LA Times Uses The Worst Possible Example To Highlight Homelessness

Homelessness among older adults has surged to 22 percent in Los Angeles. An honestly shocking number that caught my eye when I was scrolling through the news last week. Piquing my interest as a possible writing topic, I clicked on the L.A. Times link expecting to read about elderly parents getting forsaken by their relatives, priced out of their homes due to increasing property taxes and other fees, and, of course, addicts and the mentally ill.

However, that’s not the lead paragraphs-long-story of woe the L.A. Times decided to pull people’s heartstrings.

Instead, writer Gale Holland decided the example of elderly homelessness in Los Angeles she wanted to put front and center wasn’t an unfortunate octogenarian who fell through the cracks. The lead person of interest is a transitioning man in his late 60’s who willingly put himself into untold thousands of dollars in credit card debt to undergo surgeries that would physically transition him into looking like a woman.

Andrea Colucci’s long, slow slide into homelessness began, as it does for many, with medical bills.

At the age of 67, she had decided to finally transition as a transgender woman. Her insurer balked at paying her surgeon’s bills, so she put them on credit cards.

Then her post-surgery housing plans fell through. A hospital put her out on the sidewalk in a paper gown.

Now 70, Colucci lives in a white van with no license plates, a sagging tire and a broken window. Growing up in the San Gabriel Valley, “playing the role of a man” was tough, she said, but added that the stigma of homelessness is worse.

“The joke.”  Unfortunately, his joke is a reality they could very well face and isn’t very amusing. And neither is the Ms. Holland’s burying it under the gratuitous identity politics of Colucci’s story.

Get it together, L.A. Times.

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