Cities must stop blaming Los Angeles for their homelessness problem

For the editor: We’ve long heard about other cities and states busing homeless people to Los Angeles. Most recently, a video was released showing Burbank police officers throwing out a homeless man in North Hollywood, a neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles.

Have you ever wondered why there are sometimes tents around Beverly Hills, but Beverly Hills itself remains pristine? The answer is intuitive, and it’s not because homeless people don’t want to live in such a nice city.

The City of Los Angeles should respond legally and aggressively. We need to stop being everyone’s dumping ground for the homeless. It’s hard enough managing our part of this crisis without also being responsible for homeless populations in other places.

Of course, this source represents only a fraction of our overall homeless population, but it shows why we have not been able to solve this crisis. We’re successfully getting homeless people off the streets of Los Angeles every day, but more of them are ending up there. So, despite the construction of units, the problem continues to worsen.

We need to conduct a thorough audit of the dozens of sources of homelessness, such as job losses, costly health disasters, evictions and more. We then need to figure out how to address each source and get to the point where we at least exceed the number of new homeless people on our streets. Otherwise, we will continue to sink into a deeper hole.

Paul Koretz, Los Angeles

The writer is a former Los Angeles City Council member.

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For the editor: Video of Burbank police officers allegedly throwing a homeless man outside Los Angeles City Council Speaker Paul Krekorian’s field office in North Hollywood comes as no big surprise to residents of Northeast Los Angeles .

It’s well known here that small towns on our borders have been routinely dumping homeless people into Northeast Los Angeles for years, but it hasn’t been caught on camera like this recent incident.

Now is the time for all of us to have an open discussion about our strategies to combat homelessness, which are clearly not working. Instead of cities dumping their residents elsewhere and pointing fingers, we should all hold Los Angeles County accountable for this worsening crisis.

If there was one government entity that should accommodate homeless people, it would be the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, whose members have failed us all.

Ken Walsh, Los Angeles