Tag Archive for: Venice Beach

The Progressive Destruction of Venice Beach

Make no mistake about it, behind the lawless mentality that has informed rampages across this nation over the past week, there are progressive roots. Because these riots aren’t about what remains of racism in America, or nurtured by pugnacious tweets from President Trump. Instead the root cause of the anarchy we are seeing are decades of progressive indoctrination which has corrupted a generation.

The destruction of the Venice Beach community in Los Angeles typifies how the progressive agenda has evolved from trying to save the disadvantaged to trying to destroy those who are not disadvantaged. In the process, the progressive movement has been taken over by plutocrats and tyrants, finding personal advantage in the corrupt parody of what was once an ennobling ideology.

In just a few years, progressive power, abetted by big money and co-opted bureaucrats, has turned Venice Beach from a bohemian gem into a lawless hellhole. The streets are overran with drug addicts, drunks, sexual predators, petty (and not so petty) criminals, and psychotics.

Worst of all, Venice Beach is also overran with otherwise normal youth who have made a rational choice to go on a perpetual rampage because there is no accountability, no expectations, no law and order, and, wherever possible, the government provides them free food and shelter. While the citizens endure a COVID lockdown, the “unhoused” of Venice Beach continue to go anywhere they like, anytime they want. It’s gotten so bad that even when the lockdown eventually ends, these residents will remain besieged in their own homes.

The scam that alleged “progressive” governance has perpetrated on Venice Beach, echoed in Blue states and municipal enclaves across the nation, centers on doing the bidding of what might accurately be termed the Homeless Industrial Complex. This alliance is controlled by powerful nonprofit corporations and their for-profit affiliates, who use paid for activists and paid for politicians to agitate for and approve “supportive housing” for the homeless.

These boondoggles are built by the Homeless Industrial Complex against the wishes of residents and at staggering cost. Acting as a magnet for more homeless, yet accommodating a mere fraction of them, they waste money, solve nothing, and sow chaos wherever they’re built.

The City of Los Angeles has already imposed several of these housing projects and shelters in Venice Beach. The most recent is a “Bridge Housing” complex, a shelter two blocks from the famed Venice Beach Boardwalk that opened in February 2020. This “temporary structure,” nonetheless cost an estimated $8.0 million. And at operating costs estimated to consume an additional $8.0 million per year, it offers the “unhoused” 154 beds, along with free meals.

You’d think that at least the so-called progressives who built and operate this shelter would have the slightest respect for the residents of Venice Beach, who must daily contend with well over 1,000 permanently encamped homeless on their streets. At the least you would think some sort of behavioral conditions would be placed on those who enter the shelter – sobriety, job training, counseling, a criminal background check, and a curfew. You’d be wrong.

As reported a shortly after this shelter opened: “In the week since officials celebrated the opening of a new Bridge facility at the old Metro bus maintenance facility on Main Street in the heart of a residential neighborhood three blocks from the Venice boardwalk, people have reported and documented dozens of crimes and public disturbances. The incidents occur at all hours of the day and night and include assault, sexual assault, fights, vandalism, graffiti, illegal camping, public defecation, drug use, and disturbances of the peace.”

And since around that time, Venice Beach residents have been on “lockdown.” But the activities surrounding this shelter continue unchecked.

To understand just how powerless ordinary workers are when up against the Homeless Industrial Complex, consider how they were treated at a recent virtual “Town Hall” where local residents spoke up in opposition to a 40 unit “Safe Place” planned on a block with three elementary schools in close proximity, and sited adjacent to one of them, St. Mark School. Already this school has endured a lockdown and placed dozens of calls to law enforcement because of disturbances caused by the homeless who are using the nearby Bridge Housing complex as their base.

As one resident put it, regarding this new proposal (1:16:00), “250 parents of St. Marks students wrote personal eloquent letters to you expressing their genuine, experience based safety and security concerns for their young children, with the developer’s proposal. They recounted many disturbing incidents of harassment and intimidation against our children by clients of the developers that are being ignored or dismissed by their supporters. Many of our children continue to struggle with actual trauma from those incidents and we have every reason to believe they will increase with this proposal.”

One after another, residents explained how a project like this cannot coexist with an elementary school, but to no avail. The project remains on track, with no planned security, no announced criteria for admittance – except to include mentally ill but able bodied young men in order to secure one of the sources of funds – and at an estimated cost of $500,000 per unit. And this four story structure will be erected in complete defiance of local zoning laws, for which it received automatic waivers.

There is big money in being compassionate in progressive California, especially if you don’t solve anything. How much of the homeless crisis will be solved, for example, if another of the proposed supportive housing projects is approved, the 140 unit so-called “Monster on the Median“? This proposed concrete abomination, reaching over 60 feet in height at a construction cost of well over $100 million, is planned to occupy, and wipe out, the last place in Venice Beach where ordinary workers living in Los Angeles can drive to the beach with their families and park their cars for the day. If the land were to be purchased by a commercial developer, it would be worth another $100 million, making the total project cost for this ridiculous scam over $1.4 million per unit.

None of these figures are outliers. The average cost in California’s coastal counties for affordable housing, i.e., studio and one-bedroom apartments, currently runs around $600,000 per unit.

Progressive Ideology Has Been Corrupted

What’s happening with the “unhoused” in Venice Beach, and across California, epitomizes progressive dysfunction. In the name of compassion, no conditions are placed on receiving assistance. Intravenous drug use is a lifestyle to be respected. Theft and vandalism are pathologies that will subside when the perpetrators are made free of material want. Hard work to get ahead is futile unless you are privileged, and the affluent are obligated to provide for the indigent as an act of atonement.

If this preposterous approach to managing a society weren’t bad enough, modern progressive dogma adds what’s termed “inclusive zoning,” the theory that if low income people are given subsidized or free housing in the middle of high income neighborhoods, through a process of social osmosis, they will become industrious, sober and law abiding. But in reality, when you teach people they are victims and should not aspire to anything apart from entitlements, you destroy their character, and it doesn’t matter where they live.

None of this common sense matters to the developers, however, who make billions building housing to serve a minute fraction of the “unhoused” on some of the most expensive real estate on earth. And against whoever may object to the entire charade, howling mobs of progressive activists are unleashed, bellowing accusations of racism and classism.

Operators of private shelters don’t get a dime from any level of government because they demand sobriety and job training as a condition of admittance. When asked what policy would best apply to manage and treat those unhoused who will not submit to sobriety and job training, every one of them, every one of them, said we need new forms of incarceration. Indeed we do.

What if the unhoused were given a choice: They might either accept free or subsidized housing – not on the beach, but in, for example, a less cost-prohibitive inland industrial park – in exchange for sobriety and job training, or they can go to a minimum security prison, perhaps on a ranch in the central valley, where they will dry out, do wholesome work, and submit to counseling and job training. In both cases, they would recover their dignity, if not their freedom. And just imagine how many of the unhoused would suddenly find friends of family if presented with this option.

Progressive ideology in America today is bankrupt. People do not respond well to being told they are victims. In the aggregate it is a lie, because the primary reason groups of Americans log differing levels of academic and economic achievement has more to do with the failures within their own culture than with external prejudice. There are far too many examples of successful “communities of color” to believe otherwise, and even if there is a shred of truth to the victim narrative, it is an unhealthy attitude for any individual to embrace, and an utterly futile, destructive principle on which to organize a society.

No wonder America is in flames. The members of these mobs, millions of people, have been told for their entire lives that they live in a hostile nation. They don’t want to work, they don’t want to study and earn marketable degrees or learn a lucrative trade, and they’ve been taught to dislike people based on their age, income, and skin color. They’re taught to not recognize the right to private property. They’re even taught that verbal offenses are indistinguishable from physical violence. This is socially conditioned insanity.

Progressive ideology today is a perverted inversion of everything it once stood for. In a joint venture with corporate behemoths and implacable bureaucrats, progressive ideology has become a nihilistic disease. The infection now reaches into every burning city; the road to a cure will be long and difficult.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

The Hidden Agenda Driving the Destruction of Venice Beach

AUDIO – How nonprofit developers and their corporate partners are wasting billions of taxpayer money by building affordable housing and homeless housing on some of the most expensive real estate on earth, and destroying established communities in the process – 18 minutes on KABC Los Angeles – Edward Ring on the Larry O’Connor Show

How the Homeless Industrial Complex Plans to Destroy Venice Beach

“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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Venice Beach Locked Down Except for Homeless Encampments

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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Gathered for the Feast at the Hotel California

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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Crazy and Woke Progressive Insanity Will NEVER Help the Homeless

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.

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

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.

Venice Beach’s Monster on the Median

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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