A common theme between the organizations we saw yesterday and today were gaps. Gaps between the have and the have-nots, those that perpetuate gentrification and those that are displaced as a result of it. Gaps between what the people who write acts and policies think the homeless need vs what the homeless think they need vs what they actually need. Gaps between services and the people who need them, whether the gap is as a result of result of distance, accessibility, knowledge of the service, and so on. Some of these gaps are as far apart as the outstretched hands of Adam and God in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, and soe are far, far wider and deeper, like the Mariana Trench of Policy.
But I especially want to talk about the gaps between policy and procedure, or as a LA CAN representative said, his arms outstretched, – “left vs right, you know what I’m saying’.” These are gaps between people who are enacting policies and bills and those that those policies and bills are affecting, and that gap is so far removed that the people that are enacting the policies may have genuinely good intentions but have no idea how their actions affect those on the bottom of the totem pole. Likewise, the gap between those that write policy and those that enact it is often a slippery slope because some policies take years to enact, and that process outlives the term of the policy authors. Not only that, but the gap between the authors of the policies and the people implementing the policies are vast since there is no communication between the two. The implementers interpret the policy as they see fit, in ways that are convenient or possible in their realms. A good example of this is the Safer Cities Initiative: the policy that was passed was two-fold, with a component that increased security and police activity on skid row, coupled with a component that would provide more services on skid row. By the time it was implemented, the second half of the initiative was lost. We see the effects of that everywhere we go.
How can we address and diminish those gaps? How can we prevent them from occurring in the future?
