The public tends to blame homelessness on poverty, drug use, crime or warm weather. But other cities don’t have L.A. levels of homelessness. They have more housing.McGee said he spent a year as a sheetrock finisher to pay off the deed. Charities paid $4,000 in back taxes and bought him a television set.
McGee didn’t have money for dinner the night he allowed The Times to visit him; he was considering eating peanut butter from a jar because he had no bread. His dog Blackie was nursing new puppies, but McGee could not afford to treat the cancerous tumor that was bulging beside her teats. He had about half the monthly insulin he needed for his diabetes and no inhaler to treat his asthma.
Jackson cannot look at homelessness in isolation, she said. Decades-long problems, including a dark history of racial oppression, environmental discrimination and discriminatory zoning practices, have left many more people living in poverty, she said.At another downtown church breakfast, Brown spotted a woman who has helped keep people off the streets, Esther Ruth McGrigg.
The brother is back on the streets, but McGrigg’s old student and two other men were still staying in her small apartment. One man slept in the living room.