Down and out in Beverly Hills
- added September 14, 2008
- 3 responses
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- brad62
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- Homeless (186)
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"This is the finest place you can be," said Isaac Young, an affable 59-year-old with a wide grin and a smooth baritone voice who has been homeless in Beverly Hills since 1992.
In this manicured community of 35,000, Rolls Royces and Lamborghinis glide around city streets, movie stars live in gated mansions and Rodeo Drive price tags provoke gasps from tourists.
But the city also features about 30 rather scruffy residents who live in parks, bus shelters and alleyways.
I just looked at this article, it struck me as kind of funny
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They're an incongruous sight amid the shows of superfluous wealth, underscoring the pervasiveness of the huge homeless population in Los Angeles County. Some 74,000 people live on the streets or in shelters, making the county the nation's capital of homelessness.
"Homelessness is just all over, even Beverly Hills," said John Joel Roberts, chief executive of Path Partners, which provides street outreach services.
But the homeless in Beverly Hills have direct access to something most street dwellers do not: rich people, who can afford to be pretty generous. They pull up in Porsches and SUVs offering trays of cooked food, designer clothing still in dry-cleaner plastic and odd jobs.
"They have a sympathetic thing for us and we're grateful for it," said a man with grizzled hair pulling a train of wheeled suitcases, an office chair and a stroller piled high with a motley bunch of items found in the trash. He would only identify himself as "Bond."
Sometimes life even imitates the 1986 movie "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," in which a homeless man (Nick Nolte) is taken in by a hoity-toity couple (Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler).
At a park where homeless people congregate next to the Good Shepherd Catholic Church, Young found a benefactor who is allowing him to live free for a year in an empty house in swanky Benedict Canyon.
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We want to support a war at 30 billion a day. yet we cant give charity to our own homeless people.
But you'll give homes to 9 thousand iraqi's that hate us? -
I hope the word gets out to the rest of the transient homeless that life is better when you're homeless in the more affluent places.
The result of too much affluence in a culture is going to be more people left behind and it should be a closed loop.
There was an article somewhere else on current.com that showed statistics that the middle-class (working class) gives more to charity than the upper-class (affluence) in comparable net volume (that is a person with $100 giving $1 is more than someone with $1,000,000 giving $100). That's a statistic that should not be.
Affluence should come with more responsibility than privilege.
