City Journal: Last month, the downtown San Diego franchise of the Burgerim restaurant chain closed its doors, contending that chaotic conditions caused by large numbers of homeless people in and around nearby Horton Plaza Park had driven customers away and made it impossible to operate, even during the Christmas season. The shuttering of the Burgerim location, which had been open for little over a year, was a warning signal to the San Diego business community—and to city hall, too. Burgerim would not be leaving quietly. The franchisee, backed by parent company Burgerim USA, intended to sue in state court, claiming that neither its landlord nor the City of San Diego had lived up to their responsibilities to keep the city’s historic Gaslamp Quarter clean and suitable for business.
Burgerim’s legal action will be of special interest to members of the multi-billion-dollar homelessness industry nationwide. (In Seattle alone, $1 billion a year gets spent on the city’s 11,500 homeless people). San Diego County’s homeless number about 8,500, which means this beautiful Southern Californian region has the nation’s fourth-largest homeless population (after New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle), a rank it has held for several years. The San Jose area is fifth.
Despite the many billions spent on homelessness, however, the problem is getting worse, especially in California. Along with homeless encampments come deadly outbreaks of hepatis A, typhus, and other communicable diseases, driven by attending drug addiction. Some parts of the city are littered with syringes. A desperate San Diego now steam-cleans its streets and sidewalks. Even in expensive neighborhoods, unguarded greenery is often strewn with trash and toilet paper, revealing where homeless people have spent the night. The city tries to keep the squalor at bay with improved shelter programs. It even plans to provide 500 bins, where the homeless can stash their belongings, but that effort alone will cost the city about $2 million a year in overtime for the cops who guard the lockers. Advocates suggest that these overtime millions could be better spent placing hundreds of homeless in their own studio apartments.
Will Burgerim’s lawsuit have any effect on this complex, expensive, and apparently intractable social issue? Can retail and restaurant tenants really use the courts to force landlords and municipal governments to protect them against a problem that no one seems able to solve?
Absolutely, says Niv Davidovich, a lawyer for Burgerim. “There is ample case law that will allow the Burgerim lawsuit to move forward,” he maintains. “Landlords and the city are responsible for reasonably maintaining the common areas of any commercial property. If they fail to do so, they are violating the lease terms, violating their covenant of good faith and fair dealing with the tenant, which is implied into the lease by operation of law, and are acting negligently, thus subjecting themselves to liability both in tort and contract.” read more
The high powered steam cleaning needs to begin to with… the governors mansion and the statehouse, eject your federal elected officials and let the patriotic, freedom loving Californians, no longer willing to put up with liberalism and open borders. I remember my idyllic childhood in the golden state.
I wouldn’t set foot in that state of decay now.
Too big to fail worked for the titanic.
This god awful turn for the worse makes many of us shake our heads.
Permission granted to take back your miserable state. We outsiders have lost patience and have absolutely no influence in your effluence.
Go to any democrat controlled territory with a Walmart on anyday at 7 AM.
Look at the empty parking lot.
Curb high fast food cartons, cups, plastic bags, french fries but not one straw.
This happened over the last 8 years.
Where else does this, who else does this?
Shit Hole countries
Time to clean up skid row, chase off all the hobo’s
Ace used to call for a hobo hunt, is he still doing that?
I have to believe there are vagrancy and littering laws still on the books that have simply been ignored. Who’s fault is that, Hmmmm???
Don’t worry, California, the Chinese will buy you when the price is right. Hang on ’til then, okay?
So much of homelessness is either self-inflicted or personally desired. There’s little to no excuse for not working in such a robust economy.
Even at minimum wage, the groups of homeless that huddle under trees could easily obtain jobs and join forces to secure a house and build a future.
The main problem is, as usual, the money. All that lovely money flowing into bureaucracies and so-called non-profit organizations that nominally are being paid to deal with the homeless problem. They have no vested interest in ever solving the problem. Quite the opposite: if they solve the problem, the money stops.
I have zero – ZERO – doubt that if the money stopped flowing, the “homeless” would virtually disappear, with the likely exception of the mentally ill/damaged for whom there are no longer any institutions equipped to house them.
I was in STD, the “Gaslamp Quarter” was locker clubs, strip joints, pool halls, tattoo parlors, 1970.
I went back, a free trip, it was nice, stayed out on the point.
Had a nice dinner in the new, at that time, Gaslight district.
Kinda dry toast.
They ran all the Navy off, only to be overrun by the homeless.
ROFLMFAO, wonder how the chamber feels about the Navy now?
Yes Virgina, ZOMBIES ARE REAL…
How about whip up a tasty batch
of Soyient Green.
@BUTTHEAD …. You couldn’t put enough candy-colored green frosting on the Soylent Homies for anyone to even consider ingesting a microbe of that goo. Maybe fish food?
OpenTheDoor, I too remember how scuzzy downtown San Diego was back in the 70’s when I was in the Navy back in the 70’s. It was an interesting place of dive bars, dirty movie theaters, massage parlors etc. and was a favorite hangout for sailors off duty. But it also had good places intermingled with the bad places that sailors frequented, some buddies and I were treated to a free Thanksgiving dinner the day before Thanksgiving 1973 when we were shipping out to go overseas aboard the Kitty Hawk the day after Thanksgiving, that was a nice gesture. When I went back to San Diego in August 1996 the city had completely changed the whole character of Broadway St. in downtown SD and it was much better and far cleaner and more of a tourist area. I am sorry to hear that they’re having a large homeless problem down there but the liberal govts. encourage too much of that by not keeping a handle on it and not enforcing vagrancy laws etc. to keep the riff raff in check. We also have more of a homeless problem here in downtown Spokane than we ever had in the past especially around the House of Charity and some other local homeless shelters. One of the counselors was stabbed (fortunately it was non life threatening) this morning at one of the local overnight shelters by a crazy homeless woman. The city fathers don’t know what to do and the cops hands are tied and a lot of local businesses are frustrated with the homeless camping out on the streets around their businesses and some have closed and moved out of downtown. No one really knows what to do, perhaps it’s time to crack down and admit that we like so many other cities have a homeless problem that is starting to spiral out of control. My daughter and I will no longer go to the Starschmucks just off the freeway heading into downtown because of all the riff raff using their restrooms, it’s disgusting and shouldn’t be encouraged.
“Homeless” is a catch-all word that groups the truly needy with itinerant bums and lowlife scum. The problem is not homelessness. The problems are substance abuse, mental illness and crime.
Instead of putting up bums in studio apartments and showering them with freebies (they, of course, will not take showers), the “homeless” should be given four choices: get a job, enter rehab, accept treatment and institutionalization (if deemed necessary), go to prison. Building homeless shelters, and enabling urban camping and panhandling only encourages the influx of more “homeless” into the area.
There is an old paranoid-schizophrenic that camps a couple miles down the road. He is the quintessential “lovable” tramp. The city moved him into housing last year but he left after a few months and returned to his spot. He said the apartments that the city rented were full of criminals, prostitutes and drug dealers.
Free housing obviously did not solve the “homeless” problem.
Maybe it is time to study China in
1949 when they eradicated the opium heads,
gamblers,drunks,whores from Shanghai water front…
For $2m you could put them all on buses to Detroit where there’s lots of vacant homes.