(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

According to L.A.’s most recent homeless census, there are roughly 47,000 people without a place to sleep on any given night in the city. Thousands more families have lost their residence in recent years, with 16,000 homeless families in the county now dependent on California’s cash welfare system, CalWORKs, a system which is increasingly failing to prevent homelessness as subsidies have mostly plateaued while average rents have shot up by 25% since 2000. In 2016, for the first time in over a century the number of women and children seeking shelter on Skid Row surpassed the number of single men.

L.A. County officials estimate that roughly 8,000 women become homeless annually at some point during pregnancy, however there are only 69 beds dedicated for pregnant women in shelters. In the five years from 2010–2015, the L.A. County coroner reported the deaths of at least eight infants who died sleeping in shelters, car seats, garages, or other unsuitable conditions which ended up being the only choice for homeless parents. Under California’s past two administrations, both Republican and Democrat, the state’s legislature has repeatedly cut grants to CalWORKs — slashing funds by 12% between 2008 and 2013.

At first Governor Brown justified the cuts as part of a larger trend to trim spending during a recession, however the maximum checks available to families of three have still not risen back to 2006 levels despite a continued upward trend in the state’s median rent. In 2016, the maximum monthly CalWORKs check a family of three could receive was 714$, up only 20$ since 1989 — a measly 2.8% increase relative to median rent in California, which has more than doubled in the same time period. Meanwhile, last year Brown’s administration pulled $47 million from federal funds set aside for CalWORKs and other cash aid programs.

While the common misconception that welfare is some sort of handout for the lazy and unmotivated may be hard to penetrate, we must do so for the sake of the thousands in desperate need of help. Stripping away all of the rhetoric, the problem is quite simple: when wages remain stagnant and cash welfare is cut, if rent goes up (which it has) then people can and will fall through the cracks and become homeless. The result is a moral conundrum that we must face and attempt to rectify through our political institutions, should we feel a sufficient impetus to. The choice is ours — do we want to see the people lying on the sidewalk or sleeping in cars as a nuisance, victims of their own poor choices and subject to the unforgiving laws of social Darwinism, or should we empathize with them and try to help?

If we choose the latter, then we must confront with brutal honesty both the scope of the crisis and the costs of taking meaningful action to mitigate it. We cannot keep kidding ourselves when it comes to the common denominators. Somehow wages need to go up, people need more cash assistance, rent needs to go down, or some combination of the three needs to occur. We must remember that to continue trying the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the very definition of insanity. If we continue to cut welfare and ignore our state’s growing homeless population, this human rights issue can and will reach a critical mass — if it hasn’t already. Jerry Brown must decide if he intends for part of his legacy to be leaving California with the highest child poverty rate in the nation.

The Democratic supermajority of California’s state legislature risks leaving a shredded safety net as their legacy and the L.A. City Council ought to reconsider their priorities, particularly their decision to revive a decades old law prohibiting sleeping/living in cars in certain parts of the city. The original version of the law was struck down as discriminatory, but they hope this one will stick as long as it doesn’t explicitly target the homeless. Similar laws and ordinances have passed across the state, such as Proposition Q in San Francisco which prohibits sleeping in a tent on the sidewalk for longer than 24 hours. Taking a step back, such superficial Band-Aids applied in adherence with the out of sight, out of mind principle beg questions about the priorities of our legislators. Further, they beg questions regarding our priorities as individual citizens — bringing to light the flawed paradigms through which we view the human rights crisis on our hands.

When thousands of people have nowhere to stay, many of whom continue to work and receive welfare yet can’t afford rent, approximately one-third of whom struggle with mental illness or addiction, it’s somehow framed as a quality of life issue for the property-owners who have to see them sleeping on the streets or in their cars and not for those with no stable roof over their head. To me, that is a grotesque moral failure on our part both as citizens and as human beings. Instead of making private Facebook groups to “take back” our neighborhoods from the “homeless invasion”, lobbying our local politicians for laws to get them out of our neighborhood, let’s get to the roots of the problem. Instead of being content with blanket generalizations blaming liberal politicians or inept government, let’s finally put aside our partisan politics and preconceived notions to take an objective look at why one of the richest states in the richest nation in the world can afford to leave so many people out on the streets every night.