Tag Archive for: homeless

Fixing California – Part Six, Homeless and Law Enforcement

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The homeless population in California now tops 160,000, concentrated in Los Angeles County, but growing in every major city and in smaller towns up and down the state. Despite throwing tens of billions of federal, state, and local spending at the problem, the number of homeless increases every year. Expensive housing is part of the problem, and increasing the supply and lowering the cost of homes might help.

It is a huge mistake, however, to claim that a shortage of housing is the primary cause of homelessness in the Golden State. After all, during 2021 an estimated 103,000 new housing units were built in California, slightly more than half of them homes and the rest apartments. Meanwhile, California’s total population actually declined by 182,000 people, the first time that’s happened in over a century.

There must be more to this puzzle than housing, and there is: California’s homeless problem is caused by the inability of law enforcement and health professionals to deal effectively with criminals, substance abusers, and the mentally ill. If these people were taken off the streets and treated appropriately, the remaining homeless could easily be accommodated by existing shelter programs. Solving the homeless crisis requires reassessing the underlying assumptions informing the policies of recent years, rethinking the nature and meaning of compassion, and recalibrating where tolerance ends and law enforcement begins.

As it is, the so-called “housing first” policy has been a disaster. It has spawned a Homeless Industrial Complex of developers, public bureaucrats, and assorted “nonprofits” who have squandered billions on supportive housing and shelters that are outrageously expensive and place little or no requirements on occupants. The average per-unit cost for “permanent supportive housing” has been well over $500,000, and at that price, only a small fraction of California’s homeless have gotten under a roof.

Meanwhile, from Venice Beach to downtown San Francisco, and in countless other neighborhoods and urban cores, junkies, alcoholics, schizophrenics, and predators are sleeping, shitting, and shooting up in plain sight. It is an environmental, health, and safety catastrophe, and the situation is worse than ever.

How Did the Homeless Crisis Get So Bad?

An assortment of policy failures can be directly linked to why homelessness in California is a bigger problem than ever. They have taken the form of overzealous court rulings, citizen-approved ballot measures that wreaked havoc in their unintended consequences, and flawed legislation.

Court Decisions: The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, unsurprisingly, is the author of at least three rulings that have tied the hands of law enforcement in dealing with the homeless. The most significant of these is Jones v. the City of Los Angeles, decided in 2006, which ruled that law enforcement and city officials can no longer enforce the ban on sleeping on sidewalks anywhere within the Los Angeles city limits until a sufficient amount of permanent supportive housing could be built. Subsequent to the Jones ruling, activist attorneys repeatedly have sued cities and counties to force them to define “permanent supportive housing” with specifications that make it far more difficult and expensive to get anything built.

The practical impact of these rulings is to create private space wherever a homeless person camps on publicly owned property. Apart from trying—often ineffectively—to prevent the homeless from blocking passage on roads and sidewalks, if a homeless person wants to camp in a public space, that person cannot be removed.

State Ballot Initiatives: In 2014 California voters approved Proposition 47, which downgraded drug and property crimes. Proposition 47 has led to what police derisively refer to as “catch and release,” because suspects are only issued citations with a court date, and let go. With respect to the homeless, passage of this initiative has made it a waste of time for police to arrest anyone for openly using illegal drugs or for petty theft (defined as stealing items worth less than $950 per day). Only very serious crimes are still investigated. Proposition 47 has enabled anarchy among the homeless and in the neighborhoods where homeless are concentrated.

In 2016, California voters approved Proposition 57, intended to make state prison inmates convicted of nonviolent felony crimes eligible for parole. About 7,000 inmates immediately became eligible, and as of early 2016, there were about 25,000 nonviolent state felons who could seek early release and parole under Proposition 57. We can hope that most of these released inmates reintegrated successfully into society. But those among this at-risk population who did not reintegrate joined California’s homeless.

State Legislation: Foremost among recent state laws that have exacerbated the homeless problem is AB 109, passed in 2011, which released tens of thousands of “nonviolent” criminals out of county jails due to overcrowding without providing adequate means to monitor and assist their transition back into society. Thousands of these inmates were coping with drug addiction and mental illness, and they have found their way onto California’s streets and public spaces. Many of them are “non-violent” drug dealers or convicted thieves. As with Proposition 57, AB 109 has changed the character of California’s homeless population.

No summary of counterproductive state legislation would be complete without mentioning the laws that make it nearly impossible to get treatment for mentally ill homeless people. According to a report published by CalMatters, this problem began way back in 1967 with “a law signed by then-Governor Ronald Reagan. Aimed at safeguarding the civil rights of one of society’s most vulnerable populations, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act put an end to the inappropriate and often indefinite institutionalization of people with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities.”

Ever since, and especially in recent years as the percentage of homeless who suffer from mental illness has increased, attempts to reform the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act have faced tenacious resistance from the ACLU and other homeless advocacy groups. As reported by San Francisco’s public radio station KQED, during 2018 three laws were introduced by California legislators that would “attempt to change conservatorship rules to allow city health workers to help homeless people with substance abuse and mental health problems by legally and temporarily stepping in to force a mentally ill person into treatment.” Only one, SB 1045, became law, and the final version was so watered down that San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed, a liberal Democrat, claimed, “As drafted, SB 1045 would allow us to help fewer than five individuals.” As of May 2021, the official estimates of the number of homeless in San Francisco ran as high as 20,000.

The Obligations of Compassion

Exercising what City Journal’s Christopher Rufo calls “unlimited compassion” for the homeless has been a disaster. What informs homeless policies, especially in California cities governed by progressives, seems to come down to this: homelessness and crime are problems we just have to live with until we’ve achieved equity and social justice for all.

The new breed of Democratic prosecutors who embrace this theory—including George Gascón in Los AngelesCounty and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco—are part of the problem, not the solution. They have placed a highly selective compassion before common sense.

It is true that Americans need to figure out how to reduce the number of people who are incarcerated. But the obligations of common-sense compassion require policymakers to accept unpleasant realities: When you downgrade crimes you encourage more crime. When you decriminalize possession and personal use of hard drugs, you encourage more drug addiction. When you provide benefits and services to homeless people, you encourage more homelessness.

These realities don’t mean we shouldn’t have compassion for people who are homeless or who are coping with drug addiction, or even for those who have turned to a life of crime. But creating incentives for people to be homeless, or drug addicts, or criminals is a recipe for a failed state.

A return to broken windows policing, in the broadest sense of that term, would have a deterrent effect. The crime and drug use and homelessness that remained would be manageable, especially if the power of the Homeless Industrial Complex is broken. Instead of building half-million-dollar apartments in the most expensive parts of our cities, officials could construct supervised tent encampments in more affordable areas.

Compassion has become so corrupted by progressives and the special interests who benefit from disorder and misery that the policies enacted in its name have made the problem worse. How is it compassionate when supposedly compassionate policies lead to more victims: more homeless, more drug addicts, more criminals?

Compassion, properly tempered with common sense, and properly balanced with the other fundamental moral values, may seem harsh, but the results are what matter, not the rhetoric.

Paul Webster, who until 2020 operated a privately funded homeless shelter in San Diego, has described how there are two ways to treat the homeless, the “transformation model” and the “containment model.” The transformation model works to identify homeless individuals who are able to transition back to self-sufficiency and gives them the training and services to accomplish that. The containment model emphasizes getting shelter for the homeless before offering additional services.

Webster’s organization, Solutions for Change, requires no drug use and work; they have roommate restrictions, partying restrictions, and they do drug testing. This means they can’t accept federal funds and they also aren’t eligible for state funds because of the “housing first” rule, meaning that housing has to be provided before providing any other solutions to homelessness. After a bitter fight with federal authorities seeking to enforce the “housing first” doctrine, the organization was forced to abandon drug testing in some of its locations, against the wishes of the residents.

This is lunacy. According to Webster, there are three types of homeless. About 15 percent are “cannots” who are mentally ill or disabled. Another 40 percent or so are the “have nots”—people who could succeed if they were trained to acquire new skills and had access to services. The have-nots are often not counted; they live doubled up in homes, with friends, in cars. Many of them are single mothers who want to avoid living on the street. The remaining roughly 45 percent, and easily the majority of the “unsheltered” homeless, are the “will nots” who do not want to change. Most of these are drug addicts or alcoholics. They’re the most problematic of the three.

The will-nots know they have safe havens on the street, where they can get drugs cheaply and readily. The will-nots become very sophisticated at getting things for nothing—the government doesn’t make a distinction between the unwilling and the unable—as a result the unwilling will always have the ability to crowd out the unable.

Because of laws aimed at helping the homeless (the Federal Hearth Act) or at criminal justice reform (California’s Proposition 47 and AB 953), the will-nots generally receive the bulk of government services, despite the fact that their treatment is invariably more expensive, and the likelihood they will ever change is small. Left behind are the cannots and the have-nots. Also left behind, at least when it comes to funding, are organizations that work on permanent transformation, instead of mere containment.

To state the obvious, all of this must change. Here are some ways to make that happen.

Solutions to America’s Homeless Crisis

Quit blaming homelessness on prejudice and privilege. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, African Americans make up 13 percent of the general population, but more than 40 percent of the homeless population. Similarly, American Indians/Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and people who identify as two or more races make up a disproportionate share of the homeless population. Clearly, minority communities are disproportionately represented among the homeless.

While these statistics are probably accurate, they are used to reinforce the liberal catechism that finds all disparities between minorities and whites to be the result of white racism. Accepting this catechism results in policies that are ineffective, expensive, and divisive. Rather than granting preferences and entitlements to people based on their alleged status as victims of racism, it would be far more productive to identify the more likely cause of individual criminality, addiction, and unemployability, which is the parental status of the homes they grew up in.

For example, 57 percent of black children in 2014 were being raised by single mothers, compared to only 18 percent of white children. There is a remarkable degree of correlation between the proportions of homeless by race, and the proportions of single parent households by race.

It’s easy, and plays well, to attribute minority homelessness to racism. But a growing body of evidence suggests that intact families are the prevailing indicator of individual success in life. Until that evidence is confronted by the communities affected by it, other suggested causes for minorities being disproportionately represented among the homeless lack authenticity.

Untie the hands of law enforcement. The theory of “broken windows,” or “order maintenance” policing argues that“tolerating too much local disorder created a climate in which criminal behavior, including serious crimes, would become more likely, since criminals would sense that public norms and vigilance were weak.” Broken Windows policing, whereby police crack down on low-level crimes, was begun in the 1990s in New York City and—so long as it remained in effect—was credited with greatly reducing crime rates.

At the other extreme is the near lawlessness that prevails today on the streets of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities experiencing a homeless crisis. In California, as described, well-intentioned citizen-approved ballot measures and ill-conceived legislation have tied the hands of law enforcement. Public intoxication, petty crime, and vagrancy are all either decriminalized or have been downgraded to the point where offenders have to be released almost immediately after apprehension.

The consequences of tying the hands of law enforcement are obvious. It is preposterous that criminals, drunks, drug addicts, and insane people are permitted to take over entire sections of cities and neighborhoods, but that’s exactly what’s happened. It is important to stress that while a little over 40 percent of the homeless are so-called “have nots,” these people almost all find shelter, often with friends or family. The remainder, the “cannots” and the “will nots,” are the ones found living on the streets. Virtually all of these “cannots” and “will nots” are either mentally ill, alcoholics, or drug addicts; many of them are criminals.

Measures that tie the hands of police have to be overturned by voters or repealed by the legislature. Police need to be allowed to do their jobs.

Make it easier to commit the mentally ill. It’s worth wondering how anyone can think it is compassionate to allow raving schizophrenics, terrified by their own thoughts, to roam unmedicated on crowded city streets. But that’s what’s been happening in the interests of protecting their human rights. Certainly, it is important to avoid overreach, but at this point laws available to compel the mentally ill into treatment are inadequate. Often the afflicted have family members who have the means to help and are desperate to get their relatives into treatment, but the laws prevent them.

Approximately 15 percent of the homeless are mentally ill; arguably, the alcoholics and drug addicts are also suffering from a form of mental illness. Together these cohorts constitute well over half of all homeless, and nearly all of the unsheltered homeless seen on the streets. Families, caseworkers, and mental health professionals need to be given the legal tools to help these people.

Overturn Jones v. the City of Los Angeles and similar court rulings. Starting in 2006 with the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Jones, the homeless cannot be prohibited from sleeping on the street unless “permanent supportive housing” is available. The impact of these rulings, combined with the other constraints on law enforcement, make it nearly impossible to clear the streets of homeless encampments.

The problem has been exacerbated by subsequent lawsuits to enforce the Jones decision, the cumulative effect of which has defined “permanent supportive housing” in ways that make it more expensive. The practical impact of the Jones case has been to make it financially impossible to ever deliver adequate housing alternatives to the homeless. A major city with the financial wherewithal to pay for a sustained legal battle needs to challenge the Jones decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, with the objective being a ruling that will permit less elaborate, more cost-effective housing and shelter solutions to be allowable alternatives.

Set limits on costs. In Los Angeles today, temporary shelter (designed to last three years) is being constructed at a cost of just over $50,000 per bed, and “permanent supportive housing” units are being constructed for more than $400,000 each on average. These costs are absurd. Designing solutions that cost less, but offer shelter to 100 percent of the homeless, is vastly preferable to solutions that cost so much that only a fraction of the homeless get assistance.

Low-cost creative solutions exist. Off-the-shelf tents, sheds, prefab “tiny homes,” and prefab homes made from shipping containers are all less costly options. Relocating the homeless to repurposed industrial or retail sites that are already built out and not on premium real estate would cut costs.

Putting shelters in the middle of some of the most expensive real estate on earth not only squanders finite available funds, but when the unused property is government-owned, the chance is lost to sell that property and invest the proceeds in less expensive locations. Somehow, the public needs to pressure politicians to recognize that costs are out of control and act accordingly.

Assert the moral argument for a new approach. Most citizens who live in neighborhoods or commercial centers overrun with homeless people feel justifiable anger at the failure of civic leaders to get the problem under control. But no serious conversation about solutions should fail to acknowledge the fact that the homeless are people who deserve compassion. For every predator, opportunist, or slacker, there are others who have simply lost their way. Who knows what happened during the formative years of an inmate just thrown back onto the streets, or a teenager who just aged out of foster care?

When discussing new policies to manage the problem of homelessness, the importance of compassion can remain first among equals when considered along with other moral virtues; fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. When offering new solutions, practical solutions, solutions that work for everyone affected by homelessness, reformers have to emphasize the moral worth of their ideas. They may have to shout this over the well-orchestrated objections coming from the compassion brigades. But fighting the compassion brigades does not require one to lack compassion.

The culture of normalizing drug use, protecting the rights of the mentally ill to their detriment, insisting on prohibitively expensive accommodations for the homeless—these are all morally flawed arguments. The deterrent value of strictly enforced laws against vagrancy has moral worth, because individuals—specifically, the “will nots”—will not be enabled to more easily choose a life of idle indulgence. Compelling the mentally ill to submit to treatment is a humane policy, not oppression. Similarly, compelling addicts and alcoholics into treatment facilities where they can detox and work productively is often the only way to offer them a chance to recover their dignity and regain control of their lives.

Part of this moral conversation must examine the wisdom of the “housing first” policy of containment that is now a condition of receiving federal funds for homeless programs. Proponents of new approaches to helping the homeless should consider the success of transformational programs, which offer job training, counseling, and sobriety programs in addition to shelter.

When discussing the moral worth of a new approach to combating homelessness, perhaps the most urgent priority is to end the waste and corruption that infest the entire process today. The absurd costs of any sort of construction is exacerbated by the myriad parties to the process, all with their hands out, all of them hiding behind righteous rhetoric. The Homeless Industrial Complex has spawned far too many charlatans and opportunists. They must be exposed and expelled.

In California, a Homeless Industrial Complex has acquired money and power by presiding over a problem that has only gotten worse, year after year. The worse the problem has gotten, the more money and power they have acquired. Creative solutions exist, and only await a critical mass of networked citizens and conscientious policymakers to insist on change.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Homeless Anarchy in Los Angeles

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Anyone thinking about blaming the police for the anarchy that grips America’s liberal cities is not paying attention. The police know how to do their jobs, but the politicians, elected by progressive liberals, do not let them. And often enough, even when there are laws left on the books that might permit prosecution, activist prosecutors, also elected by progressive liberals, do not press charges.

Life in California, as usual, epitomizes this dysfunction. In 2014 voters approved Proposition 47, which downgraded drug and property crimes. In 2016 voters approved Proposition 57, which released thousands of nonviolent criminals. Back in 2006, the ACLU prevailed in the Jones vs City of Los Angeles case; the judgment prohibits arrests for vagrancy unless there is a space available in a homeless shelter.

The result of these laws is predictable enough. California’s unsheltered homeless population is now more numerous than all the rest of the homeless in the United States combined. And why not? Along with great weather, there are no serious legal consequences for being intoxicated on methamphetamine or heroin, much less marijuana or alcohol, nor are their serious legal consequences for stealing to support your drug habit. And if you want to set up a tent, almost anywhere, nobody can make you move along until they provide you a shelter.

If California is ground zero for urban anarchy, Venice Beach is one of the epicenters. Well before the COVID-19 pandemic and pre-election planned rioting turned the anarchy up two notches, Venice Beach was already occupied, and terrorized, by well over a thousand homeless. Today, the homeless population in Venice Beach is estimated to have at least doubled to 2,000, in an area of only three square miles. Several factors caused this increase.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in thousands of prisoners being released from the Los Angeles County Jail, and many of them headed for the beach. A new homeless shelter was opened earlier in 2020 in Venice Beach, and while it only has 140 beds (at a cost of $8 million), it serves meals to many more, and has no requirements for sobriety or even a curfew. But how the City of Los Angeles responded to the COVID-19 crisis had an even greater impact on Venice Beach.

For years, once per week the streets would be cleaned. This forced people living in cars or RVs to move them to allow trash and debris including feces to get regularly swept up and washed away. But since March 2020 there has been no street sweeping. Also suspended in 2020 by court order was a 2016 LA County ordinance that prevented homeless people from accumulating more than what could fit into a trash bin (about eight cubic feet). If that weren’t enough, since COVID came along, the police have virtually stopped enforcing all laws and ordinances still in effect that might regulate the number of homeless and the behavior of the homeless.

Venice Beach residents are besieged as never before. When speaking with residents to prepare this report, one of them said “I feel like I have a house in the middle of a large homeless encampment.” Residents describe the mountains of trash that have begun to accumulate as a result of a breakdown in code enforcement, along with an explosion in the rat population. For those who have been assaulted or shot, of course, rats and trash are just a nuisance.

The degree to which civilization has receded in places where the homeless have taken over in Los Angeles is difficult to separate from the other epic distractions that have dominated the news in 2020. But these other distractions, COVID-19, economic hardship, mass rioting and vandalism, have compounded the problem of the homeless.

For example, on one residential corner in Venice Beach, for the past few months a man has lived there, working on welding projects. Many of these projects involve converting scrap metal into knives, machetes and axes. According to a neighbor, the man was approached by Antifa and offered marijuana in exchange for weapons, but he refused, stating he only would work for methamphetamine. The entire operation, the generator, the welding torch, the hammering in the middle of the night, is hazardous and disturbing. But despite hundreds of calls to the LAPD, this man continues to ply his trade.

Police Undermined by Progressive Prosecutors

What the City of Los Angeles needs to do is challenge the 2006 Jones ruling in federal court. They need to join with other California cities to put initiatives before California’s voters that will repeal Prop. 47 and Prop. 57. But under pressure from progressive billionaires and BLM activists, they are moving in the opposite direction.

The currently serving Los Angeles District Attorney is Jackie Lacey, an black woman who by most accounts would be considered light on crime. But not light enough. Running against Lacey in November is George Gascon, formerly the D.A. for San Francisco. Gascon is endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter, and his campaign has already benefit from over $1 million spent by George Soros to defeat his rival. To say Gascon would not restore the ability of law enforcement to restore order to the streets of Los Angeles is an understatement.

One would think that a liberal black woman serving as the Los Angeles District Attorney would at least earn a respectful opposition from radical activists, but not Jackie Lacey. In March, Black Lives Matters protesters showed up at Lacey’s house, banging drums, pounding on their front door, and demanding a “community meeting.” In response, Lacey’s husband opened the door, pointed a gun at the protesters, and demanded they get off the porch. A Los Angeles judge has just ruled that California’s liberal attorney general, Xavier Becerra, should file charges against him, just in time for the November election.

Not long ago, Rudy Giuliani characterized places like Los Angeles as “criminal friendly cities.” This is an accurate description. On top of everything else, California’s state legislature passed SB 10 in 2018, designed to make California the first state to end the use of cash bail for all detained suspects awaiting trials.” The legislation would replace the state’s cash bail system with “risk assessments.” This legislation was successfully challenged through a referendum petition, so this November California’s voters will decide if they want jails to release suspects without the hook of bail to improve the chances they’ll ever show up in court.

What is happening in Los Angeles is typical for California, and is part of larger and related policy failures. Everything California’s government has done for over 30 years, ever since the progressive grip on the state and local governments became nearly absolute, has made life more difficult for its once thriving middle class. Excessive regulations for the law-abiding small businesses, which big business takes in stride and the underground economy ignores. Urban containment, draconian building codes, and punitive permit fees that have made housing unaffordable.

California has become a feudal economy, and if entire cities are turned into fetid, ungovernable swamps, so what, as long as the right slogans are uttered, and fists are raised in solidarity with the oppressed?

“Black Lives Matter.” “All Cops Are Bastards.” Let’s hear you say it, if you want to have a political career. On your knees. Raise your fist. Say what we tell you to say, because “silence is violence.” Has it come to that? Is this all it takes to remain a successful politician?

But it isn’t just politicians who have brought Los Angeles and other progressive cities to the brink of complete chaos. Activist judges, activist prosecutors, and well funded activist attorneys have all played a role. In some respects the legal obstacles to common sense governance outweigh the political obstacles. The City of Los Angeles should just round up the homeless and put them into supervised tent encampments in inexpensive areas, but the lawsuits would stop that in its tracks. But in feudal California, there’s an innovative workaround.

Instead of solving the problem for pennies on the dollar, homeless advocates build “permanent supportive housing” for $500,000 per unit, using taxpayers money, and for every unit they build, hundreds of homeless remain on the streets. This utterly futile scheme has cost California’s taxpayers billions while the numbers of homeless have only increased.

The next step California’s progressive policymakers envision, well under way, is to erase zoning restrictions and allow investors and developers to collect subsidies and tax incentives to build rent-subsidized multi-family dwellings, randomly dropped onto the sites of demolished single-family homes. Imagine the feeling, when next door to the home you’ve worked for all your life, one of your many new neighbors, living for free in a looming six-plex, is a welder who works all night for methamphetamine.

Police in Los Angeles, like in all cities ran by progressive liberals, are up against a system that is failing. It makes their jobs nearly impossible. The only way their lot will be improved, along with that of residents in Venice Beach and other besieged communities across all of California’s urban landscape, will be through a sustained realignment by voters that categorically rejects progressive politics.

On the other hand, California’s cities offer the example that will be America’s fate if Biden wins in November.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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How the Homeless Industrial Complex Plans to Destroy Venice Beach

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“I intend on putting in another proposal in the next week or two that asks the city to look at the federal bailout or stimulus funds we’ll be getting as a result of this crisis…and using some of that to either buy hotels that go belly up or to buy the distressed properties that are absolutely going to be on the market at cheaper prices after this crisis is over. And use that as homeless and affordable housing. It’s going to be a hell of a lot cheaper to purchase stuff that is already there and move people in there than if we start from scratch. A lot of good stuff is being done.”
– Mike Bonin, LA City Councilmember, 11th District, remarks at 4/18 virtual town hall

It isn’t often you’ll find a politician revealing so explicitly what they’re intending to do, especially when it involves the displacement of an entire well-established community. Nor is it often, if ever, that something so tragic and disruptive as a disease pandemic comes along to hasten the accomplishment of such a nefarious objective.

The policies being enacted in California, and in Los Angeles in particular, to help the “unhoused” find shelter, have little to do with helping the “unhoused.” If they did, the problem would have been solved years ago. Venice Beach provides an excellent case study in how everything being done to help the “unhoused” has a hidden agenda.

The key to understanding this hidden agenda is to recognize that a Homeless Industrial Complex has arisen in California that acquires power and profit by pursuing an utterly dysfunctional strategy. In Los Angeles, for example, instead of rounding up homeless people, sorting them according to their various challenges – drug addiction, alcoholism, criminality, mental illness, laziness, or just bad luck – and moving them into supervised camps in low cost areas of Los Angeles County, the Homeless Industrial Complex has grown into a voracious leviathan, devouring billions in taxpayers’ money. And for all practical purposes, and with all that money, they have just made the problem worse.

This is because you can’t ensure the rule of law when you permit people to wander the streets stoned out of their minds, or sprawled across park benches in a heroin stupor, or drinking and carousing all night long, urinating and defecating everywhere, and then permit them to receive free food and bedding in a shelter two blocks from the beach with no curfew and no restrictions on behavior. But that’s what they did in Venice Beach.

Furthermore, you can’t get the tens of thousands of homeless living in Los Angeles into shelters of any kind, when you’re spending over $8 million to build a shelter with 154 beds, but that’s what they did in Venice Beach. And you can’t move these homeless from that temporary shelter into “permanent supportive housing” in a new structure containing 140 apartments at an estimated total project cost of over $200 million. But that’s what’s planned for Venice Beach.

The members of the Homeless Industrial Complex know this. But they don’t care, because public bureaucracies get funding to expand, and “nonprofit” corporations and their for-profit subcontractors get public funding and tax incentives. These perks are far more lucrative when the “solutions” they construct are on high value land, even though locating supportive housing and shelters in inexpensive areas would solve the problem.

The Next Step – The Destruction of a City

Which brings us back to Councilmember Bonin’s revealing comment: The City of Los Angeles intends to use bailout funds to buy distressed properties and use them to house the unhoused. There are all kinds of problems with this. Here’s what’s happened, and what’s coming next:

The homeless could have been kept off the streets. But the public authorities and their allies in the Homeless Industrial Complex hid behind insufficiently challenged court rulings and legislation that made it prohibitively expensive to house all the homeless, and almost impossible to treat them or hold them accountable.

The current pandemic has crushed the economy, and has been equally devastating to both small landlords and renters. But how have elected officials responded? They have clamped down on landlords, making it impossible to evict tenants, or raise rent, and are even considering mandating a 25 percent rent reduction. While there is some moral justification for these measures during these extraordinary times, what sort of reciprocal relief has been offered landlords? Nothing. No property tax relief, much less grants or low interest loans. “Distressed properties.” Indeed.

For years developers have been eyeing the residential paradise that remains intact on the blocks immediately behind the Venice Beach boardwalk. Armed with phony legislative mandates to protect “sprawl,” and “greenhouse gas,” which has prevented construction of entire new cities along California’s 101, I-5 and 99 transportation corridors, developers hope to demolish these beachfront neighborhoods and fill them with multi-story, multi-family units.

As an aside, but essential to any discussion of the homeless crisis, California’s environmentalist inspired legislative mandates are the reason that developers can no longer make a profit building affordable homes without subsidies. These laws caused California’s housing shortage and were a major factor in causing California’s homeless crisis. They should be revised or repealed.

While there is room for legitimate debate over how cities should manage densification, some of which would still be inevitable and mostly beneficial even if Californians did not live under the oppression of urban containment, what is happening in Venice Beach is not legitimate. It is economic war.

The elected officials in Los Angeles have allowed the homeless population in Venice Beach to become dangerously out of control. Trespassing, theft, disturbing the peace, vandalism, public intoxication and worse are all crimes that are now ignored. The people living in Venice Beach, working hard to pay rent or mortgages, were besieged before this pandemic began. Now, in a cruel twist of injustice, they are under “lockdown,” as the still unrestricted and unaccountable homeless become further entrenched.

Purchasing “distressed” properties will never house all of the “unhoused,” because Venice Beach’s natural attributes of perfect weather, endless beach, and big sky sunsets over the Pacific cannot be altogether destroyed no matter how much the neighborhoods are blighted. In a place like Venice Beach, if you buy houses and give them away, more “unhoused” will come. To squeeze the property owners in Venice Beach while displaying compassion without conditions to the homeless is a travesty. But blight can be useful.

Once Venice Beach acquires a critical mass of blighted and distressed properties, and manage to “house” a sufficient number of the formerly “unhoused,” two things will happen. The blight will empower the city to declare entire square blocks as subject to eminent domain, and the lowered average income per census tract will qualify developers for low income tax credits. At that point, bring on the bulldozers, and say goodbye to a city, a way of life, and whatever incentives may have remained for hard working property owners to work hard and own property.

Councilmember Bonin and his comrades must feel very proud to have seized this moment.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Gathered for the Feast at the Hotel California

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Welcome to the Hotel California, such a lovely place… Plenty of room at the Hotel California, any time of year, you can find it here…
– “Hotel California,” by the Eagles, 1977

For decades California’s aristocracy has engaged in unsustainable feasting, as they consume the leviathan carcasses of what were for a time the world’s the finest water project, freeway system, and the public universities. Living off a capital endowment that once provided abundance, the aristocrats of California have neglected all of these achievements, instead imposing scarcity on a quiescent populace.

California’s aristocrats get wealthier as they ration supplies of every necessity, from housing to water and energy, and the money they should have invested in maintaining affordable abundance goes instead into pay and pensions for their armies of usefully co-opted, unionized public servants, and entitlements for a growing underclass that votes reliably Democrat.

By now California’s so-called “up down coalition” of Democrat voters has enabled its ruling class to acquire absolute power. Meanwhile, California’s beleaguered middle class either flees to other states or continues to vote against their own interests because they think it will demonstrate their commitment to the twin Gods of “diversity” and fighting climate change. And as the old adage goes: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

California’s political economy today is set up to reward the wealthiest political insiders, destroy the hardest working middle income citizens, while expanding the ranks of the lowest income residents and pandering to them by pretending to care about wealth inequality, social “equity,” and “environmental justice.” This explains the status of California as a sanctuary state. It also explains California’s burgeoning, unaccountable homeless population.

These deplorable social conditions as well as the neglected infrastructure in California could easily be managed, but then there would be no reason to expand the unionized state, no reason to drive down private sector wages while elevating public sector wages and benefits, and fewer opportunities for the wealthiest Californians to profit from asset bubbles. This is textbook political corruption. California is a one-party banana republic, ran by a plutocracy that is looting the people’s inheritance to further enrich themselves.

The Hotel California Is Now Open on Venice Beach

In February 2020 the Venice Beach homeless “bridge housing” complex was opened for occupancy. It is a prime example of how crony capitalist corruption hides behind the mask of social justice and “inclusion.” This shelter is situated two blocks from the beach, on a three acre parcel where land is valued at $30 million per acre. This city owned land could be sold, and the proceeds could be used for shelter housing in far less expensive parts of Los Angeles County.

Instead, 154 homeless individuals are now occupying a “temporary” shelter that cost $8 million to construct, and will cost another $8 million per year to operate. Eventually, supposedly within three years, “permanent supportive housing” will be constructed on-site for these homeless – or as they are now referred to, the “unhoused” – so they can continue to live two blocks from the beaches of the Pacific on one of the most expensive pieces of real estate on earth.

This is an example of “inclusive zoning” at its most extreme. It is based on the premise that if disadvantaged people, low income people – even those struggling with mental illness or substance addictions – are brought into an affluent neighborhood, the habits and attitudes of the affluent residents will be absorbed by these less fortunate individuals, and “foster greater social and economic mobility and integration.”

The entire affordable housing policy agenda, enshrined in zoning regulations and tax incentives across America and especially in California, is susceptible to corruption. Why develop market housing, when you can get tax credits and tax exemptions if you build subsidized affordable housing. In California, the government implemented regulations and fees so punitive that they effectively rationed housing for all but the very wealthy, and now are soaking the taxpayers to subsidize “affordable housing” at an average cost of over $600,000 per unit. But why seed the most expensive parts of California’s cities with homeless shelters a cost of over $50,000 per bed?

Here where we could be seeing corruption disguised as compassion at its worst, because the easiest way to acquire tax subsidies and tax credits is if an area can be officially declared “blighted.” Once this label applies to any census tract, not only do the federal money coffers automatically open wide for redevelopment, but the local cities can declare eminent domain to force homeowners to sell their homes which are then demolished to make way for hotels, hospitals, shopping malls, and residential high-rises.

It doesn’t take much to tip the balance in a census tract to a “blighted” status, and even less to earn a score that qualifies the area for less draconian but still very lucrative tax credits and subsidies. It is based on three variables, average median income, rate of unemployment, and rate of poverty. Take a look at this map of the coastline of West Los Angeles. The census tracts are outlined with yellow lines; some of them are only a half-mile in area, only a few hundred acres in size.

Notice that large parts of Venice Beach are already shaded yellow, meaning they are “eligible” for tax incentives based on “blight.” Flip that shade from yellow to red, as has happened in Santa Monica to the immediate north, and even more tax incentives arrive. How many people with perfect scores for “blight” would it take to transform these areas?

Don’t Walk Your Dog After Dark in Venice Beach

The homeless in Venice Beach have been a growing menace to law abiding, hard working residents for years. The problem has became considerably worse in just the past year, but if you object to the presence of people smoking methamphetamine and defecating on the sidewalk in front of your home or business, apparently that means you’re a fascist, a social darwinist, and a sociopath. Never mind the fact that you and your spouse may both be working overtime to pay a mortgage, or that you have young children you want to keep safe.

Now that the Hotel California “bridge housing” is officially opened up, a new breed of homeless have arrived on the scene. As if the nonstop distribution of shit on Venice’s sidewalks and syringes on the local lawns wasn’t bad enough, eyewitness accounts offer lurid details of local women now being aggressively followed and harassed by gangs of young men who correctly identified this new “shelter” as a place where they can get free meals and free overnight accommodations.

Common sense would suggest that if the civic authorities had the slightest respect for the residents, this shelter would have a curfew, and would not admit intoxicated individuals. But the opposite is the case. Out of respect for the human rights and dignity of the “unhoused,” Venice Beach’s Hotel California is a “wet” shelter, meaning that any time of day or night you can stagger in as stoned or smashed as you wish, get some sleep or a free meal, then leave again.

Exactly how is something like this not expected to pull even more of the “unhoused” to make Venice Beach their free home? They have everything they need – free food, free shelter, freedom of movement, “tolerance” of their “lifestyle,” and no accountability. But in a census tract of only a few blocks, a facility of 150 people without jobs (perfect score on “unemployment rate”), without income (ditto), and clearly living in poverty, watch out. Blight, and with that, eminent domain by the City of Los Angeles, could swiftly follow.

Inclusive zoning, California style, includes the practice of redistributing poverty to make certain neighborhoods blighted and low income, so that developers, working closely with the city bureaucrats, can use major federal financing incentives and eminent domain to completely demolish previously intact neighborhoods where residents invested their lives and fortunes to call home.

The ideal underlying inclusive zoning is overtly communist. It suggests that everyone has a right to live anywhere they want, and that private property rights are a manifestation of privilege and oppression as much as hard work. What great irony that this seductive siren call is a useful tool in the hands of political cronies and profiteers.

And so California continues its descent into madness. At least, down in Venice Beach, one may get out as well as get into the Hotel California. But what incentive might prompt anyone want to do that? From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Manger vs The Monster

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And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
– Luke 2:7

Advocates for the homeless frequently invoke biblical passages in order to appeal to the Christian compassion that still guides the hearts of most Americans, whether they are religious or secular. “No room at the inn,” is a phrase the American Left relies upon to justify everything from open borders and immigration amnesty to affordable housing and homeless shelters. But what sort of inn? An inexpensive manger that is warm, dry, and safe? Or an overbuilt monstrosity? Both options are warm, dry, and safe, but the monster is so grossly expensive that only a few find shelter.

California’s policies currently favor these overbuilt monstrosities, with the biggest losers the homeless. The average cost for “permanent supportive housing” in California is now easily in excess of a half million per unit. A recent audit in the City of Los Angeles estimated the average cost at $550,000 per unit. According to a program overview released by the Santa Clara County’s Office of Supportive Housing, their average cost is in excess of $500,000 per unit. In San Francisco, according to a report released by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, over $700,000 per unit. Across the Bay in Alameda County, a 2018 report released by the City of Oakland discloses average costs of over $600,000 per unit. On Federal property in Los Angeles County, remodeling an existing building to provide permanent supportive housing is estimated to cost over 900,000 per unit. But the champion of all monstrosities is in Venice Beach, California, where developers propose to construct housing for the homeless at a cost of approximately $1.4 million per unit.

Dubbed by its opponents as “The Monster on the Median,” this building is set to occupy three acres of city owned property located in the heart of Venice Beach. The land is currently used for public beach parking, as well as periodically hosting farmers markets and craft fairs. If these three acres were zoned for mixed use commercial development, they would sell for around $100 million. Any rational policymaker would either leave this property alone, allowing it to remain one of the last scraps of publicly accessible open spaces in Venice Beach, or sell it to a commercial developer.

Instead what is being proposed is a 140 unit “community project,” a concrete blockhouse with a three acre footprint that will rise over the residential neighborhoods of Venice Beach like the fortress of an occupying army, which is not an entirely inaccurate metaphor. At an estimated construction cost of around $700,000 per unit, and including the value of the land, the total project cost of this monstrosity will exceed $200 million. This is an astonishing, criminal waste of public money. To house every one of the City of Los Angeles’s estimated 60,000 homeless in structures like this monster would cost taxpayers around $100 billion. That will never happen. What’s going on?

It doesn’t require a cynic to recognize that something’s rotten: The incentive to build monsters instead of mangers is because with these monsters, project developers and financiers have a larger monetary denominator to work with. Much larger. That’s more budget to accommodate overhead, fat consultancy contracts, huge payoffs to litigators, hefty payments to the public sector for permits and fees, lucrative deals with subcontractors, and the promise of endless additional work since at this rate, and at this cost, the problem will never get solved. But how is this ever justified morally?

Here’s where one of the more insidious manifestations of socialist ideology comes into play. Like all socialist principles, it reeks with compassion but is utterly impractical if not nihilistic in the real world. Building homeless housing and low income housing on some of the most expensive real estate on earth is to fulfill the ideals of “inclusionary zoning.” Relying on “scientific studies” that defy common sense, 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.”

“Greater social and economic mobility and integration.”

In practice, this means if you work hard your entire life to live in a neighborhood where your children can go to decent schools and feel safe walking the streets, if you skip vacations and take on a 2nd job to pay off an astronomical mortgage, it does not matter. If you lose the inclusionary zoning lottery, prepare to have an apartment house dumped onto the lot where your neighbor’s single family home just got demolished. Then, while investors pad their profits with property tax exemptions for creating “inclusionary” housing, prepare to have this property occupied by tenants who pay little or no rent out of their own earnings – if they work at all – because your taxes will be paying their rent for them. Prepare for them to openly consume drugs and watch your belongings since petty theft and heroin use is now decriminalized in California.

That is what happened to Venice Beach. And it’s coming to your neighborhood.

There is nothing compassionate about this. In the real world, people congregate in low income neighborhoods because they have low incomes. This is where developers build, at no cost to taxpayers, defacto low income, market housing. This is where charities build and operate shelters, because they are affordable. And when people are fortunate enough to be able to afford to move from low income neighborhoods to middle income neighborhoods or beyond, they expect to be rewarded for their efforts, not have to wonder if the Homeless Industrial Complex will destroy their new neighborhood.

The obligations of compassion don’t end when the Homeless Industrial Complex is finally forced to build inexpensive mangers instead of overwrought monsters. What if baby Jesus was born in a barn filled with addicts injecting heroin and smoking methamphetamine? What if the three wise men didn’t have to bring gifts, because gangs of thieves had set up lucrative criminal enterprises to pay for their drugs, and instead of the hospitality of the innkeeper providing food, King Herod dispensed free government meals?

Compassionate Christians who reelect these corrupt politicians should imagine that scene defining their next Christmas pageant. And while this all sounds horribly cruel during the holiday season of giving, true cruelty is to accept the solutions currently being pursued. They are wasting billions while suffering only increases.

These are the tragic consequences of a perfect storm of flawed legislation and court rulings. In California, the practical effect of Prop. 47, sold to voters in 2014 as criminal justice reform, has been to decriminalize possession of hard drugs and petty theft. At the same time, court rulings such as Jones vs. City of Los Angeles prohibit law enforcement from relocating or detaining anyone camping in a public space unless they can offer them “permanent supportive housing.” The final straw is the “housing first” regulations originating at HUD during the Obama administration that require virtually all federal grant money get spent on housing, rather than also on parallel treatment for substance abuse and mental health.

Tolerate vagrancy, drug use and petty crime. Permit an alliance of developers, service nonprofits, and government bureaucrats to hijack and waste every dollar taken from taxpayers to help the homeless, abetted by useful idiots who believe this impossible, toxic intersection of futile, corrupt strategies somehow constitutes “compassion.” The result? Billions have been spent, additional billions will be spent, and the population of homeless in California, already numbering over 130,000, will only get bigger and more unmanageable.

This is the fraud presided over by supposedly compassionate politicians such as California governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Hiding behind supposedly compassionate principles such as “inclusionary zoning” they are spending billions of dollars to construct monstrous housing boondoggles where homeless people will be given “permanent supportive housing” in order to “integrate with the community.” At the same time, California’s unsheltered homeless, the majority of whom are either mentally ill, substance abusers, criminal predators, or all three, shall be subject to minimal expectations.

Perhaps it’s time for the Homeless Industrial Complex bureaucrats to construct one of these housing monsters on the park property immediately adjacent to Gavin Newsom’s gubernatorial mansion. Isn’t that sort of “integration” the logical endpoint of “inclusionary zoning?” Perhaps these monstrosities should follow Gavin Newsom, and every other wealthy liberal who pushes these scams – and they are scams, designed to enrich the Homeless Industrial Complex, not to help the less fortunate – to the streets where they live and the schools where their children learn.

Instead of into the neighborhoods of hard working families, let California’s completely unaccountable homeless come en masse to the exclusive, “low poverty” enclaves of the liberal elites who engineered this crisis. Let them come, with all the lawless behaviors that California’s liberal laws enable. Let them urinate in your hedges, defecate on your lawn, shoot heroin and smoke methamphetamine in plain sight, beg, bellow, fight, rape, mug, murder, and, of course, steal everything that isn’t nailed down or under armed guard.

This is exactly what happened to Venice Beach. Fact. Where’s the difference?

And yes, we know, some of the homeless just need a helping hand. So how does it help the virtuous homeless when we fail to police the predators among them?

Isn’t it funny how politicians like Gavin Newsom are willing to impoverish the taxpayers with tens of billions in housing bonds that have not even begun to solve the problem, and leave unchallenged laws and court rulings that turn their state into a magnet for lunatics, addicts, predators, perverts and bums, and destroy neighborhoods across the state with “inclusionary zoning,” but make sure to leave their own streets and schools untouched by this growing nightmare.

Nothing about California’s homeless policies today qualifies as genuine compassion, because compassion has to be rational. Compassion has to have a winning strategy, not become an endless, losing war. California’s housing for the homeless policy is corruption masquerading as compassion.

If Gavin Newsom, Eric Garcetti and all the rest of them cared about the homeless, they’d build the modern day equivalent of mangers, warm, dry and safe, located in more affordable neighborhoods. They’d defy HUD’s preposterous “Housing First” mandate, rallying compassionate reformers in every Continuum of Care agency in the U.S. to back them up. They would use the money they saved to actually help the homeless in every way – managing their mental illness, treating their addictions, training them for jobs. That would be compassion worth its name, and worthy of the season.

An edited version of this article originally appeared in the California Globe.

How Federal Intervention Can Ease California’s Homeless Crisis

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On October 24, Curbed LA reported that the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to provide an additional $24 million in homeless housing bonds to “repurpose a building (207) on the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles for housing for veterans.” According to the article, the rehabilitated building would provide 59 units of permanent supportive housing for homeless and chronically homeless senior Veterans.”

According to Ryan Thompson, writing for VeniceUpdate.com, the developer’s budget for this rehab project is $54.6 million, which equates to a per unit cost of $926,000. In his write-up, Thompson not only questions the astronomical per unit price tag, but the entire process whereby these contracts were awarded and how the designated developers were selected. It warrants close reading.

Spending up to one million dollars per unit to not even create new housing, but to upgrade an existing structure, is not an outlier. These astronomical costs are typical. In Venice Beach, a new structure being proposed to accommodate homeless and low income residents is budgeted, including the value of the land, at over $200 million, in order to create 140 new apartment units. That’s a cost of $1.4 million per unit.

In order to assist the homeless, in 2016, Los Angeles voters approved Prop. HHH, authorizing $1.2 billion to construct “supportive housing.” As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the total project cost, on average, for the few thousand units that will eventually get built is $550,000 each.

Up north, the San Francisco Bay Area’s local politicians are equally adept at spending unbelievable sums of money to create housing for the homeless and for low income families. The City of Oakland provides a typical example, the “Estrella Vista” affordable housing project, wherein 87 housing units were constructed at a cost of $64 million, which equates to $736,000 per unit.

And then there’s San Francisco’s Prop. A, set to be voted on November 5th. This $600 million bond will be used to construct low income housing, but a close analysis of the bond estimates that it will eventually fund, at most, 650 units of new housing and 450 units of rehabilitated existing housing.

Why are our public officials spending a half-million per unit, or more, to build housing units for homeless and low income families in California? How on earth do they think they will ever solve California’s homeless crisis, when they’re unable spend less than a half-million dollars each, to get a roof over someone’s head?

A Crippling Assortment of Laws and Regulations Have Enabled Corruption Instead of Cures

The San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County host, between them, well over 100,000 of California’s estimated 130,000 homeless. And in both of those metros, local government policies have utterly failed. This failure is partly because local elected officials are hampered by state laws which make it nearly impossible to incarcerate petty thieves and drug addicts, or institutionalize the mentally ill, and court rulings that prohibit breaking up homeless encampments unless these homeless can be provided free and permanent “supportive housing.”

The state and federal governments have even mandated that providing “housing first,” and getting every homeless person under a roof prior to any allocations of funds for treatment to overcome drug addiction or manage mental illness, is a condition of  receiving government funds to help the homeless.

As if these laws and court rulings that have made homeless populations unmanageable weren’t enough, California’s state legislators have crippled the ability of developers to cost effectively construct any type of housing. State laws designed to prevent “sprawl” have caused land prices within cities to skyrocket. California’s environmental laws, most notably CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act), require a dizzying, time consuming and expensive, seemingly endless array of reports from developers seeking project approvals. There are literally hundreds of various applications and fees that developers have to file with dozens of state and local agencies, and often these agencies will take months if not years to process the applications.

But instead of challenging these laws, local elected officials have used them as an excuse to engage in one of the most corrupt misuses of government funds in American history. Without first changing these laws, the problem cannot be fixed. But a special interest movement has been created to spend the money anyway. This alliance of special interests constitutes what has now become a Homeless Industrial Complex, comprised of government bureaucracies, homeless advocacy groups operating through nonprofit entities, and large government contractors, especially construction companies and land development firms.

It is Time for the Federal Government to Get Involved in California’s Homeless Crisis

An executive order involving several federal agencies could launch a coordinated effort to get California’s homeless crisis under control. Federal action would not solve the homeless crisis overnight, but it would prevent something truly catastrophic occurring such as a disease epidemic, and it would set the stage for Californians more swiftly implementing permanent solutions, for which there currently is no end in sight.

For example, the IRS could reform the laws governing nonprofits to curb the legalized waste of billions that pour into what have become special interest behemoths.

The SEC could classify the taxpayer as having investor rights, in a long-overdue move that would make it a lot more difficult for public projects to squander public funds.

The SEC could also require consultants to public agencies to register as financial advisers and be subject to the same restrictions on political donations that govern these consultants in the private sector.

The Justice Dept. could investigate some of the more egregious wasteful projects allegedly launched to help the homeless to possibly uncover cases of collusion or racketeering.

The Justice Dept. could also send in DEA agents to break up the criminal gangs and drug traffickers who exploit California’s lenient drug laws and hide among the homeless encampments.

The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development could reform the Low Income Tax Credit program to put a cap on per unit costs for housing projects to qualify. They could repeal the disastrous “housing first” mandate that prevents homeless programs from prioritizing treatment equally to constructing shelters.

The Dept. of Education could get more aggressive against the teachers union which resists competition in K-12 education, and is consequently responsible for thousands of students graduating into homelessness instead of productive lives.

The Centers for Disease Control could declare a health emergency and sweep through the homeless encampments, cleaning up the trash and human excrement.

The EPA could participate in that effort by declaring – quite accurately – homeless encampments to be Brownfields, in order to save California’s soil, water, and runoff to the ocean.

The Dept. of Labor could implement an executive order preventing Project Labor Agreements from being used to inflate the cost of housing projects, as if with the shortage of construction laborers in California, there is any need for PLAs.

And the Dept. of Veterans Affairs could house homeless veterans on unused sections of California’s abundant military bases. For less than $926,000 per unit!

If these recommendations were implemented, California’s homeless crisis would quickly improve. Criminal drug traffickers would be looking over their shoulders. The CDC and EPA would declare an emergency and clean up homeless encampments. Homeless veterans would find immediate shelter. And the power of the Homeless Industrial Complex, a special interest movement that has been enriched by going slow and overspending on everything, would be shaken to its foundations.

Nonprofits would no longer be able to legally squander funds intended to help the homeless. Taxpayers would have the same rights as private sector investors, making it less likely public agencies could waste money on projects. Federal funds would be contingent on cost-effective projects. Unions would have to compete to participate in projects, and with the shortage of construction workers in California and the many projects awaiting funds, that would not be a hardship to them. Over time, maybe a sustained effort by the Dept. of Education to introduce competition to the monopolistic union controlled public schools might even change both the aptitude and the attitude of students graduating into California’s workforce.

Eventually, maybe the other root problem connected to homelessness, prohibitively expensive housing, could get addressed. Not only through many of the reforms proposed here, which could apply to low income housing as easily as to permanent supportive housing, but through a loosening of the requirements to run building permit applications through an obscene gaggle of local and state agencies. Projects that take as little as 20 days in Texas to get approved, and at most 20 months in most states, can take up to 20 years in California. Small wonder there’s a housing shortage. These countless applications with their exorbitant fees and endless delays constitute criminal negligence and naked, insatiable public sector greed, masquerading as a public service.

California’s policymakers are puppets of special interests. Those special interests include their own bureaucracies, which are controlled by public sector unions that gain membership dues and power whenever a public sector challenge worsens. Similarly, the other special interest members of the Homeless Industrial Complex, developers and nonprofit corporations, gain profits and revenues when the homeless crisis worsens.

It is time for the federal government to take decisive action where our public servants on the state and local level have failed. It must never be forgotten that this failure victimizes not only the taxpayers and the members of the public who live in areas overran with homeless people. It also victimizes the homeless themselves, who are not getting shelter, and who are not getting treatment.

The power of the special interests who have turned homelessness into a self-serving, taxpayer funded industry, must be broken.

An executive order from President Trump declaring a state of emergency, followed up by a coordinated interagency response, could get California’s homeless crisis under control. And it could happen in months instead of interminable years.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Crazy and Woke Progressive Insanity Will NEVER Help the Homeless

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AUDIO:  Venice Beach remains the epicenter of Homeless Industrial Complex corruption, as planners consider a proposal to house 140 homeless people in an apartment complex with a total project cost of over $200 million. The strategies being pursued by California’s progressive politicians will NEVER solve the problem of homelessness, but they will spend billions and billions and billions of dollars “trying.” – 17 minutes on KABC Los Angeles – Edward Ring on the Dr. Pinsky and Leeann Tweeden Show.

How to Help the Homeless

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VIDEO – A discussion towards understanding the root causes of homelessness in California, and how we can help solve this problem – 23 minutes in Epoch Times studio, Los Angeles – Edward Ring with Siyamak Khorrami on California Insider

https://www.theepochtimes.com/california-insider-interview-with-edward-ring-on-the-homeless_3118270.html

Crazy and Woke on the Western Front of Progressive Insanity

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The reason progressive extremism persists in America today is because progressives are either making money by embracing progressive policies, or because progressives are not living on the front lines of progressive insanity.

It is hard to imagine a place that would have an electorate any more progressive than Venice Beach. Located on the shores of West Los Angeles in California’s 33rd Congressional District, Venice Beach is represented by Democrat Ted Lieu, who was reelected in 2018 with 70 percent of the vote. But a revolution is brewing in Venice Beach, because Venice Beach is on the front lines of progressive insanity.

Thanks to progressive ideology as expressed in laws and court rulings, in California today you cannot arrest and hold vagrants for petty theft or possession of hard drugs; you cannot move them out of public spaces unless you can provide them with free and “permanent supportive housing;” you cannot commit demonstrably insane people to asylums; and publicly funded shelters must offer food and urgent care without any preconditions whatsoever.

The Streets of Venice Beach Are An Open Sewer

Testimonials from residents of Venice Beach provide ample evidence of what happens when you impose these progressive policies on an urban area bordered on the west by some of the most inviting beaches and agreeable weather in the world. An estimated 1,200 homeless people have set up permanent encampments in this three square mile beach town. They almost never use actual toilets.

According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, the average human produces one pound of feces per day. Simple math therefore tells us that every week, the homeless population deposits more than four tons of feces onto the gutters and sidewalks and driveways and lawns of Venice Beach residents, where they are dutifully hosed into the sewers and eventually make their way into the ocean.

The reality of being on the front lines of progressive insanity requires more than hard numbers. The homeless don’t shit in their tents, or anywhere near their tents. They walk into the neighborhoods to relieve themselves. Consider this eyewitness account from a Venice Beach resident:

“People have to hose this [shit] down where it runs down the street to the sewer on Main Street. Westminster Elementary school serves the children of local residents. Kids pick stuff up, dogs walk in the stuff. This is all tracked into homes and classrooms. They leave bottles of urine in their water bottles [figure around 16 tons per week] and leave the bottles. The only way these bottles don’t accumulate forever is because property owners have to pick them up.”

Insoluble Homeless Problem Benefits Politicians

If anything stinks more than the shit that is deposited each day in Venice by the homeless, it’s the corruption that prevents action. All the laws and court rulings that prevent decisive action could be bypassed if Governor Newsom would declare a state of emergency. But why on Earth would California’s progressive, woke governor do any such thing, when the progressive elite in Los Angeles are exploiting these laws and court rulings to make billions of dollars, while the problem only gets worse?

Here is an excerpt from an email sent to Mike Bonin, the Los Angeles City Councilmember whose district includes Venice Beach:

“Councilmember Bonin: I just received my property tax bill. It sort of feels like a sick joke. Can you please let me know how I can deduct for services not rendered? I’m not paying for your bloated administrative costs anymore. Our streets are lawless, they are covered in feces and our crime rate is spiraling. How can you force us to live in such horrible conditions? Don’t you see that the City of Los Angeles is actually the #1 slumlord in the nation?”

Or this one, also sent to Councilmember Bonin, along with many of his colleagues on the Los Angeles City Council:

“Councilman and City Officials: I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous this is becoming for all constituents – the homeless and the housed both. Increasingly, we are witnessing acts of violence and being subjected to very disturbing spreading of dangerous bodily fluids and needles on the streets of Venice. Sadly, this is why many of us have actively embraced the federal government to intervene in our city in order to begin some sense of sanity and rights to our neighborhoods. I join my fellow Venetians in calling upon you to step up and take immediate steps to stop these wild, wild west actions that are now taking place on a daily basis, and restore safety for all in Venice Beach.”

Or this lengthy, vivid appeal:

“I was almost attacked by three dogs off leash fighting with another dog early this evening. Told another neighbor to walk his dog the other way. He appreciated the advice. This is ridiculous. To our ‘respected’ (NOT) council and city people: You pad your pockets, and don’t think we don’t know it. We are not blind and dumb. We get poorer so you can pocket money and yet our living conditions have gone to hell in a handbasket. And you drove the bus.

Make amends. LISTEN to us. We are not just rich NIMBYs. We are hard working in all variety and type of work, peoples who come together to help each other. Some people are wealthy, some fighting for their very last dollar to maintain at least an apartment.

Start doing something about the actual problem rather than seeing what developers with whom you can seek prosperous deals can do for your OWN BANK ACCOUNTS. DO SOMETHING! And DO it NOW!!!!!

You may not like what I say, but I stand firmly that I am correct in my assessments that you mismanage money and somehow it comes back to your own bank accounts. Once again don’t think we are stupid. You can say what you want, but we know the truth and you cannot dodge it every chance you get.

We will find ultimately what you did. Much like a felon, just admit now to what you did and get it over with before you end up with the wrath of the power of the people you purport to represent.”

Residents Are Recognizing That Political Corruption Prevents Solutions

These excerpts from emails sent to the local elected officials who run the City of Los Angeles represent a minute fraction of the avalanche of emails, letters, phone calls and public statements pouring forth from an enraged electorate.

The corruption is obvious. You don’t spend over a half-million dollars per unit to provide “permanent supportive housing” to homeless people, taking years to build them, all the while leaving the vast majority of the homeless on the street. In Venice Beach these “progressive” public officials are considering a 140 unit apartment for the homeless that will cost an estimated $205 million – nearly $1.5 million per homeless person.

This is insanity. This is blatant corruption that deserves criminal prosecution. Yet thanks to laws and court rulings pushed by progressive ideology, it’s all perfectly legal.

And the “woke” progressives on the front lines of this war are indeed waking up. This comes from a Venice resident whose ideology has shifted in recent months:

“Two years ago, I would’ve voted for anyone but Trump. After watching Bonin and Garcetti attract drug addicts and criminals to LA and Venice, I’ll never vote for a Democrat again. Bonin and Garcetti lie about the drug and crime epidemic calling it a “housing crisis” so they can pay their donors with HHH money. Don’t believe me? Look at who is donating to their non-profits. Housing developers and service providers.

Women, elderly and even men are afraid to walk the streets at night. Two of my friends were attacked by homeless criminals in the last month alone. The new encampment on Hampton, (who say they are waiting for the MTA bridge home to open), are doing drugs and chopping up stolen bikes in broad daylight. A group of us are working with the White House. They are close to an intervention to protect us. Instead of asking the Fed for Federal land to build housing out there, Garcetti is asking for money to give to his donors. We are going to escalate this to the national level until the Federal government comes in to protect us.”

Venice Beach is Becoming Unlivable for Residents

And meanwhile, the war goes on. The residents are losing this war. They are losing their homes. They are losing their community.

Across the streets of Venice Beach, there is glass everywhere because of discarded and shattered liquor bottles. There is homeless on homeless violence, and to protect themselves and their property, many of the homeless have dogs.

One resident, who, like most, does not want to be identified, had this to say about the dogs:

“Last week, a woman was bit by a homeless person’s pit bull. About an hour later the police showed up at the van where the dog lives with his owner, but the owner fled. Nothing was done. If you walk by a tent or a van, the dogs will lunge at you, because they are protecting their property and their owner – never mind if the ‘property’ is a public sidewalk. ‘Off-leash’ pit bulls and other large dogs are everywhere. The animals are being used as weapons. Residents are intimidated and have to avoid the entire area. It isn’t worth the risk of getting bit. The dog could cause a serious injury, they could have rabies. If you have your own dog, there are very few safe places to take the dog for a walk because the dogs of the homeless will attack your dog and possibly kill it.”

The stories coming from the shell shocked residents of Venice Beach are endless. Back in July, a mentally ill man stole neighborhood trash bins to construct a personal fortress. The police removed the man but left the bins, which cannot be identified and reclaimed. Three months later, still there, the pile of bins have become a magnet for trash. A broken television, a couch, and the ubiquitous needles. Throughout Venice Beach, an entire new urban ecosystem has been created by the trash. Rats and mice and skunks eat the trash; they in turn become victims of hawks.

When it comes to open drug use in Venice, there is a perverse twist to the story. As told by a resident:

“There are more discarded needles up in San Francisco, because the drug of choice in Venice seems to be meth. On the other hand, this is worse, because meth users become violent and agitated. I would prefer to encounter a heroin user because you can run from them.”

Just the fact that residents have had to learn how to size the homeless up and figure out what they’re on is part of the tragedy that has befallen this city. Residents are constantly assessing their risk factor. As another resident explains:

“You constantly have to be aware of who you are around. Always stay visible to other people so you can call for help. Stay near places that are open or where people can hear you calling for help.”

And colorful characters become part of the landscape.

“Drug use is totally out in the open. We have a man living in the bushes on Main Street, he smokes crystal meth in the open, he shits in the same bushes, and he wears a loincloth. He walks around all day defecating in the bushes and smoking crystal meth from a pipe. He is almost always high, but he gets violent when he comes down. All the residents know him. You don’t want to be around these people when they’re coming down.”

Homeless Encampments Create No-Go Zones

Entire blocks of Venice Beach have become the site of permanent homeless encampments, where residents cannot park their cars, walk their dogs, or, in some cases, patronize local businesses which leads to those businesses closing their doors. As described by an eyewitness:

“It’s like a whack a mole. When they’re cleared out they just pop up in a new place. When they were temporarily cleared off the beach they moved to Rose and 3rd, the ‘no ticket zone’ because you can do anything there and not get written up. It’s considered a ‘contained encampment,’ a place that the LAPD have designated as a defacto homeless haven. They are like Favelas where the homeless know they can retreat to and there is no law.

These areas where they are concentrated is evidence of how much property they have. Tents, chairs, bicycles, umbrellas; they take up a lot of space and claim the sidewalks. There are frequent fights over the space, a lot of homeless on homeless stabbings, they are fighting over property. On what we call ‘RV Row,’ there are over 30 RVs on Main Street that they have to move every Monday for street cleaning. They move their cars exactly when the sweepers come.

Many of these RVs are not drivable so they literally push them to the other side of the street, then push them back again. There is a whole crew that controls RV Row, putting their RVs up on blocks to level them off. Residents can forget about ever parking their cars on the street. And then there are the vans filled with homeless, which are all over Venice, and they are even worse. The occupants will do drugs all night in their van; you can hear them partying in the vans. They park in front of homes constantly playing music and shouting etc. all night long.”

Nearly All Venice Homeless Are Drug Addicts

You don’t have to be a clinical psychiatrist to tell when someone is obviously insane, or under the influence of narcotics. You just have to live in Venice Beach for more than a few days.

According to residents, and contrary to the pandering progressive nonsense that comes from the Homeless Industrial Complex, nearly everyone who is homeless in Venice Beach is a heavy drug user. The population might be generally subdivided as follows:

About one-third are mentally ill and heavy drug users. Another one-third are heavy drug users who have become mentally ill because of the drugs. And the final one-third are just heavy drug users.

None of these people belong unsupervised on the streets, shitting and fighting and stealing, destroying a community, while the progressive politicians get rich pretending to fix the problem. Letting this happen is a despicable betrayal of the residents by these politicians. And it’s not doing these homeless people any favors, either. They are lost souls. They need help, and they’re not going to get it.

And so, day after day, the story goes on. As those of us in more peaceful neighborhoods listen to the weather reports, the besieged residents of Venice Beach listen to reports of fights, thefts, rapes, and murders. Here’s one of the latest dispatches from the Western Front of Progressive Insanity:

“I cycled down the boardwalk at 7 a.m. today. Cool looking guy with blue sunglasses openly selling drugs. Homeless all over the place and rubbish all over the side of the boardwalk. A huge shit on the bike path. Then fire trucks, cop cars and life guard cars at one of the life guard towers. Apparently they found a dead body and started a homicide investigation. Such an exciting place for tourists to take their kids for a walk in the morning and then write home to tell all their friends to come and visit. Where else can you be in a life crime scene on a daily basis?”

The Woke Plan to Bring the Western Front to EVERY Neighborhood in America

The consequences of progressive policies towards the homeless embrace a host of interlinking flawed beliefs. This is why it is not enough to stop the LA City Council from building a 156 bed “wet” homeless shelter on three acres of city owned property at 100 Sunset Avenue in the heart of Venice Beach, at a cost of well over $100 million (the property alone is worth over $90 million), or a 140 unit apartment to provide “permanent supportive housing” at a cost of well over $200 million, on another three acres of city owned property in the median between North and South Venice Boulevard, one block from the sand, also in the heart of Venice Beach.

These two projects are perfectly legal, but nonetheless are morally criminal examples of corruption. Because there isn’t enough money in the world to see all of them through, eventually projects like this will be stopped, even if those two abominations are pushed through to completion. But stopping these projects is not enough, because the fall back plan being pushed by progressives is just as bad, if not worse.

Progressive extremists believe that simply providing a safe, well appointed dwelling will cause the pathology afflicting homeless people to subside. They also believe that dispersing homeless people into subsidized dwellings in tranquil neighborhoods everywhere will be “inclusive” and further alleviate their pathology. And there are powerful financial incentives for them to pursue this policy.

By pretending the homeless crisis is inextricably linked to a shortage of housing, and because it is considered heresy to expand the urban footprint, draconian new state zoning guidelines are poised to become laws that will override local ordinances. It will become permissible to demolish single family homes in single family neighborhoods and replace them with multi-family dwellings. At the same time it will become mandatory for landlords to accept Section 8 and other subsidized renters.

California’s progressive lawmakers are planning to seed California’s suburbs with high density dwellings, randomly placed, and fill them with taxpayer subsidized renters. This is where they will relocate the homeless, including substance abusers and mentally ill. The cost of supervising these people when they are disbursed throughout the cities and suburbs will make it scarcely less wasteful than constructing gargantuan palaces at $500,000 (or more) per unit, but progressive ideology and corrupt financial opportunism make this an attractive Plan B for the woke.

Across the suburbs of California in the coming years, expect homes to become worth more to buyers to demolish and replace as a Section 8 fourplexes. And as these suburbs fall prey to increased crime, the state will move in, extending to residential courts and cul de sacs the same pervasive surveillance that already blankets our cities.

There are alternatives to destroying our cities and suburbs in order to feed profits to investors and power to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. But it will require more than a revolution that merely moves policy from the obviously unworkable Plan A (expensive palaces that “help” only a few) to the insidious yet feasible Plan B (rezone suburbs for subsidized multifamily units).

It will require a realignment that allows conservatives and liberals to join together to demand quick, decisive, cost-effective action. Call in the national guard who can work with law enforcement to round up the homeless, move them into quickly erected tent cities on state-owned land away from residential areas, and use the billions in savings to get them treatment. If the governor declared a state of emergency, it could be done in a matter of weeks.

From an ideological standpoint, that will require a common recognition that the rights of hard working and responsible people have to be given, at the very least, equal priority to the rights of drug addicts and psychotics.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Venice Beach “Monster on the Median” is Corruption Incarnate

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AUDIO:  To solve the homeless crisis we first have to recognize that laws and court rulings have been exploited to allow everyone involved – nonprofits, developers, consultants, and government agencies – to charge far, far too much. Homeless shelters should cost 1/10th what they cost. In some cases even 1/100th what they currently cost. Stop building them on the priciest real estate on earth. Stop building palaces when tents would get the job done. The planned homeless housing and homeless shelter in Venice Beach, California, provides a perfect example of this amazing waste of money – 12 minutes on KABC Los Angeles – Edward Ring on the Dr. Pinsky and Leeann Tweeden Show.