Los Angeles freeway fire proves homeless crisis is also arson emergency
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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For more than a week, the closure of Interstate 10 brought the Los Angeles metropolitan area to a literal standstill. After appalling Angelenos with the suggestion that repairing the freeway after a major fire would take three to five weeks, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) took a victory lap, flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, to announce that I-10 would reopen before Thanksgiving.
But the brouhaha over the freeway itself has overshadowed the arguably more important cause: a case of arson committed at a homeless encampment downtown, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
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California’s homeless crisis has exploded to something beyond an offensive eyesore to what the medieval would consider apocalyptic. Cases of typhus, tuberculosis, and the bubonic plague have emerged from the mini-metropolis of Skid Row, and homeless people are involved in some 15% of the city’s violent crime despite comprising about 1% of the population. But the most devastating implication of the homeless crisis is the fire and brimstone brought to the city that is still fundamentally a desert.
The overwhelming majority of the near-billion-dollar budget of the Los Angeles Fire Department is spent on homeless-related fires. LAFD estimated that four in five fires downtown and more than half citywide are caused by the homeless. Even the accidental fires emerging from homeless camps have wrought as much destruction as the cases of arson: Recall that the devastating Skirball fire of 2017 was caused by an illegal cooking fire at an encampment.
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And the “root cause,” to borrow a phrase from a famous Californian, is only worsening in scope. California, which already contains about a third of the nation’s homeless people, has seen its own homeless population increase by about 10% in the last year alone. While both Newsom and Bass have laudably enacted a series of zoning reforms to allow housing supply to meet the dire demand impelling the entire homeless crisis, the camps are evidence that they have not gone far enough.
As evidenced by Los Angeles during last year’s Super Bowl and San Francisco during communist dictator Xi Jinping’s visit, when there is a will to clear out the encampments, there is a way. Refusing to exert that will is increasingly a matter of life and death.