Voices from the homeless community along Venice Boulevard (via latimesopinion)
When we talk about the homeless population, we tend to focus on people who are mentally ill or under the influence of drugs or alcohol. But many of the 40,000 homeless people in the city of Los Angeles — 33% to 71%, depending on whose numbers you use — are neither. They are simply not able to afford places to live in Los Angeles, where rents for apartments average $2,500 a month.
Paul Alvarez, who used to work in construction before a spider bit his eye, which led to his homelessness. He recently has been staying in a tent at Venice and Grand View boulevards. After my father died, 16 years ago, I started framing houses. I built the foundation and the walls, and I made $24.50 an hour. I liked the work.One night a brown recluse spider bit me in my eye when I was asleep. I didn’t feel it, but I woke up, and my eye was swollen. I went to the doctor and they sent me to UCLA, where I was in bed for a month. When I got out, I owed them $15,000. Since I hadn’t paid my rent, my landlord had kicked me out. That’s when I became homeless.
People are generally nice to me when they walk by. At first, when I started sitting here, they’d give me mean looks, but, after a while, they either ignored me or they were polite. The people who work in the post office are nice to me; they say hello. I don’t know their names, but I recognize them, and they’re all nice to me.
“It’s like there are two versions of life — the homeless version and the not-homeless version. People don’t understand. They can’t.”In Minnesota, you can’t live in your car. I was 45. I have three brothers and a sister, but, over the years, we talked less and less, until we weren’t talking anymore. And they had their own families. I couldn’t ask them for help. I figured I’d drive south. It’s warmer, the further south you go.
Some homeless people won’t take money from the government. I’ve never understood that. I don’t understand people who live in the extremes. It has to be all one way, or all the other way, with them. There’s no middle ground. Some people are just like that. That’s why there’s war, because a lot of people are like that. Some people either want to kiss you or kill you; there’s no middle ground for them.I was married for a bit. I met her at a bar called the Minnetonka Mist.
Do I smoke? Yes, a pack every four days. American Spirits. It’s enough to kill a normal human, but not me. I don’t drink and I don’t do drugs, though I smoke pot whenever I can. You have to do the things that make you feel good. Blue, a father of five, says he thinks about his children every day. He has been estranged from them for years.We owned a house; it was my grandmother’s. My mother could have tried to hold onto it but she didn’t want to; it would have been too hard to pay the loans back and, besides, it had lots of memories she didn’t want to be around. So she went to Vegas. She asked me if I wanted to come with her, but I told her no. I love everything about Venice. The weather, the people, the atmosphere.
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