SW corner of 3rd St. and Main St., Skid Row, LA, 2003 © Camilo J. Vergara, used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

We do not typically associate homeless with death. Yet homelessness is, in many ways, very much a death sentence. Life expectancy for Los Angeles’ homeless population is 48. (California’s, in morbid contrast, is 80.) This should seriously disturb the residents of Los Angeles, which for years has faced a severe homelessness crisis. According to a recent USC study on homelessness, “between 2010 and 2017, the number of homeless people across Los Angeles County went from 38,700 to over 55,000 — an increase of 42%.” It’s not hard to figure out why, either: a combination of soaring rents, stagnant wages (if you’re lucky enough to have a job), and personal debt makes it nearly impossible to live a financially stable life, nonetheless in one of the most expensive cities in the country. Los Angeles’ safety net comprises meager welfare payments and a years-long wait for Section 8 housing vouchers. In turn, every month thousands upon thousands of people and their families are forced out of their homes to the streets or their cars or motel rooms. But homelessness doesn’t just leave one without a home — it also makes one much more likely to die.

This year, homeless people accounted for 16 percent of all the homicide victims in Los Angeles — even though homeless people make up just 1 percent of the city’s population. Over the past year the homeless homicide increased 35 percent, even as the overall homicide rate for the city continues to fall. Looking beyond the data is necessary, but predictably horrendous: In September, Ramon Escobar, armed with a baseball bat and bolt cutters, murdered four homeless people across Los Angeles County. Out of the eight people who survived his attacks, five were left comatose. Last week, two people murdered a homeless man in his sleep. And only two days ago, Fred Johnson was charged with stabbing to death a homeless man in downtown Los Angeles.

Growing up in Los Angeles has meant listening to family and friends talk of homeless people’s innate violent tendencies. “Homeless people are unpredictable, aggressive creatures whom one should avoid at all costs,” they said. It is certainly true that homeless people, just like non-homeless people, sometimes murder each other. But being homeless in and of itself does not — it’s sad that this even needs to be said — make one more likely to commit violence. Being homeless does, however, make one more likely to become the victim of violence. Indeed, the LAPD notes that “between 2016 and 2017, there had been a 14% increase in the number of homeless people who were victims of Part I crimes — such as homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.” Last year, the “Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles [found that] 50% of the women who sleep in shelters or on the streets of [Los Angeles] reported they had experienced physical or sexual abuse.” It’s for good reason that sociologists refer to homeless people as “disposable.” Shunted to the utmost margins of society, they must protect themselves from the constant aggressions of the police and, increasingly, regular people. A homeless person in Los Angeles (or any city, for that matter) does not have the luxury of falling asleep without worrying that someone may stroll by and casually stomp their head in.

Yet most homeless people will not die of murder — they will die of poverty. Living on the street exposes one to the elements, and Los Angeles’ older homeless population is more vulnerable to the city’s bipolar weather. Last July several homeless people died of heat stroke induced by 100-plus degree temperatures and dehydration. When rain comes to Los Angeles, homeless people’s belongings are ruined; tents are flooded or swept away entirely. Other deaths fall under the category of “accidental”: a homeless person was not murdered — they only overdosed or burned to death or killed themselves. Or take the case of 30-year-old Kaily Lund, who suffocated after getting her neck trapped under the lid of a donation box.

So-called preventable diseases have proved fatal, too: In 2017, the Los Angeles Coroner reported that “cardiovascular disease, pneumonia, diabetes, cancer, cirrhosis, severe bacterial infections and other treatable conditions were all listed as causes of [homeless] deaths.” But conditions are “treatable” only insofar as has access to a doctor. Last year a hepatitis A epidemic that killed sixteen people in San Diego reached Los Angeles’ homeless population. And several months ago a typhus outbreak affected Los Angeles’ homeless and their pets, the result of having to sleep next to flea-infested rats. The “cleanup” effort to combat this outbreak has mostly consisted of confiscating and destroying homeless people’s personal items. People often return to their tents to find them gone entirely. They have become, in essence, homeless again.

Outbreaks like October’s are not uncommon given the overcrowding and unsanitary conditions that Los Angeles’ homeless live in. In 2012 the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health found on Skid Row “small piles of feces and urine on the sidewalks and grass areas of the majority of the streets surveyed,” “ an accumulation of feces [and] urine in two storm drains,” and “no soap in one of the City maintained automatic public toilets, and trash and debris in another public toilet.” For Skid Row’s 2,000-odd residents, there exist only nine bathrooms. A report conducted in 2017 on Skid Row’s bathroom shortage found that “38% of the available bathrooms were broken during operating hours, and most lacked paper towels and menstrual products.” Homeless people cannot even go to the bathroom without permission: they “have to ask guards to use mission facilities.” The bathrooms are “also hard to get into, inaccessible to disabled people and provide no privacy.” The report concludes that “homeless people on Skid Row have less access to bathrooms than Syrian refugees living in a United Nations camp overseas.” (Which certainly doesn’t excuse the inhumane conditions of refugee camps.)

Now, the city is indeed making efforts to address the crisis. These efforts, however, have proven pitiful. In 2016 the city passed a $1.2 billion bond measure (Measure HHH) to fund the construction of 10,000 housing units over the next decade. As of October, though, only about 600 units had been funded. (Funded — not built.) The following year voters approved Measure H, a sales tax raise designed to raise $355 million annually. By the end of 2018, though, “not a single unit financed by voter-approved money opened.” The city says that those 10,000 units have now become 6,000. But even 10,000 was insufficient; the city needs — at the bare minimum — more than 20,000 new units to house all of its homeless. Mayor Garcetti’s A Bridge Home shelter building initiative is a wasteful Band-Aid at best. And it’s been met with resistance, not open arms: This year, “mass protests against allowing homeless people near schools, homes and businesses helped kill a homeless housing proposal in Sherman Oaks, and a Koreatown shelter proposal.” Los Angeles’ residents certainly support allocating money toward addressing the crisis — as long as the solutions are out of sight and out of mind.

Bond measures and sales taxes cannot restore a deficiency in human morality. The city clearly needs to exercise its veto power to force through shelter and housing proposals. But many of the neighborhoods debating shelter proposals have significant financial resources they can use to tie up projects in the courts for years on end. Meanwhile, Los Angeles’ homeless people will continue to rot. In the end, the city will probably force homeless housing projects into low-income, minority communities, where the city will ensure they remain neglected and underfunded. Undoubtedly homeless is an economic problem. But its roots are very much human. Every day, those with wealth and power make decisions that, whether they admit or not, kill homeless people. We have the resources to stop the killings; what we’re missing is the compassion. For now, homelessness will remain a death sentence.

Correction: This piece originally stated that Fred Johnson had been convicted of murder — so far, he has only been charged.