Homelessness Booms in Tinseltown

A week after the city glittered with Emmy Awards stardust, Los Angeles was shocked back to reality, declaring a state of emergency over a burgeoning homeless crisis roiling behind a backdrop of wealth.

While entertainment industry types lounged behind gated walls and the new fall television season was kicking off, Los Angeles officials last week announced a fix for their runaway homeless population — a serious problem for the region and one that has grown by 12 percent in the past two years.

Some describe fixing the problem as futile, a dance between the heartless and the practical.

While money targeted at a solution is a start, some describe fixing the problem as futile, a dance between the heartless and the practical. How do you keep people safe with basic qualities of life while ensuring city residents that their streets are not teeming with the sight of human suffering and neglect?

According to figures compiled by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, those homeless residents living in desperation out of cars, tents and ramshackle outdoor encampments, rose by 85 percent, the Los Angeles Times noted. Of those 44,000 homeless countywide, half were living inside the city limits, forcing lawmakers and leaders to announce a $100-million proposal a week ago Tuesday directed at solving a problem that all say is not going away.

Noted the New York Times of the city’s quandary: “The move stems partly from compassion, and in no small part from the rising tide of complaints about the homeless and the public nuisance they create.”

That is, requests from L.A.’s bleeding hearts to please remove the unsightliness from the street and put it somewhere else. One would think left-wing California would be a proletariat paradise by now. But the evidence of free-stuff failure is sitting right outside the limousine window

As city sanitation workers are dispatched to clear up a litter-strewn homeless area and to move those people out, they come back — in days if not weeks. This scene is repeated over and over again.

With high rents and cost of living, as well as limited public housing, making a dent in the problem will be tough.

Authorities acknowledged that arresting those displaced people for trespassing or other slight infractions like stealing shopping carts used to tote their meager belongings also doesn’t make the issue disappear. Many, officials added, refuse public services that would get them off the streets, clinging to living life on the fringes.

With high rents and cost of living, as well as limited public housing, making a dent in the problem will be tough.

But Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin told the Los Angeles Times a fix could wait no longer, calling it a “collective failure of every level of government to deal with what has been a homeless crisis for generations and is exploding and exacerbating now.”

Bonin, whose district includes many such encampments, added, “It’s time to get real, because this is literally a matter of life and death.”

“The problem is not a shortage of affordable housing,” writes conservative activist Nikitas3 on his grassroots blog site, nikitas3.com, with the headline:

“Suddenly Liberals Discover Homeless in Los Angeles.”

“The problem is the fundamental and ongoing decline in the California economy brought on by total hard-left Democrat control of the state,” he said. “California is ultra-liberal, and like all ultra-liberal states it is in an economic tailspin. Every statewide office in California is Democrat. The radical public-employee unions have had an iron grip on the policies of the state for the last few decades.”

Los Angeles Mayor Gil Garcetti described the work ahead as a battle plan and a “war on homelessness.” He planned to discuss specifics of his new fight, which will materialize in a month or so.

“Every single day we come to work, we see folks lying on this grass, a symbol of our city’s intense crisis,” Garcetti told reporters and others Tuesday during a City Hall news conference.

“You see people lingering in emergency services or going to the streets.” The same streets plied by the Democrats’ biggest, richest donors.

Homeless advocates decried the lack of housing for the poor.

“This is the fallout of not having anywhere near the affordable housing that’s needed,” Megan Hustings, interim director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C., told the New York Times.

“It is repeated all over the country: We work to get them emergency food and shelter, but housing continues to be unaffordable, so you see people lingering in emergency services or going to the streets.”

The same streets plied by the Democrats’ biggest, richest donors. In a city run by Democrats for 46 of the last 54 years. Not that Hollywood would recognize the disconnect.