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We avoid numbers just like we try to avoid the people they quantify:

• 88,000: the number of homeless people in Los Angeles County – three and a half times the number of students at UCLA.

• 12,000: the number of homeless people who live in the area downtown known as Skid Row – the largest concentration of the homeless in the entire United States.

Westwood is no stranger to homelessness. Though we simply prefer not to think about it too much, the numbers confront us with the truth: More people are ignored and disenfranchised in L.A. County than anywhere else in the nation.

It doesn’t make you feel very good about walking out of your way to avoid being asked for money.

Here’s a rosier number: $12 billion. That’s the amount of money it will cost the county over 10 years to put a roof over the head of every homeless person between Skid Row and Santa Monica Pier, according to a Daily News article citing a study by the Bring L.A. Home Blue Ribbon Panel.

In a city where, for decades, the Los Angeles Police Department and the transient population have been locked in a dreary dance – police officers arresting the homeless and then shuffling them off to jail or simply dropping them on Skid Row, only to arrest them again if they haven’t died yet – this month has shown a heartening flurry of attempts to help those who we usually help only when they have cornered us in line at Buck Fitty’s asking for the assortment of nickels we don’t mind getting rid of.

Just days before the announcement of the $12 billion plan, which calls for a drastic increase in the amount of affordable housing and short-term housing available to the poor as well as an increase in funding for social services, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors approved a $100 million plan to establish five centers across the county to provide shelter and care for the transient.

On Friday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of six homeless plaintiffs, saying it was unconstitutional for the LAPD to arrest people merely for sitting or lying on the sidewalk; they decided that the ordinance forbidding sitting or lying on the sidewalk was essentially criminalizing the uncontrollable state of being homeless, especially considering lack of shelter beds in Los Angeles.

These plans do have their critics. Many don’t want shelters and social centers to be built around the city, preferring the homeless to stay downtown; many find the plans unfocused and potentially unfeasible; and some simply do not wish to spend so much money on those who don’t contribute to the municipal pot.

But a wide-ranging and ambitious plan is better than no plan at all.

It is time for those of us who call Los Angeles home to recognize our homeless problem, to realize that 80,000 people can’t pull themselves out of poverty when there is no structural system for helping them do so, and to commit $12 billion to those people to whom most of us individually would never even think of giving $12.

It may seem counterintuitive to be praising a court ruling and civic plans that effectively allow the homeless to stay on the streets as long as they’re not being disorderly or disruptive, and even potentially bring more of the homeless into the area if a shelter is built nearby. It would certainly make it easier on our psyches if the entire transient population were shuffled off to Skid Row, where we would no longer have to think about them.

Instead, these new developments signal the opposite: an immense new drain of our tax dollars, a restriction on the LAPD’s ability to cart the homeless carte blanche off to jail or to Skid Row, and the construction of five centers for the homeless in suburban areas of the county in order to spread the problem out instead of continuing to use downtown as an inescapable vortex for the disenfranchised.

Some neighborhoods are already beginning to voice displeasure over the plans, feeling as if the city is somehow dumping “that downtown problem” into their laps. It is the same fundamental civic problem that plagues landfills, prisons, and nuclear power plants: We would all like there to be more of them, but none of us want them in our neighborhoods.

How appropriate that the centers to be built on behalf of the homeless may themselves be without homes as L.A. municipalities play hot potato over who has to build them.

Instead of that game, there must be a fundamental change in how we view the homeless if these new plans are to have any chance of success.

Whether this means that you will start giving money to those who ask for it, that you will support shelters being built where you live, or merely that you will support the use of your taxes to build those shelters is, at least for now, immaterial.

What is most important right now is that the entire city of Los Angeles gets behind a new vision to help our least fortunate, in the same way that the city of New York has done – the number of homeless people in New York City has fallen from 80,000 (nearly as many as in Los Angeles) to 30,000 over the past several years as the city has increased funding for helping the homeless to $750 million per year.

L.A. officials working on the proposal even visited Times Square – the national epicenter of the homeless problem before its massive cleanup project – for inspiration.

The national epicenter of the homeless problem is now the city we call home. The price tag to fix it is $12 billion. Are we, as a community, up to the challenge? Can we make a crisis that we have ignored into a priority? Or, when asked, will we simply avert our eyes and pretend that we don’t have any change?

E-mail Atherton at datherton@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.