Links - 4th July 2019 (2) (Homelessness and other Californian Problems)

Ten Plagues of California Are Turning The Golden State into a Third-World Hell Hole - "In your typical Third-World megalopolis, basic city functions fall into disrepair, while once-eradicated diseases run rampant -- and the local bigwig boasts about saving the world.Los Angeles is quickly becoming a typical Third-World megalopolis, and the rest of the state isn't far behind... the problem goes back at least to last October, when the city noticed nine cases of typhus... "out-of-control rat population can even lead to the spread of dangerous strains of salmonella and bubonic plague."

Rats at the police station, filth on L.A. streets — scenes from the collapse of a city that’s lost control - Los Angeles Times - "We’ve got thousands of people huddled on the streets, many of them withering away with physical and mental disease. Sidewalks have disappeared, hidden by tents and the kinds of makeshift shanties you see in Third World places. Typhoid and typhus are in the news, and an army of rodents is on the move."

California to pay full health benefits for illegal immigrants - "California will become the first state in the country to pay for some adults living in the country illegally to have full health benefits as the solidly liberal state continues to distance itself from President Trump’s administration... to pay for part of it, the state will begin taxing people who don’t have health insurance"
Priorities!

Opinion | America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals. - The New York Times - "The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged.The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality. Just look at San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s city. One of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire, and the annual household income necessary to buy a median-priced home now tops $320,000. Yet the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are crowdfunding a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard. A public-school teacher suffering from cancer is forced to pay for her own substitute. And there is no end in sight to such crushing success. At every level of government, our representatives, nearly all of them Democrats, prove inadequate and unresponsive to the challenges at hand. Witness last week’s embarrassment, when California lawmakers used a sketchy parliamentary maneuver to knife Senate Bill 50, an ambitious effort to undo restrictive local zoning rules and increase the supply of housing.It was another chapter in a dismal saga of Nimbyist urban mismanagement that is crushing American cities... there is the refusal on the part of wealthy progressives to live by the values they profess to support at the national level... What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out."

The Bipartisan Cry of ‘Not in My Backyard’ - The New York Times - "people who live in whiter neighborhoods today are more supportive of restrictive development, and that cities that were whiter on average than their respective metropolitan areas in 1970 have more restrictive land use in the 21st century, a pattern that helps explain why segregation persists.. Beyond race, the crucial divide in the politics of housing development isn’t between left and right, but between people who own homes and those who don’t. William Fischel, an economist at Dartmouth, has long argued that homeowners who fear threats to their property values are motivated as voters to protect them.More recently, Andrew Hall and Jesse Yoder at Stanford compared voter file data with housing deeds for 18 million voters in Ohio and North Carolina. They found that buying a home prompts people to participate much more in local elections, particularly when zoning questions are on the ballot. And the effect of homeownership is far larger — boosting turnout by about four percentage points — than most strategies political campaigns use to drive voters to the polls, like personalized phone calls.The more expensive the home people buy, Mr. Hall and Mr. Yoder find, the larger the increase in their likelihood of voting. That suggests that homeowners aren’t more likely to vote merely because they become invested in their communities. Their motivation also appears to grow as the value of their asset does.One possible interpretation: “It’s not that you become more selfish, but you become more likely to translate selfishness into political action,” Mr. Hall said of homeowners. “Renters could be just as selfish, but they’re not getting their act together as a group to vote.”Generations of American politicians have argued that homeowners make good citizens — and in the early days of the nation, only property owners could vote. It seems reasonable that a financial stake in the community would make people more likely to care for it. But this research suggests that homeownership can also prompt people to oppose what’s good for their communities in a larger sense — at least if you believe, as Mr. Carson does, that many communities need more housing... liberals who say they support redistributive policies also oppose new development around them. Their ideology on national issues clashes with their personal interests as homeowners, and if forced to pick one they tend to choose the latter. Even being shown messages reminding them of the benefits of new housing for low- and middle-income families does little to alter their views."
Hypocrisy adds insult to injury

Homelessness jumps 12% in L.A. County and 16% in the city; officials ‘stunned’ - Los Angeles Times

How to Solve Los Angeles's Homelessness Crisis - "The mayor’s response has been to increase public spending on homelessness sharply, but he’s had frustratingly little to show for it. When the homelessness issue burst onto front pages a few years ago, Garcetti jumped into action with an ambitious plan to build emergency shelters in all 15 districts of the city. But as the mayor soon discovered, the issue with an “emergency” plan oriented around construction is that Los Angeles is a far cry from Bob Moses’s New York. Eighty percent of the shelters have been held up by red tape and community resistance... the mayor had been touting the 20,000 people the city had moved off the street and into some form of housing... while the Garcetti administration was helping to move 380 people off the street each week, some 480 others were joining the ranks of homeless Angelenos. Put another way, until someone does something about the city’s larger housing crisis, homelessness will be as much a part of the city’s landscape as Runyon Canyon. Would building more housing bring an end to homelessness in L.A.? That might be too much to ask. As in most U.S. cities, a large share of the city’s homeless are thought to be mentally ill... the city’s mild climate makes living outdoors a more viable option than in colder communities... Los Angeles also attracts an enormous number of homeless young adults from elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Among the 18-to-24-year-olds living on L.A.’s streets, whose numbers grew by nearly 25 percent this past year, a disproportionate share are newcomers to the city, who don’t have strong ties to the region... One of the ironies of this unfolding humanitarian disaster is that homelessness is a problem most pronounced in successful cities, where dynamic economies all too often meet rigidly regulated housing markets... Detroit’s poverty rate is twice that of New York City’s, but because of its notably inexpensive real estate, it maintains a homelessness rate a third the size... you start to see a rising rate of homelessness once a city’s average rent reaches 22 percent of median income, and an even more rapid rate of increase once that number hits 32 percent. In Los Angeles, the average rent is 49 percent of median income. Some studies have shown that the city has as many as 600,000 people who regularly put as much as 90 percent of their monthly income toward rent. Simply put, these people need a lucky bounce to not end up homeless... Governor Gavin Newsom set the goal of building 3.5 million new housing units in California over the next seven years, an implicit acknowledgment that insufficient housing supply was the driving force behind the state’s ruinously high rents. This was a controversial stance for a progressive politician whose ideological allies often prefer to blame profit-hungry landlords and absentee owners... the bill died in committee, sunk by anti-growth legislators who denounced it as a threat to local control. When a bill to help the most vulnerable people in California fails, one can hardly blame Sacramento’s dwindling band of conservative legislators, because they are very much on the margins of the state’s political life. They can hardly muster the votes to name a park bench, let alone decide the fate of California’s housing regulations. As Michael Hendrix, also of Manhattan Institute, has observed, the real culprits are self-described progressives... their resistance to one form of disruptive change, as represented by the gradual replacement of single-family homes with higher-density apartment buildings that could house many more families at far lower cost, is contributing to another form of disruptive change—the transformation of large swaths of Los Angeles into unsanitary homeless encampments, where women, men, and children are forced to spend much of their waking hours fending off vermin."