HOMELESS LA RANT

Regan started this bullshit in the 1980s with closing mental health facilities. Since then there has been a steady decline nation wide of mental health hospitals for severely mentally ill patients. They have literally been turned out onto the streets to live like animals. All homeless people are not created equal, and not all will take help and thrive. 

There is a segment of the NON HOMELESS population that isn't willing to work and earn for a living. So there are the same types of people living on the streets. The type of person if you put a roof over their heads, they wouldn't lift a finger to keep it. A month or two later they are back out on the street back to their shenanigans. 

There are people who are out getting high and drinking who given a place to live or rehab wouldn't stop using to the point of not being able to function normally. Then there is the person who has been fired or downsized and unable to find work. Or the person who has been bankrupted by MEDICAL BILLS who has no place to live because their health will not allow them to work but social security A.) takes SO LONG TO GET and B.) Isn't enough to live on so collecting a check and living in a tent is about the most they can hope for. 

There are people who have a mental illness and cross over to drugs and alcohol to self medicate thus amplifying their original illness. Functioning in society isn't really an option. They can function sometimes to UNDERSTAND how to apply for housing; but the process is so daunting and tedious for a perfectly sober sane person that making appointments for assessments and case management are almost a joke for someone struggling with mental illness or addictions. 

Outreach is meager at best, and funding is stretched so tight that finding a decent, clean, safe place to live on a voucher or section 8 program can try men's souls. The section 8 program has changed in the past couple of years too. Section 8 used to handle problems with tenants through their program. If a program participant broke a rule (say was selling drugs out of their unit) section 8 would then be responsible for removing them quickly so another tenant could move in. 

NOW it's up to the landlord to evict the tenant screwing up and it's a long and involved process that could end up siding on the side of the tenant and leaving the owner with excessive damage and disturbances to the property. Because of this section 8 is no longer a golden ticket to a landlord, and options have shrunk for apartment hunters. Section 8 tenants are even being put on leases that when they expire they are not allowed to stay and the landlord then turns around and rents the unit for market price. 

There is NO regulation of landlords adding affordable units to new construction. There is no punishment for not opening 30% of your units to low income families.




Did I mention that the average waiting list in Los Angeles for low income housing is 2-7 YEARS LONG? What are people supposed to do for 2 to 7 years while they are waiting to be housed?




Regan closed the hospitals then flooded the streets with drugs.......

Rainy

Watching A Ben Stiller movie where he has this inner dialogue about his personal life choices. 

Now, he is a middle aged man who is taking his son to college in Boston. He's gotten into Harvard. 

They live a pretty nice middle class life. Live in a nice white suburb and want for nothing. He's coveting people who have millions and billions of dollars. Who have private planes and preferential treatment everywhere they go.

Why wasn't that him?

He had friends in college who hooked up and were power hungry. Who were competitive and over achievers. He says at one point his wife was always so content with whatever she had. He says in his head 'Was her contentment holding me back?'

Later he flips it and realizes his son is an amazing human. That if he was some rich guy his kid could have turned out spoiled and entitled. That's the upside. His kid is grounded and pretty normal. 

But....

When they get to the interview his son realizes he got the wrong day and that he was a day late. Dad loses it. He can interview back in California with an alumni. The son is cool with it but his dad won't let it go. He's insistent that they get their interview. The son is trying to calm his dad down. His dad is screaming 'Your a white kid from the suburbs, without a sob story and you aren't a legacy! We are the underdogs here! No! No! No! No!' So he obsessively tries to think of who he knows that he can call to help him get his son in. He only knows one guy. Whom he's tried to do business with in the past and simply blew him off years prior. So now he has to call this asshat for help with Harvard.

I guess this is real shit. You have to grovel sometimes. He calls the dude and he's living in Hawaii with two women he's developing a resort there on the island. Making more millions without even trying. He lets it slip that friends of theirs had gotten married, and he realizes he hadn't been invited to the wedding. In his head he thinks that the guestlist wasn't compiled out of friendship but out of perceived success. He was not on that list.

FUCK!

I guess I can understand his torture. Why not him? Why them? I guess we all go through that.

I am at the half way mark of my life and want to make a sharp turn into prosperity in a short period of time. I have to be a beast.

Insane beast.