The Homeless in Ventura: Frustration, Confusion, Ambivalence, Avoidance

I go round and round in a circle.

I don’t quite know what to think about the homeless in Ventura where I live.

There are new numbers of homeless people in the neighborhoods I travel in, and I have complicated and ambivalent feelings towards them.

On the one hand, they are a burden to the community and a blight on the landscape. Here is this homeless person sleeping under a camouflage blanket in the mulch off to the left of the strip mall, or pushing an abandoned grocery cart heaped tall with their belongings down the street. It sends a signal of tawdriness and a neighborhood in decline. The public costs associated with homelessness, the calls for service by police and social workers, are significant. There is trash, trespassing, and vandalism. Sometimes there is much worse.

On the other hand, there is a person living in squalor who is in need. That homeless lady limping across the street with no shoes is obviously down on her luck, to put it mildly, and one doesn’t want to kick someone when they are already down. They need help. Someplace to stay? A shower? A meal? Mental health treatment? Drug addiction counseling? A subsidized apartment? Their humanity affirmed? Dignity recognized? A second — or a third or fourth — chance?

But then so many of these of the homeless are obviously drug addicts or alcoholics and/or they suffer from serious mental illness, and they are living on the streets for a reason. I recognize many of them will have difficulty doing what most do: have a regular job, go to a daily job, pay rent each month — getting by as a “normal person.” People much smarter and more knowledgeable than myself have wrestled with the homeless conundrum without success. California has a low rate of poverty compared to the rest of the nation, but with only 12% of the population California has fully half of all the nation’s homeless living on its streets. A quick Google search brought up this:

As of January 2018, California had an estimated 129,972 experiencing homelessness on any given day, as reported by Continuums of Care to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

It is a stubborn problem. Homelessness has many complex causes and few easy solutions.

I don’t know.

But I do know that over the last year or two, the homeless in Ventura have started to migrate away from the beach and downtown areas where they have always been numerous to the suburban neighborhoods further east where most of the people live. I have heard that police patrols breaking up encampments in the Santa Clara and Ventura river beds had forced the homeless to other neighborhoods, or that downtown merchant crackdowns had dispersed the homeless to areas where they don’t normally stay. But the numbers of homeless on the east end of town had increased. Like a frog that will fail to notice the water in a saucepan getting hotter little by little and fail to jump to safety even as it begins to boil alive, we get used to the homeless here and there and fail to see how much worse the problem has gradually gotten over time.

It changed the landscape in subtle but telling ways. For example, in the shopping center at Victoria Ave. and Telephone Rd. the landlords have been waging a passive-aggressive struggle with the homeless. In one little alley between a strip mall and a gas station next door, the landlord has erected a fence that cleverly tried to discourage the homeless from congregating there. The idea was to make it difficult to flit from the alley to the gas station and back and forth, and to thereby make the location much more isolated and inhospitable. The landlord also installed lights in that alley designed to keep the alley from becoming a dark niche where dark things take place in the dark. But the homeless still congregate in that alley, and the police can be seen in that there often standing over the homeless. “Move on guys. This is private property and you are loitering.” A conversation that happens a thousand times in an hour in California, the homeless capital of the country.

The county jail is across the street, and I suspect many vagrants are released from jail and they simply walk across the street to this area. They don’t have cars. They don’t have money. So they just come here. They hang out. They do drugs. They talk. The police occasionally stop and question them. They move on. Other homeless take their place.

This whole parking lot near the Ventura County Government Center, centered by a Vons grocery store, can be a bit of a freak show. There are strange characters all over the place, even as the majority of customers are just normal people going about their errands. I remember a couple of months ago sitting in my car watching this sketchy homeless guy near me search at length for something in his backpack when another homeless guy came loudly walking down the middle of the crowded street yelling loudly while punching the street signs. The man with the backpack looked over at me as we both watched the guy yelling, and he kind of laughed. “This whole scene is surreal — a freak show,” I remember thinking to myself. I have heard the employees at the Vons grocery store bemoan the problems the homeless present them on a routine basis. “You would not believe what happened yesterday with this one guy…” This summer in front of the Vons I saw the cops load into their car a homeless guy who was naked except for a pair of black shorts. He was in a wheelchair and had only one leg. They had to lift him into the patrol car. My heart ached for this homeless guy obviously in desperate straits. I sympathize with the cops, too. I always feel sorry for the police when they are standing there with their medical gloves getting ready to search a filthy homeless person who reeks of body odor and day’s old urine.

Ventura is not a homeless mecca like Skid Row or Venice in Los Angeles, or even other areas of that city where one can find homeless encampments under the freeway or in tents along city streets. It is not like parts of San Francisco where human feces and used hypodermic needles are common in the gutters. In the shopping center at the corner of Telephone Rd. and Victoria Ave. the homeless are relatively few in number compared to other California hotspots. But there are more of them than in the past. And across the cities of Ventura and Oxnard their numbers are growing.

But this is not universal across Southern California. I see very few to no homeless when I take my daughter to her soccer games in the nearby cities of Thousands Oaks or Westlake Village. I see none in Irvine when I visit my sister there in Orange County. My brother tells me there are a few around Doheny State Park who get free meals from the city government there, but the homeless are not much in evidence where he lives in Dana Point and nearby Laguna Niguel. I drive to see my father in ritzy Laguna Beach and everything is scrubbed clean and smacks of wealth. The homeless don’t sleep in the streets or parks there. I don’t think the people who live there would put up with it.

But Los Angeles is inundated with homeless. Santa Ana, the county seat of Orange County, has huge numbers of homeless. Anaheim. Carson. Van Nuys. Garden Grove. San Pedro. City of Commerce. San Bernardino. Lake Elsinore. Visalia. Stockton. Sylmar. “Blue collar” or “working class” cities. Crystal methamphetamine in Godforsaken Fresno — this kind of dynamic can be seen in the city of Ventura where I live. I recognize the meth guy in the following video — I see his type routinely in Ventura cruising around on their bikes —

“I guess I’m in the pharmaceutical business.”

What to do about it? Is there a solution?

THERAPEUTIC MODEL

The orthodoxy among the City and County of Ventura authorities seems to be to offer services and try to ameliorate the situation of the “unsheltered.” A social worker cooperates with a police officer to extend services to the homeless and to try to help them. As I read in the Ventura County Star, 

“I feel like everybody right now is solution-based, working together to make differences,” said [Meredith] Hart, who in December joined the city as its safe and clean manager. “The energy’s right. It’s just kind of a perfect partnership.”

There exists the Mercy House facility in Ventura which opens soon for the homeless — at taxpayer expense to the tune of $1.2 million per year. All sorts of social services from government and non-governmental charities for the homeless. This is the “therapeutic model” which looks at the solution to homelessness as “wrap around” government services that will be the band aid which heals the disease. With enough government money and public assistance we can end homelessness — or so goes the argument.

Up to a certain point, who can argue with this?

But the problem has gotten worse in the community of Ventura. There exists the limits of what others can do for those who too often are unwilling to help themselves.

Nineteen years ago when I first moved to Ventura, there were the homeless around downtown and along the beach at the pier but one never saw the homeless in the strip malls and neighborhoods where people lived. They were out in the river beds where nobody ran across them, but they were not camped out in the city parks or alleyways. 

That has changed. Now the homeless are encountered in all parts of the city. Not in droves like in Los Angeles, but singly or in small groups.

“Is this so bad?” I ask myself. “How does the mere presence of the homeless near my home annoy me? Does it pick my pocket or break my leg?” Why does viewing the homeless walking around the neighborhood where I live bother me? I am not a homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk, after all. I am not pushing an overloaded shopping cart down Telephone Ave. with all my worldly possessions in it. I have a job. I have shelter.

But I don’t want to step around the homeless on the sidewalk, if at all possible. I don’t want to be around tweakers. I don’t want someone to overdose and fall and wedge themselves into the wheelhouse of the right  front tire of my car — this actually happened to me several years ago. In that parking lot at the corner of Telephone Rd. and Victoria Ave. (across the street from the county jail) I came out from a restaurant with my five year old daughter to see an off duty nurse and a few others lifting up a homeless person who had overdosed and fallen next to my car and was partially underneath it. The nurse was officiously and efficiently in charge — slapping his face and briskly asking, “Hello! Hello! Can you wake up? Wake up!” I quickly took in the scene and got in my car and drove away — I wanted to get my young daughter away from this. It was an ugly scene — this overdose. It was like the guy had taken a shit in public and left it there underneath my car.

I don’t want to be around this.

I can see someone criticizing me for being less concerned for the homeless OD victim than for my daughter having to witness it. I am sorry for the OD guy. I wish him the best. But I don’t want him anywhere near my daughter or where I live. Go OD somewhere else.

The City of Ventura has traditionally struggled with a homeless population. Supposedly police everywhere in Ventura County — in Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, as well as Oxnard — would arrest and cart the addicted, the mentally ill, and the indigent to the county jail at the corner of Victoria and Telephone. Later they would be released into the neighborhoods surrounding the jail. Or they would be taken in a medical emergency to the Ventura County Medical Center. Then they would be released into the surrounding neighborhoods. Addicted. Mentally ill. Desperate. Homeless.

What to do?

It is a hard situation. “An intractable problem” — the columnists intone.

I have not been able to get my mind around it. 

On the one hand, I want the homeless to be treated with compassion and kindness, as far as possible. I want them to have opportunities to exit their desperate circumstances and to get their feet back underneath them. To get the help they need. But the homeless also are a blight on the landscape. It saps the community spirit; their sight drags down the community. I am told some 40% of all the crime and calls for police service in Ventura involve the homeless. Petty crime, and not so petty crime. But arresting people clearly is not the long-term answer to homelessness.

What to do?

Provides funds from the public treasury to pay for the entire upkeep of the homeless? Their housing, food, and medical costs? All as a “human right”?

Is there enough money to do that? A public willing to pay enough in taxes for this? Los Angeles City and County spent over $600 million dollars on homeless assistance in 2018, and there was still a 12% increase in the amount of people living on the streets there. The State of California is reportedly spent $1 billion dollars on homelessness last year. Yesterday Gov. Newsom vetoed a bill passed by the California Assembly for 2 billion dollars this year for homeless aid, claiming the state budget could not afford that. When tax-and-spend liberal Gavin Newsom claims we can’t afford more social welfare spending as passed by the legislature, you know the state has really gone too far! And what are we getting for our taxpayer dollars? Supposedly the homeless population in Ventura County increased 28 percent last year. Is government spending in California on homelessness helping? It the cure to this disease government spending? Throwing taxpayer money left and right at the problem of homelessness?  Is there enough money to paper over the huge economic imbalances at play? Will much of the assistance be wasted by bureaucrats spending other people’s money? Will homelessness only get worse? The evidence so far is not promising.

Who are the homeless I see around Ventura?

Are they our “neighbors”? Homeless people who grew up in and are from Ventura? Or are they on the “homeless circuit” where they move around constantly? A few months in Ventura and then down to Los Angeles for awhile? And then next move on next fall up to San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle for a few months?

Most of the homeless I see are of the “moving through” variety. But there also the long-term Ventura locals. Then there are people so mentally ill and helpless that it makes one want to cry to regard them in their squalor. And there are bike riding crystal methamphetamine addicts with backpacks and prison tattoos on their necks who are as menacing as they are filthy. It is complicated. I see a lot of heroin guys like this in Ventura:

Another guy not from Ventura? The homeless man who murdered a guy in the Aloha’s Steakhouse restaurant near the Ventura pier on April 20, 2018 is not from Ventura. Jamal Jackson, a 49 year-old vagrant, stabbed Athony Mele Jr. in the neck while Mele was holding his five year-old daughter in his lap. The police had been called about the erratic behavior of Jamal along the boardwalk earlier, but they chose not to send an officer to investigate. There are tons of homeless types like Jackson around that area. Even the most obnoxious ones don’t usually kill anyone. Why send a cop? And then the murder took place in the crowded upscale restaurant. This horrible tragedy shocked the Ventura community — it was the crime that launched a thousand CCW applications.

A local deputy district attorney told me Jamal Jackson is as mentally ill as they come and will never stand trial for murder. Jackson will most likely be sent to a lock-down mental health facility. Chances are he will never be released. Maybe that should have happened before Jackson stabbed Anthony Mele Jr. in the neck?

Why was Jamal Jackson even in Ventura in April of 2018? Does he have family in the area? Is he from here? Or was Jackson doing the “homeless circuit” tour and just passing through? Was he in Ventura because other homeless are here?

Other questions. Do the extensive social services offered by the City and County of Ventura attract the homeless to us? Do the homeless come here knowing they will get more goods than elsewhere? “The weather is good there at the beach in Ventura and there are meals ready for the eating at the local charities, and the police don’t usually sweat you. And I know where we can score dope there. Johnnie J. and Martin are already there. Let’s head up to Ventura next!”

The homeless “crisis” in Ventura and California is complex and multifaceted. There have always been the severe cases on the mentally ill and drug addled — I remember hanging out occasionally with an African American homeless guy in the neighborhoods around USC back around 1994. He would tell me about how the local 18th Street gang members in the area would charge him “rent” to sleep on the sidewalks. He said his problem was heroin, and that he was originally from the Midwest. I would buy him a hamburger and fries while I also ate after my day job ended and I was waiting for my teacher credential classes to start at nearby Mount Saint Mary’s University Doheny campus. I think he not only wanted free food from me but enjoyed our light banter. We must have eaten dinner six or seven times together. I enjoyed his company. He was skinny as a rail, but there was an air of consideration and politeness about him I liked. I will hope he kicked his drug habit and is doing well 25 years later, but I fear he is dead. Two and a half decades is a long time to be a homeless heroin addict in the neighborhoods surrounding downtown Los Angeles.

That sort of person is going to have enormous difficulty holding a job and making his rent every month. Until he kicks heroin, he is going to be homeless. Even if you give him a free place to stay, he will often prefer the streets. He will likely refuse help so as to pursue his drug habit. He will be begging for food from strangers, as when I met him. These are the hard cases of the long-term homeless —

It will be an uphill struggle. While there is life there is hope, but… It will be hard.

The United States Courts of Appeal for the 9th Circuit in its Martin v. Boise decision has ruled that it is illegal to arrest someone for camping on the sidewalk when there is no other place for them to sleep. How about we build tent cities or primitive barrack-like dorms for emergency shelter with beds, bathrooms, and showers, and have at least somewhere where a homeless person can sleep and wash up — so there are options for those who want to get on the road to reintegrating into society with sobriety, mental health treatment, job and paycheck, and an apartment. Then make it illegal to live on the streets. You will surely have those difficult dead-enders who refuse to move into shelter, any shelter, and they will be the hardcore homeless cases — the tweakers, the schizophrenics, etc. Then I would argue we should legally reconstitute what it means to have a “grave disability” and force those with physical and mental illness to go live somewhere. At taxpayer expense, if necessary. We cannot leave homelessness policy for the severely mentally ill in the hands of civil libertarians and disability rights advocates. Bring back hospitals or whatever for those utterly incapable of taking care of themselves.

Our mental illness system in America really has a lot to answer in this. I am no specialist on the subject, but allowing someone who suffers from severe psychosis to live in his piss and misery in a ball lying on the sidewalk at night or talking to himself on a bus bench all day — month after month, year after year, until he dies — is doing him no favor at all. Provide alternatives and a place to go, and otherwise clear the back alleys, freeway underpasses, and public parks. Make it illegal to camp on the sidewalk. It might be difficult to balance the rights of the homeless and the rights of society to have order and basic public sanitation, but what we have now has reached a crisis point. Isn’t it time to take bold action? I have heard that in the 1950s and 1960s there were all these mental hospitals where supposedly odd but harmless people were imprisoned against their will, so they let them out and closed the hospitals. The scale has swung too far in the opposite direction, in my opinion. There are hundreds of thousands of homeless people unable to take care of themselves in the United States, and they fall apart in squalor on the streets. In the areas where homeless people live, everyone suffers and is miserable, homeless or not. It is a tragedy. In places like Los Angeles where I lived for twelve years it used to be bad but tolerable; then it got worse, and here we are now. Time for change, and it must start with bold leadership from California politicians. Spineless leadership on the issue is what we have had so far. California politicians want only to throw money at the problem by the billions, like the tax-and-spend liberals they are, but there are also hard conversations that need to happen about the law and the rights of the homeless versus the rights of the rest of society.

But what about those persons who do not have some debilitating mental health or drug abuse problem but simply cannot afford rising rents? Retail workers like the Wall Mart greeter or McDonald’s cashier — or a home health care aide or office building janitor. What happens in California when a minimum wage earner makes $12.00 per hour but has a rent of $1,700 per month? When such a person literally cannot afford rent even when working 40+ hours per week? Or an old woman who lives on social security? Or an immigrant family where the parents don’t have documentation to work legally? Or someone who gets horribly sick? Is that where the swelling ranks of the homeless are coming from?

And then if the rising cost of housing renders them homeless and they are living on the streets, will that not lead them to mental illness or substance abuse as a result of their horrible circumstances? Will they be made “crazy” by trying to live on the streets and sleeping under freeway overpasses? Will they abuse drugs as a coping mechanism for the stress of being homeless? This is concerning in the extreme.

The State of California under Gavin Newsom has made increasing the stock of housing a priority. There are so many regulatory measures — environmental protection regulations, energy conservation rules, local control meetings, coastal commission concerns, organized labor set-asides  — that new housing is slow and expensive, if it happens at all. The “NIMBY” movement that says we want no new growth in California has now found an opponent in Gov. Newsom. But after decades of underbuilding California has a 3.5 million unit housing deficit, and we built only 125,000 new homes last year. Even with housing becoming a priority everywhere, it will be a decade before that supply and demand imbalances changes. I won’t hold my breath.

In Ventura the “no growth” politicians have firmly been in control for decades. The SOAR initiative has been very popular with the voters. This law makes it very difficult to convert farmland to new homes and development. The idea is that the cities in Ventura County do not want large quantities of new housing and more resulting traffic — “Save Open Space & Agricultural Resources,” is a way of preserving the nature of the communities and not allowing real estate developers to pave over the strawberry and avocado fields. “We don’t want to become a metropolis like Orange County where all the orange orchards were turned into tracts of suburban homes.” I would like for Ventura Country to become more like Orange Country where I grew up. Become more developed. More prosperous. Less rural and agricultural. More international trade and high technology. I am in the minority, according to election results.

The end result of SOAR passing again and again in Ventura County elections is that there has been a low level of new housing development in the area for decades. This results in an artificially high cost of housing. This supply and demand housing mismatch happens not only in Ventura County but all over California. It benefits those who already own houses, as the value of their homes is ever increasing. The young people — the newly married with families, or even single people — suffer. To buy even a modest “beginner” house costs some $525,000. That is a bad deal. Why any young person would spend that much money to live in cities of Oxnard or Ventura is beyond me. Sure, the area has the beach and much natural beauty. But it also has a dirty side. An ugly underbelly. Is the cost of living worth it?

I was in line at a store recently. A young-ish man was talking to an older man in front of me. Was it his father? He said, “There is no way I can save $100,000 for a down-payment on a house. No way!” The older man was telling him he could do it if he constantly saved. I think it is ridiculous to have to have $100,000 in cash to buy a house. Any young person with any sense would move elsewhere! I thought to myself. If I were not a few years away from retirement and already in a house, I would move away myself. If my daughters were not already half-raised and invested in the community of Ventura and its schools and with their friends, I would be gone.

It seems as if there is a generational war going on in California. There are the older Baby Boomers who already own homes and like their neighborhoods as they are. They want to put a sign outside of the city saying, “No new housing. No more people. No more traffic than we already have. We are full!” So laws are passed and there is no new housing and the price of housing goes up and up. Younger persons — Millennials — have to pay the Baby Boomers for their expensive homes. This 68 year-old Baby Boomer owns a house — in addition to the separate house he lives in — and he rents it out to supplement his other investments as retirement income. There is a young married couple of 30 year-old Millennials who are going to pay $3,200 to live there in an artificially inflated housing market. They will spend 50% or more of their disposable income on housing. It is exploitation. A sort of generational warfare.

I urge all younger adults to leave Ventura rather than to accept this deal. The world is wide and beautiful. Seek your fortunes in happier climes. $525,000 for a starter house? Only those lucky few with lush paychecks and lots of cash on hand will live comfortably here. The wealthy can afford it, but others will struggle mightily. And housing is even more unaffordable in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties — all the way along the coast from Santa Barbara down to the Mexican border. If you leave Ventura for more affordable housing elsewhere, you will not have been the first:

“Ventura County lost 35,000 residents between 2013-2017. Here’s a look at where they went.”
by Erin Rode

Is not this logical?

This is the California we live in. There are the wealthy who have so much money that it has ceased to have much meaning for them. They can pay for ultra expensive housing and still afford sky high taxes. Spend, spend, spend. The technology industry in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and their entertainment and international trade counterparts in Southern California. Wealthy California progressive Democrats — “limousine liberals.” They will extend all sorts of expensive social services to the burgeoning poor who could scarcely afford to live even in a less expensive real estate market. Ever increasing numbers of poor dependent upon a small pool of wealthy — with the middle class shrinking, and moving out of state. It is the Third World model of society. The few wealthy and the masses of poor. It is un-American. I don’t want to be a part of it.

Much of the response of the Democratic Party, which runs California almost entirely, to the current housing crisis has revolved around government big-spending on social programs. Los Angeles County has a billion dollar budget for the homeless. Ventura County spends more than ever on the homeless. Rent control legislation, and housing and health care as a “human right” for everyone. Sky high taxes. The few wealthy up in the hills and the legions of poor down below. The ranks of the homeless swelling. The middle class shrinking/leaving. California today.

I miss the days of yore when California was different. I wrote the essay California: My Paradise Lost some 5.5 years ago. It is worse now.

I look up Boise, Idaho or Chandler, Arizona on the Google Maps app on my iPhone. I wonder how life would be like there. My imagination takes flight.

Or should I move from the City of Ventura to Camarillo or Thousand Oaks where there are fewer homeless? Cleaner streets? More affluent neighborhoods? Less “sketchy” people? But even more expensive housing? 

Or move to Dana Point with my brother, Irvine with my sister, or Laguna Beach with my father? My family urged me to do so and my father offered to give me the money to make it happen. I would be able to live closer to him and my siblings. I turned his offer down. I never wanted to move back to Orange County where I grew up. “Going backwards is not going forwards,” I had always told myself. The community of Ventura is where my wife and I have made our adult lives. But in the last few years, I have begun to reconsider. Was I foolish not to do whatever I could to move to a “nicer” (I.e. greater family wealth, more expensive housing, better public schools, higher college graduation rates, much less crime, almost no homeless) community. I don’t know.  My dad has always said that Ventura was a very average “nothing-burger” town. He claimed it was the city one drove past to get to the beautiful tourist destination of Santa Barbara — that there isn’t anything worth stopping to see in unpretentious “working class” Ventura. Move to the “nicest,” most expensive town you can afford to live in, runs the conventional thinking. Ventura is medium — mediocre. While it is not woebegone Fresno, neither is Ventura anybody’s Santa Barbara. And it seems to be slowly getting worse — Ventura is gradually losing its toehold as a proper home for middle class families, even as there are still plenty of decent folk there. Ventura needs a good scrubbing and a face-lift. The downtown and pier multilevel parking structures are located next to breathtaking natural beauty. But they reek of urine as the homeless use them as a toilet. And you want to be careful walking around there after dark. The place is increasingly frayed around the edges. The local economy is in the doldrums. Empty retail storefronts with no new business to occupy them are common in too many Ventura strip malls. Petty theft and stabbings. The homeless.

And a fixer-upper house in Ventura still costs $525,000.

I don’t know.

My Ventura-local friend Frank told me he wants to leave to Washington State when he retires. Allen wants eventually to sell his dentistry practice and depart for Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. There are many more such stories. There is this abiding idea among many of my peers that coastal California is too expensive and not worth it, even as we have lived here our entire lives. We think about cashing out our overly-expensive homes and leaving for elsewhere. I read the following about the “haves” and “have nots” in contemporary California:

“The high cost of housing (71%) is the most common reason given by voters for wanting to leave California,” polling director Mark DiCamillo said. “However, high taxes (58%) and the state’s political culture (46%) are also prominently mentioned, particularly by Republicans and conservatives.”

I would leave coastal California without a qualm, except for the fact that the weather here is so good — and it is so bad in many neighboring states. How would I do in mountain snow? Or in the heat of the high desert? I talked of moving back to Orange County after 32 years absence. More likely I would move out of California entirely. The world is “broad and wide.” Why not see some of it?

But my friends and family are in coastal California, alas.

We shall see.

But a man has to have his dreams. To contemplate plans for the future to make an unbearable present bearable.

Let me leave you, esteemed reader, with one final Ventura vignette. 

It was sometime in the spring of 2019 — a year after Anthony Mele Jr.’s murder — and I was at the Carls’ Jr. at the corner of Thompson Blvd. and S. Evergreen Dr. I was there with my eight year old daughter to get a quick snack while we waited to pick my older daughter up from her middle school bus stop at nearby Cabrillo Middle School. It started to rain — and the rain came down fast and furiously, as it rarely does in Ventura. The sudden downpour of water flushed the homeless out of their hiding spots, and five or six came into the restaurant to escape the rain. Several of them had that prison look — the jailhouse haircut growing back unevenly, the gang tattoos covering the scalp still visible through growing hair, and the “pimp roll” walk meant to intimidate others. These guys had a lot of mileage on them already; they were maybe 35 but looked older. One guy in particular — it took him all of five minutes to get into it with the manager of this Carl’s Jr. The two exchanged harsh words and performed the male “monkey dance” to try to establish superiority. It was surreal. I sat there with my daughter next to me watching the drama in the restaurant as the rain came down so hard outside. The bathroom in this Carl’s Jr., like most such bathrooms in places like this, has a push button electronic lock to keep the homeless from camping out there and “showering” in the sink basin, or shooting up drugs in the stall.* “Would this tattooed guy doing the gangster slide across the restaurant and sparking with the store manager be out of jail if Proposition 49 had not passed and become the law?” I wondered. Should he be walking the streets? Is this guy dangerous? Drugs? Stealing? Is he out of jail in between “petty” crimes before he commits the one big crime? On the other hand, do we just put all such people in jail? How much does that cost? Is it sustainable? Does it result in prison overcrowding? Would a guy like this ever hold a job and make rent? Where in the world is this guy from? After so many years of incarceration and homelessness, is he from “anywhere”? I had many questions.

I told my wife about it later and she had just one question. “Why would you go to a Carl’s Jr. where you might encounter people like that? Go sit someplace else.”

Fair enough.

In similar fashion, most people from Ventura drive right by the homeless and choose not to spend time with them. Out of sight, out of mind. The cheap motels on Thompson Blvd. near Hurst Ave. (Rodeway Inn. Topper Motel & Liquor Store. White Caps Motel.) are great examples of unpleasant local corners nobody wants to look into too closely. (Drug use? Drug dealing? Sex trafficking?) Drive straight by without stopping, my fellow Venturans. But those motels are still there. Nobody should be at all surprised when the newspaper announces some horrible thing has happened in one of them.

And the cheapest houses nearby cost $525,000.

Is that worth it?

Or not?

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* A good gauge of the socioeconomic level of a community is to look at the bathrooms in the Carl’s Jr. or similar fast food restaurants. Or look at the restrooms in gas stations or in the public parks. If the restrooms look heavily used — as if people had lived in them, they are all marked up, and look dirty even when they have been cleaned, yet the doors to the bathrooms are secured with electronic locks, you are in a lower socioeconomic area with lots of homeless. The staff will give you the electronic code if you are a paying customer. In contrast, if there are no electronic locks and the bathrooms are clean and easily available to all, you are in an upper class area. Few to no homeless are found in these affluent neighborhoods. The public restrooms go unscathed.

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