When Survival Becomes a Crime: A Response to the Koreatown Encampment Coverage

# When Survival Becomes a Crime: A Response to the Koreatown Encampment Coverage

I just read ABC7's piece about the "sprawling homeless encampment" in Koreatown, and honestly, the tone of outrage from residents reveals something deeply troubling about how we view human desperation. Let me be blunt: behind all this complaining about tennis courts and gardens, what I'm really hearing is that you'd prefer these people just disappear—or better yet, die quietly out of sight.

## The Audacity of Growing Food

What particularly struck me was the resident's complaint about "a garden where they're growing stuff." *Kio terure!* What exactly should homeless people eat? Air? The moral panic over people trying to feed themselves reveals how disconnected we've become from basic human needs. These people are literally growing their own food because our society has abandoned them, and somehow *that's* the problem?

More than 40% of food in America gets wasted—thrown away because it's not profitable enough to distribute. Meanwhile, people are criticized for trying to grow tomatoes on an empty lot. The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

## Empty Homes, Full of Hypocrisy

Let's talk about what's really happening here. Los Angeles has thousands of empty homes and apartments sitting vacant because rents are so inflated that working people can't afford them. The same economic forces that created this housing crisis are the ones that put people on that lot in the first place. But sure, let's focus on the "eyesore" instead of addressing why people need to live there.

*Vi ĉiuj estas nur unu paŝo for de senliteeco.* Most of you complaining are one emergency, one medical bill, one job loss away from being in the exact same situation. The thin line between housed and unhoused is something many people refuse to acknowledge until it's too late.

## Basic Human Needs Aren't Luxuries

What these people need isn't complicated or expensive:

- Healthy food (which they're trying to grow themselves, apparently to everyone's horror)

- Safe shelter

- Basic medical care

- *Digneco*—dignity

These aren't extravagant demands. These are fundamental human rights that should be available to everyone, regardless of their economic status or housing situation.

## The Real Safety Issue

Yes, there are legitimate safety concerns about makeshift electrical connections. But let's be honest about what's really going on here. When residents say they're "afraid" to walk their dogs, when they complain about people building community spaces and growing food, we're not talking about safety—we're talking about the discomfort of seeing poverty up close.

*Ni volas, ke ili malaperus, sed ni ne volas pensi pri kien ili iras.*

## The Resources Are Already There

Here's what makes this whole situation even more infuriating: we already have the resources to house everyone. The issue isn't scarcity—it's distribution and political will. There are empty properties, wasted food, unused land. What we lack is the collective desire to prioritize human dignity over property values.

Instead of spending money on sweeps and cleanup crews and bureaucratic processes to remove people, imagine if we redirected those resources toward actually housing people. Revolutionary concept, I know.

## A Mirror We Don't Want to Look Into

The real reason this encampment upsets people isn't because of tennis courts or gardens. It's because it forces comfortable residents to confront the reality that our economic system creates disposable people. It's easier to call for removal than to ask uncomfortable questions about why people are there in the first place.

*Kiam oni vidas homojn kiel problemojn anstataŭ kiel homojn, oni jam perdis sian humanecon.*

Every complaint about this encampment is essentially saying: "I don't want to see the consequences of the inequality I benefit from." The tennis court isn't the problem—the fact that people need to build their own community infrastructure on an abandoned lot because society has failed them is the problem.

Until we're ready to have honest conversations about housing as a human right instead of a commodity, about dignity instead of displacement, about solutions instead of sweeps, we'll keep having these same discussions while people continue to die on the streets.

The question isn't whether these people deserve basic human necessities. The question is whether we deserve to call ourselves a civilized society while denying them.