Great! About time!
Clear them straight into the countless vacancies that keep rents high.
Oh? You just mean spend resources pushing the unfortunate around until they are unseen? Nevermind.
https://calmatters.org/justice/2024/01/california-prison-cost-per-inmate/
Somehow, spending $11,000 per month to trap vulnerable people into the prison system is better than providing rent for a $2,000/month place, with enough left over for food, clothing, basic medical and mental healthcare and providing college or vocational training for free.
An UBI of just $500/month? Nope, those are handouts for the undeserving. The people that deserve money hand over fist are police unions, prison guard unions, prison goods and services contractors of course.
All you need to do is look where (to whom) that $11k is going to answer the question.
For-profit businesses are expected to do what they can to turn a profit. A business whose profits are often dictated by public policy are expected to bend that policy toward their profits. Elected officials who are dependent on fundraising to be re-elected have an incentive to listen to the will of those businesses in their constituency.
Which is exactly why for-profit prisons should be absolutely, without exception, banned from any free country. It’s not a conspiracy to say for-profit prisons create more prisoners, it’s an obvious and inevitable consequence.
Edit: before anyone mentions California banning for-profit prisons, the industry still makes plenty of money from the system.
Just because the prison is not “for profit” does not mean the prisoners are free from the prison industry. They can still be loaned out to private companies to make things.
Yup! Which, again, incentivizes those companies to push politicians to make more prisoners.
Oh yeah, just putting the clarification plainly. So many people do not understand that.
“…there is one thing I don’t understand: how could they have let things get so bad?” "That’s a good question. I wish I had an answer.
39more days!los angeles had the closest thing to the sanctuary districts shown in ds9 thanks to their previous mayor’s recommendation. if the bell riots happen, it’ll be there.
And this is the fucker people kept bringing up as a potential alternate to Kamala.
Thanks for making me ashamed of my state, asshole. Then again, my love is actually for the Bay Area and specifically Oakland, so little change there. Fuck off, Gavinator.
he used to be the mayor of san francisco.
You blame the govenor for the Supreme Court ruling?
Nobody’s forcing Newsom to embrace the ruling.
The growing homeless problem is forcing him to embrace the ruling. Why would he ignore the problem?
“prioritizes removal of encampments that pose threats to life, health, and safety, while partnering with local governments and nonprofit providers to facilitate offers of shelter and supportive services in advance of removal.””
Before the 9th circuit stopped it, homeless sweeps were wholeheartedly embraced as the de facto solution. Somehow, over forty years of homeless sweeps, it doesn’t seem to have solved the problem.
It’s because encampment sweeps aren’t a fix, it’s just blasting money out of the government’s ass to temporarily wallpaper over the problem and make life harder on the people who’ve been brought lowest in our society. He would be wise to remain on the path of housing reform and other reforms that California was starting to embrace when it didn’t have any other choice, that is, if he actually intends to fix the problem.
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I have worked with unhoused populations in L.A. for the past 7 years and have past experience managing a housing provider agency. I currently work at a housing services agency.
The idea that the communities have “substantial resources” is laughable. It seems like there’s a lot of money, but there really isn’t. My agency is one of the larger agencies in L.A. and we struggle. It’s not even “the heads take all the money in pay”. Nah, there’s just not enough money.
It’s definitely not as easy as “just build more housing”, though I wish it were. Even “housing first” doesnt work well enough and it even backfires quite often.
Newsom’s idea of moving people along doesn’t work either. That’s what was happening before housing first came along and it didn’t help shit.
I will say that substance use issues, physical and mental health need a lot more attention and treatment options that are available to all.
If anyone wants to discuss the issues, feel free to AMA. I’m open to suggestions that’ll make my job easier.
If anyone in the L.A. area wants to help, the following link has connections to jobs at a lot of services providers in L.A. county.:
Edit: left out some words
Also, when it comes to money for our agency, most of our money comes from private/corporate donors, local taxes, and the Feds. The state doesn’t provide as much financial assistance to our agency.
That money also has to cover transportation (ubers/whatever) to places to obtain documentation, paying for client necessities, moving vans if needed plus the moving crew, security deposits and other move-in costs, utility setups and past due bills, damage mitigation to keep clients from being evicted…I can go on and on. There’s not enough money.
no longer any barrier to local governments utilizing the substantial resources provided by the State, in tandem with federal and local resources, to address encampments with both urgency and humanity
With those “substantial resources” and a sense of “humanity”, you’d think they’d build housing for those in need.
Nope! It just means shuffling people experiencing homelessness to another place. What an absolute asshole!
Shuffling them to other places is how many arrived in California to begin with. But an eye for an eye is bullshit. The la times has no love for newsome
San Diego did a study and found that most homeless people there were natives who had been fully employed and watched over years as rent got worse and worse until they were evicted.
The idea that all the homeless are from red states who gave them a bus ticket is a myth meant to relieve us of any feeling of responsibility or empathy for them.
rent got worse and worse until they were evicted
Renting in California is like being expected to run forever on a treadmill with an ever increasing rate of speed.
It wouldn’t surprise me if most of the people in new California rentals were new arrivals, as other areas continue to get worse every year making the idea of escaping to California increasingly attractive. I wonder how often people from other markets move in with savings from other areas, pay the overpriced rents for a couple of years and do their part to help justify the rising rents, and then go back to where they were from after their savings are exhausted. Anecdotally, I know quite a few people who did something not very dissimilar to the above.
Really disappointed in Newsom here. He’s done a lot to try and improve the housing situation here (though not nearly enough, it’s a lot more movement than this issue has seen in years), so I really expected better than this of him. The camp sweeps are just the biggest fucking waste of money. The state spends millions of dollars playing whack-a-mole, tormenting the people in our society who need the most help and just wallpapering over the problem, and it does absolutely nothing to help. Arguably, it makes things worse. That money could be better spent on direct action, building affordable housing, funding rehabilitation, etc. But we gotta blow it out our ass just tormenting people because whiny wealthier people want them moved now.
And we have the audacity to mock communist regimes for fake grocery stores, as if this is any better. You can’t fix homelessness by making these people miserable. The extra frustrating part is that the real fixes are far, far cheaper than this stupid fucking band-aid system we’ve developed.
Really disappointed in Newsom here.
same here.
i liked him before because he was the only democrat to force the issue of gay marriage by providing marriage certificates to same sex couples while he was mayor of san francisco.
cynically: it’s san francisco so he knew he wouldn’t receive any political blow back for the stunt; but it came at a time where even obama publicly espoused anti-gay marriage views; so it felt like there was hope that my life partner wouldn’t be deported because i couldn’t sponsor him for citizenship due to doma.
Gavin you still have not provided the housing people need you are a failure. Now you wish to tear down the little they have. Disgusting.
People seem to confuse his politics. He’s seems to be pro equal rights, but otherwise centrist(-ish?).
Whether those are his genuinely felt thoughts or a cynical play for a national run, I have no idea.
But he’s been trying to get them off the streets since he was a mayor. This isn’t new.
He’s been trying to erase them. He doesn’t care where they go, a grave or a cell.
I agree this is likely to cause suffering cause relocating sucks, and there probably isn’t shelter space for these people.
He has a valid point that the camps have a lot of negative impacts. I’ve seen fires started,l in my city, heard horror stories about the conditions that develop.
That said, I don’t know how much better the alternative is.
About housing, I mean, it takes more than a few years to build the tens of thousands of houses needed, and every year the state assembly is doing more to help with building more dwellings and preventing local govt and orgs from blocking construction. I’m not thrilled about response but it seems like they’re doing a lot to help with infill development. I’m not an expert, so feel free to correct me.
And 10% of those homeless will literally shit in the houses and destroy them. But many more of them could thrive given sufficient help.
You have to be prepared for the first while doing what can be done for the second. It’s a difficult problem, but it gets a lot easier if your goal is to cut it down by half or more instead of eliminating it completely.
Most of the homeless will cooperate with you. They want out too. It’s good for everyone to get those people out. It’s going to take time, and money, and effort.
So trying for another hobo riot huh? History is like in books and stuff all they gotta do is read one on occasion.
The Panic of 1893;: A time of strikes, riots, hobo camps, Coxey’s “army”, starvation, withering droughts, and fears of “revolution”, (A Focus book) https://a.co/d/dmEcsJH
What the fuck are a population of weakened and hungry, some suffering drug addictions, and also many mentally ill people, going to do protesting against well funded well organized and militarized police armed to the teeth with lethal firearms, and willing to use them?
How hard do you think it is to riot? It ain’t but like $5 and an underhand throw or two to burn down several buildings. You don’t need organization to do damage, you need numbers and anger.
How hard do you think it is to riot?
That’s a great question actually. But you don’t really have an answer, nor do i. Because neither of us have the balls to do it and prefer an obese soft peaceful life behind our computers.
I’m not homeless so being involved an homeless riot is a bit far fetched for me at the moment, it isn’t that far fetched for people with literally nothing left to lose as the state pushes them from their spot and burns their shit as they watch (if you didn’t know how cleanouts work).
Deep Space Nine had an episode predicting this.
“We must act with urgency to address dangerous encampments, which subject unsheltered individuals living in them to extreme weather, fires, predatory and criminal activity, and widespread substance use, harming their health, safety, and well-being, and which also threaten the safety and viability of nearby businesses and neighborhoods, and undermine the cleanliness and usability of parks, water supplies, and other public resources.”
I don’t even know where to begin.
“The order requires state agencies to adopt policies modeled after a California Department of Transportation policy directive that “prioritizes removal of encampments that pose threats to life, health, and safety, while partnering with local governments and nonprofit providers to facilitate offers of shelter and supportive services in advance of removal.””
Unless they’re setting people up with homes, this sounds like an excuse.
If the shelters were safer and had space, the people in encampments would be using them already.
Newsoms been moving rightward since he got more national airtime and I fucking hate it. No good person survives politics, if they were ever even good they either leave, die, or turn into an asshole.
He was preparing for the 2028 presidential election. If Harris wins though…
Right on schedule https://youtu.be/XqF7XojXzd0
Going off on a tangent, but are vacancies keeping rent high or are they a result of overpriced rent not responding to market pressure? It seems like vacancies should mean low demand at the current price, which, in my little econ 101 view of the world, should push the price down.
Vacancies happen when landlords refuse to lower the rent that they’re seeking to meet falling market value. Don’t believe landlords.
Econ 101 falls apart when landlords are allowed to participate in a pricing cartel. They can also make more money off the asset in their book worth X amount than they can filling the unit with a tenant at a lower price. This is possible because they have a minimum percentage filled at a price that covers their costs for the unfilled units.
So there is no incentive for them to lower prices unless they need to raise revenue for some reason.
