MacArthur Park is LA’s latest chapter in callous – Latest News
The atrocious scenes in MacArthur Park are simply the latest chapter in many years of inhumanity.
But the City of Los Angeles has stopped these of us who’re attempting to do one thing about homelessness.
My husband and I based, funded and ran a recovery-based shared housing group referred to as Haaven.
Together, we supported eight totally furnished and outfitted shared-homes the place more than 200 previously homeless people discovered group and assist in properties constructed on cultures of health and restoration.
Homeless people at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles on December 23, 2025. Ringo Chiu
The City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) excluded Haaven from their menu of options, claiming shared housing was “undignified.”
We didn’t require sobriety, however requested residents to chorus from doing medicine in the properties.
The City and LAHSA stated that impeded people’s civil rights.
Our privately funded answer was pushed out of business merely for offering a recovery-based various to the distress of the streets.
I first grew to become conscious of the homeless disaster in Los Angeles about 17 years in the past, when my son was simply 3.
We dwell in Venice, Calif., and I used to push him in his stroller down to the native children’ park.
Day after day, I handed the identical people sprawled on the sidewalks in varied states of misery.
Looking down at my harmless toddler, it hit me: Every one of these struggling souls, rotting on our streets, is somebody’s youngster too.
Once they gazed up at their moms with those self same large, lovely, hopeful eyes.
Seventeen years later, I’m horrified — as a mom and as a human being — to see different people’s youngsters nonetheless rotting on the streets and in the parks of Los Angeles.
Hundreds of younger people undergo in plain sight, misplaced to dependancy, mental sickness and agony, whereas the group, the town and now the world stand by and watch.
It shocks me immediately as a lot because it did back then that our elected officers not solely tolerate however actively allow different people’s youngsters to waste away in public parks — destroying the health, security and well-being of everybody round them, housed and unhoused alike.
Eunisses Hernandez, the Los Angeles council member whose district consists of MacArthur Park, and her politically aligned Democratic Socialists of America friends all declare to be “addressing” homelessness.
In actuality, they’re pursuing a radical ideological agenda: waging battle on capitalism, dismantling “neoliberal” housing insurance policies and ending enforcement in opposition to the unhoused.
In the method, they deal with our mentally sick and substance-addicted youth as mere pawns.
They say they’re tackling root causes, however they’re actively sustaining drug dependancy and mental sickness.
It’s a perverse kind of maternalism — wrapping ideological indulgence in a blanket of “compassion” and “harm reduction,” whereas turning locations like MacArthur Park into open-air fentanyl markets rife with hourly overdoses and every day deaths.
And we’re paying for it in so some ways.
Los Angeles pours about a billion {dollars} a 12 months into “Housing First” and so-called hurt discount methods that declare to guard those that are most weak.
Tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} are spent every year on needle distribution and “safer smoking” kits — together with crack pipes distributed on our streets.
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Government-funded groups roam by MacArthur Park every day, handing out drug paraphernalia to different people’s little kids, who’re barely clinging to life in drug-induced stupors and varied states of psychological torment.
Seven of these children die on the streets of Los Angeles each single day.
Yet politicians have a good time “minor” reductions in homelessness — reductions that suspiciously mirror the annual toll of these very deaths.
These are usually not simply statistics.
These are somebody’s infants — youngsters who as soon as laughed, performed and dreamed.
Now they lie dying in filth, poisoned by drug dependancy nurtured by our tax {dollars}.
All whereas idealogues like Eunisses Hernandez and her DSA allies preach “compassion” as they hand out pipes and needles.
There is nothing type about this strategy.
What Hernandez is permitting in MacArthur Park is cruelty disguised as progressivism — yet one more occasion of a politician prioritizing her radical agenda over saving lives.
It’s a betrayal that tears the guts out of each mom who’s ever held her youngster close.
Imagine how the moms of the seven children who will die on the streets of Los Angeles immediately really feel, and ask your self: How many more of our kids should undergo and die in broad daylight for the sake of flawed ideologies?
How many more hearts should break?
And when will we lastly demand treatment-first applications, enforcement and restoration housing that may help our children rebuild and restore their lives?
Enough.
These are our children — our lovely, flawed and irreplaceable youngsters.
Not one more ought to die for the sake of a heartless political ideology.
The insanity should finish immediately, earlier than one other mom is compelled to bury her youngster.
Heidi Roberts co-founded a shared housing initiative that shifted 212 people out of homelessness till the town intervened.
