By a Concerned Resident of Los Feliz
Los Angeles is in crisis. Nearly 70,000 people live on the streets or in shelters across L.A. County — and the number keeps rising. In neighborhoods like Los Feliz, encampments have become a permanent fixture, and our parks, sidewalks, and overpasses reflect a city overwhelmed. Yet for all the billions spent, we continue to dance around the core issue: the overwhelming driver of chronic homelessness is untreated drug addiction.
You’ll hear a thousand theories about the causes of homelessness — housing costs, mental illness, job loss, systemic failures. And yes, these are factors. But when we look honestly at the individuals most visibly, chronically homeless — those living in tents, pushing carts, screaming into the void — the common denominator is usually not just poverty. It’s substance use. Fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin — these are destroying lives, fueling psychosis, and making it nearly impossible for people to regain control.
It’s become unfashionable to say this out loud. Some activists and city leaders fear that acknowledging the role of addiction will stigmatize the homeless. But the truth isn’t stigma — it’s reality. And denial has costs: for the people suffering on the street, for the communities forced to navigate open-air drug scenes, and for the credibility of public policy.
Los Angeles spends billions on “housing first” programs that prioritize shelter without requiring treatment or sobriety. But when housing becomes a revolving door because residents are still deep in addiction, are we truly helping? When we enable a lifestyle of drug dependency rather than insist on the dignity of recovery, we are not being compassionate — we are being negligent.
We need a paradigm shift — one rooted in compassion, accountability, and results. That means investing in addiction recovery programs, not just housing units. It means empowering outreach workers with tools to encourage treatment, even if it requires consequences for refusal. And yes, it may mean reforming state laws that have made public drug use effectively consequence-free.
Our community of Los Feliz cannot solve the homelessness crisis alone. But we can insist on honesty. We can demand that our city leaders stop hiding behind euphemisms and start focusing on the real crisis playing out on our sidewalks — a drug epidemic that’s claiming lives every day. Until we address that head-on, no amount of spending will solve the problem.
Because no one chooses to live in a tent on the sidewalk when they’re clean, sober, and mentally stable. And until we deal with the addictions trapping people there, we’re just rearranging the deck chairs.
