It is criminal in my mind that our society has gotten to a point where 70,000 people can be living on the streets in a metropolitan city like Los Angeles! When national media shines a light on the “Golden State”, there is a problem and it should be a crime that we the electorate have not solved this problem. There has been plenty of legislation and hand-wringing and yet the problem is getting worse, not better. Why? Because we have removed the element of personal responsibility of those on the streets from this equation and are not addressing the root problems: mental illness, drug addiction and yes, lack of affordable housing. I have heard estimates of 30% of homeless choose NOT to moving into supportive housing and have just toured a sober/transitional housing facility in DTLA that has empty beds! You ask why? GREAT question and segue to an excellent editorial piece released by the Wall Street Journal on September 23, 2019 titled “California’s Hobo Paradise”:
“President Trump performed a public service last week by highlighting the causes of exploding homelessness in California. Democrats aren’t taking it well, but this is a debate the U.S. and especially the Golden State need.
On a visit to San Francisco last week Mr. Trump warned that the Environmental Protection Agency might cite the city for pollution in the streets. The city council has banned plastic straws, but the good liberals don’t seem bothered by streets strewn with human feces and needles that fall into storm sewers.
California’s poverty rate is near a record low, yet its unsheltered population has jumped more than 20% in three years compared to 5% in the other 49 states, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. With only 12% of the country’s population, California accounts for half of those living on the streets.
Democrats can’t blame this on climate. San Francisco is only a few degrees cooler than Orlando in January, but its homeless rate is 30 times higher. While San Francisco and Skid Row in Los Angeles have long attracted vagrants, homelessness has spread to the suburbs. Rodents, infectious disease, drugs, theft and assault have followed.
Last year the Orange County government cleared 13,950 needles, 404 tons of debris and 5,279 pounds of hazardous waste from a homeless camp in the Santa Ana riverbed. Since 2009 cases of flea-born typhus have increased 10-fold to 174. A homeless person in Bel Air started a fire in 2017 that razed 400 acres and shut down West LA for several days.
A video recently went viral of a woman being assaulted outside her San Francisco condo by an apparently mentally ill homeless man. After being booked for battery, the assailant was released. A union representing groundskeepers last week demanded pepper spray so workers can defend themselves from homeless people after a rash of assaults.
Democrats blame rising rents for driving people onto the streets. But as a new White House Council of Economic Advisers white paper on homelessness notes, housing costs are swelled by restrictive building codes, zoning, environmental mandates, rent control, cumbersome permitting and labor regulations—in other words, liberal policies.
The economists project that homelessness would fall by 54% in San Francisco and 40% in Los Angeles if housing costs approximated production costs more closely as they do in Texas, Florida and Arizona. Yet California’s homeless population is still 2.2 times larger than projected after controlling for poverty, home prices and weather. What gives?
Mental illness, substance abuse and a history of incarceration also contribute, the report notes. HUD says about 28% of California’s unsheltered homeless have a severe mental illness and 20% are chronic substance abusers compared to 18% and 15% in Florida. These figures are based on interviews with the homeless so they’re probably understated.
Notably, California’s homeless rate began climbing in 2015 after voters approved a referendum effectively decriminalizing drug possession and theft. Many low-level criminals and addicts have been released onto the streets. Voters approved a 1% income surtax on millionaires in 2004 for mental health, but Sacramento squandered the money as usual.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last year also made it harder to remove people sleeping on the streets by barring Boise, Idaho, from enjoining a ban on public camping. So police in California now have a limited arsenal to impose public order.
HUD Secretary Ben Carson recently met with state and local officials to discuss how the feds can help get people off the streets and stand on their own. But Democrats have responded by attacking the President while begging his Administration for money.
“Donald Trump is a slumlord who has spent his presidency pushing people into homelessness by taking away health care, food assistance and affordable housing funds,” declared San Francisco state senator Scott Wiener. Yet California’s rising homelessness preceded Mr. Trump, and federal spending on Medicaid and housing have kept rising.
Liberals are mortified that Mr. Trump is shining a national light on the squalor spreading across the Golden State. They want to spread their policies nationwide, but how about keeping your own streets clean and safe first?”