Right now a few dozen volunteers are mobilizing to prepare for the hurricane rains about to hit LA this weekend.
We're buying tarp, tents, ponchos, + plastic bags so our unhoused neighbors can stay dry + so they can keep their stuff dry.
Ways you can help:
🧵
Last rains we heard people say they hadn't eaten in days because they didn't want to go outside and get soaked or get the inside of their tent wet.
Drop off some meals + water to your unhoused neighbors if you can so they don't have to go outside.
If you have any extra plastic bins, offer them up. Bins and plastic bags are the only way to keep things like important documents dry.
Same with any extra camping supplies like blankets, tarp, sleeping bags, tents, lanterns, etc.
Look out for people that are suffering from hypothermia. If you see someone soaking wet and laying down on the sidewalk who is showing signs of hypothermia, call 911 (omitting that they're unhoused - just say a person is unconscious and needs MEDICAL help).
If you see someone soaking wet, offer a change of dry clean clothes in a plastic bag. Sitting in wet clothes for a long period of time in the cold is a recipe for hypothermia and possible death. Especially if the person is elderly or young.
Lastly if you can't do any of the above and you'd like to support our work, please v*nmo @KtownforAll. Tarps and tents are expensive. Thank you! ❤️💜
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Nobody every plans to end up on the street in a tent.
But it's so easy.
An emergency occurs: Your: car breaks down, partner dies, hospitalized due to an accident, get sick, get laid off, hours are reduced, the cost of your meds went up, etc.
You miss a couple of paychecks.🧵
You get evicted.
Then if you don't have friends/family to move you in, you probably move into your car.
You try to get rehoused but don't have a large deposit saved up. You have an eviction on your record so you're automatically declined for most apartments.
Application fees eat up a lot of the money you have - all to get declined.
You try to keep a job but living in a car - being harassed by cops or homeowners to move keeps you from sleeping. Finding a place to shower is hard.
No therapy/medication given to an unhoused person is going to repair their credit, give them 3x the rent in deposit, 3x the rent in income, positive references, and increasing income to cover rent increases for years. The for profit housing system is not set up to house the poor.
Most unhoused people have evictions on their records that make it impossible to rent a market rate apartment ever again. WE NEED HOUSING WITHOUT BARRIERS. Publically owned, maintained, affordable, and not dependent on credit or other economic screening tools.
Some voucher + public housing programs exclude you from qualifying if you have an eviction on your record. You have to be poor enough to meet their qualifications but not poor enough to have ever been housing insecure due to poverty. Make it make sense!
This type of "news" only serves to rile up the ppl who believe that the unhoused deserve nothing and if they have anything other than nothing they must not really be suffering. The comment section is filled with ppl saying how the person is lazy and mooching off tax dollars.
Newsflash: Housed ppl leave tech out for free every time they move in this city. I got a free food processor that way.
Also: A generator/solar battery costs less than rent. A mint mobile plan costs less than rent. A shared Netflix account costs less than rent.
And watching TV and listening to music is one of the few escapes people have from the absolute torture it is to live in a tent outside. Good for this person who figured this out.
My cousins are now Qanon MAGA right wingers even though their parents were undocumented Mexican immigrants and grew up in a heavily Mexican community. They got radicalized online and came to hate our music + culture + coming to family parties.
They've since taken on more Anglo sounding nicknames and stopped speaking Spanish completely, and there's a ton of people like that out there. Self-hatred and assimilation will have radicalized people of color embracing nazism thinking they're "one of the good ones."
Just adding this since I've seen a few skeptical "How can the shooter be Latino and a nazi" posts floating around. The answer: Angry disaffected radicalized assimilated self hating young men.
Waking up to a text from a young lady who has been trying desperately to get off the streets. 4 LAHop requests - the requests that are supposed to get a LAHSA social worker out to people to connect them to services - and zero connections made. "They don't want help" is a lie.
And heartbreakingly, while she's desperately trying to figure out how to get inside, she's also worrying about her tent and all her belongings being thrown away in a sweep during the rain. ID cards, medicine, pets, food, clothing. They don't care they toss it all.
People spend so much energy moving from street to street for these pointless sweeps that they can't go to resource centers and sit and wait all day to talk someone. If LAHSA shows up when someone isn't in their tent they throw it all away so people don't want to leave them.
Being homeless is illegal in the US. Loitering, pan handling, trespassing, open containers in public, public urination, + dozens of other crimes are used as an excuse to arrest ppl who don't have a place to live and public facilities to use.
A lot of people don't have criminal records until they become unhoused - or become unhoused after their first charge that keeps them from being able to find a place to live. Then they get more and more charges due to the nature of the criminalization of the poor + survival.
Even if he had 40 murder charges (which he didn't -because no one racks up 40 charges unless they're minor!!) he didn't deserve to get executed by a random person in a middle of a train for yelling about being hungry and thirsty.