The issue of homelessness in the United States is devastating across the board, but in Los Angeles, the impact is a touchy and tricky subject in a city so filled with contradictions of the uber-wealthy, rich, six-figured working class, and those just making it by the skin of their teeth in the working class.
According to data supplied by the 2023 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, there was a 9% year-over-year increase in homelessness in Los Angeles County and a 10% rise in Los Angeles. The data showed 75,518 people experienced homelessness in Los Angeles County, and 46,260 in Los Angeles, an increase from 69,144 in the county and 41,980 in the city from 2022.
And if the only real lesson we all collectively learned from COVID-19 was that working people are dangerously close to experiencing being unhoused.
I had the opportunity to review the short doc film “The Forgotten Ones” by Tracii McGregor, which is streaming on Black Public Media and was streaming as part of the Afro Pop Digital Shorts series.
This short is very short but it packs a punch. The story focuses on one man’s 40-year battle with homelessness on the mean streets of Hollywood. His name is Willie “Billy Brown” Smith, and he’s a 75-year-old African American man who fled the racism of the Deep South for the City of Angels (Los Angeles) in the mid-sixties. After decades of hard drug use and alcohol abuse, he finally kicked the habit and started piecing his life back together.
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Today, he has an apartment. A key that fits into a lock. A safe place, and one that he expresses extreme gratitude for. In “The Forgotten Ones,” there is an invitation to tap into your humanity and look at the people living and dying on the streets of this city. Most of those on the streets are more like you and me. Rents and property taxes continued to rise while salaries did not. Big corporations are given loopholes not to pay taxes as are the wealthy, but hardworking human beings (like you, like me) are not given these options.
Most of the people on the street are older, and the doc gives a glimpse and asks the question of how to address America’s growing problem of unhoused elders.
“The Forgotten Ones” isn’t the best short documentary that I’ve seen on the subject, but it isn’t the worst short documentary that I’ve seen on the subject, either. So, maybe that’s why you should see it. It’s simple, honest, and raw. And there, by the grace of whoever you pray to… there goes you, or I.
Go here for the trailer.
Go here for the AfroPoP Digital Shorts playlist.
