Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse

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Forbes

Michael Shellenberger

Sept. 12 2019

On Tuesday, fifteen officials from the White House toured Skid Row in Los Angeles with the head of a local homeless shelter. “Four or five of them were from the Environmental Protection Agency,” Rev. Andy Bales of Union Mission church told me. “That’s because human waste flows into storm sewers.” 

California is home to some of the world’s toughest environmental and public health laws, but skyrocketing homelessness has created an environmental and public health disaster. The 44,000 people living, eating, and defecating on the streets of L.A. have brought rats and medieval diseases including typhus. Garbage is everywhere. Experts fear the return of cholera and leprosy.

And homelessness is making people violent. “We are seeing behaviors from our guests that I’ve never seen in 33 years,” said Bales. “They are so bizarre and different that I don’t even feel right describing the behaviors. It’s extreme violence of an extreme sexual nature. I have been doing this for 33 years and never seen anything like it.”

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What happened in California isn’t the first time that we progressives let our idealism get the better of us. To understand how the current disaster unfolded, we have to go back in time, back to the post-World War II era when progressive reformers convinced themselves and others that they could destroy the country’s system for dealing with the mentally ill and replace it with a radically different and wholly unproven alternative.

A Mania for Reform

 

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I left the reporting for this column surprised by how stuck California’s leaders remain in 1960s ideology and how slow they’ve been to react to the crisis. “It’s better late than never, but still we are not treating it in the urgent manner we should,” said Bales. “We’re not there yet where people are really taking it seriously as an emergency.” For Torrey, it all comes down to leadership. “It is not clear where the leadership for change will come from,” he wrote seven years ago, “but until it emerges, change is unlikely.” 

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Trump Orders Sweeping Crackdown on Homeless Camps in California

Citizen activist Scott Presler: Los Angeles is worse than Baltimore.

Leslie Eastman   

Thursday, September 12, 2019

President Donald Trump is sending a team of White House officials to California so they can conduct a sweeping crackdown on homelessness in California.

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Los Angeles officials are currently planning to establish more aggressive limitations as to where people can “camp.” Unfortunately for them, the proposed program is likely to be torched by a progressive court.

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The visit by White House officials comes as lawmakers in Los Angeles debate a plan barring people from sleeping and camping on streets and sidewalks in more than a quarter of the city. The plan, which could be taken up by the City Council as early as Wednesday, would add to existing rules that put about 15 percent of Los Angeles – mainly its city parks – off-limits at night.

If approved, the plan will almost certainly face numerous legal challenges after a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling from last year found that prosecuting homeless people for sleeping on public property when they have no access to a shelter represented constitutionally prohibited cruel and unusual punishment. But local politicians argue that something needs to be done as they search for a way to build permanent housing for the thousands of homeless people living on the city’s streets.

Citizen activist Scott Presler, who recently led a 12-ton garbage removal drive in Baltimore, is planning a clean-up of Los Angeles on September 21. Presler has just visited the city and was shocked to discover how genuinely awful conditions are.

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