Some members of the Sherman Oaks community have had enough with the area's homeless problem. For one business owner, his last straw was being targeted by a man who threw feces at his direction.
An unhoused woman walks back and forth saying, "Isis, Isis, Isis."
Yet another man, presumably under the influence of drugs, screams, "You gotta die, you gotta die, you gotta die!"
Business owner Paul Scrivano describes his community this way, "Every day, it’s like one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, literally a psych ward."
Scrivano is the owner of The Blue Dog Beer Tavern. He’s had about all he can take from a man who openly defecates on Ventura Boulevard.
"Every single morning, I’m wiping that off my property before I have to do business," Scrivano said.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, one morning, the unhoused man tossed a bag of his human waste onto Scrivano’s SUV.
"Many business owners are at their wits end, they're not getting the responsiveness that they need and that they deserve," says Attorney Larry Slade, the Chair of the Homelessness Committee for the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association.
"Individual homeless people will camp out in front of a store, make it their home, bring their possessions, use it as a bedroom. In the morning, when the business owners come to open up, they have to try to deal with a homeless person literally blocking the entrance to their business and then, they have to deal with cleaning up hazardous waste right in front of their business, right in Sherman Oaks, right on Ventura Boulevard," Slade said.
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