Note: This is an encore post from 2021.

As longtime readers know, I always begin a new year with an annual donation in memory of Elizabeth Short to Heading Home, which works with the homeless in the Boston area. Partly because of my research on Elizabeth Short, I try to make the issue of homelessness a continuing theme of the Daily Mirror.

I donate to an agency in the Boston area because of Elizabeth Short’s connections there, but Los Angeles also has a severe, chronic problem with homelessness and there are many local agencies that welcome donations. I recently visited Hollywood and saw camps of homeless people along the exit ramp from the northbound 101 onto Hollywood Boulevard and along the Walk of Fame. Men pushing shopping carts. Women cowering in doorways of buildings that are boarded up or closed with roll-down shutters that are tagged.

I believe people will find helping the homeless more meaningful in the long term than, for example, leaving a bottle of liquor and some cigarettes at her grave, especially since Elizabeth Short didn’t smoke and rarely drank.