In 2021, I hit a breaking point. I was tired of working sales jobs, chasing money, and feeling that none of it mattered. I wanted to do something genuinely good, something difficult that I thought might actually help people. I found what I thought was my answer through a temp agency listing for a night-shift position at a downtown Los Angeles homeless shelter. The pay was $16 an hour, and the listing said, “urgently hiring.” I was an adult with a pulse willing to do the job for that wage, so I was hired.
Politically, I was ready for it. I had recently paid $40 to hear Bernie Sanders speak in Glendale and bought his book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. I believed that the suffering on Los Angeles streets was the inevitable result of corporate greed. A society wealthy enough to produce billionaires, yet willing to tolerate Skid Row five miles away, seemed morally bankrupt. Tax the rich, redistribute the money, and everyone could live with dignity—it seemed obvious.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Shortly before I had begun my new position, I attended a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) meeting. The politics were more extreme than mine, but the people seemed compassionate. After the meeting, I found the host standing beside his bicycle lock, which had been cut in half. His bike was gone. I offered him a ride home and he accepted.
In the car, he told me that it was unfortunate that our capitalist system forced people to steal like this. I was impressed by his grace. Someone had taken his property and form of transportation, yet he still blamed the system, instead of the thief.
I arrived for my first shift at the homeless shelter near MacArthur Park, home to one of the city’s most accessible open-air drug markets. It was a scene of despair: people hunched over on fentanyl, lying on the ground seemingly unconscious, or huddling in groups to buy and sell drugs. Others sold stolen goods from local stores to pay for their next high. If you showed MacArthur Park to people from Europe or Asia, they would never believe it was part of the glamorous culture capital they hear so much about.
I went to the gate and introduced myself. A security guard scrolling on her phone seemed upset that she had to let me in. My shift ran from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m. The shelter looked promising—newly built, with a modular shipping-container design and 70 beds divided between men and women. Each resident had a small room separated from the hall by a curtain. As staff members, we called them our “clients.”
Every three hours, we performed wellness checks. The purpose was not subtle: make sure nobody had stopped breathing from an overdose. Drug use was so routine that checking for dead bodies had become part of normal operations.
The drugs came through the gate. During checks, I sometimes encountered residents injecting themselves. On one occasion, a resident missed a vein, and their limb became so badly swollen that I called an ambulance. Police officers and paramedics were frequent visitors.
Each evening, a van delivered 70 packaged meals, and about half were usually eaten. I was instructed to throw away the rest. Night after night, unopened Styrofoam clamshell containers packed with full meals went directly from the hot bag in which they had been delivered into the garbage. Residents often preferred food they had purchased themselves or came asking for late-night snacks instead.
It was when I was disposing of freshly delivered meals that had just been delivered in Styrofoam clamshells that I began thinking about all the money. The city was not withholding any resources. It was spending enormous sums, visibly and constantly. Yet the people inside the shelter didn’t seem to be moving toward stability.
I still had the desire and optimism to help our “clients,” and would chat with them in my downtime. Once, a resident showed me an expensive specialized electric bicycle. A nerd for e-bikes, I was familiar with the model and knew that it cost thousands of dollars. When I asked where it came from, she casually described traveling with other residents to the West Side to steal bicycles. Buyers sometimes met her outside the shelter.
The shelter, it turned out, had a full-scale theft ring operating inside it. New bicycles came in every day, and a huge pile accumulated on the lawn. I asked other staff members about this, and they said they were well aware that residents stole and sold bicycles, but there was no way to stop it. I remembered then the DSA organizer whose bicycle had been stolen, and how he saw it as a crime of necessity.
I did, of course, meet some wonderful people with brutal backstories who could not find a path back into society. But the situation in Los Angeles felt close to impossible for someone like that. How could you rejoin society and qualify for a lease on a new apartment, let alone pass a background and credit check? Especially in a city that has a self-inflicted housing crisis due to NIMBYism, endless red tape restricting the housing stock, and an eviction process that lets someone stay in a rented unit free of charge for over a year at times, making landlords and developers hyper-skeptical about the leasing process.
Still, the shelter’s chaos was often overwhelming. One night, a resident threatened the one security officer there with a knife and began smashing everything in sight. We called the police. An hour later, roughly 20 police cars and a helicopter even flew over the facility. Officers struggled with him on the ground before taking him away. He was back the following night.
Another client, a transgender woman, engaged in prostitution in the tents outside the shelter and repeatedly frightened older women in the dormitories and started fights. The client also made residents uncomfortable by constantly wearing revealing clothing around women in their sixties who had only recently arrived in the country.
During a wellness check, this person failed to respond, so I followed protocol and opened the dormitory curtain. The client lunged at me and displayed what appeared to be a weapon. I ran and locked myself in the meal-preparation room. Management acknowledged that the client's behavior was a known problem, but because I had not been injured, nothing was to be done.
I tried voicing my concerns during a meeting with senior management. I heard the familiar language of victimhood and systemic injustice. I heard much less about stopping the drug dealers at our gate, preventing clients from using drugs inside, treating severe mental illness, or moving residents toward independence.
I also happened to know that these nonprofit managers made great salaries while not even coming into the shelter. They regarded my concerns as offensive to the clients, while I worked inside the shelter for $16 an hour. I eventually told them that the transgender client sleeping in the women’s dormitory, separated from the others only by a curtain, was frightening the women and had tried to attack me. I said that this resident should not remain in a women’s dorm divided by curtains anymore because we had elderly women from Latin America telling me in Spanish that they were afraid of this person. They vehemently disagreed.
A week later, social workers at the facility got the client an apartment in Los Angeles, but the client rejected it. This actually pained me. This person genuinely wanted to engage in prostitution in tents around Los Angeles rather than get help and have a real home. I slowly came to understand that when you have been living a certain way for so long, you become attached to it, even if the life is unimaginable to an average person.
After watching this endless incineration of tax dollars, I concluded that the problem was not a lack of compassion or money. I came to see the shelter as part of a calculated system disguised as a compassionate philosophy. The system derided expectations and consequences for bad behavior as oppressive. It abandoned vulnerable people to addiction, psychosis, violence, and predation. Meanwhile, a network of highly paid professionals administered the decline, took vacations in Europe, and patted themselves on the back as good, selfless people.
It made me sick. We were not helping. We were sustaining an epidemic of suffering.
I have not and will not stop caring about the poor. My faith does not permit that. I still believe that a decent society has obligations to the hungry, the mentally ill, and people sleeping outside. But those obligations include telling the truth about what is destroying them and, at times, forcing them to change. That is what you do for someone you love. If someone is hurting himself and others, you intervene. You do not hand them their favorite poison and look away. That is what too many of our local governments have done.
I entered that shelter believing that my fellow leftists had a monopoly on compassion. I departed understanding that compassion without order and accountability is deeply unserious. We all know the old saying about hell and good intentions. Working the night shift at a downtown L.A. homeless shelter has given it fresh resonance for me.