A Specter is Haunting Venice Beach

A few days ago, my wife and I went for a walk on the Venice Canals, which is a Los Angeles neighborhood next to Venice Beach. You can tell that this must have once been a sleepy beach town, with cute little bungalows lining a few acres of crisscrossing canals. But over time, they've mostly been bought up and replaced with mansions. And while the conspicuous wealth of LA can be pretty depressing, this neighborhood was quite beautiful, as everyone clearly spent a lot of time (or money) on landscaping. So, we had a really enjoyable stroll through the canals, with my wife indulging my desire to photograph every last tree, flower, and plant.

But we began noticing these very political looking lawn signs. No dummies, we were both very suspicious of their message to "Stop the Monster." And we were right. The "monster" these people wanted to stop was a very modest public housing development. With a total of 140 units, 68 were slated as "permanent supportive housing" for homeless individuals, 34 units were for low income individuals, another 34 units for artists, and the remaining 4 units were designated as manager units.

What caught us about the sign was the use of the word "monster." It's hard to think of a more terrifyingly evocative word, as it's a word we reserve for those people who are so far beyond the community of human beings that there is no way to integrate them into society. We put monsters in prison, we execute monsters, and we wage war on monsters. But we certainly don't allow them to live among us. It's a really dangerous word, and I think most of us are reluctant to use it, because we realize it refers to those who don't belong in human society, and who we're therefore justified in eradicating one way or another.

However, the rhetoric of the sign and the associated website were more subtle. They didn't call homeless people monsters - they called their potential home a monster. As the website read, the community group behind the signs had formed only two years earlier out of their concern over the possibility of just such a monster, and now their worst fears were being realized. And so the time had come to "Fight Back Venice!" (incidentally also the name of the group), because the monster they had feared was now in their midst.

I found this not only disgusting but revelatory, because I think it speaks to the conservative logic of the modern liberal mindset (and I do suspect that residents of this Los Angeles neighborhood were Democratic Party voters). As individuals, homeless people might deserve help and charity because they are, after all, human beings. So, they weren’t demonizing people. What they were demonizing, what was inhuman or monstrous to them, was the one thing that would cure homeless people of their homelessness—homes.

I think only one Venice resident understood this. One of the few holdouts in a modest home rather than a new mansion, this cute bungalow had a peace sign on its roof, making me think that its resident was an aging hippy who had managed to hold onto their home through waves of gentrification. And their yard sign read that "Homes cure Homelessness." You can't get a simpler statement of the cure than that.

The “Fight the Monster” website not only described this one housing unit as a “monster,” but it also went on to describe others like it as a kind of invasion that was "ferociously devouring" Venice. But walking around the Venice canals, with most family homes having been replaced with massive mega-mansions, what was obvious was that the gentrification of the "Fight the Monster" constituency was the real monster devouring Venice. This monster was helping make LA housing unaffordable but for the very rich, this monster was contributing to the homelessness crisis, and this monster was demonizing any attempt to get in its way.

I couldn't help but think of any number of modern problems, from student loan debt to inadequate healthcare, and how the “liberal” response is to rend their garments in faux outrage while simultaneously claiming that the cure is worse than the disease. Interestingly, what all these cures have in common is that they require greater socialization - of education, of healthcare, and of housing. But to such a liberal mindset, the cure really is worse than the disease. And this raises the question of whether the monster we're really talking about is that great specter that Marx thought was haunting Europe.

PS While the homeless were forced into tent cities outside of the Venice Canals, the ducks that swam in the canals had an entire lot reserved for their private use.