Not widely known as a hot investigative publication, the AARP Bulletin offered a heartbreaking picture of homelessness in California around the time the large financial services crashed. Seventy-three thousand are homeless in the Los Angeles area alone—a number approximately equal to the combined population of Holyoke and Northampton. Some of them hold full-time jobs and sleep in their cars at night. Some lost their homes in a wave of foreclosure. The reason for the AARP's interest: around 4,000 of them are 62 or over, senior citizens whose Social Security can't keep them housed at Los Angeles area prices.
And in Santa Barbara, according to the AARP report by Carole Fleck, a dozen parking lots have been designated as space for people to sleep in their cars, with one even reserved for women. Fleck interviewed a 66-year-old woman who slept there for three months after losing her job before a friend found her a place to live. Sleeping in the same lot was a 79-year-old woman.
Fleck describes people sleeping in cars in Santa Barbara who "work and can afford cars, gas and insurance and often retain gym memberships for a place to shower."
In 1939 John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, a book about people from Oklahoma, thrown off their land because of drought, heading west to find work in California. There things went from bad to worse, leading to an unforgettable description of carloads of oranges dumped on the ground and sprayed with kerosene as hungry people looked on, because, or so it was thought, the price of oranges would collapse if they could take them for free.
The picture facing us today—streets full of empty, deteriorating and vandalized houses not used to shelter human beings because the market forbids it—brings to mind Steinbeck's comment about the destruction of food before the eyes of the starving: "There is a failure here that topples all our success." To be committed to a free market is not to say that the market doesn't need preventive regulation and guided correction.
