Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Cause and Effect ?

When A and B seem to occur together with surprising frequency there are only a few possibilities. First, they occur together by coincidence. Second, A causes B. Third, B causes A. Fourth, there is some common factor, Z, that causes both A and B. Occasionally the “obvious” relationship between A and B is the obvious. Let’s take for example, the relationship between how a city is doing and who is in charge in that city. Presently the two of the most obvious examples are Los Angeles and San Francisco. In regard to both of these cities, most are aghast when they see the disgusting dirt, trash, excrement, and discarded needles on the streets in parts of these cities. Most of this filth is occurring in the homeless encampments that line the streets in certain areas of each of these cities.Last year we had a similar problem in San Diego. In the downtown area there were blocks of tents and makeshift shelters on the sidewalks that looked similar to what we are seeing in L.A. and in San Francisco today. What brought this issue to a head was a hepatitis outbreak that occurred in part because of these squalid living conditions. Today in the downtown area, those block-long encampments are no more. On certain mornings of the week, city crews can be seen hosing down the sidewalks with some sort of disinfectant, and more than once I have seen police telling homeless men and women to move on. In the last six months or so, to me it appears that the number of homeless in the downtown area is much less. Problem solved ? . . . Not by a long shot as after the “clearing of the homeless from the downtown area,” complaints of an increased number of homeless began to crop up in the adjacent neighborhoods of Mission Hills and Hillcrest. So apparently the homeless were still homeless, and had merely relocated. Now the latest is to open a storage facility in the neighborhood of El Cerritos about ten miles east of the city’s two other storage facilities in the downtown area. In theory, these facilities are a place for the homeless to leave their belongings when they are elsewhere, while keeping sidewalks clear of shopping carts, makeshift  structures, and other debris and clutter. Unfortunately, having a storage facility in El Cerritos is only going to attract homeless to the El Cerritos vicinity.

San Francisco saw a 17% jump in the number of homeless residents over the last two years, according to preliminary results of the city’s point-in-time count. In January, volunteers recorded 8,011 homeless people living in shelters and on the streets in the city of roughly 880,000. Their 2017 count logged 6,858 people.California is spending millions of dollars to stem the tide of homelessness without much to show for it. The latest evidence of that arrived last month when several Bay Area cities and counties (not just San Francisco) reported that their latest tallies of homeless people revealed big increases.
As of January 2018, California had an estimated 129,972 experiencing homelessness on any given day, as reported by Continuums of Care to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Of that Total, 6,702 were family households, 10,836 were Veterans, 12,396were unaccompanied young adults (aged 18-24), and 34,332 were individuals experiencing chronic homelessness.
According to California State Association of Counties (CSAC)Joint Homeless Task Force “Homelessness impacts all 58 counties in California – rural or urban, northern or southern, inland or coastal. It impacts individuals and families of every background.  The causes of homelessness can be traced to a variety of problems including loss of employment, lack of affordable housing, drug and alcohol abuse, and physical and mental illness. There is no one solution to this growing problem.”I do not pretend to know the answer to the homeless problem in California, but I think it is reasonable to say that whatever the Democrats in Sacramento are doing, is not working!

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