. We believe the state should reaffirm its goal, while reconsidering its method.”

There’s nothing wrong with reaffirming the state’s organic recycling goal. And if the method of implementation can be improved upon, we’re all for it. But stopping the organics recycling law now after cities and private industry have invested so much time and money into compliance would be a huge mistake. If California is lagging in carrying out this crucial climate change policy, the response should be to try harder, not to give up.

Happily, that’s the position of CalRecycle, the state agency overseeing and guiding local governments’ compliance with the law. CalRecycle Director Rachel Machi Wagoner said pausing the law would send a terrible message to the waste industry that has been investing in building new facilities, such as those to do large-scale organic composting, and to local governments that have been setting up recycling and food recovery programs to meet the 2025 deadline.

Besides, she says it is too soon to say whether the 2025 deadline will be met. Cities and communities have made significant improvements this year to catch up after being stalled by the pandemic. “We have made so much progress in the last 18 months, and that is not reflected in their review,” Wagoner said of the commission report. For example San Diego, the state’s second-largest city, was behind in implementation but now expects to roll out curbside organics collection to all residents by August, she said.

The report makes clear that the commission’s intention is to help the state reach its organics recycling goal, and many of its recommendations to improve compliance — such as increasing public education and providing extra consideration for rural counties — are welcome. The suggestion that California become a model of waste management that other countries can follow is certainly right on.

State regulators should embrace the commission’s ideas for improvement — and forge full speed ahead to reach the 2025 goal.

California’s two biggest reservoirs are all but full after reaching perilously low levels late last year.

Lake Shasta, at 96% full, and Lake Oroville, at 100%, had fallen to around 25% to 30% of their capacity before the state’s historically wet winter rejuvenated them.

Statewide, reservoirs are at 85% of total capacity, well above their 30-year average of 73% for the month of June. With the Sierra Nevada snowpack still above three times its normal level for mid-June, they are expected to fill up even more as the snow melts.

The before-and-after images below from NASA show Lake Shasta on Nov. 18, 2022, when the lake stood at just 31% of capacity, and again on May 29, 2023, when it was 98% full.

California’s biggest reservoir had not been so full in more than four years, according to California Department of Water Resources data. A “bathtub ring” around the lake showing how far the water lline had fallen was clearly visible in November, but it had vanished by May.

Lake Oroville, in Butte County, has also undergone a spectacular transformation.

The image below shows the lake near Enterprise Bridge on Dec. 21, when levels were at 29% of capacity. A narrow band of water winds through the bottom of the gully, far below the bridge’s span. Aerial view of a bridge crossing a mostly dry lake with a narrow band of water in the gully far below the bridge

Lake Oroville under Enterprise Bridge had nearly disappeared on Dec. 21, 2022.

(Ken James / California Department of Water Resources)

Less than six months later, the landscape had undergone a noticeable shift. In the image below, taken June 12, water levels are dramatically higher at the same part of Lake Oroville, filling up nearly to the top of the piles supporting the bridge. Aerial view of a full lake with a bridge crossing

A similar view of Lake Oroville on June 12, 2023, showed a dramatic transformation. The reservoir is now 100% full.

(Ken James / California Department of Water Resources)

In the second photo, the reservoir is 100% capacity, submerging the barren hillsides that were previously exposed by low water levels.

A study of satellite data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found that the winter brought the greatest net gain of water in California’s lakes in the 22 years that the metric had been tracked.

Between October 2022 and March 2023, the Central Valley’s “lakes, rivers, soil, snowpack, and underground aquifers” saw their levels increased by the equivalent of 20 inches, or around twice the average gain in the last 22 years.

However, groundwater levels remain depleted, experts say, and may remain so into the future.

“One good winter of rain and snow won’t make up for years of extreme drought and extensive groundwater use,” said Felix Landerer, a scientist at JPL.

Times staff writer Nathan Solis contributed to this report.

Public policy and common perception have long tied the road to homelessness with mental illness and drug addiction.

But a new study out Tuesday — the largest and most comprehensive investigation of California’s homeless population in decades — found another cause is propelling much of the crisis on our streets: the precarious poverty of the working poor, especially Black and brown seniors.

“These are old people losing housing,” Dr. Margot Kushel told me. She’s the lead investigator on the study from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, done at the request of state health officials.

“They basically were ticking along very poor, and sometime after the age of 50 something happened,” Kushel said. That something — divorce, a loved one dying, an illness, even a cutback in hours on the job — sparked a downward spiral and their lives “just blew up,” as Kushel puts it.

Kushel and her team found that nearly half of single adults living on our streets are over the age of 50. And 7% of all homeless adults, single or in families, are over 65.

If that doesn’t kindle at least a bit of fear and empathy in your heart, you’re either a mogul or a trust fund baby who has never struggled to pay the bills. As much as we want to see the average homeless person as a drug tourist dropping into too-progressive cities for the good fentanyl and lax laws, as is the narrative in San Francisco, or someone whose mental illness makes it impossible for them to live unaided, the truth is simpler — and much more devastating: As Californians age, they are being priced out of housing.

We have come to the point of income inequality that if you are older and unable to work, homelessness is a real threat throughout the Golden State. For every 100 extremely low-income people in California, defined as making less than 30% of area median income, there are only 24 units of affordable housing available.

That makes obtaining and keeping permanent housing an ugly game of musical chairs, as the report puts it, in which too many are left standing when the music stops.

“What people need to know is there are professionals on the street,” DeDe Hancock told me. She’s a member of the lived experience advisory council for the study.

“People who are middle income are dropping to low,” Hancock said. “People working every day are living in cars.”

Before becoming homeless in 2006, Hancock, who has a psychology degree from UC San Diego, owned both a home and a rental property. She lost her job as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit after pointing out a financial discrepancy, she said, and filed a wrongful termination complaint.

But losing her job started that spiral that ended up with her losing both her properties. She and her son moved into her mother’s home, but within a few months, her mom died of pancreatic cancer. She ended up losing that property, too, when she couldn’t pay off a loan against it.

One loss leading to the next.

Her 12-year-old son went to live with his football coach, and she began sleeping in a storage unit where she was keeping the remnants of her lost life. But eventually she wound up on the streets, two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2009. She remained homeless for seven years until she was able to apply for early Social Security at age 62.

“The sad thing is that in those seven years, no one ever asked me why or how I became homeless,” Hancock told me.

And like so much of our inequality, race is a big factor — Kushel found that more than a quarter of those surveyed identified as Black, while only 6% of Californians overall are Black. Native Americans are also over-represented in our homeless population.

Those facts are shameful and should change both the narratives we tell ourselves about the 171,000 people homeless in California and how we fix the crisis.

That’s not to say that there isn’t also a crisis of mental illness on our streets, or that substance use isn’t a problem. Mental illness and substance use are clearly troubling pieces of the puzzle, as is the terrible job we do helping people re-establish themselves when they come out of our jails and prisons. The study found 1 in 5 of those interviewed became homeless after being incarcerated.

A bit more than a quarter of the people Kushel’s team interviewed had a mental illness serious enough to require a hospitalization at some point in their lives — a sign of what we all know, that our mental health care system is unconscionably lacking. Which is why initiatives such as CARE Court are critical to providing an alternative path for those with severe mental illness.

And though Kushel points out that the perception is that most people on the street are using drugs, “it’s not everybody,” she said. Only about a third said they were regular users of meth — the most common drug reported.

But Kushel found that even for people with those other factors, financial instability was the tipping point.

She discovered that many of the older people living on the streets were employed for most of their lives, often in physically demanding jobs such as waitressing, warehouse work or construction. The kind of jobs our economy depends on, where workers are easily replaced and often are.

That was the case for Tony, a homeless man I met last week in Sacramento, who says he ended up in a tent after “a storm of bad luck.” He asked me not to use his last name, but he shared his story. He was born in the San Fernando Valley and went to Sacramento to be with a girlfriend. He had a job in transportation but lost his license over a traffic violation in 2018 that he never cleared up. Then he broke up with the girlfriend and had to move out of her apartment.

“After you lose your job, you lose everything,” he told me, standing under a line of shady sycamore trees on a road that divides a rich neighborhood from one filled with encampments.

“There’s too much money on one side [of the street] and not enough on the other,” he said.

The study used eight counties throughout California, including Los Angeles, to create a snapshot of both rural and urban homelessness — surveying nearly 3,200 people and conducting 365 in-depth interviews. Researchers found that the results held regardless of whether a person was without housing in one of our large cities, or in our less-populated northern and eastern counties.

Kushel and her team also found another myth-dispelling fact: Most of the homeless people on California‘s streets are Californians. While conservative pundits love to scream about lazy homeless people flocking to the state for easy living, “we have to stop these narratives that people are flooding into California,” Kushel said. “It’s not true.”

Kushel found that 9 out of 10 people lost their last housing in California and three-quarters live in the same county as where they most recently had a place to call home.

And a side note: Does compassion require a specific ZIP Code? Most of the money cities and counties are using for housing and homelessness comes from the state and the federal government — not local coffers. Those dollars do not come with where-are-you-really-from strings.

Kushel said her findings should be a wake-up call that while access to substance use treatment and rebuilding the mental health care system are urgent for some of the homeless population, the only solution to homelessness is housing. We have to build not just affordable housing, but housing for extremely low-income folks, she said. And we have to do better at keeping people in the housing they have, through rent subsidies and other direct intervention, when life punches them in the face.

Because as fast as we can pull people out of homelessness, the rent is too high and more and more people can’t pay it. She found in the six months prior to their being homeless, people’s average income was $960.

So impoverished people need stable housing — which is the starting point L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is using, to her credit. My colleagues Ruben Vives and Doug Smith recently reported that during her first six months in office, Bass has found permanent housing for more than 4,300 people living on the streets and interim housing for thousands more. Her plans may be imperfect, but they have the right goal.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has initiated a crackdown in the troubled Tenderloin that entails arresting folks for crimes including public intoxication, dragging them into custody for a few hours, then tossing them back on the street. Not a single person detained has accepted offers of treatment so far — unsurprising since incarceration is not a huge trust-builder.

That kind of short-term fix drives people farther into the margins, Kushel warned, making them invisible but no less in need.

The last statistic I will give you is this: Fewer than half of people living on the streets have received formal help obtaining housing. Despite all our efforts, there is a massive disconnect between how much intervention the government perceives it is offering and how much is actually reaching people, Kushel said.

Though the reasons for that are unclear, she said it may be in part because aid is focused on shelters or troubled encampments and misses the quiet, hidden homeless.

That is the case for Ivan Dixon, 53, whom I talked to in an alley in Sacramento. He’s been homeless since his father kicked him out at age 14, he said, living with a group of underground hip-hop dancers until he aged out of that scene.

When I asked him if he wanted housing, he looked at me as if I was stupid.

“Of course I do,” he told me. But he said being homeless means you are “nobody’s friend.” He has not been offered help, he said. But he also tries to avoid people — moving every night to avoid becoming a “target” of both violence and the police.

“That’s just being in the streets,” he told me.

But it’s no life for an old man.

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