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Midjourney homeless encampment in the style of Edvard Munch
One of my condo association neighbors recently put an old sofa out on the curb for pick up by the city’s “bulk items” collection service. The city missed a few promised pickups. Before we knew it, a group of vagrants had made themselves at home and were eating, drinking, and littering. After receiving multiple complaints, the city finally agreed to a date certain. My neighbor put the couch in storage and tried to sanitize the now-stinky area. He and I picked up most of the trash.
Such is life in today’s West L.A. We don’t have the most scary homeless people—this isn’t San Francisco—but we certainly have a lot of usually messy campsites on sidewalks, in parks, and in nearly derelict RVs by the side of the road.1
The photo another neighbor sent me, as president of the HOA, to complain about the sofa and its denizens.
In one of the most hyper-regulated places this side of Singapore, the level of public disorder is disturbing. Everyone complains about it. A recent LAT op-ed titled “Why my pyromaniac neighbor lives outside the law,” captures the frustrations of the compassionate liberal with a lick of sense:
Anyone who walks L.A.’s streets or takes our public transit understands that people experiencing homelessness effectively exist in a state of lawlessness. It feels as if authorities are unwilling to intervene except in cases of serious crimes committed against housed people. Under Dist. Atty. George Gascón, the city largely does not prosecute misdemeanor offenses such as drug possession and disturbing the peace that he says are linked to addiction or homelessness.
This is admirable in the abstract, and ideally the police would not be the city’s point of contact for our unhoused population. But increasingly this disregard seems to have filtered to the general citizenry as well, and it feels as if we have simply become accustomed to seeing people passed out in the street, or smoking meth on the sidewalk.
The belief that we are showing people experiencing homelessness compassion if we spare them the attention of law enforcement is understandable but is fundamentally misguided. Through volunteer work and by talking to people in my neighborhood, I have met many unhoused people. Most of them do not set things on fire. They do not walk naked through traffic, and whatever issues they have with substance abuse they keep mostly to themselves. In my experience, the majority of crimes committed against people experiencing homelessness are never reported because they are most often perpetrated by other unhoused people. Placing the unhoused outside the consequence of law also means placing them outside its protection.
Moreover, the city’s failure to enforce the law among the homeless population puts that burden on private citizens, with potentially awful results. Despite all my experience working with the unhoused, I was scared and furious the last time I saw J. It isn’t hard to imagine our interaction ending badly. We don’t ask Angelenos to put out fires unless they are trained professionals, nor should we have them serve as de facto homeless outreach workers. Doing so fuels the tensions between the housed and unhoused citizens of Los Angeles.
A Ninth Circuit court decision equating bans on living on sidewalks and parks with cruel and unusual punishment limits what public authorities can do. (When the court recently affirmed the matter en banc, its conservative judges issued scathing dissents.) Along from the legal restrictions, there is a powerful cultural taboo against considering the public order aspects of homelessness, as opposed to its humanitarian dimension. We’re supposed to choose empathy over order, as though they can’t coexist.
In a recent New Yorker column, Jay Caspian Kang writes that “much of the public’s confusion about what should be done about the crisis comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what homelessness actually looks like.” He then goes on to explain, correctly, that public attention focuses on a small fraction of the Californians without shelter.
When the state of California talks about homelessness, it’s largely drawing upon a consensus of experts and advocates who want to employ an evidence-based approach to the issue, aiming to prevent people from slipping deeper into homelessness—whether from housed to unhoused, or from short-term to chronic. When aggrieved individuals talk about homelessness, they’re often talking about their visceral response to the “service resistant” individuals who make up just a fraction of the over-all homeless population. The average homeowner or renter in San Francisco or Los Angeles doesn’t really care who might be staying in the shelter system, nor does he care all that much if a family has decided to crash for a few nights in a car (as long as it’s not parked on his block). He cares when he walks down the street to his office and has to pass through encampments, or when someone walks onto a bus and starts to act erratically. He doesn’t see how building housing for mostly stable people who are quietly living in cars actually addresses the problem.
If you define “the problem” as people without homes, then Kang’s more-evidence-based-than-thou attitude makes sense. But there are actually two different problems. One is about housing and the other is about public behavior. As someone who writes, reads, and cares a lot about housing—I’ve gone to public meetings and sent emails to legislators—I fully understand that California has a housing shortage. That shortage hits economically precarious people especially hard. It’s ridiculous that Californians can live on the sidewalk but can’t swiftly construct new apartment buildings without endless reviews and expensive mandates. Supportive housing alternatives can indeed help vulnerable people. Kang’s favored “evidence-based approach to the issue” is fine and dandy if you define the problem as only about housing and dismiss other concerns with phrases like “aggrieved individuals.”
But policies to address the housing problem, however worthy, do not make complaints about the public order problem illegitimate. Normal people want to safely use the sidewalks, parks, subways, and bus stops that supposedly exist for everyone’s benefit. Safe camping sites, like the ones San Diego has opened, are a constructive alternative—but they’re paired with restrictions on “unsafe camping” that push people to use them. More could be done to provide similar safe spots, with toilet facilities, for people living in RVs they don’t want to give up in return for inside shelter that might later disappear. (In their situation, I’d make the same decision.)
If you want to build political support for the “mostly stable people who are quietly living in cars,” you can’t do it by pretending you’re addressing the visible problems that scare normal people. The current bait-and-switch breeds resentment, undermines civic institutions, and drives away the productive inhabitants on whom flourishing cities depend.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 13, 2024 • Comments
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on June 3, 2023. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.
With Andrea Pisano’s weaver, 1348–1350, in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence. Originally on the facade of the Campanile (bell tower), it has been replaced by a replica and moved inside to protect it.
The textile trade, including the banking institutions that it fostered, made Florence rich. The production, finishing, and sale of cloth funded the art that now supports the city’s tourist industry. Its greatest single artwork may be famously nude, but traces of the central role of textiles are everywhere in Florence.
Take the street names: Via de’Vellutini and Canto de Velluti refer to velvets. Calimaruzza and Calimala are named for the guild that finished and sold foreign cloth, such as English woolens, while the Via Dell’Arte della Lana is named for the wool guild. Its symbol of the Lamb of God with a banner is everywhere—a seemingly religious sign that is as much a commercial brand as an Apple with a bite out of it.
The city’s luxurious silks mostly show up in paintings. Art historian Rembrandt Duits argues that the abundant gold brocades represent in cheaper paint what even the wealthiest Florentines couldn’t afford in real life.
Even without the gold, weaving such complex patterns was incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive before Jean-Marie Jacquard’s famous punchcard system automated them at the turn of the 19th century. If you visit a still-existing workshop like the Antico Setificio Fiorentino in Florence or Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua in Venice, you will see what now looks like a laborious process. But it’s actually speedy and high-tech. These artisans use Jacquard looms, which can be operated by a single weaver, without an assistant to lift pattern threads. Coded into cards, the patterns can also be stored and reused. Here’s an 18th-century depiction of a European draw loom, with figures showing the weaver and the “draw boy (or girl)” who pulled the pattern threads. Every single pass across the loom required a different selection of threads, and the setup was new for each new pattern. (For more details see chapter three of The Fabric of Civilization.)
Having written about Florentine sumptuary laws, I was also amused to see the mini-tunics, or pannos curtos (“short cloths”), that revealed men’s legs above the middle of the thigh when standing. Under a law passed in 1373, such sexy styles were prohibited unless the wearer paid a fine/fee of 10 florins. They were still in evidence decades later. Aside from showing off men’s muscled legs, they economized on expensive cloth, surely saving more than the value of the fine.
My father died recently, after a rapid decline into dementia and a period of failing physical health that began with a fall in December. Unlike many women, I have been blessed to be surrounded all my life by good men, starting with Daddy and including my three brothers and later Steven. My father believed I could do anything, and he adored my mother, his own mother, and his big sister. Traditional in many respects, he never doubted the capability of women. Here are my favorite photos of Daddy and me together, the first when I was about two and the second on my book tour for The Future and Its Enemies.
With a few contributions from the rest of us, my brother Sam wrote a terrific obituary:
A devoted husband, father, preacher’s son, brother, uncle, mentor, coach, raconteur, trouble-shooter, carpenter, repairman, friend, and church leader, Samuel Martin Inman, III, age 88, passed away May 15, 2023, of old age: a venerable way to exit this modern era and begin a refreshed life with his Lord.
The Reverend Samuel M. Inman and Margaret Garwood Inman raised Sam and his older and surviving sister Margaret first in Richmond, Virginia, and then in Charlotte, North Carolina. Following his being among the first class to graduate the new Myers Park High School, Sam played tennis for Davidson College and graduated in 1956, having majored in mathematics and minored in physics. Within 18 months thereafter, Sam also graduated with an industrial engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). During his time in Atlanta, Sam found a focus of his love and attention for the next 67 years: the outgoing, intelligent, transplanted Arkansas Presbyterian Sue Sanders Lile, whom he married in 1958. As he began his career in the newfangled field of commercial plastics, he also served in the United States Army Reserves for 6 ½ years, with a year of active duty at Fort Benning, Georgia, during the Berlin and Cuban Missile Crises.
Sam worked for Celanese Corporation in Rome, Georgia, followed by a transfer with the company to Greenville, where he was a part of the design team that built the Greer (SC) Celanese Polyester Films Plant. Over the course of his professional career, Sam became the manufacturer’s go-to guy in solving problems in production, quality control, research and development, and technical service. In 1992, the successor to Celanese — Hoechst Diafoil — sent him and Sue to Japan, where he spent a year as liaison representative for the joint plastics venture that included operations in Germany (Hoechst AG), the USA (Celanese), and Japan (Mitsubishi Diafoil). A Japanese colleague dubbed him “Mr. Polyester,” which we think was a supreme compliment.
Active in Greenville’s Westminster Presbyterian Church since 1963, Sam served as an elder, deacon, Sunday school teacher, youth advisor, basketball coach, and a member of a pulpit nominating committee. For several years, he taught in the “Life Skills” program at United Ministries as part of the pre-GED Program. He served as chairman of the chemistry advisory committee at Greenville Technical College, chairman of the Presbyterian Pastoral Counseling Center, advisor to the Foothills Presbytery for various church strategies and operations, and as a board member and a lead carpenter for The Warehouse Theater. And in his “spare time,” he co-coached youth baseball teams with the YMCA and City League to multiple undefeated seasons.
His passions were rooted in his energetic church and dynamic family, both now spread like a proverbial banyan tree that his father often used in parable. Sam loved walking in the woods, whether in northern Georgia, the two Carolinas, or the West. He loved American history, especially of the Southeast, and was known to breeze through and retain the thoughts and facts of the thickest historical novels that The Open Book stores in Greenville could offer.
Sam is survived by his wife of 64 years, Sue Lile Inman, and their adult children and spouses: Virginia and Steven Postrel, Los Angeles; Sam and Jamie Inman, Greenville, SC; Drs. John and Amy Inman, Mt. Pleasant, SC; and Bill and Karen Inman, Bend, OR. His four treasured grandchildren – Rachel, Nathan, Andrew, and Katherine – also survive him.
A memorial service will be held at Westminster Presbyterian Church on Saturday, June 17, 2023, at 12:00 p.m., followed by a reception in the church atrium.
Memorials may be made to Westminster Presbyterian Church Endowment Fund, 2310 Augusta Street, Greenville, SC 29605, www.wpc-online.org; United Ministries, 606 Pendleton Street, Greenville, SC 29601, www.unitedministries.org; or a charity of one’s choice.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 13, 2024 • Comments
