TheTinderBlog

Dear LA (again), One out of ten homeless people in the entire country live in our city. Despite whatever statistic our mayor claims to the contrary, things are getting worse around here. The biggest challenge to solving a problem is accepting that you have one, and that starts with admitting that our problem isn’t money, it’s corrupt leadership. Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Nithya Raman, and Governor Newsom have built a political web so financially entangled with homelessness NGOs that the dysfunction isn’t a failure, it’s their business model. I’ve spent nearly 20 years studying the chronic homelessness epidemic and no matter how many new gold plated condos Gavin Newsom promises to build on the back of our tax dollars, the root cause has NEVER been lack of housing, and housing itself will never be the primary solution. As my friend Paul Shirley would phrase it, if “housing first” worked, it would have worked. The only reduction in homelessness that housing first deserves credit for is the 30% of overdose deaths in San Francisco that came from their “supportive housing” initiatives. I’m sorry if that is shocking to read, but many of you need to wake-up & smell the fentanyl. The one thing housing first is good for; however, is financial scheming. Recently Karen Bass’s office was complicit in a grift involving the Weingart Center Association, a Los Angeles based homeless non-profit, to take a massive grant of LA taxpayer funds to convert properties into homeless housing as part of California’s Project Homekey. Sounds lovely, right? The mayor’s ingenious plan involved a property which had originally been purchased for $11 million that was then immediately flipped to Weingart on the city’s dime at nearly TRIPLE the price. I’m sure Mayor Bass has lots of clever talking points for why $20 million magically disappeared into thin air, and she’ll need to perform them convincingly as this act of service is now facing a federal probe. We will never know how truly bad the corruption is as Gavin Newsom has blocked the audits of countless related projects that have vanished billions of dollars, all in the name of homelessness. If you can help Gavin come up with a good reason why we shouldn’t audit how tax funds are being used then you’ll probably have a job waiting for you at the LA Times.  Our media needs to do better. They once did… So why do I care about this so much?  In 2006 Del Bigtree (formerly of Dr. Phil & The Doctors, currently host of the High Wire) took me on the misadventure of a lifetime when I agreed to help him document a group of homeless men who had just survived a tough winter in Denver. What we captured, acquired by Merv Griffin Entertainment & later titled “Under the Cardboard,” was ultimately dubbed “too difficult for audiences to watch.” What began as a light-hearted expose seeking the sort of wholesome temporarily down-on-their-luck tale we often naively attach to the homeless, instead crash landed into an honest glimpse of what life is truly like for the humans suffering mental illness & crippling addiction in plain sight. The best thing that came out of our docuseries was that it inspired a man named Kevin Adler to begin his own experiments to record the experience of our brothers and sisters living in the streets, while fruitless as a documentary, the countless conversations that ensued led to his creation of “Miracle Messages,” a charity focused on another underappreciated cause of homelessness: “relational poverty,” and is an inspiring example of the first of what I see as the three primary solutions to ending the homeless epidemic: REUNITING FAMILIES I am forever honored & humbled that Kevin asked me to become his first advisor. Kevin’s breakthrough came in asking people he interviewed on the streets two incredibly important questions. 1). “When did you first feel homeless?” The more conversations he had the more he heard the same answer… Part 2 👇👇👇