BY RICK MORAN
There is something wonderfully childlike in the inability of California liberals to figure out what to do about the frightening rise in homelessness. If the circumstances were different, you might refer to their naivete, ignorance, and stupidity as endearing, adorable, even cute.
But their utter disconnect from reality has real-world consequences for tens of thousands of people who are victims of their idiotic policies.
National correspondent for the Los Angeles Times Matt Pearce tweeted out the grim statistics:
Spikes in this year’s homeless counts across California:-Los Angeles 🆙 16%-San Francisco 🆙 17%-Orange County (since 2017) 🆙 43%-Ventura, San Bernardino and Kern Counties 🆙 20% or more https://t.co/SFAF8k6slW— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) June 4, 2019
Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas appears to be perplexed about why there has been a spike in homelessness:
“At this point of unprecedented wealth in the county of Los Angeles, we are equally confronted with unprecedented poverty manifesting itself in the form of homelessness,” Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas told The Times.
Maybe it's because only the wealthy can afford to live there?
In a statement, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called the increase in homelessness “heartbreaking,” but said he was he hopeful about the city’s recent work to alleviate the crisis, including an investment of $42 million to respond to public health concerns and intensify street-based services.
“This work has never been for the faint of heart, and we cannot let a set of difficult numbers discourage us, or weaken our resolve,” Garcetti said in a statement to The Times.
The city has spent billions to try and address the homeless problem proving once again (if proof were needed for anyone but a liberal) that throwing taxpayer money at a problem doesn't solve anything. Also note Garcetti's response to the crisis is to shovel more money into services that benefit residents, but only after they become homeless.
Is that an exaggeration? Surely, you jest:
But among others in L.A. County, the point-in-time count crushed the optimism from last year’s tally, when a modest decrease in homelessness was recorded. The uptick left officials struggling to understand how the tide could have turned so badly in a year when millions of dollars had been spent rolling out new initiatives to move people into shelters and permanent housing.
Incredibly, there are thousands of Californians who are homeless despite being gainfully employed.
A 2017 survey of the homeless population in San Francisco found 13 percent of respondents reporting part or full-time employment. That’s in a city with an estimated 7,499 people experiencing homelessness.
This year, an estimated 10 percent of the 4,990 people living unsheltered in San Diego said they were currently working.
Los Angeles County has more than 50,000 residents who are homeless. Eight percent of adults surveyed in 2017 said they were working to some degree, mostly in part-time, seasonal or temporary work. Among homeless adults with children, 27 percent said they were working either part or full time.
If the radical lefties attended a community college course in Capitalism 101, they would be shocked to learn that the reason there are so many homeless people is because of government policies that stifle economic growth and prevent developers from building enough housing units at a reasonable cost.
The burgeoning population of homeless in California, now estimated at some 150,000 people, is a problem that could be solved in months if the appropriate political and judicial decisions were swiftly enacted and decisively applied. Instead, there is no indication it will ever be solved. The state has become a magnet for the welfare cases of America as well as the expatriates of the world, at the same time as the state has imposed crippling restrictions on the ability of the private sector to build new housing.
California is unaffordable because extreme environmentalists have imposed an agenda of engineered scarcity onto state policymakers that, unfortunately, dovetails perfectly with the agenda of special interests—in particular, public sector unions and bureaucrats, and large corporate land developers and construction contractors.
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