L.A to give people living in cars on Venice-area streets overnight parking

L.A to give people living in cars on Venice-area streets 'safe overnight parking' | L.A. NOW | Los Angeles Times

LA city ready to allow overnight parking for folks living in cars and RV's in supposedly upscale Venice Beach. City is also looking for a social services provider to provide needed social services to the displaced homeless Venice Folks living out of their vehicles.

Venice was till recently seen as a burgeoning upscale beach front trendy hip community, a favorite haunt of LA artists involved in the movie industry, and as very hip and offbeat. Now we have this small but growing population of Venice homeless living out of their cars and RV's. Who would have guessed! When the average price of homes in VB was till recently near 1 million, no wonder some area residents who may have lost jobs or fell thru the economic roof have been turned out in the streets, or in VB's case, in their vehicles.
A sign of our tough economic times? I have seen folks in tidy suburban Orange County - not transient urchins but decent former middle-class suburbanites such as boomer-aged moms - digging thru garbage bins at OC state beaches, fishing for aluminum cans in order to survive.

Anyway , we have Venice Beach, long thought to be a hip upscale tourist trap, becoming swamped by homeless folks living out of their vehicles. Needless to say the area's residents are not too happy about it, seeing these folks as not down and out but as area nuisances. I cannot judge this as all of us can take an unfortunate economic turn and be cast out on the streets, or have to find refuge in living with friends or relatives.

These are bad economic times, and even along CA's upscale beach communities there are impoverished homeless and folks struggling to survive. These are mostly former middle-class suburbanites, mostly white and many of them aging boomers, perhaps with disabilities, unable to return to work in this badly depressed economy, or unable to afford beach-area housing prices if they do find work at reduced wages.