By LAURA J. NELSON, APR 06, 2018
From the LA Times
Melissa Crawford, who has been homeless for two years, often rides on the Metro Red Line early in the morning in Los Angeles. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
The early morning commuters stepping off the Metro escalator paid little attention to the 10 people huddled under blankets and curled up in corners at the Hollywood and Vine station.
John Gant, 60, lay sprawled on the tile floor, his hoodie drawn over his face. When three social workers stopped to ask if he wanted help, he nodded.
Over hot coffee and pages of paperwork, Gant, who had been homeless for years, called his mother to share the news. He cracked a rare smile, saying: “They’re trying to find me a place to sleep.”
"This is a crisis. If we don’t get a handle on it, it’s going to keep growing."
- Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis at a recent Metro meeting
The Metro system has been a refuge for homeless people for decades. But as Los Angeles County’s homeless population has surged, reaching more than 58,000 people last year, the sanitation and safety problems on trains and buses are approaching what officials and riders say are crisis levels.
People looking for warm, dry places to sleep have barricaded themselves inside emergency exit stairwells in stations, leaving behind trash and human waste. Elevator doors coated in urine have stuck shut. Mentally ill and high passengers have assaulted bus drivers and other riders.
Top: People sleep at the Civic Center/Grand Park Metro Station. Middle: A Metro transit security guard wakes up a sleeping person on the Red Line. Bottom: A man sleeps next to a wheelchair as morning commuters exit the Red Line at the Hollywood/Highland station. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Amid a wave of complaints about homelessness, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has bolstered spending on law enforcement and security by 37% this year. But the agency is testing a different approach, too: social workers on the subway.
Under a one-year, $1.2-million contract — one of the first of its kind in the country — outreach workers spend five days a week on the Metro Red Line, trying to help the system’s homeless riders.
It’s a modest sum for an agency with a $6.1-billion budget, though the program will probably expand. Whether the outreach workers’ efforts will retain current riders, or bring back those who have left, is unclear.
How Metro addresses homelessness is crucial to the agency’s future. A perception that trains and buses are dangerous or dirty could undercut Metro’s ambitious expansion plans, which call for the construction of nearly a dozen new rail lines over the next four decades.
“This is a crisis,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis at a recent Metro meeting. “If we don’t get a handle on it, it’s going to keep growing.”
‘Filthy, noisy, scary’
Riders’ feelings about the safety of buses and trains have had a direct effect on ridership. More than 1 in 5 current passengers has been harassed on the train. In a 2016 survey, 29% of former riders told Metro they stopped taking transit because they felt unsafe.
“Too many homeless and not enough cops,” wrote one former rider, in survey responses reviewed by The Times. Others described their commutes as “filthy, noisy, scary” and “rather disturbing at times.”
There’s little solid data on how many homeless people use the transit system each day, and the region’s yearly count has not historically included rail stations, trains or buses.
But the scant available numbers are grim. One cold, rainy night in January, Los Angeles police swept 160 people from buses and trains on their final stops of the night. That figure dramatically understates the extent of the problem, officers say, because it does not include the lines that finish their runs in other cities.
Passengers who encounter chronic addiction, illness and misery say they feel they can do little to help, and struggle to stay empathetic when they encounter trash and human waste on platforms, urine in train cars, and harassment from riders who are mentally ill.
Top: John Fuller, right, talks to himself while riding the Red Line. Bottom: An LAPD officer speaks with Ken Adam, wearing a hospital gown, in the subway. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
More photos: Scenes from homelessness »
“Week by week, it seems like it just gets worse,” said Sarah Caldwell Sim, who takes the Expo Line, the subway and the Gold Line to work in a Cypress Park factory. “My frustration with what I see is turning me into someone that I’m not. I’m really struggling with this.”
Sim said she saw a man pull down his pants, squat over the edge of a platform and defecate onto the train tracks at Union Station. She said she has sat in urine on the subway, “hopscotched through peoples’ feces” on sidewalks, and endured verbal and sexual harassment on the train.
Metro doesn't need more security officers, Sim said, but the employees it does have should step in more often when something is wrong. When a homeless man followed an elderly woman across a Gold Line platform, screaming profanities, a guard dismissed the man as “a local” and did nothing, she said.
Her other suggestion: “Stop putting carpet on the seats.”
Metro budgeted nearly $207 million this fiscal year on law enforcement and system security. Policing on the system is shared between the Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments and the Sheriff’s Department, aided by private security guards who write citations for loitering, littering and fare evading.
The security contracts, approved last year, will cost Metro almost $800 million over five years.
continue reading Waves of Homeless Descend on Trains
