Yeah, the mentally ill homeless are a big part of the problem.

Then there are these kind of "disposable" workers, like the guys they interviewed, with no real job skills, who drift from place to place, that employs low wage low skilled folks, like cleaning stalls at the track, or hot walking, (a job some friends of mine had at age fourteen when I grew up in Arcadia because it was legally considered agricultural work and kids could do it), which are seasonal.

Another major cause of income loss and resulting homelessness is disability. Many of these older guys are "beat" as a result of working in low end "hard" and sometimes "dangerous" work, and, as the article note from the bad "luck" anyone could have crossing a street and ending up disabled, too.

Elderly former prisoners is another problem, folks with no skills, no families, no social infrastructure, no income or pension, and too old to hire for anything. We have dumped a lot of these, because it saves us all a lot of health care costs in State prisons, without ever having figure out what to do with them, or keep them engaged, supervised, and off of the streets.

Does BART cause homelessness, does the Gold Line? And your "fed up", so what? What are you doing about it?

The solutions for the mentally ill is obvious, many of them need supervised group housing, and court ordered supervision. But, a long time ago we decided that there had been abuses in "committing" these people, and we got too cheap to keep our mental hospitals open, so we dumped them on the street. As the kind of assistance they do get has been unable to keep up with rising rents, now they are homeless and unsupervised too, often victims of crime, themselves. Ditto for some of these other categories.

I have even suggested, at a recent neighborhood meeting with my Councilman over this problem, suggested that we organize, "adult day care" to gather these folks up, and keep them in better supervised, more sanitary, and safer homeless centers. But, not on my block, of course.... We tried to get one of the "hooker" hotels, on a fairly "run-down" section of east Colorado in Pasadena, converted to long term family housing (folks with kids), and the Nimby's a majority at the meeting from places over two miles away, went full on ballistic, over it.

And, since statistically, some of the folks on here, are about three paychecks short of joining these folks in the park, what do we need to do to create the kind of work that can help those without disabilities or impairments, and have sufficient income security to afford housing? And, what can we do with our tax codes or zoning to encourage folks to invest in providing a better match between housing production and housing affordability, in the production of sufficient units of more affordable housing.

One thing transit does do, is it allows for more mobility. And, having grown up in Arcadia, and having worked on the SP, and later for firms, located in the bowels of downtown LA, I'll definitely take Arcadis, if I have to plan on camping out overnight.

So are you really fed up with it? Or, are you just feeding on it?

Damn those evil trains!