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At the Friday event, heated arguments broke out among the hundreds of people who turned out for assistance, more evidence of the brutal Los Angeles housing market and the desperation felt by the tens of thousands of Angelenos who are unable to secure permanent places to lay their heads.
The crowd overwhelmed Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority workers, who were unable to meet more than a small fraction of the need and left while throngs of people were still waiting for help.
The housing authority was there at the behest of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who delivered emotionally charged remarks to the crowd Friday, at one point using an expletive to defend her efforts to relieve the city’s housing and homelessness crisis.
On Tuesday, dozens of people showed up at the third event, again expecting to receive Section 8 housing vouchers. Again, they were told that they were misinformed and that Fathers and Mothers Who Care was only able to take people’s information and enter it into an emergency housing database.
Waters told the gathering of mostly homeless people Friday that “you cannot get Section 8 vouchers here.” And later, “I want everybody to go home.”
The response was fast and angry, a voice from the crowd yelling, “We don’t got no home, that’s why we’re here. What home we gonna go to?”
Less than half a minute later, the congresswoman responded to a question from the founder of Kingdom Warriors Foundation, a local housing advocacy nonprofit. Jabbing her finger into the air, Waters said, “Excuse me, there’s nobody in Washington who works for their people any f— harder than I do. I don’t want to hear this. No, no, no.”