Finalist: Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times

The trash trucks arrived early Wednesday afternoon, and members of the cleanup team from the Los Angeles sanitation division came with protective coveralls and white masks.

A mountain of rotting, oozing, stinking trash awaited them, stretching a good 20 yards along a skid row alley. Rats popped their heads out of the debris like they were in a game of Whac-A-Mole, then scampered for cover as a tractor with a scoop lurched toward them.

Two homeless people, who live in tents pitched alongside the trash, watched the proceedings with a look of weary surrender.

I’m sorry if I’ve ruined your appetite as you scrub the grill for a holiday weekend barbecue, but the scene I’ve just described is a routine part of life in the downtown section of the nation’s second-largest city.

The trash problem is not confined to any one street, but this particular location on the 800 block of Ceres Avenue is surrounded by food distribution companies that sell to shoppers, vendors, stores and restaurants. I counted seven within a block, so you have to wonder — given the colonies of football-size rats — about the potential contamination of the food supply chain and the spread of disease.

“I have had many conversations with the city about that,” said Estela Lopez, who runs the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, or BID. “When the typhus outbreak was first reported in October, that was one place we knew rats were, for sure.”

Lopez has spent many years on the skid row beat, and she’s understandably frustrated by the City Hall response. A lot of city officials and employees work hard and do a great job, she said. But they’re not keeping up with the demand, and calls to the 311 service line can take days, weeks and months to get a response.

Elena Stern, spokeswoman for the city Department of Public Works, said the backlog on service calls for trash pickup around homeless encampments sits at just under 8,400 currently. On average, the city gets six calls per site.

“If it’s a homeless encampment, it’s a lengthier process because humans are involved and we have to meet certain protocols,” she said, including a survey of who’s there, an inventory of personal property and notice of a cleanup.

To Lopez, it’s a situation that screams for a more urgent response.

“Skid row is the worst it’s been from a sanitation perspective and a safety perspective and a humanitarian perspective,” Lopez said. “It’s easy for me in the cheap seats to say what should or shouldn’t be done, but as a native Angeleno I feel that our city looks and feels mismanaged. When you take the oath to become mayor or a City Council member, your job is to run this city. It’s to manage this city.”

When KNBC-TV Channel 4’s Joel Grover and Amy Corral reported on the Ceres Avenue dump last October, Mayor Eric Garcetti jumped in and the city cleaned it up right away. The same news crew just went back and reported that the heap was as big as before, and it got cleaned up again.

Stern said that since October, Ceres Avenue litter has been cleared nine times. The BID staff disputes that, but whatever the correct number of cleanups, the dumpers are winning.

So who’s tossing all that trash, turning city streets into landfills?

Without doubt, some homeless people discard junk on the streets where they live, and not always in the trash bins that dot the district by the dozens. But they don’t appear to be the biggest polluters. Not even close, and I’ll get back to that in a minute.

I spent a few hours one morning on trash patrol with Jesse Ramirez, operations manager for Lopez’s maintenance and safety crew. He told me the 17-person team picks up four tons of trash each day, but the recent numbers have been even higher. One two-person crew walks up and down San Pedro all day between 4th and 7th streets.

At 9 a.m. Thursday, we had been out for not quite two hours, and already several pickup trucks had been filled with trash. There had also been six service calls to the BID from merchants — four to pick up human waste and two to clear storefronts blocked by encampments.

Joey Joseph, who owns a seafood distribution center on Gladys Avenue near 4th, called to report urine and feces on the sidewalk where vendors pull in to load their vehicles. Joseph told me he also calls police and City Hall, along with the BID, so I asked how often.

“It’s every day,” Joseph said as two of Ramirez’s crew picked up the waste, disinfected the area and then power-washed. “Usually several times a day.”

On Agatha Street near Crocker Street, I watched a homeless dumpster diver half-disappear into a bin, digging for recyclables. As I was watching, and standing with Ramirez and one of his uniformed deputies, a man exited an alley on foot carrying several boxes and other debris and threw the junk down on the sidewalk, right in front of us.

“You can’t do that,” Ramirez protested, ordering the man to pick up the trash and properly dispose of it in a bin.

We followed him back into the alley, where he tossed the junk into a dumpster and then showed Ramirez the tarp he sleeps under. He said the business owners allow him to sleep there in return for dumping all the trash, and they apparently don’t care where he disposes of it.

This didn’t come as a surprise. Ramirez said the BID has confronted business owners about illegal dumping, but if you don’t catch them in the act, and supply photographic evidence to authorities, nothing happens.

A merchant near Ceres told me that once a pile takes shape, the appearance of lawlessness and neglect is a magnet for other dumpers. Trucks pull in and toss construction or landscaping debris onto the pile, and homeless people do their part, too.

Councilman Jose Huizar represents the downtown area, and two of his staffers told me they have requested more resources to knock down illegal dumping. There’s definitely a backlog of service calls, they said, and some areas downtown don’t get the attention they need because they’re not in a BID. The 800 block of Ceres, in fact, is just south of Lopez’s BID, and dumpers may be taking advantage of the fact that there are no regular patrols.

When I was at the Ceres Avenue trash pile, I noticed a lot of packing materials, food crates and bins that appeared to be from local businesses. Word on the street, from merchants and homeless people, was that some of the more unscrupulous merchants routinely dump their own trash on the streets or pay homeless people a few bucks to get rid of it for them.

The dumping got worse, one merchant claimed, when the city switched to a new recycling system that gave monopolies to companies in each sector of the city.

“I was paying $80 a month, and my cost went up to $300,” said the merchant, who said that rather than get gouged, some business owners began illegally dumping.

He also showed me photos he has taken of homeless people pushing trash from nearby produce outlets to the Ceres Avenue alley in shopping carts, and asked me not to use his name because he’s been retaliated against for complaining. He then showed me photos of rotten trash dumped in front of his shop, presumably from the people he confronted.

Stern said the recycling fees might be one small factor, but some merchants never participated in the recycling program and have a history of dumping. Stern said 25 illegal dumping citations have been written in the area this year, and the department is bringing in additional patrols, with more video surveillance. The department is also considering monetary rewards for people who report illegal dumping.

Stern said a minor offense gets a $75 fine, but a worse offense can bring a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.

I’d say it’s time for City Hall to step up the prosecution and the penalties, and maybe suspend business licenses for repeat offenders. That ought to get the attention of the slobs who keep fouling their own nest.

The morning after Ceres was cleaned up, I went back and saw several crushed tomatillos on the ground. Stern said a much bigger dump had been cleaned up earlier that morning, and the sanitation team was following leads back to a suspected merchant.

Ramirez and I then cruised a street just a few blocks west of there — the 800 block of Crocker.

There, we found a wretched mound of trash extending from the sidewalk into the middle of the street. A homeless woman, pushing a broom outside a nearby business, told me the pile had been there about two weeks.

Drivers swerved and pedestrians tiptoed through the trash, all too familiar with such hazards. Just another day in the city.

The good news is that two trash-strewn downtown Los Angeles streets I wrote about last week were cleaned up by city work crews and have been kept that way, as of this writing.

The bad news is that I didn’t have to travel far to find more streets just as badly fouled by filthy mounds of junk and stinking, rotting food.

Then there was the news that the LAPD station on skid row was cited by the state for a rodent infestation and other unsanitary conditions, and that one employee there was infected with the strain of bacteria that causes typhoid fever.

What century is this?

Is it the 21st century in the largest city of a state that ranks among the world’s most robust economies, or did someone turn back the calendar a few hundred years?

We’ve got thousands of people huddled on the streets, many of them withering away with physical and mental disease. Sidewalks have disappeared, hidden by tents and the kinds of makeshift shanties you see in Third World places. Typhoid and typhus are in the news, and an army of rodents is on the move.

On Thursday I saw a county health inspector on rat patrol between 7th and 8th streets on skid row. He was carrying a clipboard and said he had found droppings and other evidence of rodents, and I asked where:

“Everywhere,” he said.

Well, it’s nice to know somebody is doing something, but you don’t need a clipboard. I’ve seen so many rats the last two weeks in downtown Los Angeles, I have to suspect they’re plotting a takeover of City Hall, which vermin infiltrated last year.

The city of Los Angeles has become a giant trash receptacle. It used to be that illegal dumpers were a little more discreet, tossing their refuse in fields and gullies and remote outposts.

Now city streets are treated like dumpsters, or even toilets — on Thursday, the 1600 block of Santee Street was cordoned off after someone dumped a fat load of poop in the street. I’m not sure when any of this became the norm, but it must have something to do with the knowledge that you can get away with it. Every time sanitation crews knock down one mess, another dumpsite springs up nearby.

You wanna take a tour with me of how things looked Wednesday and Thursday?

OK, the shovels were still out on Crocker Street, which was looking pretty good, so I went over to East 10th Street and Naomi Avenue, several blocks away, near the Coca-Cola distribution center.

The north side of 10th Street looked like a landfill. Trash was scattered in the street and on the sidewalk, and there was a little bit of everything. Splintered lumber, metal poles, soiled blankets and clothing, a sofa, buckets, boxes.

“Trucks come by and run over the trash,” said Ron Riego, 60, who lives under a tarp on the corner and pointed out where some of the debris has been flattened by traffic.

Riego said he was just back from the hospital, where he was treated for congestive heart failure and water on the lungs. On returning to his tarp, he discovered that someone had set fire to some of his belongings. Now he was sorting through his things to see what was salvageable, and planning to move a few feet to the west.

“Rats chased me out,” he said, so he was surrendering his lean-to to the rodents.

“Someone came by in the middle of the night and dropped all those bags,” Riego said, telling me such dumps were common. “I looked out and saw a nice new white pickup truck stop and toss everything, then he took off,” he said.

The bags, some of which were split open, contained spoiled fruit and trimmings from pineapples and mangoes. That part of town has a lot of produce wholesalers, and it’s no secret that some of the illegal dumping is done by local merchants and customers. Nor is it any secret that food scraps attract rats.

At East 16th Street and Compton Avenue, just south of the 10 Freeway, trash billowed at the corner and tapered gradually to the east along a building tagged with graffiti. The debris included boxes, bulging trash bags and a crushed Lime scooter. The centerpiece was a heaping shopping cart.

I saw a few encampments nearby and standing, murky green water in the gutters. Were the drains clogged with trash? Is a water or sewer line leaking? You just never know, and you almost don’t want to think about it. I go through a lot of antibacterial wipes after a day here, and I take my shoes off before I enter my house. It’s horrifying to think about how many people live in the middle of all that muck.

I went back to 16th and Compton the next day to find a city crew cleaning up the mess, and I spoke to James Campbell, who runs the uniform rental company on that corner.

“I call the city and they usually come within a week, but then it’s always piled right back up again,” said Campbell.

“I don’t even like stepping out here because of the needles,” said Campbell, who told me he cringes when customers come to his office and witness what’s at his doorstep.

“It’s embarrassing,” he said.

Yes, but it’s not Campbell who should be embarrassed. It’s L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti and the 15 members of the City Council who run the city and have not responded with the urgency necessary to deal with the homelessness and trash problems that plague Los Angeles.

They alone did not create the social and economic woes that have contributed to the city’s major problems, and it’s not as if they’ve been completely unresponsive. About 27,000 people were housed last year, for instance. But even more people have ended up in their cars and on streets and riverbeds, and taxpayers are right to wonder why City Hall keeps losing its most important battles.

When I called Councilman Jose Huizar’s office about the trash piled on Ceres Avenue, a staffer told me issues like that are complaint-driven, and if no one has called, the office might not know the problem exists.

What, they don’t have eyes?

Look, I know Huizar might be a little distracted, given that the FBI has hauled records out of his home and office as part of a City Hall corruption probe, and the councilman has other legal problems too.

But council districts have as many as two dozen employees and in times of crisis they ought to have more than a few of them in the field, spotting and solving problems, and cracking down on illegal dumpers. Not just with citations, but with handcuffs, perp walks and mandatory trash pickup duty.

The city has thousands of workers on the streets every day writing tickets, fixing potholes, driving trash trucks. Every one of them ought to be reporting issues they see on their rounds.

“If you’re writing a parking ticket and someone dumps a toilet in the street, you should call sanitation,” said Estela Lopez of the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, or BID.

The crews that clean the streets of that BID are homeless or formerly so, and they’re employed by the nonprofit Chrysalis, which tries to get them all housed and self-supporting. James Blackwell, for instance, supervises Lopez’s crew and told me he just moved into his own place.

It’s a terrific program — clean the streets and get people off the streets at the same time. Chrysalis staffs 16 BIDs in L.A. and 10 Caltrans crews, and would like to do more. But an expansion proposal has gotten bottled up at City Hall. Stay tuned for more on that in the near future.

Meanwhile, let’s keep the pressure on City Hall.

I drove a little farther south Thursday and found a monumental dumpsite at East 25th Street and Long Beach Avenue along the railroad tracks. I took photos during my survey to share with City Hall, and I’d like you to do the same.

Get your camera or phone and send me photos of eyesores in your neighborhood or near your place of employment. Include the address, and I’ll take a look at as many as I can get to, publicize the filth and count the days until City Hall cleans it up.

If we don’t take charge, who will?

The balding, middle-aged man was facedown on a flattened piece of cardboard, arms at his side, a small pool of blood near his mouth. He wore bluejeans, his feet were bare, and headset buds were still in his ears.

Two LAPD officers who responded to the emergency call from a passerby had pitched a white pop-up tent around the body, which lay on the sidewalk of Massachusetts Avenue between Sepulveda Boulevard and the 405 Freeway in West Los Angeles.

It was Sunday morning, the middle of Labor Day weekend, three-quarters of the way into a year in which deaths of homeless people in Los Angeles County are on a record-setting pace to top 1,000, according to preliminary numbers from the county coroner.

“I hope this will be another wake-up call that urgency is the order of the day,” said County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who called it incomprehensible and unacceptable that dying on the streets has become routine.

On average, nearly three homeless people are dying daily in the county, nearly double the rate of deaths by homicide. Illness, addiction, accidents, suicide and the ravages of being unsheltered are among the primary causes of death.

“We know the research says that people who are what’s called rough sleepers, those who are living on the streets and not in a shelter or a car, are 10 times more likely to die than the regular population,” said Dr. Susan Partovi, citing a study in Boston. Partovi has been administering to homeless people in Los Angeles for years.

The average age of the first 666 homeless people who died in L.A. County as of Aug. 25 was 51, well below the county’s average life expectancy of roughly 80. Homeless people are dying on sidewalks, along riverbeds, and in tents, parks, shelters, vehicles, motels and hospitals.

You can call it a travesty. An emergency. A call to action.

It is all those things.

Bodies are being found in virtually every corner of the county, a grim consequence of the intensifying epidemic of homelessness. In 2012, 407 homeless people died in L.A. County. The number has gone up sharply every year, to last year’s record high of 921.

This year, the toll hit 525 in just the first six months — 88 more than over the same period a year earlier — and the pace has been steady since then.

New York City has roughly the same number of homeless people as Los Angeles County, but has moved tens of thousands of them into shelters. Despite much harsher weather, New York recorded 292 homeless deaths in 2018, fewer than one-third the Los Angeles total.

“We’re seeing homeless deaths in areas where we didn’t see them five or 10 years ago,” said Brian Elias, chief of investigations for the county coroner’s office.

Elias’ boss, Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Jonathan Lucas, said his office is stepping up its analysis of trend lines and causes of death to help address the crisis.

“We need to be taking this information and looping it back to the departments of mental health and public health, to the policymakers, the county supervisors, and present it in a way that can help inform their decisions,” said Lucas, adding that he’s passionate about what he considers a duty to the community.

The coroner’s office noted that the six-month increase in deaths over last year was roughly proportional to the increase in the total number of homeless people from a year earlier.

The first 666 deaths of the year included 42 homicides and 27 suicides. Males vastly outnumbered females, 83% to 17%, and the victims included 253 white people, 220 Latinos and 168 African Americans.

Substance abuse and heart conditions, sometimes in conjunction, were among the leading causes of death, but no cause had been determined in about 100 of the cases.

The coroner’s reports, filled with clinical language and dispassionate narratives, are ghostly sketches of social disorder, poverty, violence, addiction and isolation. They speak to a breakdown that extends beyond homelessness and reaches into our economy, our schools, our criminal justice and healthcare systems.

In a region of abundant wealth and world-class hospitals, people die penniless, they die in pain, they die alone.

On Jan. 1, a 37-year-old African American woman died at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank after being found unresponsive a day earlier on a sidewalk in North Hollywood, one week after giving birth to a girl. The woman had a history of asthma and substance abuse. On her left arm was an “RIP” tattoo.

On Jan. 20, a security guard noticed a man sitting awkwardly, with an open beer at his side, near a business on Telstar Avenue in El Monte. The guard touched the man, got no response and dialed 911. Paramedics pronounced the 71-year-old white man dead at the scene.

On Feb. 6, a 27-year-old Latino male with a history of depression died on Foothill Boulevard, west of Osborne Street, in Pacoima. According to the coroner’s report, the young man had attempted suicide a week earlier and was placed on psychiatric hold.

At 8:45 p.m. on the 6th, says the coroner’s report, the man’s “father heard the decedent moving around outside their tent. He heard a gasp of air but did not check. 10 minutes later the decedent’s father went outside of their tent and found the decedent hanging from a tree. He cut the decedent down.”

In the case of the man who died Sunday in West Los Angeles, I arrived on the scene at the same time as coroner’s investigator Adrian Munoz, 29.

He sized up the scene. No drug paraphernalia was visible. There were no obvious signs of struggle. Munoz ran his gloved hands over the man’s head, feeling for evidence of trauma. He found nothing.

Los Angeles Police Officers Jeff Duarte and Ray Leung told me there were a lot of homeless people in the area, most of them veterans who get services at the nearby Veterans Affairs campus.

The victim, who was African American, appeared to have been traveling lightly. No shopping cart filled with belongings. No tent or tarps. Just a red sleeping bag, his backpack and a few Budweiser tallboys he never got to.

Munoz performed his duty with an air of respect, taking care in offering this one last service to a fellow human being. He crouched, laid his hands under the man and turned him onto his back. The man’s mouth was bloody. His gray eyes aimed skyward, in the direction of wispy clouds and sunstruck palms.

Munoz checked inside the man’s mouth for signs of trauma. Nothing there. He lifted the man’s shirt, examined his torso.

“A scar in the middle of his chest,” Munoz said. A possible heart procedure.

Munoz laid a clear plastic sheet over the man, then placed a white sheet on top of that.

In the man’s wallet, Munoz found a driver’s license, a bank card and a state medical benefits card. In the backpack, he found a little blue packet of Alka-Seltzer, several pairs of fresh socks and some medicine vials. It appeared that the man had been a patient at the Venice Family Clinic. Those details should help the coroner’s office in the next phase of its investigation: trying to determine who the man was, how he ended up alone and dead on this stretch of sidewalk, and whether he has family to notify.

Only a few days earlier, I had spoken to Carrie Kowalski, a physician assistant at the clinic. On her street medicine rounds, she had told me, she sees every conceivable malady and a lot of addiction. A common theme among her patients, she said, is that “something went wrong from childhood and started someone on a path” to physical, mental and addiction issues.

“It can be physical violence, abuse in the foster care system, sexual abuse, the experience of veterans, and you become homeless and now you’ve got more trauma,” Kowalski said. “You get hit by a car or you get raped and you get beaten. Your stuff is stolen and it becomes this huge mess, and it snowballs.”

As does the death count.

Ridley-Thomas recently called for creating enough shelter and housing for everyone, and imposing a requirement that homeless people come indoors.

Those are big, expensive, difficult challenges. But losing ground, as we currently are, is not acceptable, Ridley-Thomas said. We need more psychiatric emergency services, more addiction rehab and more recuperative care so that homeless patients don’t go from hospitals straight back to the streets.

In the area around the West L.A. death, I couldn’t find anyone who knew the dead man. A homeless guy named Kenny told me he knew of someone hit and killed by a car nearby. A homeless guy named Emerson said someone was found dead on Westwood Boulevard.

“I got to get off the streets,” said a homeless guy named Adam.

A van from the coroner’s office pulled up to Massachusetts Avenue about 12:30 p.m. and Munoz helped the driver lift the body into the vehicle.

The day was young as the van headed to the morgue, but the man was already the third homeless person to die on Sunday.

And the 680th to die this year.

Staff writers Ben Welsh and Maloy Moore contributed to the column.

L.A. County coroner’s investigator Adrian Munoz had one last duty to perform in the case of Alvin Robinson, a homeless man whose body was retrieved from a West L.A. sidewalk: making the call no one wants to receive.

He dialed a Las Vegas phone number and a woman picked up.

“I asked if she knew anyone by the name of Alvin Robinson and she said yes, that was her husband,” said Munoz. “I told her that unfortunately he was discovered deceased by the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Lola Robinson had to compose herself. For years, she wondered where her husband was, and she never let go of the hope that he’d come back home. But she had also worried that a call like this might come.

Alvin Robinson, 61, was found sprawled face down Sunday on Massachusetts Avenue near Sepulveda Boulevard. I arrived at the scene at the same time as investigator Munoz. It was unclear how Robinson had died, but he had a surgical scar on his chest and prescription medication in his backpack. Blood had puddled on a cardboard mat near his mouth.

In L.A. County this year, nearly three homeless people are dying each day on the streets, in vehicles, shelters, hospitals and parks. Robinson was the third homeless person to die Sunday, and the 680th this year. By Friday afternoon, 18 more had died, bringing the count to 698.

There’s a lot I could say about that, but the numbers don’t need my amplification. You only have to do the math. There are an estimated 60,000 homeless people in the county. If the current pace continues, more than 1,000 of them will die, topping last year’s total of 921. That’s one in 60.

We’ll never know all their back stories, but having watched Munoz load Robinson’s body into a coroner’s van, I wanted to know this one. Maybe there’d be something in it to help us figure out what everyone wants to know:

How did we end up with as many homeless people as Arcadia has residents, who are they, and what do we have to do to get in front of this epidemic?

Lola Robinson arrived at the Greyhound bus station in Los Angeles before dawn Thursday. She had taken an overnight bus from Las Vegas, traveling with her son, Stephan, to claim her husband’s property and make burial arrangements.

When I picked them up, I already knew part of Alvin Robinson’s story because I’d spoken to Lola and Stephan by phone. Lola met Alvin at a party in Bakersfield when they were in their 20s. They married in 1984, had five children and every expectation of a normal life, with Alvin working at restaurants and at a carpet company.

But Alvin grew increasingly erratic and unreliable over time, Lola said. He drank, he dipped into drugs and was sometimes guided by irrational thoughts no one could fathom. He was a loner who disappeared for long stretches, came home, then vanished again.

“He had a prosthetic eye,” from an accident as a child, Lola said, “and he felt that people were looking at him or talking about him, even his own children.

“He would not admit that he had mental issues,” she went on, “and he was not going to try to get help because according to him, he was good. But if people knew what I went through and lived through, they would be amazed.”

The coroner’s office wasn’t open yet when Lola’s bus pulled into L.A., so we went to breakfast near Union Station. A few homeless people had congregated near the Denny’s parking lot, and while we ate, Lola Robinson eyed a dirt-crusted, manic, nearly naked man ranting outside.

We know, of course, that thousands of people in our jails and on the streets are mentally ill. Seeing the pain in Lola Robinson’s eyes reminded me that every one of them represents a family’s heartbreak and frustration. Every family wonders how it can be, in a civilized society, that sick people languish.

Lola Robinson showed me some family photos, including one in which she wore a fine dress, had just come from church, and was pregnant with their first child, Stephan, who is now 34. She wanted me to take a close look at the photos and tell her if I was sure that was the man I saw in West L.A.

She sagged when she heard my answer.

There were good times, she said, and happy moments. But she raised the kids largely on her own while working. She moved from Bakersfield to Las Vegas in 2004 and he came to live with her for nine months in 2006, when he had surgery for a leaky heart valve. Then he disappeared. She had not heard from him in more than 10 years when she got the phone call from the coroner’s office.

Lola Robinson had a rough start in her own life, which began in Modesto. She said mental illness ran in her family, and that she was regularly beaten with a hose while in foster care.

She dotes on her five children, her blessings, but lost a 2-year-old granddaughter to a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting. Her son Stephan was diagnosed with schizophrenia, had his own bouts with homelessness and was in and out of mental institutions. And Mrs. Robinson’s daughter has struggled to cope since being assaulted.

She carried all of these burdens without her husband’s help, and I asked whether she had ever resented him.

“I didn’t resent him because I knew he had mental issues,” she said. “I still love him. To hear that he’s dead, that’s devastating.”

Stephan was conflicted. He remembered horsing around with his dad, he said, then wondering where he was and finally getting used to his absence. The other kids had a range of views of their father.

“I told my son Justin, don’t be bitter,” Lola Robinson said. “Just forgive him because he had mental health issues, and I need your help to bury your father. He said mom, I’m not bitter. I’m just indifferent.”

She paused and added:

“I can’t leave him like he’s a nobody. I have to bury him the right way.”

An autopsy of Alvin Robinson did not reveal a cause of death, and the lab work could take 60 to 90 days. But in some ways, this is a relatively straightforward case for the Medical Examiner-Coroner’s office. Lt. Brian Kim, who leads an identification and notification unit, said it can take weeks or longer to identify someone who dies on the street.

Sometimes the bodies are decomposed, or there’s no ID on the person and no one in the vicinity knows the decedent’s full name. With Robinson, they were lucky: He had an ID in his wallet, and once they knew who he was, they were quickly able to locate his wife. It often takes a long time to find next of kin, and sometimes they’re never found. At the moment, Kim said, 97 next of kin notification cases are still open, and a lot of those involve homeless deaths.

Robinson’s story also illustrates how complicated it can be to address homelessness when a man with a mental illness or any other ailment refuses help.

In my view, the civil rights pendulum has swung too far in the wrong direction, providing an excuse for not intervening even when people are desperately in need of intervention. We stand by and watch, paralyzed, while people die of disease or addiction or both.

I told Mrs. Robinson I’m going to Italy this month to check out a model that Los Angeles is planning to try next year in Hollywood. In the United States, we closed mental hospitals without building the community clinics that were promised as replacements. Trieste, Italy, did build the clinics, and it built a culture in which the entire community is involved in rescuing and nurturing the lives of the most vulnerable.

She took a measure of hope in that, and in the thought that her husband’s death might help shine a light on the need for a better, more humane response.

At the coroner’s office, Lola Robinson wanted to see her husband, but viewings are not offered. A clerk wheeled her husband’s belongings into view.

“That’s a huge backpack,” said Stephan. “It’s probably everything he had to his name.”

The attendant then made copies of Alvin Robinson’s photo ID and gave them to his wife. For years, she had told me earlier, she had maintained her strength with God’s help. But seeing her husband’s ID nearly broke her.

She slumped and buried her face in her arms, and her body heaved as she let loose a stream of tears. Stephan put his arm around her and tried to comfort his mother, but that brought no relief.

“He’s in a better place,” Stephan said as his mother reached for a box of tissues.

It took several minutes for her to stand, still sobbing. She placed the copies of her husband’s ID into her purse, along with the photos that showed her family intact, in better times.

Lola Robinson began making arrangements a few minutes later for the cremation and a burial ceremony in Bakersfield. A few hours later, she and Stephan caught a bus back home to Las Vegas.

When we met, in 2005, I wouldn’t have guessed we’d still be in each other’s lives this far down the road.

He was playing a violin near the Beethoven statue in downtown L.A.’s Pershing Square. The violin was missing two strings, which didn’t seem to dampen his spirits, and everything he owned was in a shopping cart.

Another thing I wouldn’t have guessed was that all these years later, Los Angeles would still have thousands of people living under the stars, many of them reeling from mental illness as severe as his.

Nathaniel Anthony Ayers showed me a world I knew little about. I thought I could help him, shine a light and show the way for others. I was naively confident the powers that be would respond with whatever it took to do the right thing, the humane thing for all the Nathaniels out there.

What a fool I was.

Almost 15 years later, Nathaniel lives in a locked mental rehab facility, and the rest of us live at the center of an epic collapse of care and a failure of leadership.

Up and down the state, and more so in L.A. County, outdoor asylums are the norm, a raging drug epidemic is on graphic display, and homeless numbers are on the rise despite all the good intentions, the marginal successes and the hundreds of millions invested in a turnaround.

To be honest, I didn’t want to touch the topic this year, because things never seem to change no matter how stories or commentaries are assembled. But they did change. For the worse, thanks in part to a shortage of affordable housing and myriad other catastrophes.

I can’t stand seeing it, but I can’t look away from all the people sleeping on sidewalks and in parks without thinking about Nathaniel, and about the thousands like him who wouldn’t be homeless if we hadn’t let it happen.

Early on, when I wanted to help Nathaniel but had no idea what I was doing, I’d call a psychiatrist for guidance, naively hoping that someone more knowledgeable would have an easy answer. I still have moments when I’m lost and frustrated as I try to help Nathaniel. And I still seek advice. But I no longer expect quick fixes.

Nathaniel became one of the faces of homelessness through my columns, my book and a movie. We drove to conferences together. Orchestra musicians escorted us to our seats at concerts. We met with Yo-Yo Ma, whom Nathaniel had played with in the Juilliard School student orchestra. We went to the White House together when the Obamas invited Nathaniel to perform.

I’ve felt queasy every step of the way, worried that I couldn’t control the impact any of this would have on him. But the idea all along was to tell a story that looked beyond the illness and into the heart of who he is. He let me into his life; I tried to use that access to make a difference for him and others.

Along the way, Nathaniel became a part of my family, and he delivered on his part of the bargain.

I still struggle to deliver on my end.

Thankfully, there are moments when we disappear, together, into the imaginations of his heroes.

“Let’s listen to Variations on a Rococo Theme by Tchaikovsky,” he said when I visited him a few days ago.

Music remains the only medicine he willingly takes. Absorbed in Beethoven, Bach or Brahms, he is momentarily healed and temporarily freed from his demons. Sometimes, as he’s lifted by a musical swell, his eyes fill. I always wonder if it’s the beauty that tugs at him or if it’s thoughts of what might have been if schizophrenia hadn’t stolen his dream.

“How is everybody,” he always asks before naming every member of my family and making sure all is well.

Everybody in my family is fine.

Everybody in Los Angeles is not.

What I’ve learned from Nathaniel is that no two cases are alike, and that some people are easier to help than others. There’s always been too much emphasis on diagnoses and treatment protocols rather than on the specific needs of individuals, and the service cracks are filled with lost souls.

Nathaniel went from homeless to housed, from isolation to supervision. He had his own apartment for a while in Hollywood. But a solid Monday and a good Tuesday have never meant with him that Wednesday will top the charts. The cycles are wicked, relentless, exhausting. Despite the help of the best nonprofit agencies and most devoted case managers, supportive housing didn’t work for Nathaniel.

I’m grateful that he is housed, fed, cared for and safe. But a locked facility isn’t the solution I envisioned when we met 15 years ago. If all of us pulling together couldn’t deliver a better outcome for Nathaniel, what chance is there for those with no one on their side?

Yes, the challenge is that daunting. Those helped into housing are immediately replaced by waves of newly homeless people. They are victims of job loss, economic reversal, mental illness, addiction.

And so we have tents everywhere, blocking sidewalks and taking over parks, much to the frustration of residents who feel as if they’ve been hit by a storm with no FEMA coming to the rescue.

I don’t want to hear another word about how long it takes to build a unit of supportive housing (two or three years) and how much it costs (half a million dollars or so). For too long now, the explanations have all sounded more like excuses.

I’m tired of hearing that other cities look to us because of how progressive and innovative we’ve been, because we haven’t been enough of either. We need six of everything we know is working and a dozen of what might work better. Who other than us, living in this laboratory, should be figuring out what those more creative approaches might be?

We need more modular housing, more shelters, more medical and mental health services, greater use of neglected public and private property for housing and shelters. The volume of meth, opiate and alcohol addiction is huge, our drug war is useless, and our rehab efforts embarrassing.

And we need people who demand answers to stop saying no when the proposed shelters or the services are near where they live.

I’ve been saying for years that when you shut mental hospitals and never follow through on the promise of community clinics, you create skid rows. And it’s true.

In a few days, I’ll be headed to Trieste, Italy, with a local posse of government and nonprofit officials who are studying a world-renowned mental health model that’s scheduled to be copied in a Hollywood pilot project next year.

I don’t know why Trieste did it and we didn’t, but I’m curious to learn whether that model can work here, where poverty and addiction are bigger problems. I’ve been told that you don’t see people with severe mental illness suffering on the streets in Trieste, fending for themselves. Can you imagine being able to say that about Los Angeles?

In Trieste, as I understand it, there’s an ethos of acceptance, inclusion and community involvement. I’ve seen examples of those concepts in various local mental health agencies. But we need a broad cultural makeover.

One thing I’ve had to do at times, as Nathaniel’s friend, is tamp down my expectation that his situation might significantly improve. I can empathize with families that get worn out waiting for change, and frustrated at the built-in madness of systems that are supposed to help but often do the opposite.

You try to lower expectations, because guilt and hope can destroy you. But then you catch a glimpse, once more, of the human being behind the mask.

Every visit with Nathaniel is opera. He’s on the meds, he’s off. He’s getting along with others, he’s not. He wants to leave, he wants to stay.

Music evens him out. Playing it. Hearing it. Dreaming it.

He breaks my heart, to be honest. I’m inspired by him at each visit, what with his endurance, humility and devotion to music, and then I’m shaken as I walk away, leaving him there, behind a locked door, me with all my freedom and health and places to go.

But I can’t give up.

We’re good at putting thousands of mentally ill people into our jails and leaving thousands more on the streets, even as some of them wither and die.

We need more places in between.

I wonder where Nathaniel would be now if, at 20, when his troubles began, he’d lived in Trieste.

I wonder if Trieste can be translated in Hollywood and beyond.

I wonder if there will be a time when we do the basic things a caring, civilized people do.

Part One: The residents

The trash, the fights, the drugs, the blaring music.

For months, it was relentless.

“It was intolerable,” said Greg, who lives in a Hollywood neighborhood surrounded by homeless encampments, including one that until recently was just a few feet from the windows of his apartment. He wore headphones and turned up the AC to drown out the cacophony. Nothing worked.

“You have no idea the hell I was living.”

Tents and tarps have become a part of the streetscape in L.A. County, which is home to an undeclared state of emergency. We’re all witness to disturbing scenes of human suffering, unrestrained drug markets and festering illegal dump sites, although for most of us, the calamity is not at our doorstep.

But last summer, for Greg and his neighbors near Hollywood Boulevard and Gower Street, there was no escaping the impact of L.A.'s greatest unsolved challenge.

They felt, as have residents in Venice and elsewhere, as if they had lost their neighborhood and that nobody — including anyone at City Hall — cared enough to do anything about their deteriorating quality of life.

“Sometimes there was constant screaming, and the N-word, and people screaming that they were going to kill each other, and music playing nonstop,” said Marissa, who works at home and tried meditating to get through it.

“I honestly feel like I’m going insane,” she wrote in a July email to neighbors and public officials.

The apartments these people live in are middle-class dwellings, with some rents well below $2,000 a month. I spoke to a bookkeeper, a media company manager, a book editor, a pharmacy manager, all of whom asked me not to use their last names because they fear reprisals for calling out what’s happening.

One resident, Gil, got together with neighbors and spent $1,000 on planter boxes, arranging them in a way they hoped would discourage overnight camps in the cul-de-sac. It didn’t work. Some of the plants were destroyed; some of the pots became trash receptacles.

Gone, Gil said, are the days when he hosted family gatherings at his home.

“I don’t dare invite them back,” he said. “It’s a rough place.”

In July, when I first heard about what was happening, I visited to have a look. Since then, I’ve made frequent trips to the area, because it provides an excellent vantage point for exploring colliding perspectives on an epidemic that’s got Los Angeles in its grips.

Residents wonder if too many people — including young folks arriving daily from all over the country — view tents on the streets of Hollywood as a destination rather than a last resort.

Homeless people, some of them drained of hope and struggling to survive, say they have nowhere to go.

And an LAPD detective who walks this beat is stuck with the frustrating task of trying to keep order in a city with a raging drug epidemic, too little housing and no clear strategy to turn things around anytime soon.

You’ll be hearing from all of them.

Hollywood and homelessness are not strangers. I remember a night in 2017 when, while working on a column about severely mentally ill people decaying on the streets, I saw someone pop out of a manhole on Gower, near the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, and scamper toward a row of tents.

Nothing surprises in this part of town, where bright lights throw long shadows. What’s different now is that on top of misfortune, mental illness and poverty in the capital of high rent and low wages, drug addiction has spread unchecked through the streets, making its victims all the more difficult to reach. In Hollywood, the patience of residents has worn thin in places where camps have grown and a sense of futility has settled in.

Four months ago, I was added to an email list residents set up to air their grievances about the camps near Carlos and Tamarind avenues. It included police officers, Mayor Eric Garcetti, Councilman Mitch O’Farrell and others. Residents sent photos, recordings and first-person accounts to back up their claims that they were under siege.

“I was threatened with violence,” Greg wrote in an August email, describing an encounter with a homeless person. Twice, Greg told me, his car was keyed, possibly by someone who knew he was in touch with authorities.

To keep things in perspective, no one is more prone to physical assault than the homeless people themselves. But as a rule, Greg and others said, they avoided sharing their grievances with homeless people, fearing what might happen if someone was unhinged by drugs.

That sense of helplessness only fueled their frustration. Were they reduced to accepting this level of havoc as the new norm? Were they supposed to go to work, pay their bills and their taxes, and get so little in return even after weeks of emailing and calling local officials to plead for help?

“I’ve seen someone roll up a sleeve and just shoot up,” said Brian, a longtime resident. “I’ve seen someone [defecate] on the street. I once saw a skirmish where one guy was hitting another guy over the head with a board.”

“If the LAPD can’t help, does anyone have any ideas of what we can do as a community?” Marissa wrote to the email group. “How do we keep the peace, stop people using the sidewalks as a toilet and trash dump, and protect ourselves when the lack of support from authorities means this group is essentially now a ‘camper gang’ who controls our street, threatens residents, and openly fights and carries tasers?”

Often, street dwellers form smaller groups within the larger scene, and through the summer, a cohort of people in their 20s and 30s spent their days and nights clustered together on Carlos Avenue. A woman known to everyone as TK was in charge of the mostly LGBTQ crew.

TK’s group did not appear to mingle much with those who frequented the tents 50 feet away in the cul-de-sac on Tamarind Avenue, where vehicles sometimes pulled up to deliver what I’m pretty sure were not pizzas.

One day I was talking to a young woman who was moving into the building at the intersection and she said she had a “live and let live” attitude, so the street scene didn’t bother her. But as we spoke, a drama was unfolding just a few feet away from us.

Someone TK thought didn’t belong had wandered onto her turf, strutting and ranting, high on meth by appearances. When he tried to enter a tent, TK called out to her posse, and they chased the guy down. Someone punched him in the mouth and he staggered, but then he popped back up, ready to fight. He was ordered to leave, or else, and he slowly retreated, still screaming profanities.

The woman moving into the apartment appeared to be reassessing the situation. I asked if she thought she’d feel safe walking down Carlos Avenue at night. No, she said. Probably not.

Several weeks ago, Carlos and Tamarind avenues got quieter. TK and her crew cleared out, though residents didn’t know why or where they went. Even the cul-de-sac tent population began to thin, leaving behind broken bottles, a used condom, insect-covered food containers.

“It’s been such a relief,” Greg said, but he knew the return to sanity was likely to be short-lived. He’d seen the cycles before. One group moves out, another moves in. And there were still tents half a block away on Carlos, closer to the Presbyterian church, and growing encampments nearby — at Carlos and Bronson avenues, and at Gower under the 101 Freeway.

“I used to be able to walk to work … but I won’t do it anymore,” said Jeff Briggs, an attorney who lives near those encampments and says they’ve gotten worse in recent months. Briggs said he’s been verbally assaulted and his family has asked him to drive, not walk, because they fear for his safety.

Jesse Coley, who lives near Briggs, said she’s stopped walking with her young daughter to the Red Line and the Hollywood Farmers Market.

“I don’t feel good complaining about it. It’s definitely a sad situation,” Coley said. “It’s denser than it’s ever been and the tents go on for a longer stretch along the sidewalk. There are tents set up where they never were.”

What’s all the more maddening about this, Briggs said, is that the community was promised by city officials that there’d be noticeable improvement on the streets after the opening of the Schrader shelter, which provides bridge housing for people trying to get off the street, last spring.

Briggs was a founding member of Hollywood 4WRD, which has been working on solutions to homelessness for years, and he said he supported the shelter. But he now wonders if Schrader, a 7,200-square-foot facility that cost more than $3 million to build and will cost millions more to operate, has been anything other than “a very expensive experiment.”

Briggs wants more information on how many people have been helped, and whether the other planned bridge shelters — a key part of Garcetti’s plan to curb homelessness, with a $77-million price tag for 25 sites — will be designed and managed well enough to make a difference.

More on that later, but in a broader sense, the problems in Hollywood are illustrations of a systemic failure to harness the growing challenges of homelessness. What I found was not a lack of support from authorities but an inefficient response sabotaged by a lack of coordination and clear strategy.

There has been more outreach in Hollywood since the shelter opened, more police attention and more people connected to housing. Four of TK’s buddies are now in shelters. But there is nowhere near enough of any resource, whether it’s housing, addiction rehab or mental health treatment. And for every person rescued, another washes ashore. That may be especially true in Hollywood, which draws people both because it does have resources and because of the mythical allure of the place.

Late next year, a pilot mental health program based on an Italian model might bring some relief to Hollywood. And some of the housing approved by voters is finally going to be ready soon.

But that housing has taken way too long to build, cost way too much, and even when done, will leave us with staggering shortages, still.

In Hollywood, I heard support for the radical and expensive idea of building enough living space for every Californian and then requiring people to come indoors. I heard talk about limiting how much time someone can stay on the same slab of pavement, and offering bus tickets to those who might have a better chance of finding help, jobs and housing in the places they came from.

“I swear I am sympathetic, and I feel bad for people, and I want them to get the help they need,” Greg said one night in his apartment building.

But he and his neighbor Brian wondered if some of the campers have given up or chosen to drop out. Others I spoke to wondered if there are too few consequences for using drugs in public, blocking sidewalks and littering streets.

A week or so after residents told me they were relieved by an improving situation on Carlos Avenue, a stained queen-size mattress appeared on the sidewalk just down from their building. And then someone dumped a sofa.

I watched as one man pitched a tent, and when I returned the next night, there was another. Others followed, and the encampment was not just growing, but moving closer to the apartment buildings where residents had a summer they will never forget.

Part Two: The homeless camp

One day on Carlos Avenue in Hollywood last month, just south of the 101 Freeway, I met a woman who goes by the name Raven. She said she was 29, had been homeless since she was 17, and headed west in June from her home in Ohio.

Why L.A.?

Why not?

Like so many others, in so many other places, Raven wanted a change. And for restless spirits, the West still beckons.

But she suffered from an autoimmune disorder and came to believe, shortly after arriving, that Los Angeles had nothing but crappy options for her.

“I could couch-surf and get raped,” Raven said.

Or she could get a job and hope she didn’t get sick and lose it, which had happened before. But even with a decent paycheck, Raven said, she couldn’t afford a place of her own. Not with these crazy prices. So instead she was reading tarot cards on Hollywood Boulevard when she could find a taker, and living in a tent on Carlos Avenue, “with typhus and rats and human [feces] everywhere.”

I told Raven I had met with frustrated, exasperated residents of the area who wanted their sidewalks back, and they too were tired of tiptoeing around human waste.

Raven’s jaw tightened and her eyes narrowed.

“Then why don’t they open some bathrooms?” she asked, anger rising. “We need housing, and we need some ... respect. People walk past us and make fun of us, and we’re more afraid of them than they are of us. How dare them!”

Hollywood has long had a dark underbelly. Maybe the darkness, rather than the glitz, was always the bigger draw. Maybe there were always more people running from something rather than to something. But I have never seen it as ruptured as it is now, with thriving commerce and astonishing social collapse side by side.

You see damage everywhere. You see the pain of abuse and neglect, you see the harrowing effects of mental illness, you see the way drugs can empty the eyes and anchor someone to the street, and you see a bit of the relief that comes from knowing you’re in a place, finally, where you don’t have to hide sexual or gender identity.

The young people who go through the youth service center called My Friend’s Place are often wounded casualties of foster and juvenile justice experiences in L.A. and elsewhere, said program director Erin Casey. They don’t hit the streets for the meth, Casey said, but if they’re out there long, the powerful drug can help them temporarily “manage the trauma,” even as it slowly destroys them.

The downward spiral is hard to escape, but occasionally there are happy endings. On a visit to My Friend’s Place last week, I met a woman of 40 who had been a client there in her teens and later, amazingly, became a physician. Sheryl Recinos said she ended up homeless in Hollywood after running away to Los Angeles from a dysfunctional home in North Carolina and then getting raped after she arrived.

It took years for her to trust any adult, said Recinos — whose book on her journey is called “Hindsight: Coming of Age on the Streets of Hollywood” — and to believe that My Friend’s Place was really trying to help her. The young people on the streets of Hollywood today probably think they’re going to die young, Recinos said.

Understanding them isn’t possible without knowing that.

On Carlos Avenue, Raven’s friend Joe told me he came to Los Angeles not long ago, from Tennessee, looking for a woman he’d met on the internet. But like Hollywood itself, she was a tease, a dream. Joe said they never even met. He got booted from the bus station downtown for trying to catch a nap, then wandered over to Hollywood with little money and even less of a plan.

“I just want to get a legit job,” said Joe, who told me he had thought about going into comedy, or investing in bitcoin, or saving up enough to buy a vehicle he could live in.

In the meantime, he said, he digs for some of his meals out of trash containers.

“You just don’t dig to the bottom,” he said.

I asked Joe if he knew why more people don’t return home when they find out how hard it is to survive in L.A.

“A lot of them can’t go back home,” Joe said. “A lot of them have warrants.”

Outreach workers make the rounds in Hollywood, keeping tabs on the Ravens and the Joes, asking if they’re OK. One such worker was helping Joe get into L.A.’s homeless services system. Joe, born out of state, didn’t have a Social Security card or birth certificate, which would make it nearly impossible for him to get work or housing, but the outreach worker promised to help.

Well, I thought, it would be great if Joe made that tough transition from homeless to housed.

But I had another thought too:

How many Joes can Los Angeles take care of?

I’m not suggesting there shouldn’t be a net for those who stumble, get sick, or get chewed up by an economy that buries more people than it lifts.

But with nearly 60,000 homeless people in L.A. County and limited resources, should taxpayers who can barely cover their own cost of living be on the hook for every new arrival from somewhere else in California or the nation?

I’m not convinced we’re helping those who need it most. An average of about three homeless people die each day in L.A. County, while countless others suffer monstrous madness in full public view. I don’t think we’re working hard enough to reach the neediest.

“We’re not distinguishing,” said Kerry Morrison, who’s working on a pilot designed to bring better mental health treatment to Hollywood’s most severely disabled people. “You can come to California, sleep on the streets, do drugs — which are easy to find — and when you’re ready, you can get in line to get a housing voucher with no strings attached. And that is not sustainable.”

On the same street where I spoke to Raven and Joe, a young woman in a wheelchair spoke wistfully about her family in Idaho and about her child, who was in foster care. Another young woman, living in a tent, said she was pregnant, something that will probably move her up on the waiting list for housing.

A young chap who moved here from Oregon a couple of years ago to get away from his problems told me he had only found more. As we talked, he ran a finger along the bridge of his nose, wondering if it was broken. He said he’d been jumped twice the last couple of days.

An hour later, I saw some of the people I had talked to sitting in a circle on the pavement, passing a piece of aluminum foil and snorting a line of something.

Meth is everywhere. So is fentanyl. They are killing people.

In Hollywood, and in much of L.A. County, the housing shortage is only part of the problem.

“One hundred percent of everybody out there has trauma,” said Amie Quigley, director of community services at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, which is surrounded by encampments and provides services to those with severe mental illness. “You don’t meet anyone who’s high-functioning but going through a tough time. … These are people whose back story is ‘my stepdad tried to kill me at 3; I was raped at 5; I was a prostitute at 14.’”

Quigley tries to “lovingly redirect” people, as she describes her mission, and sometimes that means sending them back where they came from. Quigley estimated that church staff had arranged for about 40 people to get on a bus and go back home so far this year. Typically, she said, she’ll be talking to someone who’s having a rough time in L.A., and she’ll ask if they’ve considered returning home. Then comes the question:

“Do you think I should?”

Quigley answers honestly:

“I would.”

Quigley said she won’t buy bus tickets for people unless she thinks it’s the best choice for them, and they make the decisions. She tries to make sure there’s someone on the other end who can give them a shot at building a better life. If all that checks, she might say:

“You need to be in the safest place you can be in right now, and this isn’t that. You need to get to where you can get the best care, and I don’t want to see you on the sidewalk here for three more years.”

Quigley lives near the church, but said she no longer feels comfortable walking home through the Gower/101 underpass. From her office, she hears screaming from the tents, and the wailing of a dog that’s regularly beaten by a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The domestic violence here is off the charts. We’re dealing with it in the tents, and I had to call the police because this guy was yelling at his wife that he was going to kill her, right outside my door. It was screaming you could hear in Pasadena,” Quigley said.

Quigley talks about the “competing virtues” of residents who want encampments cleared and homeless people who don’t want to be harassed and herded when there’s nowhere for them to go.

Maybe we need to regulate how long someone can stay in the same spot on the sidewalk, Quigley said, and maybe we need to bill other states for the services we provide their residents. A struggling but “semi-capable” person can be in L.A. a year or so, Quigley said, and get housing before a California native who’s schizophrenic and has been on the street for a decade.

“We have to look at who should be eligible for housing in Los Angeles, because it can’t be everyone having a tough time of it in Cincinnati,” Quigley said.

“We need new tactics.”

Alicia and her sister Tea, both 22, along with friends Gray and Keni, 20 and 23, used to live near the apartment building on Carlos Avenue where residents were begging for relief from the noise and the clutter.

Now they’re in shelters in Hollywood, matched for housing, and waiting for their new homes to become available. I found the four of them one day, sitting on the sidewalk across from the bridge shelter on Schrader Boulevard, passing a joint.

“Instead of coming out and talking to us as human beings, the first thing they did was jump to the police,” Alicia said when I told her about the fed-up residents.

She added that someone yelled at them out the window one day, calling them homeless bitches.

“It’s always rudeness before kindness,” she said, “but respect begets respect.”

She said if residents were complaining about their taxes paying for homeless services, she wasn’t losing any sleep.

“Youth have been screwed over by, sorry, your generation,” she said.

The four told me about their histories of broken homes and mental health evaluations. Gray is from Southern California, but Alicia, Tea and Keni are from Michigan. Alicia said she left after being raped there.

“It’s either be homeless in Michigan and choose to freeze to death or come here and live semi-comfortably until we get our s— together,” said Alicia, who told me she did her research on homelessness before heading west, considered Venice, but settled on Hollywood.

“I’d rather be in the inner city,” she said, “where there are more services.”

Hollywood has roughly 2,000 homeless people, and there are only 72 beds at the Schrader shelter. So she’s one of the lucky few, but I wonder if Schrader operates in a way that can really make a difference.

Heidi Marston, chief program officer at the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, told me Schrader is still getting established but has had more early success than other shelters. When I asked how many people have moved on to permanent housing since the opening, the authority relayed numbers to me that it got from Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office.

Twenty-six people have been matched to housing; 16 more are ready to be matched when housing becomes available.

But only four have been housed so far.

In eight months.

And how many more homeless people have arrived in Hollywood in that time?

In Los Angeles, we all keep wondering when things are going to get better. But there’s no compelling reason to believe they won’t get worse.

Part Three: The police

LAPD Det. Shannon Geaney reports daily to what looks like anarchy, bedlam, madness.

She works Hollywood, and her beat is homelessness.

On a recent morning, her first call of the day sent her to a small park near Selma Avenue Elementary School, where a man known as Papa Smurf had overdosed on opioids. A nurse from the nearby LGBT Center was summoned before Geaney, and she had administered two shots of naloxone, but Papa Smurf wasn’t responding.

Geaney handed the nurse a third dose of nasal spray, and it saved the man’s life.

On another morning in that same neighborhood, Geaney was on foot patrol, making sure an array of tents had been collapsed and sidewalks were cleared, as required by a city ordinance. One remained, and as a sanitation crew cleaned up around the campsite’s periphery, Geaney told the tent’s occupant she would have to clear out.

The woman did not respond.

Geaney repeated the demand.

No response.

Geaney told the sanitation crew chief to go ahead and clear the camp, the law is the law. But the worker said he couldn’t do so without approval from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, and the agency rep had not shown up.

Geaney, who runs a team of eight officers focused on Hollywood homelessness, harrumphed and pulled out her phone. She had to make two phone calls, one of them to a deputy in Mayor Eric Garcetti’s homeless services unit, to get the authority to do what the law required. The woman finally began gathering her possessions and moving along.

“This is crazy,” said Geaney, and who could argue with that?

How many city departments does it take to remove a single tent in a city that has lost control of its homeless problem? Three in this case, plus LAHSA, a city-county agency.

The flowchart is big but the leadership board is small, and while there are no easy answers to the tangled social, political and economic drivers of homelessness, there has to be a better way than to stay the course, if, in fact, there is a course.

Geaney served for 11 years in the Marine Corps, where her missions included disaster relief in Jakarta after a deadly earthquake and in Southeast Asia after a killer tsunami. Now, she wonders why Los Angeles can’t treat its own disaster as effectively.

Why can’t we commandeer public buildings, she asked, provide housing and medical services and do whatever else it takes to help people begin to recover? Do we have to wait forever for half-million-dollar housing units to get built — especially when, even then, they’ll make only a small dent in the problem?

On Friday, in a what-took-them-so-long moment, it seemed as if the Los Angeles City Council was reading Geaney’s mind. The proposals floated by the council included clearing all hurdles and moving faster to provide temporary shelters and to have managed encampments, with services. But recent history suggests none of that will happen soon.

“I’m not steeped in social policy,” Geaney said. But every day, she sees how far we are from a state of order, and she wrestles with unresolved problems long after her shift ends, challenging her own effectiveness and everyone else’s, too. She’s kind of a field marshal on Hollywood homelessness, and she talks to everyone — service providers, community leaders, public officials and even homeless people — about what’s working and what’s not.

A lot of people are doing good work, in Geaney’s opinion. But the overall strategy is flawed, the execution haphazard and the results discouraging. All of which makes policing the streets more difficult.

In July, when residents who live near the intersection of Carlos and Tamarind avenues pleaded for city officials to do something about the encampments they were surrounded by, one of my first calls was to Det. Geaney. She told me she had met with residents and she sympathized with them.

They go to work, she said, they play by the rules, they go home to relax, but don’t feel safe and can’t get any peace. She couldn’t solve all their problems, Geaney said, but she would do what the law allowed.

Geaney knows the streets as well as anyone in Hollywood, and she is trusted by community leaders and even some homeless advocates, who would like to see more services rather than stricter law enforcement.

She explained to me the dynamics of two encampments at the intersection of Carlos and Tamarind.

One was made up of younger people who smoked marijuana but protected their turf from those interested in stronger drugs, while the other, located at the end of the cul-de-sac, drew people who were more hardcore.

Although the residents had a legitimate beef, Geaney told me, some of them had an unrealistic expectation of what police could do, given the legal right of people to sleep outdoors and the lack of housing and other services available to offer them as alternatives.

“We’re doing what we can,” Geaney said of the Los Angeles Police Department, which she defended as a changed organization intent on assisting rather than punishing homeless people. “But I need more help from my brothers and sisters at City Hall.”

Tagging along with Geaney for a few days last month, I found her to be as advertised — tough, compassionate, resourceful. One day on Carlos Avenue, Geaney cited Municipal Code to a guy in his late teens or early 20s whose tent was blocking the sidewalk. It’s a speech she gives often. Tents must be down from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., and there must be at least 36 inches of clearance on sidewalks.

The young man didn’t budge and barely acknowledged Geaney. She ordered him again to take down his tent, and he suggested she do it herself.

“Stand up, turn around and face the wall,” Geaney ordered, reaching for her handcuffs. “I’m not playing.”

This got him moving, reluctantly, and with an attitude. He angrily grabbed his tent, snapped the supportive rods, and asked if Geaney was happy. If he wanted to destroy his own tent, she told him, that was his business.

She then moved on to others on the block, some of whom she knew by name. She knew which of them were working with what agency on housing, who had recently been to the doctor, who had applied for this service or that.

“Is it true what I heard about you?” she asked one woman. “I heard you’re pregnant.”

“Where’d you hear that?” the woman asked.

“A little birdie told me,” Geaney said.

The detective nearly tripped over a collapsed tent and was surprised to find someone curled up beneath it. It was a woman named Raven, who said sometimes on the street it’s best to go undetected. Geaney asked Raven if she needed anything.

“Do you have a house or a million dollars?” Raven asked.

L.A.’s daily choreography — tents going up, tents coming down — serves residents who otherwise can’t walk along the sidewalks in their neighborhoods. But enforcing the law seems like one more expensive city effort that doesn’t fundamentally change anything.

She’s frustrated by the ritual, Geaney said, and she finds it ridiculous that it’s legal to sleep on sidewalks, which seems such a symbol of failure and surrender. But still, she thinks there’s good reason to enforce municipal codes.

“I care about these people,” she said, but no one in a tent is safe, and there’s no dignity. They use bottles for number one and buckets for number two, Geaney said. You see the buckets everywhere in Hollywood.

“I treat them with respect, but I have to enforce rules and regulations,” Geaney said.

And she doesn’t do it simply to placate neighbors or to harass homeless people, she told me.

“I do it because there has to be some semblance of order.”

Nothing pains her more than knowing that some service providers — and some homeless people — see the police effort as punitive and uncaring, said Geaney.

But she has her admirers, too.

“She’s a genius,” said Quigley, the First Presbyterian outreach director. She once called Geaney to handle an emergency involving a client who was having a breakdown and refusing to sign the paperwork that would keep him housed and safe.

“He was so symptomatic, he was climbing the side of the building,” Quigley said. “Shannon came and it was like Starsky and Hutch and she’s like, ‘Hey, how are you doing, John…. I’ve heard such great things about you.”

People experiencing psychotic breaks can be inclined to fear police rather than see them as allies, Quigley said. But Geaney had a way with this particular guy.

“She said, ‘You know, I have this job helping people who are experiencing homelessness and I hear you’re such a great tenant, I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. Could you do me a favor and sign your paperwork?’ She just did it.... She’s a rock star.”

One day outside the shelter on Schrader, between Selma and Sunset avenues, Geaney was on her way to check in on Alicia, Tea, Gray and Keni — the crew that used to live on Carlos Avenue before being placed in temporary housing. But first she was flagged by a woman who announced that she would be getting permanent housing soon.

Geaney congratulated her but told the woman that wouldn’t be the end of the challenge. She had to keep working on rebuilding her life, Geaney told her, because housing doesn’t solve everything.

Geaney saved some of the tough love for Alicia and company, who were passing a joint.

“Just stop,” Geaney commanded, holding her hands over her head.

It’s just marijuana, they protested.

“Medically or not, you cannot smoke it in public,” Geaney told them, ordering them to put it out.

The crew updated Geaney on their status on housing lists, and she repeated her earlier advice.

“You can’t just be in housing, you’ve gotta have a plan,” Geaney said.

And a job.

Alicia said she already has a job. She works for her mother, who sends her accounting chores from Michigan. Alicia turns the work around and her mother sends her as much as $2,000 to $3,000 a month.

Geaney did the math and said if Alicia was making that kind of money, she should have been working to get an apartment on her own, without assistance.

But she only had about $1,500 left, Alicia said.

Geaney asked what happened to the rest of the money.

She spent a lot of it on marijuana, Alicia said, and a lot of it on Lyft, because she refuses to use public transportation or walk.

Geaney bristled. You’re homeless, she told Alicia, and you’re afraid to use public transit?

Alicia said she’d like to get a new job once she has housing. She’d like to be an assistant manager at a KFC.

That night after work, Geaney went to a supermarket to do her shopping, and she noticed that the hard-working bagger had Down syndrome. It made her think, she said, about the young people she encounters every day in Hollywood.

Geaney knows better than anyone that a lot of homeless people have been hit with all manner of damage and disability, but she wished she had pushed back harder in the conversation with Alicia. The supermarket bagger had challenges, too, but was working and making a contribution. Geaney wished she’d encouraged Alicia to get more proactive about escaping the life she’s living.

I guess it’s the Marine training that keeps Geaney marching, even on days when it seems the battle is being lost. It has not escaped her attention that a homeless shelter opened in the heart of Hollywood, and all around, encampments seem to be getting bigger. Geaney said that happened when police were told to ease off a bit, so outreach workers could connect with homeless clients rather than have to chase them around.

It’s hard enough to be a cop out there without adding social work and homeless policy mapping to the workload, but Geaney can’t let things go. She’s bothered by what she sees, and she believes there have to be better ways to help homeless people and the community at the same time.

Geaney said she’s seen people “who have all their faculties” get Section 8 housing vouchers, but she’s had to hound the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to try to get severely disabled people off the streets.

If you’re in a shelter and the goal is to get you self-sufficient, Geaney said, and you’re not severely disabled, why can’t you be required to do some chores and learn some job skills? Are you really getting either the support or the push you need if you can sleep late, hang with friends and step outside the shelter whenever you want to get high?

Geaney and her team of officers estimate that 90% of the homeless people with whom they have contact in Hollywood are addicted to something, and it’s going to be hard for those people to make it even if they get housing. But even for someone who overdoses, Geaney said, it can be hard for her to link them to the help they need.

If we’ve got an epidemic on our hands, why isn’t there a drop-everything, all-out, full-scale, inpatient, outpatient response, with battalions lining up and delivering intervention, counseling and rehab?

Geaney respects the chain of command and isn’t one to step out of line. But I could see her going with her gut one of these days — or maybe it was wishful thinking on my part — and taking to the street with a bullhorn and a call to action — this is an emergency, people, so let’s act like it.

Lord knows we need that from someone, and Geaney has the spine of a cop and the heart of a social worker.

When she tours encampments, she told me, she’s always on the lookout for those who seem ready for something different.

“If they want a better life, I ask what they’re willing to do to get it. If they say if only they had a job, I tell them I’ll help, and here’s what we’re going to do: ‘Meet me tomorrow at x o’clock at Chipotle,’” Geaney said.

If they show up — and she’s had a few takers — Geaney never hooks them up to all the services they want on the first day. They’ve got to show her they’re serious, so maybe there will be another lunch date. If they keep passing tests, she’ll connect them to someone at the authority, or let them use her name on a job application, or offer to pay for shoes or clothing or a uniform.

“They’re refugees from the American dream,” Geaney said.

“The reality of it for me is that if I was a mid-level career supervisor in the early ’90s, I would have been all in on gangs and drugs because that was the most pressing issue for public safety at that time,” Geaney told me. “I truly believe that the greatest threat to our public safety and streets, and all our lives, is the fact that so many of our neighbors are unsheltered.”

I could give you a hundred reasons homelessness has become L.A. County’s most vexing challenge, from the gargantuan income gap to housing costs to the scourge of drugs and mental illness, but the biggest impediment to solving it may be this:

Nobody is in charge.

I didn’t need to research and write a three-part series on homelessness in Hollywood to know that, but my experience over the last few weeks sealed the deal, raising lots of questions about strategy and leadership.

It’s not that there aren’t well-intentioned leaders focused on the problem. Mayor Eric Garcetti, and Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, to name just two, are deeply involved in trying to find solutions. And behind the scenes, lots of dedicated people at multiple agencies are doing noble service every day, strategizing, coordinating and delivering services that have helped thousands of people.

But encampments continue to multiply despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on housing and services, tension is rising between those favoring sweeps and those screaming for more services, and there is no single person or government authority to answer for any of it.

If this doesn’t change, we’re doomed. But there’s a glimmer of hope for a new direction.

Sarah Dusseault, chair of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority commission, told me Tuesday that she wants to explore the possibility of blowing up the current system and designing one in which it’s clear who’s in charge. LAHSA, created in 1993 to coordinate city and county services, has a lot of responsibility and distributes a ton of money for services, but it has no authority to design or implement a comprehensive strategy. So we’re left with a battalion of 88 cities and their attendant bureaucracies, along with a huge county presence, but no command center or field marshal.

“There are times where it’s very unclear who is the lead, and when there’s no clarity around that or the goals, we are not going to be successful,” said Dusseault, who was appointed this past summer.

That comment reminded me of my attempt to get some simple stats on a temporary shelter in Hollywood with funding from various government sources. I got numbers from a council office but wanted to verify them with a mayoral staffer who referred me to LAHSA, which suggested I call the nonprofit running the shelter, which resulted in a call to me from a PR person who didn’t have the answers. I later got the numbers from a LAHSA spokesman who got them from the mayor’s office, and by the way, the numbers weren’t too impressive.

Four people had been placed in permanent housing in eight months, and there is no one in city or county government who is accountable for that. The system, such as it is, is the perfect way for public officials to duck or point fingers. And as Dusseault says, we have to have accountability.

“We have to look at these expansive flow charts and figure out how we can eliminate steps and become more efficient,” said Dusseault, who said that among other things, she’d like to see a better strategy for keeping low-income and senior residents from losing their housing.

Dusseault said she and the LAHSA commission will spell out plans at next month’s meeting to form an exploratory committee that looks into the possible restructuring of LAHSA along the lines of L.A. County’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which has a Chief Executive Officer and a staff overseen by a board made up of elected officials from around the county who have control over how money is spent and responsibility for formulating a coherent strategy. Another option might be for LAHSA to hand more authority to cities or regions, some of which are already peeling off and doing things their own way.

This isn’t the first time these ideas have been floated. I had a conversation with Garcetti and Ridley-Thomas nearly two years ago in which they teased the idea of using a Metro model for LAHSA. But nothing came of that, and now, as the crisis mounts, there’s a clamor for new tactics.

Not only is nobody in charge, but nobody is explaining what happens now that a billion dollars in Measure HHH funding has been largely spent on housing that will serve only several thousand people in a county with a homeless population of nearly 60,000.

“Despite the huge investment we’ve made, the endgame is not clear,” said Miguel Santana, who worked on homelessness as both a city and county employee, and who served on the oversight committee that kept watch on the billion dollars approved by voters for housing.

In that latter role, Santana said, he was frustrated by both the time it took to build the housing (more than two years) and the cost (more than $500,000 per unit), and advocated for strategies that were more creative and less costly and time consuming.

“Angelenos are frustrated and becoming increasingly hostile,” Santana said earlier this month when receiving a public service award from a nonprofit called Project Restore.

“Their outrage is legitimate and they are rightful to ask: Why is it so difficult and expensive to house people? What is the endgame? Who is in charge? As L.A.'s civic leadership, we should not be afraid to admit that we have failed.”

The assessment by voters is no better. Polling for the L.A. Times and the Los Angeles Business Council Institute found that 95% of voters called homelessness a serious or very serious problem, and a staggering two-thirds said money is being spent ineffectively and that police should play a bigger role.

If LAHSA were restructured and given full authority and responsibility — and the commission were made up of elected officials from throughout the county — they’d be on the spot to draft strategies and set goals and be held responsible if they don’t deliver. We’d still have turf wars, political and geographic, as well as legitimate differences of opinion. But at least a public agency could be held accountable, and the public could participate.

Given the raging drug problem among homeless people, is there any good reason we’re not treating it like the epidemic that it is?

If a Democrat doesn’t win the White House next year, and federal funding for housing and services remains skimpy, what’s the local plan for building more housing?

If we house 10,000 homeless people, or even 30,000, but tens of thousands of people remain on the streets and more keep coming, what then?

You can’t start arresting people for being homeless if there’s nowhere for them to live. But are creative compromises possible in which the rights of residents and the homeless people are addressed simultaneously, perhaps by appropriating underutilized public facilities?

Should local officials get behind the call by Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Supervisor Ridley-Thomas to build at least a temporary roof over everyone’s head, with the goal of getting them started on permanent recovery, and then make it illegal to live on the street?

If so, what do you do about those who refuse to move indoors? Do you support the movement to redefine what constitutes grave disability, and forcibly treat those with physical or mental illness who are withering away?

The answers won’t be easy to come by, but thus far, we’re not even asking the questions.

And the reason is clear.

Nobody is in charge.