Tag Archive for: homeless crisis

Venice Beach Locked Down Except for Homeless Encampments

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Apart from excursions to perform essential work or engage in essential activities, California’s 40 million residents have now been under house arrest for over a week. But in the homeless haven known as Venice Beach, the party hasn’t skipped a beat.

Law abiding residents have deserted the Los Angeles coast after a crackdown following a weekend of what mayor Eric Garcetti called people getting “too close together, too often,” Parking lots along the Los Angeles beaches are roped off. Along the boardwalk in Venice Beach, all the businesses are closed.

None of these new rules seem to apply to the homeless. Whatever minimal law enforcement still existed in Venice Beach prior to the COVID-19 outbreak has diminished further, and more tents than ever have appeared on the boardwalk and along the streets.

It’s important to recognize that some of California’s homeless are victims of circumstances beyond their control, who want to work, who have to care for young children, who stay sober, who obey the laws. But not sufficiently acknowledged by agenda driven politicians and compassionate care bureaucrats is the fact that most of these homeless find shelter.

The vast majority of homeless that remain unsheltered, especially in places like Venice Beach, are either drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill, or criminals. None of these people belong on the streets, not now, and not ever. There is not a homeless crisis or housing crisis in Venice Beach so much as a drug crisis, an alcoholism crisis, a mental health crisis, and a breakdown of law and order.

Stories about what has been happening in Venice Beach are endless and chilling. A man swinging an ax in the middle of an ally who cannot be arrested because he isn’t breaking any laws. A gang of youths disassembling literally stacks of high-end bicycles in front of their tents, but this isn’t a chop-shop because there is no proof. Other youths who’ve clambered onto the roof of a church to engage in loud drunken revelry all night long, later willing to vandalize the homes of residents they suspect of calling the police. Women followed and harassed, human and canine feces everywhere, bottles of urine sitting on street curbs, discarded syringes, rats multiplying like, rats, getting fat on garbage and food scraps piling up around tents, men stoned on methamphetamine and frenetically prowling the streets, schizophrenics howling at the voices in their heads.

And it still goes on and still goes on and still goes on. Virus? What virus?

Nothing that California’s state and local policymakers have done to-date have been effective in combating these crises, because their approach has been what they refer to as “housing first,” a policy that prioritizes providing housing prior to addressing behavioral issues. “Housing first” is a boondoggle, rewarding politically connected members of the Homeless Industrial Complex. It will never solve the problem, even if for no other reason, then because of the astronomical costs.

Venice Beach offers a perfect example of this failed approach, where a “temporary bridge housing” facility opened up in February.

Two blocks from the Pacific Ocean, this shelter, one of 26 either built or under construction in Los Angeles, holds 154 beds, supposedly to accommodate a homeless population in Venice Beach that exceeds 1,000. The shelter cost $8 million and has an estimated annual budget of about $8 million. This is a preposterous waste of money, especially when considering how it operates: The shelter, which officially opened on February 26, does not require its residents to submit to counseling for substance abuse, much less require sobriety. It is a “wet” shelter, meaning inebriated residents can enter the shelter with no restrictions. Even now, it has no curfew, meaning residents can roam the streets at any hour of the day or night and still return to the shelter. It carries out no background checks on any of the residents.

Worst of all, the shelter was marketed to residents as a way to compel homeless people to get off the streets and become “good neighbors.” Once “supportive housing” was available, the law would permit police to evict the homeless who have set up permanent encampments in front of residents and businesses. A deadline of March 7th to evict the homeless came and went, however, and more homeless than ever are living for free on some of the most expensive real estate on earth.

The uptick in crime since this shelter opened has neighbors feeling like prisoners in their own homes. How ironic. The COVID-19 pandemic merely made that status official.

Incredibly, the “permanent supportive housing” planned for Venice Beach includes destroying the last public beach parking so a monstrous apartment house can be built on the city owned property. Planned to have only 140 units, the construction costs and land values put the total project cost at over $200 million. By any sane definition, doing this is a crime against the hard working surrounding residents and against all taxpayers.

Meanwhile, today, the rent-paying, mortgage paying, business lease paying residences and business owners in Venice Beach are being quarantined into financial ruin. Small businesses that survive on small margins can’t stay open. Landlords who only own one or two properties can’t collect rent because their tenants are out of work. And nothing the city, state, or federal government has done is helping.

While politicians talk about interest free loans from the SBA, one has to wonder if any of these elected officials have ever tried to fast-track an SBA loan, or tried to get relief from a mortgage company. Retailers are small businesses, and these owners can’t just call the SBA and ask for a loan. There is the underwriting process, huge applications to fill out, a requirement for three years of financial statements. Getting credit approval for a loan is mind numbing. These are huge slow moving bureaucracies. Applicants have to go through all kinds of hoops to get funding and a 2-3 month turnaround is a very best case. Nothing is feasible within a month, so as small businesses fail up and down the state, where are the real time solutions?

In an open letter emailed to Mayor Garcetti on 3/26, with copies sent to the LA City Council and an assortment of media outlets, Venice Beach resident Soledad Ursua offered some practical suggestions to bring immediate relief to beleaguered small business owners and landlords. In particular:

“1) Suspend LA County Property Taxes due April 10th. The average homeowner and small business owner is facing a $2,000 to $10,000 property tax bill. Cash is king during an economic crisis. What we need now more than ever, is to hold the cash we would otherwise pay the County of LA, in order to navigate this economic storm. As our business partner, you must take a haircut in revenue, just as you expect all of us to do so. What is the point of the US Government sending out cash checks to individuals if we must only hand that over to LA City?

2) Suspend all Sales Taxes for the next 6 months- Why on earth are we paying 9.5% in LA City sales taxes on essential goods why we try to stay alive – groceries, prescriptions, toilet paper, gas, bottled water, etc. Perhaps you could lift sales taxes only on small businesses to incentivize Los Angeleños to shop local and keep our small businesses solvent during this crisis?”

These are reasonable suggestions. The chances they will be implemented are slim.

Anyone living in Venice Beach or communicating with Venice Beach residents has abundant video and photographic evidence that while residents hunker down inside their homes, right now, their streets remain occupied by a roving army of unaccountable homeless, and it’s getting worse.

For example, ever since COVID-19 came along, the weekly street cleaning has stopped. The consequences are predictable; what had been a string of tents is turning into semi-permanent structures. The shantytowns of Guatemala City have nothing on Rose Avenue in Venice Beach.

There is no doubt that the authorities at all levels of government are dead serious in their efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19. This national health emergency has preempted constitutional rights that allow ordinary Americans freedom of movement. It ought therefore to have enough teeth to preempt whatever misguided ordinances and court rulings have created the addiction, mental health, and crime crises we face, which masquerade as a homeless and housing crisis.

Mayor Garcetti: If and when COVID-19 spreads in a second wave, with unaccountable homeless populations as the vector, don’t blame the president. If a national health emergency doesn’t give you the legal tools and funds to clean up the streets of Los Angeles, nothing will.

California’s laws to-date have made it a rational choice for many individuals to live on the streets. They can live in one of the most beautiful places in the world – the California coast – with free food, free shelter, with almost no rules to regulate their conduct.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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How to Simultaneously Lower College Tuition and Solve the Homeless Crisis

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Two of the most pressing challenges facing Americans are unaffordable college tuition and an epidemic of homelessness. But an elegant solution is just waiting to be implemented by some innovative, progressive state or region. House the homeless on college campuses.

It isn’t as though colleges and universities across America aren’t already searching for new sources of revenue. A December 19th article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Seniors Want to Go Back to Class. Universities Want to Sell Them Real Estate” describes a new trend: growing baby boomers entering retirement at the same time as college enrollments are projected to decline. So across America, colleges and universities, which have already opened hotels and restaurants on campus to earn profits from visiting parents and faculty, are now building and selling condos for seniors.

Why not go one step further, and admit America’s homeless?

Doing this is consistent with the general mission and mentality of the faculty and administrators at America’s institutions of higher learning. After all, social justice indoctrination will be far more effective if it isn’t merely academic. Allow academia to practice real world equity; real world diversity; real world inclusion.

There might be a few hiccoughs implementing this plan. For example, on-campus cultural safe spaces, which would be excellent venues for homeless people to be afforded sanctuary, would have to be desegregated. Otherwise, campuses would not be eligible for FEMA money, HUD grants, or Section 8 vouchers – all of which cannot be tapped unless true integration is practiced.

Similarly, dormitories catering to students of disadvantaged or underrepresented genders and ethnicities would have to be desegregated, in order to permit the homeless to occupy adjacent rooms. Ideally, in the spirit of equity, diversity, and inclusion, it might be best in fact to integrate the homeless into each dorm room, so that each room would have a homeless person and a student living in it.

While an unwoke individual might be concerned that many homeless people are substance abusers, criminals, or mentally ill, a more enlightened and woke perspective would not find this troubling in the least. Integrating America’s homeless population with America’s college students would be a natural extension of “inclusionary zoning” which has become a basic principle of progressive urban planning.

According to the “science based” policy of inclusionary zoning, “the role of inclusionary zoning is to encourage the development of affordable housing in low poverty neighborhoods, thereby helping foster greater social and economic mobility and integration.” If this policy is being rolled out in America’s progressive towns and cities, certainly it can also be rolled out on the campuses from which these progressive concepts originated. College campuses are, almost by definition, “low poverty neighborhoods.”

And to the extent that “greater social and economic mobility and integration” does not succeed in motivating the homeless to forego continued drug and alcohol abuse, or provide the stability that is the prerequisite to alleviating their mental illness, or the “security from want” so they will no longer commit crimes, then perhaps the students and faculty may adapt, since it is only their privilege that prevents them from succumbing to these pathologies themselves, and since it is their obligation as woke progressives to make ongoing reparations to these victims of society.

And in any case, wouldn’t any conscientious progressive agree that heroin addiction is a legitimate lifestyle choice?

The logistics of integrating America’s homeless with America’s college students and faculty are not terribly daunting. Using California as an example, the numbers easily work. California has nine University of California campuses with 238,000 students and over 190,000 faculty and staff. These are elite schools, filled with world class progressive minds, eager to demonstrate their commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion.

A successful program to house California’s 140,000 homeless could start with the University of California, since all of these schools have spacious campuses including including hospitals and clinics, along with thousands of dormitories and other structures that could be adapted for housing.

Best of all, the University of California campuses are located in the urban areas where California’s homeless are concentrated. In the Bay Area, there is UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz. In close proximity to the state capitol there is UC Davis. And in Southern California, there are five sprawling urban campuses, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC San Diego. Together, these campuses occupy nearly 7,000 acres, over ten square miles of prime urban land. Much of this land is unused, offering ample area for tent cities. Bring in the Army Corps of Engineers. Surely there’s space for 140,000 homeless people!

Many high ranking UC officials, if they are true to their ideals, will endorse this proposal. Jerry Kang, for example, UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, during 2018 earned $468,919 in pay and benefits. In return for this lavish compensation, Kang and his devoted staff produced, for example, “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Statements,” now required to be completed by all UCLA faculty applicants. Kang delivers talks on “inclusion strategies,” and surely would love to include the homeless on his list of disadvantaged and underrepresented groups to bring on campus.

A skeptic might suggest that there may not be enough room on UC campuses to accommodate 140,000 people, but such skepticism, more than anything else, reveals a poverty of imagination. Why not house the homeless in the hallways and offices of Jerry Kang’s Department of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? Bring them in, and let them indulge their diverse lifestyles as they coexist with these intrepid, and very well compensated, woke warriors.

Doubters might consider the well compensated Kang to be an outlier, but he’s not. Here are some of the others: UC Berkeley, Oscar Dubón, Jr., Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion; UC Davis, Adela de la Torre, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Diversity; UC Irvine, Doug Haynes, Vice Provost for Academic Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; UC Merced, Luanna Putney, Associate Chancellor & Senior Advisor to the Chancellor, Ethics and Compliance; UC Riverside, Mariam Lam, Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Excellence and Equity; UC San Diego, Becky Petitt, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; UC San Francisco, Renee Navarro, Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Outreach; UC Santa Barbara, Maria Herrera-Sobek, Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Academic Policy; UC Santa Cruz, Ashish Sahni, Associate Chancellor, Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

For that matter, when examining administrative bloat at the universities – the real reason for unaffordable tuition – why stop at the diversity bureaucracy? A 2015 article in the Los Angeles Times gets at the bigger picture. Between 2000 and 2015 the UC system added a modest number of new faculty, growing faculty headcount from just over 7,000 to nearly 9,000. But during that same 15 year period, they more than doubled the number of administrators, growing from a headcount of 4,500 to over 10,500. Put another way, the ratio of teachers to bureaucrats in just 15 years changed from 1.5 to 1.0 in favor of teachers to 1.2 to 1.0 in favor of bureaucrats.

Surely all these bureaucrats, steeped in the art of creating safe spaces and promulgating progressive ideology can have their jobs repurposed? Surely they may now turn their diligence towards accommodating and providing wrap-around services for California’s homeless, in all their diversity.

Why should academia be merely for the academics? If they are changing our world, perhaps it’s time for us to change theirs.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

Venice Beach’s Monster on the Median

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When President Trump arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday, he had a few words to say about the city’s homeless problem. “We can’t let Los Angeles, San Francisco and numerous other cities destroy themselves by allowing what’s happening,” the president told reporters. “In many cases [building tenants] came from other countries and they moved to Los Angeles or they moved to San Francisco because of the prestige of the city, and all of a sudden they have hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building. And the people of San Francisco are fed up, and the people of Los Angeles are fed up.”

In response, Mayor Eric Garcetti posted a video on social media in which he stated: “It is time for us to pause politics and not to demonize Americans who are on the street.”

Garcetti also warned the president that it’s not possible for authorities to “arrest their way out of the issue.” Instead, Garcetti would like “federal government aid to L.A. with surplus property or money to create additional shelters.”

But Trump better not release a dime of federal money until there’s a federal investigation that exposes how Los Angeles has wasted hundreds of millions on housing for the homeless in one of the most outrageous misuses of funds in American history.

Paradise Lost

To see just how ineffective homeless policy in Los Angeles has been to-date, and how Garcetti’s schemes will only destroy neighborhoods, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars, while doing nothing to solve the homeless problem, President Trump is invited to visit Venice Beach.

When you consider the population of homeless in Venice, estimated at around 1,000 people, you might not consider it to deserve the title “Homeless Hub of America.” You’d be wrong. Because what the Venice Beach homeless situation lacks in numbers, it makes up for in other ways.

First, consider Venice Beach itself, as opposed to the mean streets of downtown Los Angeles. If you want to sit on a warm beach all day, stoned on heroin and Xanax, or maybe just bask in an alcoholic stupor or savor a potent strain of weed, Venice Beach is for you.

In Venice Beach, you’re relatively safe. The well-heeled, clean-limbed residents aren’t going to form vigilante gangs and prey upon you. Quite the opposite. Most of them will look the other way, because they’re still struggling to reconcile compassion at any cost with reality.

In Venice Beach, the homeless can set up camp almost anywhere, and if this world class tourist destination is their choice, c’est la vie to those residents who’ve worked their entire lives to pay for the same privilege.

Bad Policies Exacerbate the Crisis

The fact that a place as beautiful as Venice Beach has been overrun with homeless people—with nothing the hard-working residents can do about it—is one reason it should be Exhibit A in the story of how bad policies have turned a manageable homeless challenge into an expensive, agonizing nightmare. But the corrupt, inept, utterly ineffective, shamefully self-righteous, scandalously hypocritical response of policymakers is what makes what’s happening in Venice Beach so exemplary.

The people interviewed for this article did not want their names used. The latest tactic the politicized homeless population of Venice Beach have adopted against anyone who objects to their presence is to have them “feceed,” that is, human excrement is deposited on their driveway, or at their doorway.

Once these homeless predators, networked by smartphones, find out where someone lives who has objected to their presence, watch out. These bold souls may expect a literal shit storm. One must ask: why don’t the police take a stool sample and save the DNA?

Then again, crime and punishment is different these days in California. Proposition 47, supported by an alliance of hardcore progressives and naïve libertarians, was passed in 2014. The measure was designed to eliminate “oversentencing.” In practice, that means if you steal anything worth less than $950, or if you make “personal use” of “most illegal drugs,” no matter how many times you are caught, you will face misdemeanor charges at best. Police call it the “catch and release” law.

Hello criminal. Hello drug addict. Welcome to Venice Beach, one of the most beautiful urban hotspots in the continental United States. Come on in. You don’t have to pay rent. You’re an “urban refugee.” Settle down. Do what you like. We can’t stop you.

YIMBYs and Other Useful Idiots

Not only are the residents of Venice powerless to stop criminals, drug addicts, drunks, and psychopaths from camping on their doorsteps, they are stigmatized as “NIMBYs” who lack compassion or awareness of their own privilege. Never mind how hard someone may have worked to live in an expensive and very beautiful neighborhood. It’s time to be “inclusive.” Shame on anyone who isn’t a YIMBY!

Behind pushing this narrative however aren’t the progressive activists, increasingly joined by their equally fanatical, equally delusional, libertarian allies. Those are just the useful idiots. This narrative of compassion at any cost is being pushed by powerful special interests who acquire power and profit from this game. After all, billions in taxpayer dollars are now being spent to help the homeless. But who gets most of that money? The middlemen.

Two projects planned for Venice Beach to help the homeless epitomize this scam, and justify its designation as the epicenter of homeless mismanagement gone wild. The first is a “temporary” shelter, a semi-permanent tent, which is being constructed on city owned property two blocks from the beach and boardwalk.

It is planned as a “wet” shelter, meaning any homeless person, no matter how deliriously wasted they may be, can stagger into this place and get a meal. If they’re really lucky, they’ll get a bed. Lucky, because while some 1,000 homeless people live in Venice Beach, this shelter will only have around 150 beds.

The cost? Some latest estimates put the total cost at $16 million, not including operating costs, nor including the value of the property, which could be sold for around $100 million. Imagine what could be done with that much money.

The Monster on the Median

But this $16 million tent is nothing compared to the other project proposed to “help the homeless” in Venice Beach. Dubbed the “Monster on the Median” by its detractors, this “permanent supportive housing” monstrosity will occupy 2.7 city-owned acres that are used currently for beach parking. It is in the heart of Venice, just one block from the beach.

Located amid one- and two-story residences and consuming the only parking area available to working families who stream to the beach after work and on weekends, this massive structure, planned to be up to five stories in height in some places, would house 140 units. Half of them will be offered to “artists” on low incomes, and the other half will be “permanent supportive housing” for homeless people.

And the cost?

Despite numerous public record act requests to the City of Los Angeles, the official estimate remains undisclosed. But other similar projects launched in Los Angeles to help the homeless came in at a cost of between $430,000 and $750,000 per unit. The “Monster on the Median” will almost certainly be in the $750,000 per unit range, for several reasons.

There is a high water table close to the beach. That, plus concerns about sea level rise affecting a structure so close to the shore, will compel extra work on the foundation. Also, the structure will be built to wrap 360 degrees around a parking garage in the center. This parking garage, unlikely to offer enough spaces to accommodate residents and visitors to the beach, will use an elevator—they call it “automated lift parking”—to deliver vehicles from the street level to the garage. Imagine the queues on North and South Venice Boulevard as people patiently wait to be hoisted up the car elevator. But why be practical?

If that weren’t enough, the structure actually will have to pass over the north end of one of Venice Beach’s scenic canals, completely covering a block of this historic amenity which is central to the identity of Venice Beach. Including the value of the property—the low estimate of the property value is $50 million—the “Monster on the Median” will cost an estimated $155 million, which comes out to $1.1 million per unit.

But that isn’t the end of the story. For example, there is also the story of how developers who build “permanent supportive housing” are exempt from normal zoning laws including height limitations, density maximums, setback requirements, parking space minimums, and even compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act.

False Compassion Breeds Official Corruption

It’s important to review these incentives, because it clarifies exactly why Venice is the epicenter of America’s homeless mismanagement crisis. Not only are homeless people incentivized to become homeless—since there is minimal law enforcement permitted, they can migrate to a beautiful place and take over. And then, in a brutal inversion of fairness, the people who live there are vilified for objecting.

But what about the land developers and the powerful nonprofit organizations? They have an incentive to see more homeless people. Because then they can build more structures that are exempt from the rules—justifiable or not—which govern all other construction.

Simple, very simple, math explains how preposterous—if not criminal—the situation in Venice has become. To house every one of Los Angeles County’s 60,000 homeless in the “Monster on the Median,” or similarly expensive structures, would cost $66 billion. Got that? Just to provide “permanent supportive housing” to the existing homeless in Los Angeles.

That’s Eric Garcetti’s “vision.”

Perhaps the tone of this commentary lacks compassion for the homeless. That would be a fair criticism. But not adequately explained in most reports on the homeless population is that the majority of the allegedly 60 percent of them who are simply people down on their luck, who don’t use drugs or commit crimes, have found shelter. They either stay with friends, family, occupy legitimate campsites, or stay in existing shelters.

The majority of the homeless who stay on the street, on the other hand, are drug addicts, alcoholics, or mentally ill, along with criminals and bums. They need to be rounded up, sorted by affliction, and treated in cost-effective compounds. There are examples all over the world of well-managed tent cities that cost a minute fraction of what the “Monster on the Median” will cost in Venice Beach. Put these compounds out in remote and inexpensive areas of Los Angeles County, and use the hundreds of millions in savings to offer humane treatment to these lost souls.

There is nothing compassionate about building million dollar apartments for a handful of homeless, condemning the rest of them to stay on the street. Venice Beach’s proposed Monster on the Median, an out-of-place, oversized, sterile box with a veneer of architectural flourishes, is corruption incarnate. It must never be allowed to exist.

President Trump has a background in property development. He likes to build things. But he has enough common sense to know you can’t build a Trump Tower, with gilded faucets and cathedral ceilings, to house homeless people.

Before the federal government sends Mayor Garcetti any more money to help the homeless, it would be a good thing to expose this unforgivable waste of money and hold people accountable. We can hope President Trump will demand Garcetti build homeless accommodations that cost literally 1/100th as much per bed, and build them in weeks, not years, and locate them in low cost areas of Los Angeles County, instead of on a world-class beach.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Countering Progressive Nihilism

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America’s homeless epidemic, along with a shocking rise in deaths from drug overdoses, stem from the same root cause: liberal progressive ideology. The seductive power of this ideology, which brims in equal measure with overwrought compassion for the less fortunate alongside fuming resentment towards the “privileged,” has earned it a dominant position in American culture.

Armed with the rhetorical equivalent of nuclear weaponry, but devoid of common sense or acceptance of hard truths, liberal progressive ideology defines the message and the agenda in public K-12 and higher education, entertainment, conventional media, social media, multinational corporations, powerful nonprofit organizations, and establishment politics. But the consequences of liberal progressive ideology are often nihilistic.

While countless critical issues are being ignored or made worse thanks to the influence of progressives, two of them, homelessness and drug related deaths, stand out. In these two cases, the failure of progressive policies are increasingly obvious, to the point where even liberals are beginning to demand a return to polices that worked in previous decades but were abandoned in recent years.

Progressive Policies Have Lost the War on Drugs

Two important recent articles explain not only how these two crises became so acute, but offer solutions. The first of these articles, published in American Greatness, was written by John Little, a prosecutor operating in a rural county in Ohio. Little has observed first hand the worsening opioid epidemic. He describes how the price of drugs has plummeted in recent years, claiming that just four years ago, eight-ounces of methamphetamine would cost between $300 and $350, but today the price for that quantity of meth is down to $60.

Little describes “industrially produced meth that makes it all the way to low-level distributors as ‘big as your thumb’ crystals, and uncut fentanyl so dangerous that cops don’t dare touch the drugs they confiscate.” He says these drugs, trafficked by cartels, “pour over the U.S. border with Mexico like a raging torrent.” The tragic results by now are known to all – over 72,000 deaths from drug overdoses in 2017, and in 2018, a slightly lower but still staggering 68,000 deaths. Many times that many lives have been ruined and families shattered by drug addiction.

Here’s where Little’s article becomes more than just a recitation of the problem. Much more, because the solution he proposes has been tried before, and it worked. He recalls the largely successful effort by law enforcement, backed up by politicians and the courts, to defeat the crack epidemic in the 1990s. It wasn’t by treating crack addiction as a disease, and throwing money at treatment centers, which, as he notes, in the best of cases only manage around a 15 percent rate of long-term recovery. Instead, Little explains how we threw the book at dealers and traffickers. He writes:

“We don’t have crack houses all over the place anymore because we took the people who ran the crack houses and we put them in prison for so long that not only would the crack crisis have passed before they got out of prison, but everyone else was forced to stand up and take note of their sentence. Economics is economics. If you are actually going to attempt to ban a substance that has high demand, you must make the risk/reward calculus obvious and simple. The risk of apprehension multiplied by the likely punishment must exceed in value by orders of magnitude the anticipated reward in light of the alternative opportunities. And in order to make that message heard by all, a multiplication factor must be applied.

Basically, the punishment for selling drugs needs to seem unfair, draconian, and very scary to those likely to deal drugs. It must be sufficient to cause them to forego easy money and choose a life either of legal hard work or, as is the sad reality of our nation, government-funded dependency. In the United States, we did that once, and we won the crack epidemic with a combination of punishment and economic opportunity.

In contrast, today federal lawmakers bicker over palace intrigue and leave the barn doors open while Mexico and China flood our streets with dirt-cheap poison. Ohio lawmakers seem intent on singing kumbaya in a drum circle, hoping it will all go away if we just love the addicts enough. It will not.”

This is the real reason there were successes in the war against drugs. Making the punishment disproportionate to the crime created a deterrent. For every individual dealer or trafficker who received a harsh prison sentence, dozens if not hundreds of potential dealers and traffickers decided to find an honest way to make a living, and hundreds if not thousands of vulnerable individuals did not succumb to drug addition.

Progressive Policies Have Created the Homeless Crisis

A similar story can be told with respect to the homeless crisis in America, and nobody has told it better than Steven Malanga in his riveting article “The Cost of Bad Intentions,” recently published in City Journal. Homelessness and drug addiction are related problems, but Malanga focuses on homelessness, identifying the same trend over the past 40-50 years. The problem got out of control, policymakers adapted, the problem got better, and now the problem is out of control again.

How homelessness was tackled in the 1990s is the same, conceptually, as how the crack epidemic was tackled. Malanga points to what he refers to as the seminal 1982 Atlantic article on the myriad factors contributing to urban breakdown, “Broken Windows,” by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, and characterizes it as one of the “turning points in the battle to conquer chaos.” He describes how by no longer ignoring petty crime, police and prosecutors found that minor offenders were often wanted for more serious crimes, and that only a small percentage of lawbreakers committed most of the crimes. Getting these repeat offenders behind bars, and persisting in this so-called “broken windows” policing, led to crime rates falling, starting in New York which pioneered this approach, and elsewhere as other cities followed suit.

Malanga spends most of the remainder of his lengthy article recounting the harrowing tale of how, in city after city, progressive elites, themselves largely unaffected by the crime afflicting low income communities, pressured police and prosecutors into abandoning broken windows tactics. Claiming that crime, homelessness and drug addiction is caused by economic injustice and racism, they pushed for a new, compassionate approach. The result has been disastrous.

From Seattle, to Portland, to San Francisco and Los Angeles, progressive politicians downgraded property crimes, stopped enforcing vagrancy laws, and ignored drug use. In the case of Seattle, which is typical, Malanga writes:

Seattle politicians have permitted encampments of vagrants to proliferate in parks, empty lots, and other open spaces. Enforcement against drug use, petty crime, and acts of disorder like public urination has declined, producing an urban landscape increasingly littered with trash, human feces, and drug paraphernalia—in one of America’s most prosperous cities.

To Seattle’s politicos, what’s needed to ease the problem is more money. Yet the city already spends hundreds of millions yearly on homelessness—just not enough of it on the kind of interventions that might help. Its council passed an employer tax in 2018 meant to raise some $120 million more per year for homeless services but had to rescind it when companies and residents revolted. At one community meeting, a resident castigated public officials for ignoring the truth. “This is a drug problem. I’ve only heard it be called a housing problem.” Even the homeless themselves admit that virtually all the city’s street people are drug users. Public policy is enabling a homeless drug culture.

Seattle police polled by a local TV station placed the blame clearly on a political culture that had told them to stop enforcing various quality-of-life laws, as an expression of the city’s compassion. “People come here because it’s Free-attle,” one cop said. “They believe if they come here they will get free food, free medical treatment, free mental health treatment, a free tent, free clothes, and will be free of prosecution for just about anything, and they are right.”

Both Malanga and Little criticize the anti-law-enforcement narrative promoted by progressives. Malanga exposes George Soros’s Open Society Policy Center and the American Civil Liberties Union as the primary funders of California’s Prop. 47, passed by voters in 2014, which downgraded “nonviolent” property crimes including shoplifting, grand theft, fraud, and forgery, “with the aim of ending ‘mass incarceration’ in the state. If a theft amounted to less than $950 in value, Proposition 47 held, it would henceforth become a mere misdemeanor.” The result is a surge in these crimes, which no longer carry penalties sufficient to serve as a deterrent.

There’s Money to be Made in Progressive Nihilism

The involvement of well heeled progressive funders such as Soros and the ACLU exemplify the odd coalition that constitutes progressives in 21st century America. On one hand, wealthy globalist billionaires, on the other, fanatical grassroots activists who are convinced their “compassionate” approach to policy is the only equitable answer for society. Corporations and nonprofits alike find expensive, taxpayer funded solutions to be remunerative, regardless of their effectiveness. Like so many taxpayer funded programs, for these players, failure is success, as they fire up their grassroots allies to demand more money. But the solution isn’t more money.

The solution to America’s grim, losing battle with the drug cartels, along with the solution to America’s homeless crisis, require a return to tough laws and tough enforcement. This is a proven strategy that back in the 1980s and 1990s won the war on crack and got the homeless off the streets.

It is tragic and undeniable that sometimes members of law enforcement make mistakes. Sometimes courts mishandle cases. Perfect justice is impossible. But the liberal progressive approach has not only failed to solve the problems of drug addiction and homelessness, it has made these problems worse. Returning to tougher laws and more aggressive law enforcement will indeed result at times in offenders receiving sentences disproportionate to the offense. But that will deter, and hence spare, far more potential offenders who will decide the risks outweigh the benefits.

This principle, that setting a harsh example against a few will spare the many, is arguably a collectivist notion. It is ironic that progressives, who hold the ideal of collectivism high among their guiding principles, would fight so hard against tough laws that protect society. They demand environmental edicts bordering on tyranny, but they’ll insist that addicts, thugs, and thieves may own the streets, and deny the crisis as rivers of industrial strength poison pour across our borders.

It is a puzzlement.

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Possible Solutions to California’s Homeless Crisis

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AUDIO:  An in-depth discussion of possible solutions to California’s homeless crisis – 21 minutes on KUHL Santa Barbara – Edward Ring on the Andy Caldwell Show.