Photograph by Matthew Lickona

I have noticed how people look at the homeless with fear and disdain. So I make it a point to smile at them, and I can see the impact it makes.

SD as bad as LA?

The Reader sank to a new low publishing this piece of rot (“Less Lonely Out Here”, Cover Story, August 29, 2024). The self-described Chinese female chronic pain patient revealed herself to be not only a special pleader for a dysfunctional group, but also part of the problem for validating both anti-social and illegal behaviors.

Throughout her ‘home girl’ story, and her street buddy vignettes, she repetitively used the same words to make what are alarming, serious concerns for many of us sound “amusing”, “funny”, “hilarious”, and “epic.” I suspect her intellectual development arrested in her teen years, as she writes much like an adolescent on social media.

She tried to normalize the abnormal with her warm and fuzzy stories of homeless people doing drugs on the trolley, a girl (who later looked she was going to cry- — poor thing!) trying to pull on a mattress...but she achieved the exact opposite result. The author unwittingly provided an in-depth, up close, real life expose of why the homeless population in San Diego is continuing to grow and create a public health/safety crisis.

She also aptly covered why the MTS Trolley system will never be profitable and pay for itself, and why it will never be a viable or preferred transit option for those who can avoid it. I myself would be willing to endure the 50% increase in my transit time to and from work to ride the trolley from the South Bay to my workplace — if it were reasonably clean and safe. But the experience of riding the trolley is untenable.

Unlike East Coast elevated trains and trolleys, MTS does not use turnstiles. Passengers can freely enter the trolley at any stop, paying or scanning a prepaid card app. The MTS transit officers on the trolley approach only those of us who are obviously dressed for work (or maybe school) to ask us to show a fare scan. They will not make the homeless get off if they didn’t pay, which of course they didn’t. They will not even confront them (no doubt per mandate from MTS brass).

In the afternoon, the trolley cars are so crowded with homeless people and their wagons, shopping carts, and bikes that to even squeeze into a car is downright physically dangerous. The available space for paying passengers is more than cut in half, even for those of us who are more than willing to stand.

There is also the unbearable body stench that many of them carry on their person. It is literally enough to make you gag, vomit, even pass out. It is egregiously unsanitary and unhealthy.

Then there’s those mentally ill men who harass or fixate on lone female passengers, as has happened to me on more than one occasion. It’s unnerving, unpleasant, even scary. And, I, too, have witnessed a non-paying (of course) passenger at the trolley platform who just “shot up.” This is not entertaining, heartwarming, normal, safe or acceptable.

The author of that slop piece article lives in an alternate universe, apparently. And if the SDSU students really thought that it was “cool” that other passengers were doing hard drugs on the trolley, I dare say a bachelor’s degree may not help much.

Frankly, I doubt the veracity of that snippet, probably just her trying to make readers think that everyone else on the trolley is also as okay, as opposed to outraged, as she is with the appalling scenarios. I’ve been on the trolley where everyone riding with me looked just as wary, unrelaxed and uncomfortable as I felt with deranged homeless aboard.

While it is true that some of them don’t smell like they haven’t bathed in a month, and many don’t harass other passengers, the writer chose to tell folksy tales of those who behave with vile manners and with no regard for the sensibilities or rights of other, paying riders.

Heaven forbid a frail elderly person who cannot drive has to use the trolley for a medical appointment, or a young mother without a car has to board with little children. This woman’s tawdry stories of people my mother would have called “ne’er-do-wells,” without intending to do so, helped make San Diego look as bad as LA and Oakland — just another blue city shithole.

Laurie K

East Chula Vista Otay Ranch

Where can they go?

I would like to ask outreach worker Miss Angelica Davis (“National City and Chula Vista ready to enforce camping bans”, Neighborhood News, August 27, 2024) if, should she have absolutely nowhere else to go, the notion of sleeping next to unsocialized street dogs and active drug users would appeal to her. Would she be willing?

The homeless epidemic is not due to the poor attitudes of the ungrateful unhoused. And Chula brags about 56 less unhoused in a year? Mind if we see the data for that? Because I bet they aren’t living comfortably in stable housing. Seems the cities regularly round up, oh, about 56 people at a time and drop them somewhere else.

Hey Angelica, where CAN someone go if they “aren’t willing” to risk their safety to make your numbers more convenient?

Kimmy J

Ramona