The Trump administration officials who came to town to study homelessness spent Monday and Tuesday meeting with officials from Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office, checking out the Jordan Downs public housing in Watts and touring the long-entrenched epicenter of the crisis, skid row. There was even a trek to Pomona.
An administration official said the purpose was to gather information so that President Trump could begin to develop a plan to address the “tragedy.”
— The Los Angeles Times
The tour comes as the Trump Administration's controversial Opportunity Zones program designed to funnel investment to underserved areas gains steam and as the administration potentially looks to rewrite "regulatory barriers" for affordable housing projects nationwide.
According to The Los Angeles Times, President Trump told Fox News in July, “You take a look at what’s going on with San Francisco, it’s terrible. So we’re looking at it very seriously. We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up. It’s inappropriate."
13 Comments
The federal solution: FEMA camp with big walls.
There is enough boarded up housing on closed military bases near Los Angeles and San Francisco, like the closed Alemeda Naval Air Station, across the bay from San Francisco, to house most, if not all of the homeless.
I trust President Trump and his excellent team implicitly.
Trump could not possibly do worse than what Gavin Newsome has done in the face of a humanitarian disaster - which is essentially nothing.
Trump can always do worse. He proves that weekly.
Why is this a federal issue? Why do some of the wealthiest cities, in a state that alone is a major global economy, filled with high income earners who say they want to pay more in taxes to address exactly this sort of issue need serious funding from others at the sole discretion of one nut job?
The high income people who “want to pay more taxes” are bullshitting you. The fact is the high-income people (developers, corporate execs, banksters, financiers, lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, etc.) creat these problems by sucking all the real wealth out of society.
Beyond being a federal issue it is a human issue. More than 46m US citizens live in poverty (absurdly defined as $12,490 for one person, $16,910 for two, $21,330 for three). What kind of life can anyone have on $240 a week?
States are revenue constrained, the Fed is not, so it is an easier source of funding (politics aside). But any Fed “solution” that does not address critical economic inequality is just another bandaid that ignores the underlying causes of the problem.
Inequality is not bad. Poverty is bad. The living standards of those in poverty is the metric we ought to use, not the difference between them and some plastic surgeon. Obviously, people with more skill, talent, education, and ambition should not be economically equal. That would be a completely idiotic way to organize a society.
Sports would be really really be boring to watch if equality was valued over competition.
I was told the problem was exasperated by the great weather. Don’t know for sure but it’s rampant there vs out east. Biggest problem i think is the disparity in income between rich and poor. Tax the rich like the 1950’s and make schools better and cheaper.
Most aren’t homeless because they did bad in school
What's the cause of 'most' homeless then? My guess is some kind of personal trauma or mental illness. We need to pay for the care of our mentally ill and better schools could provide support for those in tough situations when it counts most, that is when growing up. Thus taxes and better schools.
Recently read an article about many people in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles in support roles (writers, music composers, actors in commercials) who are living out of their cars and vans in LA. These people are not mentally ill or drug users or unemployed. They are another layer in the homeless crisis even though they are largely unseen.
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