Besides terminal illnesses such as cancer, particularly in children, homelessness is one of the facts of life I detest the most. I understand that it must be very scary to find yourself with no friends or no family to turn to and nowhere to stay. I think often about how terrible that moment must be when you realize, for the first time, that you really have no bed that night. It sends a shiver down my spine.
Around 20 years ago, I stood in a luxury development on Venice Beach, the owner, a very successful businessman said to me; “it is a very fine line between being stood up here looking down (where the homeless are) to being down there looking up”. Those words have stuck with me ever since and they are the reason why I work so hard to ensure me, my wife and daughter or anyone else we care for, never find ourselves in that position. And even then, that doesn’t guarantee it won’t happen. One bad decision, and you could lose your property.
Many, in fact, I’d say most of the people that are homeless are not bums, or dropouts, they are just down on their luck.
Think about it for one minute. Slipping under a cardboard duvet and being serenaded to sleep by passing traffic, knowing that the price you pay for a mug of soup is a half-hour lecture on infinite wisdom. The cold, the damp, the blistering heat. In some area’s coming up against our beloved wildlife or in other area’s some vile people who feel it’s “Fun” to beat up homeless people. This to me is unfathomable.
Even if everything has gone completely pear-shaped, most people know someone who’d put them up until things get straightened out. A friend. A sister. A brother. And that’s before we get to the various charities that’ll try to find you a bed for the night.
And yet somehow it’s reckoned that more than 59,000 people in Los Angeles and the surrounding counties are currently unable to do even that. They have nowhere to go, no friend or relation they can call on and absolutely no money. They therefore have no choice when they become tired of trudging but to find a shop doorway and settle down for the night.
Then there are those that have their cars as their homes. Whilst some people moan about their mattress being uncomfortable, other folk are settling down for the night on a bench with splinters in a parking lot, or in their cars with their seat reclined right back on their 2001 Ford Taurus.
In fact, it's because I care so much about homeless people that we work with many homeless charities as much as we can and as much as we can afford.
This week at St Patrick’s Church in Thousand Oaks, there was a lady representing Harbor House her name was Denise Cortes, the Executive Director of the non-profit organization. She had some stories of local people that had been dealt a cruel blow and were now homeless that bought a tear to the eye or put a lump in our throats.
One lady in her late 70’s is suffering from cancer; she lives in her 20 year old car and parks up in the library parking lot each night. Another, a retired school teacher is homeless. And a family that are homeless and living in their car, are having to find a gas station in the morning, so their kids can wash and brush their teeth before heading to school.
It’s heart-wrenching. Can you imagine how bad that must be and how you must feel that you’re letting your children down?
My gripes over the past week have been mostly about the rising cost of our house cleaning products and insurance for our house cleaning company.
But in reality we are blessed. We have many new clients who request our maid services each week and many more that we clean their homes weekly or bi-weekly for already. Our position isn’t that bad, in fact, it is pretty good. We have a reputation of being the number 1 maid service in the area for customer satisfaction. We try to pay our staff as well as we can too, we believe that not only do they deserve it, but if they’re happy, they’re going to stay with us. But based on the aforementioned, my gripes are really not that bad at all.
Over the past week, the powers that be in Sacramento announced the latest figures showing the number of homeless people in California. And they don't make any sense.
No, really, they don’t. The report says that there were more households applied locally and were accepted as being homeless. I don't understand. How can you be a "householder" and be homeless?
I don't mean to belittle homelessness. I really don’t. But figures like this do just that, belittle the problem.
I had a proud customer in Calabasas tell me last week about her son, who, while working as a bicycle-mounted food-delivery boy in a part of LA, was sent one night to the wrong address. As no one back at base had the right address, his controller told him to eat the meal himself rather than let it go to waste.
But he, being a decent proud person, he thought it would be better if he gave it away to a homeless person. And so, for half an hour he pedaled around Los Angeles looking for a person sleeping rough on his own, until eventually he found one, who then refused the food because it contained meat. “I’m a vegan,” said the guy. She was flabbergasted by what her son had told her. But while there are a few people that will make a stand like that, there are probably 20 more that will gratefully accept anything they are offered.
And this sort of story, of course, ends up reinforcing all of our middle-class prejudices. Such as; homeless people aren’t really homeless. They’re just beggars. They’ve got an Audi parked around the corner. And spend their winters skiing in Breckenridge. And a larder at home full of kale and nuclear-free Zimbabwe peace chips.
So, when we encounter someone who is genuinely homeless, or a reputable homeless charity, we have a habit of gritting our teeth and saying as politely as we can that “we don’t want to give to a homeless cause because we already do so”. But this sort of prejudice we have, we have to change.
Partly, the reason we think like this is because we all know that any sane person would do absolutely everything and anything possible to not have to sleep on the streets, but we don’t think of the reason why they have ended up in that position.
Only recently. I read about a man who is currently living with his ex-wife and her new partner. Because lying alone in a small bed in the spare room, listening to your ex in bed with her new man, is better than laying in a shop front or sleeping in your car, apparently.
Children, we are told, are now living at home until they are well into their thirties. Yes, they are told 10 times a day by their parents to sit up straight at mealtimes and to tidy their rooms and to turn the stereo down, but this is far better than trying to get cozy under a slightly damp copy of yesterday’s LA Times.
However, what interests me is that so many of them decide to head for the bright lights of California or big cities like New York. This seems like madness, because as you sit there, feeling dirty and looked down upon, you’ll be presented with an endless conveyor belt of other people leaping in and out of flashy cars with their shiny clothes and their bulging wallets and their friends and their big happy smiles.
If you hole up for the night in a shop doorway in any big city, those street cleaner men will come along before midnight and squirt you with powerful jets of icy water.
And then, when you're all soggy and cold, you'll be moved on to another doorway where a drunken late-night reveler will be sick all over you.
Genuinely, I don't understand why people who've found themselves homeless stow away on a bus or train to California. California, when you have money, and a job and friends is truly one of the greatest places to be on earth. But the Golden State when you have no possessions must be more soul destroying than listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” on an endless loop.
We can all help, we can support great charitable causes like this and others in the community.
I worked out 10 years ago when I worked in Santa Monica, that I was spending just shy of $10 a day on Starbucks Coffee, even at weekends. That was $70 a week or $3,640 a year on coffee that was served in a plastic cup, that we now realize were killing all our marine life. Think if we just cut our 2 latte fixes a day down to one, the difference we could make to people who really need it.
If you’d like to know more of the great work Harbor do, then reach out to Denise - (dcortes@harborhouseto.org).
As we approach thanksgiving and Christmas, we at You’ve Got Maids of Thousand Oaks, Malibu & Camarillo areas will be looking at ways in which we can do more for the community, particularly those that are homeless and suffering from cancer. If there are any suggestions that you may have, then please email us at thousandoaks@youvegotmaids.com – and we’ll be happy to take a look at these.
