Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is certainly no stranger to putting her foot in her mouth. But on Thursday of last week, the 83-year-old Waters may have had her worst foot-in-mouth moment when she told a group of homeless individuals who had shown up at a Los Angeles agency, which attempts to deal with homelessness, to “go home.”
Hundreds of homeless individuals showed up at the building that houses Fathers and Mothers Who Care, enticed by a mistaken post on social media claiming that the agency was giving out Section 8 vouchers for permanent subsidized housing. Employees of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, who were called there by Waters, were swamped with homeless individuals seeking housing vouchers. Waters was there to speak with employees of the organization.
Homeless persons reportedly began showing up prior to daybreak on Friday only to be sent away without any assistance. In an effort to calm the crowd, which was becoming unruly, Waters addressed them.
Waters attempted to calm the crowd, at one point getting on a police loudspeaker so she could be heard above the din.
“You cannot get Section 8 vouchers here.” Waters told the crowd.
Later, Waters told the crowd, “I want everybody to go home.”
Unsurprisingly, the crowd of homeless people erupted. One person initially giggled at Waters’ faux pas, but then came the anger.
“We don’t got no home, that’s why we’re here. What home we gonna go to?” one exasperated person told the congresswoman.
Waters waved her arms and told the crowd: “Nothing more is going to happen here today.”
Another woman tried to engage Waters saying: “Miss Maxine, you need to work with me.”
Shortly after this, Waters erupted angrily. “Excuse me, there’s nobody in Washington who works for their people any f***ing harder than I do. I don’t want to hear this. No, no, no,” Waters shouted profanely.
“What do you think I do every day?” Waters told the crowd.
One person in the crowd quite reasonably asked, “What do you do every day? I’m still on the damn street!”
“I will continue to work,” Waters told the crowd. “I will get the information … there are no more vouchers today.”
To which one person in the group replied, “There were never any vouchers.”
Waters then compounded her error by attempting to quell the story, which was originally broken by the Los Angeles Times.
“You’ll hurt yourself and the community trying to put this together without background,” she said. “I don’t want you to start trying to write it, you won’t understand it.”
Waters would only tell reporters that “people just showed up on Thursday,” and that “they were confused,” about the situation. Waters then reportedly cut the call short, not answering reporters’ questions.
“The issue here is people are under the assumption that they’re getting a Section 8 voucher, they’re overcrowding,” said homeless person Tiffany Mathis, who was at the event. “They don’t understand that you have to be in a program and it’s a referral service or you get certain services, housing or shelter care until they assess what you need, and I think that’s what messed the whole thing up today.”
Homeless persons again showed up on Tuesday, drawn in by the same mistaken social-media post that said, “They giving out section 8 on imperial and Vermont today and on Tuesdays and Wednesdays go get some help!!” The post reportedly appeared on Instagram.
“I had a doctor’s appointment I had to cancel because I thought I would be seen here today. I wasted two whole days of my life doing this — Friday and today,” said 36-year-old Cre King, who has been homeless for six months. “We’re all here, we’re all struggling. Times are hard.”
In a television interview with KABC in Los Angeles, Waters deflected blame for the chaos. “I blame those who have the money that we have sent from the federal government who have not been able to communicate properly and to provide the services that we worked so hard for,” the congresswoman said.
Back in January of 2020 — the last time L.A.’s homeless community was counted — more than 66,000 people were homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. A scheduled 2021 count was dropped due to Covid concerns. A new count was conducted last month, with the numbers not expected until sometime this coming summer. Many Los Angelenos believe that those 2020 numbers have at least doubled since Covid-19 hit.
