Start Date: October 20, 2022

Let’s call her Theresa. She lives in a rental with her family somewhere in Los Angeles. They aren’t in a luxury high-rise or a gated community.  

She is getting up before dawn. She gets in the shower, puts on her uniform, and gets a quick cup of coffee. Then the work day begins. She will walk to a bus stop and hope it is a good day. No crazy people on the bus. Nothing dangerous. Maybe there is a Metro or a second bus before she walks the last of her route to her housekeeping job at a motel. Maybe there are travelers. But increasingly there may be homeless drug addicts who had been out on the streets. Is it better to have them off the streets? Probably. But what of Theresa?

Theresa will get her cart and collect her cleaning supplies. She will wheel it from room to room, spending much of her day wearying her back from bending over, picking up, and kneeling. She will scrub toilets, vacuum carpets, wash showers, empty waste baskets, launder sheets, and make beds. It is a long hot tiring day of low wage physical labor.  

She will hope to avoid dirty needles, hepatitis, COVID, and even assault.

When the work day is over she will repeat her long commute. At home she will change and make dinner for her family. Maybe she’ll have time to check the kids’ homework before turning in to get some rest before it all begins anew.  On her day “off” she will get groceries, clean her own place, and get ahead on cooking for the week.

Theresa isn’t quitting, not even the quiet quitting we hear of from young professionals who make 6 figure salaries, yet are indignant about having to go to their office a few days per week. Theresa can’t clean motel rooms via Zoom, with the occasional break for a yoga session. She knows she can be replaced. Her family needs her. So she will go in tired. The rent has to be paid. She will go in on holidays and family birthdays. The kids need clothes for school.

Theresa isn’t abandoning ship, taking to drugs and the streets, ending up in “permanent supportive housing” where some other poor laborer would spend their day taking care of her.  

The city deems it insensitive to enforce the laws or confine the homeless to either mandated treatment or incarceration. The judges say the responders can’t remove their belongings, even when, as is oft the case, they violate the rights of the disabled to have free passage.  Finally, embarrassed at the view of a metropolis that looks like a sewer, a trash dump, and an insane asylum combined, the city’s leadership has decided to simply transfer the mess to behind closed doors.

And who has to clean up their mess?

Theresa.