Everyone knows that California broadly, and cities like Los Angeles more specifically, have a gigantic homeless problem. But unless you live here, it’s hard to understand what that means for people day-to-day. The Tent cities are ugly and they stink, sure, but they aren’t the problem… the rampant crime and dangerous degeneracy that flows out of them is the real problem, and those things aren’t discussed by anyone running these cities except in the case where they affect the overall crime rate, which is going up like one of Elon Musk’s rockets and has been for years.
Because while the tent cities are where the Homeless (or “those experienceing homlessness” in the parlance of our times) “live”, they don’t stay there all day. Most are high on drugs or alcohol, or are suffering from extreme mental illness (sometimes all three) and it’s out in the streets, in our neighborhoods, where they indulge their various pathologies.
On my street we have a small group, call it 5, regulars. We all know them by sight and it’s clear they have been deteriorating since they first appeared a couple years ago. When we first saw them, it wasn’t immediately clear that they were homeless, but as the months have gone by it’s become more and more obvious. Clothes dirty, ratty, and torn. Hair a dense immovable Sideshow Bob mop sticking out this way and that. Wild eyes and relentless mumbling that sometimes erupts into shouting and cursing and threats.
I can’t speak for every neighborhood, but in ours, they are drawn to one house in the middle of the block where they buy drugs. The police are aware, but in their radically defunded state, there is very little they can do, and they have told me so in person. As these homeless folks (mostly men, but there is one woman… I can only imagine what she does to “pay” for her drugs) spiral down into drug abuse and insanity, they are beginning to lose their grip on the world.
Last week, one of them killed a woman wth a metal baseball bat. Who knows why, but one morning he just decided to cave in the skull of another homeless woman who lived in her own tent about four blocks from my house.
And no one cares. Certainly not the mayor of Los Angeles, and definitely not our Governor. Gavin Newsom believes the only option for addressing homelessness is to build more housing… he will consider no other plan. But at the same time he’s helped create a system so byzantine and top-heavy with bureacracy that when the system does manage to actually produce a “home” it does so at a cost of $600K per house. You don’t have to be Art Laffer to know that is simply unsustainable.
But even if he was building cheap houses left and right, he refuses to hold these people responsible for their anti-social and criminal behavior in any way. He won’t, or can’t, address the real issue at the heart of California homelessness, drugs, alcohol and mental illness, and so even a well run affordable housing program would be doomed to failure.
And now a woman is dead. Yes her killer is in jail, but there are still 4 other guys wandering mindlessly through our neighborhood, human time bombs ready to go off at any moment. My wife won’t even walk our dog alone in broad daylight. And when my kids play outside in the front yard I have to keep a wary eye should one of these human IEDs suddenly appear, staggering down the block like a zombie.
On top of that, we have the indignity of dropping our two kids off at a school every day that is nearly paralyzed by state-mandated COVID rules, despite our kids being in no, that is zero (0), danger of dying from COVID. They sit all day in classrooms with every door and window open, with a HEPA-armed air filter in every room… they are, for all intents and purposes, outside… and yet they are still forced to wear masks all day despite there being no, that is zero (0), evidence that masks do anything to prevent infection. Additionally, they must test for COVID every week. If three kids test positive, sick or not, the entire class must go home to quarantine for 2 weeks.
It’s insane, it’s unecessary for a disease with a 99.9997% survival rate among kids, and it’s a crushing burden for parents who never know when they may have to make arrangements to take two weeks off work to deal with a kid suddenly sent home to quarantine with zero warning, for a disease that poses them no, that is zero (0), danger.
To make matters worse, everyone in California knows that if Gavin Newsom survives the recall effort, vaccine passports will soon become the norm across the State. It’s clear that Newsom wants them right now, but Governor Hairstyle is, apparently, just smart enough to know that if he imposes them now, then his recall is virtually assured. He’ll just wait until 9/15 and enjoy the added benefit of punishing the citizenry for daring to talk back to him.
This is no way for a civilized people in the country’s wealthiest state to live. It’s untenable, and in fact businesses and residents are fleeing the state in droves. Someone needs to face the consequences for all this failure.
On September 14th, I hope you’ll join me in making sure that the first person to pay the career price for all this losing, will be Governor Gavin Newsom.