To the editor: Columnist Steve Lopez is right: Los Angeles has asked residents to accept the unacceptable (“On the blight side, a stroll around City Hall provokes the question: Can’t we do better?,” April 11). But the blight he describes reflects a deeper problem: a political culture unwilling to plainly name the forces driving so much civic disorder. And if we will not name them, how will we solve them?
Officials invoke “homelessness” as an intractable social problem. But the term has become a polite abstraction that obscures what Angelenos actually see every day: severe untreated mental illness, addiction, open-air drug use and city and county governments unwilling to intervene before personal crises turn into public violence. That euphemism is morally and politically convenient. It avoids harder conversations about treatment, enforcement and accountability, while sparing elected officials the backlash that comes with confronting reality.
That avoidance has serious consequences for residents. Here in downtown, Angelenos endure the predictable results of concentrating vulnerable people and services without adequate intervention in the middle of a dense residential neighborhood: erratic behavior, assaults and unprovoked violent attacks.
This is not a call to criminalize illness or addiction. It is a call to stop abandoning sick people to deteriorate in public, untreated and unsafe, until crisis becomes tragedy.
At some point, Angelenos must ask what we are willing to tolerate. A city cannot recover while its leaders keep enabling the conditions eroding public life. Los Angeles will not begin to heal until its leaders find the courage to say what is happening is unacceptable — and act with urgency to restore order, uphold dignity and get people off the streets and into care.
Leslie Ridings, Los Angeles
..
To the editor: I agree with Lopez’s assessment that the ecosystem that surrounds City Hall has deteriorated — monuments, open space, the mall and local retail. Having run a business district for many years, I learned that a neighborhood does not thrive without people. So it begs the question: Why are so many city employees working at home?
City Hall and City Hall East are ghost towns. Last I checked, the pandemic is over. Though signs of human life would bring vitality to the sidewalks, I see the potential for something more powerful.
Prove me wrong, but I’m suggesting there is a direct correlation between the decline in city services and the continuation of remote work. What is sacrificed when so many are siloed at home? Cross-departmental problem solving. Brainstorming “breakthroughs” that come from being in the same room. No spontaneous lunchtime conversations, less teamwork and sadly a decline in on-the-job mentoring.
Kerry Morrison, Los Angeles
..
To the editor: Reading Lopez’s column about the deplorable condition of L.A.’s landscape prompted my agreement. It’s not just downtown — the condition of the West Valley is appalling as well. Not only do people use the streets as a public trash can, there is complete neglect. I would hope for beautification, but we don’t even get repair or replacement. Trees bursting their concrete collars, trees removed (or dead) and never replaced, bike lane pylons knocked over or missing, trash cans overflowing, bus shelters covered in graffiti. It didn’t always look like this. We can do better.
James Morrison, West Hills
..
To the editor: Lopez’s poignant Sunday California section front-page column describes the disgraceful blight and neglect in various areas of downtown Los Angeles and rightly calls out those responsible for this decades-old shame. He holds that there is “no excuse for letting things go to hell.” Sadly, this disgrace is common all over our broken city.
Then on the Sunday Entertainment section front page is a full-page exterior photograph of a portion of the new zillion-dollar pristine LACMA building (“The new LACMA is divisive. It’s also ambitious, disorienting — and radically alive,” April 8). In the photo, the building appears, in all its grandeur, to gaze upon the most pathetic-looking unkempt palm tree — just like the countless other pathetic-looking unkempt palm trees spread all over our city.
Oh, the irony!
Babette Wilk, Valley Village