MacArthur Park is LA’s latest chapter in callous inhumanity

The atrocious scenes in MacArthur Park are just the latest chapter in decades of inhumanity.

But the City of Los Angeles has stopped those of us who are trying to do something about homelessness.

My husband and I founded, funded and ran a recovery-based shared housing community called Haaven.

Together, we supported eight fully furnished and outfitted shared-homes where more than 200 formerly homeless people found community and support in homes built on cultures of health and recovery. 

The City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) excluded Haaven from their menu of solutions, claiming shared housing was “undignified.”

We did not require sobriety, but asked residents to refrain from doing drugs in the homes.

The City and LAHSA said that impeded people’s civil rights. 

Our privately-funded solution was driven out of business simply for providing a recovery-based alternative to the misery of the streets.

I first became aware of the homeless crisis in Los Angeles about 17 years ago, when my son was just three.

We live in Venice, Calif., and I used to push him in his stroller down to the local kids’ park.

Day after day, I passed the same people sprawled on the sidewalks in various states of distress.

Looking down at my innocent toddler, it hit me: Every one of these suffering souls, rotting on our streets, is someone’s child too.

Once they gazed up at their mothers with those same big, beautiful, hopeful eyes.

Seventeen years later, I’m horrified — as a mother and as a human being — to see other people’s children still rotting on the streets and in the parks of Los Angeles.

Hundreds of young people suffer in plain sight, lost to addiction, mental illness and agony, while the community, the city and now the world stands by and watches.

It shocks me today as much as it did back then that our elected officials not only tolerate but actively enable other people’s children to waste away in public parks — destroying the health, safety and well-being of everyone around them, housed and unhoused alike.

Eunisses Hernandez, the Los Angeles council member whose district includes MacArthur Park, and her politically aligned Democratic Socialists of America peers all claim to be “addressing” homelessness.

In reality, they’re pursuing a radical ideological agenda: waging war on capitalism, dismantling “neoliberal” housing policies and ending enforcement against the unhoused.

In the process, they treat our mentally ill and substance-addicted youth as mere pawns.

They say they’re tackling root causes, but they’re actively sustaining drug addiction and mental illness.

It’s a perverse form of maternalism — wrapping ideological indulgence in a blanket of “compassion” and “harm reduction,” while turning places like MacArthur Park into open-air fentanyl markets rife with hourly overdoses and daily deaths.

And we’re paying for it in so many ways.

Los Angeles pours about a billion dollars a year into “Housing First” and so-called harm reduction strategies that claim to protect those who are most vulnerable.

Tens of millions of dollars are spent each year on needle distribution and “safer smoking” kits—including crack pipes distributed on our streets. 

Government-funded teams roam through MacArthur Park daily, handing out drug paraphernalia to other people’s sons and daughters, who are barely clinging to life in drug-induced stupors and various states of psychological torment. 

Seven of these kids die on the streets of Los Angeles every single day.

Yet politicians celebrate “minor” reductions in homelessness — reductions that suspiciously mirror the annual toll of those very deaths.

These are not just statistics.

These are someone’s babies — children who once laughed, played and dreamed.

Now they lay dying in filth, poisoned by drug addiction nurtured by our tax dollars.

All while idealogues like Eunisses Hernandez and her DSA allies preach “compassion” as they hand out pipes and needles. 

There is nothing kind about this approach.

What Hernandez is allowing in MacArthur Park is cruelty disguised as progressivism — yet another instance of a politician prioritizing her radical agenda over saving lives.

It’s a betrayal that tears the heart out of every mother who’s ever held her child close.

Imagine how the mothers of the seven kids who will die on the streets of Los Angeles today feel, and ask yourself: How many more of our children must suffer and die in broad daylight for the sake of flawed ideologies?

How many more hearts must break?

And when will we finally demand treatment-first programs, enforcement and recovery housing that can help our kids rebuild and restore their lives?

Enough.

These are our kids — our beautiful, flawed and irreplaceable children.

Not one more should die for the sake of a heartless political ideology.

The madness must end today, before another mother is forced to bury her child. 

Heidi Roberts co-founded a shared housing initiative that shifted 212 people out of homelessness until the city intervened.