When California Governor Gavin Newsom campaigned for office in 2018, he called homelessness “a disgrace” and “the ultimate manifestation of our failure as a society”. He made combating homelessness one of his main goals.
Yet there was Newsom in jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap, helping state workers dismantle a homeless encampment beneath a freeway overpass in Los Angeles earlier this month. “People are done. If we don’t deal with this, we don’t deserve to be in office,” Newsom said.
California, like Ireland, long enjoyed a reputation for humane treatment of the tired and poor. Then homeless numbers shot up during the Covid pandemic. The political mood shifted. Donald Trump accused Democrats of “spending vast sums of taxpayer money to house the homeless in luxury hotels” and promised to transfer them to “tent cities” on “inexpensive land”.
On June 28th, the US supreme court, two-thirds of whose justices are pro-Trump conservatives, overturned a circuit court ruling that found that punishing the homeless with fines or jail sentences constituted cruel and unusual punishment, banned by the eighth amendment to the US constitution.
The decision effectively criminalised homelessness in the US and emboldened once liberal Democrats, including Newsom and San Francisco mayor London Breed, to drive out the homeless. Newsom issued a statewide order to crack down. His theatrical contribution to the dismantling of encampments on August 8th was a warning to Los Angeles officials who resisted that order.
One of my older brother’s closest friends was homeless for many years. They met at Chez Moi disco in Beverly Hills in the early 1980s. My brother was known as Big Bob because of his height. His friend Bob, a Canadian who dreamed of making it in the music industry, was six inches shorter. So he was called Little Bob.
My brother had just finished graduate school and was running out of money. Little Bob got him a job at the record company where he worked as a sales representative. They shared an apartment near Highway 101, between Hollywood and Sunset boulevards. “We had a ball,” my brother recalls. “We were knights on a romantic quest to meet girls, and by God we found girls!”
Bob and Bob were so successful at “chasing girls” that they moved out to live with their respective girlfriends. My brother tried marriage, took on a mortgage and commenced a career with the LA County School District.
Little Bob struck out on his own as a talent scout and agent. “He was totally passionate about music. He was really good at it. I thought, ‘Someday this guy will run the whole music industry.’ I always marvelled at what a kind, gentle person he was. And he was funny. He used to say that punk rock was created so that ugly people could have style. There was a Def Leppard song called Bringin’ on the Heartbreak which Little Bob called, Bringin’ on the Headache.”
Little Bob’s European girlfriend left him. His career dead-ended. There was substance abuse. He could no longer pay his parking tickets or rent for his run-down apartment. He slept rough in the Hollywood Hills for a decade.
When my brother went on an Arctic expedition in 2007, he gave Little Bob $3,000 and the keys to his house and told him to get a job at the grocery store.
Big Bob returned a few weeks later to find the front door open, Little Bob “on the verge of the DTs”, and the house “looking like it had been visited by the Manson family”. Little Bob had run up a $450 phone bill on “Baby Come Back” phone calls to his ex-girlfriend in Europe. My brother kicked him out.
Little Bob reverted to what he called camping, carrying his belongings in a backpack and using the computers and washrooms at the public library. His friendship with my brother survived. They would spend evenings together at El Coyote Café, where Little Bob made a drink last all evening by pouring water into it. “He was proud and didn’t want other people to pay for him because he couldn’t reciprocate.”
“It’s just winners and losers and don’t you get caught on the wrong side of that line,” Bruce Springsteen sang. Little Bob’s life left my brother pondering, “What makes people rise or fall?” That, he says, “is the mystery about homelessness we can’t solve”.
Little Bob was housed for a time by a homeless organisation. “He called them ‘the homeless industrial complex’ and said the people running it made a lot of money and drove nice cars.” Little Bob couldn’t bear curfews and restrictions on smoking, drinking and guests. He went back to sleeping rough. For the last years of his life, he lived in social housing and earned pocket money walking dogs.
“He was like an old prospector talking about the gold mine he discovered and couldn’t find again,” my brother says. “He scoured YouTube for new bands and called record stores to ask them to stock certain artists.” But Little Bob never posted anything on the artists’ management website he set up. My brother stopped asking if he sent out the letters they wrote together, because it felt like criticism.
When Little Bob died last spring, his sisters took his ashes back to Canada. He had told his family that Big Bob was his real brother.
In Dublin, Ivana Bacik, TD and leader of the Labour Party, cites the latest Government statistics for homeless people in emergency accommodation: 14,303 in June, of whom 4,404 are children. It may be few compared to the estimated 180,000 homeless in California, but “behind every figure is an individual tragedy”, Bacik says. “Every month we say the government is failing these people, and every month we see new records reached.”
My brother admits there may not be a solution to homelessness. “But it’s like a cruel, high-school prank to load them up on buses. I would always be in favour of being kind and gentle.”