Daunted by Homelessness

Fifty-three years ago this month, Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. Over time, the hotel was torn down and replaced by a school and a park to remember Kennedy and his soaring, hopeful rhetoric. But here’s the truth. Los Angeles has the second highest rate of homelessness in the United States, three quarters of whom live without any kind of shelter at all, and the site of Kennedy’s assassination is now, sadly and ironically, covered in tents and tarps, as seen below. Despite the overwhelming kindness and generosity of the people I’ve met with in LA, I’ve witnessed so much poverty in the last few days, cardboard boxes on top of cardboard boxes across boardwalks and side streets, that I called my wife a bit distraught last night, unsure of how anyone would even begin to tackle this issue if they wanted to. If you were the mayor of a city with more than 50,000 people living on the street, where would you start?