Yahoo! News
California will provide nearly 300 state properties for use as homeless shelters and should change its laws to make it easier for local officials to get the mentally ill off the streets, Governor Gavin Newsom said on Wednesday.
Newsom, a Democrat, devoted most of his annual State of the State address to the legislature to the homeless crisis.
“Let’s call it what it is, a disgrace, that the richest state in the richest nation … is failing to properly house, heal and humanely treat so many of its own people,” Newsom said.
California’s homeless population soared 16% last year to around 151,000 with a statewide scarcity of affordable housing one of the root causes despite government spending. More
So …. I wonder what the intended results of this action would be, and what the (real) unintended ones are going to be?
…funny thing is, they USED to HAVE State Buildings DEDICATED to sheltering and caring for the “homeless”.
…they even had a name liberals LOVE.
Asylums.
…maybe you guys shouldn’t have wrecked THAT mental health institution just because you didn’t like how that Jack Nicholson movie that one time ended, heh?
…of course, you have to be pretty crazy to vote Democrat in the FIRST place, so they have kind of a vested interest in NOT healing mentally ill people…
I’m sure the most woke public universities like UC Berkeley and San Francisco State in the bay area would welcome them.
A friend is an activist in The Peoples’ Republic of Santa Monica – our kind of activist, trying to reduce crime. Here is part of what she posted last night:
“Since many of my friends here don’t live in SM, just to bring you up to speed on what has happened…We’ve become known as a Mecca, of sorts, for criminals from all over the country. The last homeless count showed 5% were local. The rest come here for all the services, aka “Free Stuff”–food, medical, clothes, etc”., the mild climate and ability to sleep on the beach and in the parks, the wealthy and unsuspecting prey, er, tourists, and mostly, the lax attitude on crime. Every one of us has witnessed vagrants carrying out armloads of stuff from Walgreens, Von’s, etc. The clerks tell us there is nothing they can do.
Many times Police discourage us from filing reports. They say the guys won’t be found, or if they are, they’ll be released the next day. And hey, that keeps the crime stats down. But the problem is, we have some very bad coming here, that have warrants in other states. Like this guy, wanted in New Mexico for murder. And it’s not just “housed residents” who they prey upon. At least a half dozen homeless were beaten to death here last year, and another 22 bodies were dragged from the alleys, streets, parks, and beach. A couple of years ago, we tried talking to our local officials. We were told it didn’t happen, we were making it up, were were exaggerating. So now, we document everything we see with videos and pictures. Then the Mayor accused us of being “Russian bots from Kiev”, which is in the Ukraine, btw. So now, we try to make sure there are identifying features in the pictures. I don’t know how this is all going to end. But I do know it gets worse, every single day.”
Why I am leaving CA…
Prepping for the 2020 census.
Gotta pump up the recorded population numbers for increased representation.
The taxpayers bought the land, paid to erect the buildings, paid to maintain them and soon will pay to have them demolished as they will be uninhabitable. Another shining example of the Democrat circle of life
You know, Newsom’s proposal makes sense. After all, their state house is full of elected bums, why not let the homeless in as well.
Good, the homeless need more outhouses as if California government building aren’t already full of shit.
Left Coast Dan – I remember going to TPR of Santa Monica (beach) and often smelling pee everywhere.
Every where. And I know NJ and NY were sending them on buses there, too.
I recall Schwarzenegger cleaned up the place and installed security in the buildings (parking lots) and the vagrancy slowed down. But good to hear it’s back and shittier than it ever was before! lol.
I’m curious. Did the 3rd Street Promenade survive?
Meanwhile, crime spillover comes to Nevada. I mean look what happened already. The Raiders are here now. lol.
No seriously. Gross.
Just don’t call those buildings asylums. It’s a dogwhistle to the aclu.
“Whatever government subsidizes, you get more of.” – Rush L.
Gee Wally, they won’t just be talkin shit anymore, they’re gonna be livin in it!
No kiddin Beave, let’s see how many of ’em start “working” from home!
@MJA – 3rd Street Promenade is still relatively okay. Near the pier is terrible. A coworker came out with his family for vacation, stayed at a hotel on Ocean a half-block from the pier so they could be close to everything – and had an eye-opening experience as to how bad it is. I live a mile north, and since there aren’t stores around it is reasonably decent.
Raiders lol – ‘Just win, baby!’
…I was invited to help out when Democrats ended insane asylums…eh, “Mental Health Centers”…in my little patch, and it wasn’t pretty. All the windy ones could agree on was that institutions for people who could not survive on their own were bad and wrong and were just used by Republicans to be mean to people for no reason, and that it was terrible what happened to Jack Nicholson in that move that one time…but none of them had, you know, a PLAN.
It was as though someone went to the cardiac ward in a major hospital and said, “All these lines and wires and blood drips are just here to torture you, we are going to free you from this medical meanness in the name of the Democrat Party, and don’t forget to vote Democrat in November to thank us, even if you’re dead like you probably will be”.
It was like THAT, but even STUPIDER.
Just because you can’t SEE a mental illness doesn’t mean a person can just “Get Over It”. It can be fully as debilitating as any cancer, and with WAY less sympathy and understanding, too.
…and the best part? The WORST crazys THEMSELVES would not ADMIT they were crazy. Asking a crazy person if they’re sane is like asking a 9 year old if they feel like they can drive a car. You’re going to get a positive response either way, but I don’t envy the wreckage you’re going to see…
…my part in this drama was as a Prehospital Care Provider, the fancy, mental health-y term for medic. This gave me a front-row seat to the consequences of deinstitutionalization, as what happened was they basically flung the unwanted nuts out into the community using the fraud of “Community-based mental health care”, which was ALSO a fancy, mental health way of saying “Poorly Run Group Homes”. What happened where I lived, was that they put out a broadside to the communities (never the rich ones, is worth noting) that anyone who wanted to volunteer their home could get as many fruit crackers as they could stuff in it, provided they took a 5-10 hour training course, and they would be rewarded with stipend based on how many wards of the state they made guests in their homes. This, of course, motivated them to load up, on the assumption that these were all adults and would be EASY to take care of.
I must confess that I did not attend these “training sessions” as I didn’t personally want to raise my own crazy so I don’t know what they told them, but given the time, it couldn’t have been much. As far as I could see, it was basically, “Call 911 if there’s any problem”
I was 911. SO lucky…
…we usually got them when they were “red tagged” by the Police, because they generally don’t want to come on their own, their illnesses preventing them from knowing they were ill. We’d get a call when they got out of hand, typically 0-dark-early in the morning, that one of them kept insisting the neighbors were aliens and he was going to save the world, or another one had a minister try to talk him down that was rewarded by being clubbed with a guitar (acoustic, lucky for him), or someone had raped someone else because that’s what God told them to do…you know, fun stuff. We had three ambulances at the time in my agency with a practical carrying capacity of two people each if one was fairly ambulatory and not afraid of the other person in the vehicle, and it wasn’t unusual to tie two of them up on a single incident, one for the victim, and one for the nut, sometimes multiple nuts because they COULD collaborate.
Each mental health patient had to be written about intensively by everyone involved, was usually not very cooperative, and had to go in a cot regardless of if they had any physical damage because they had to be strapped to it in some manner, regardless of the risk WE felt. Then the LEO would have to go with us to the ONLY hospital that would accept psych patients, downtown, so we would have an ambulance AND a police officer out of service for an extended time, usually more than one of each because there was generally another victim to transport and another report to write, so this was fairly labor-intensive and left us sometimes with no one for MEDICAL emergencies.
Later, at the hospital, we would trundle them to a room with no sheets, no pillows, and no shoelaces (they’d been known to attempt murdering each other and themselves with ALL these things), and deposit them in the sheetless bed in the ward, hoping they had worn themselves out to the point where they wouldn’t club us when we removed the restraints.
…this would end our part in the drama. The LEO would return to his car, we’d retire to the squad room for the requisite fukton of paperwork for no actual medial care at all, and back in the room, the resident brainpeeper would wander over eventually and ask the Three Questions.
The Three Questions were what they came up with to determine sanity somehow, and they were just simple little things that were meant to determine if they were oriented in time and space. I won’t write them so as to not make it easier, and they may well have changed them anyway, but it’s very basic stuff. Not too hard, because the hospital didn’t want them, either, and was afraid of the same popular outrage that had shut the institutions down in the first place.
And, since “crazy” is not “stupid”, the results would depend on how aggravated the LEO was.
If he was hanging around to make an arrest if they cleared the guy, he missed every one.
If not, he ACED every one. It wasn’t unusual for us to see him walking out, free as a bird, while we were still doing the paperwork.
And sometimes we’d do it all over again THE SAME NIGHT.
The keepers wouldn’t do this for long, and eventually put their charges out, and sometimes they’d just wander off on their own and not be reported, because the average homeowner was happy to see them go. The system wasn’t tight and they weren’t checked on too much because no one, literally, cared, so they would realize that the alien neighbors wouldn’t put them up, and they could not…COULD. NOT. survive on their OWN as a normal part of society, so they’d go find a nice bridge somewhere, and we’d next see them when they were suffering from exposure or malnutrition or had been beaten or worse…
…and hence, homelessness was born.
Out of liberal do-gooderism.
…I could get into a lot else, like the subset of veterans that were traumatized during service (we had some Vietnam Vets then in bad shape) that were not…handled…well…by their particular hospital, and what happened when one got loose (on ANOTHER agency’s unit, NOT ours, thank you very much!), but this is WAYY too long already…
BUT…
One last fun fact.
Those “alien” neighbors that the crazy guy was gonna save the world from? It was a COMPLETE surprise to them because they had NO idea a group home had started up NEXT DOOR. Seems that all the Democrats and spineless Republicans on the State, County, and City levels had all agreed that there’d be MUCH less community resistance to creating satellite mental heath farms in their backyard if they didn’t TELL anyone, so all the usual public hearing requirements and such were waved because it was SUCH a good cause, so you usually didn’t know about it until you noticed a bunch of guys lurking around your neighbors backyard with nothing to do, a sharp uptick in flashing lights (but NO SIRENS! Code 2 so they don’t “Scare” anyone) next door, or started to wonder why there was a guy next to your house with a candle trying to set the aluminum siding on fire with it…
Gov. Nuisance strikes again!
Wonder what Guilfoyle ever saw in this schmuck?
I was actually toying with the idea of printing up some flyers to hand to the local homeless urging them to hop a south-bound freight train to Stockton where they can get $500 per month walking-around money. I may need to add that they can now sleep in state buildings too.
Just what California’s sinking ship needs, a few more well placed holes in its hull.
It is only a matter of time before the leftists force people to take the bums into their homes if they have a spare bedroom. It isn’t “if”, it’s “when”. Just like Dr. Zhivago.
So lack of affordable housing is one of the root causes? This should be fixable because the state government is perhaps the biggest cause of the lack of affordable housing – but it won’t be for three primary reasons.
First, the California Democrat party has been hijacked by environmentalists and other like-minded groups whose goal is to make it as difficult and as expensive as possible to build anything. For example, for large developments in areas where ancient native Americans may have gathered, the developers have to build a large clay cap over the area to reserve things like pottery shards which may be excavated sometime in the distant future. Large developers are also responsible not only for building the houses, but for putting in streets, sewers, utility lines, and water lines, as well as building schools, fire and police substations, and parks. If you tour a modest looking new housing development and wonder why each “affordable” house starts at $500k or more, this is why.
Second, California is big into the “NIMBY” (not in my backyard) culture. Affordable housing is great – just not near me. I do want jails, industrial areas, utility facilities, etc. which are necessary for modern life – but not close to where I live. I’m all for housing the homeless – somewhere else.
Third, California is a large state. Hey, we can build affordable housing in San Bernardino or Kern Counties – there’s lots of open land there. Problem: a lot of these places do not have adequate water or infrastructure to support larger populations, transportation is a problem particularly in hilly, heavily forested and desert areas, and California is notoriously anti-business so there’s nothing for them to do. And, lest you think the environmentalists wouldn’t care about building housing for the homeless in the desert, you would be wrong. California’s environmentalists hate people no matter where they are.
So, California attracts or creates homeless people due to its own policies, but cannot realistically change those policies because of the political and legal environment the state has fostered over the past few decades. But, as Newsome promised, the state will throw more and more money at this problem because California is also keen on crony politics, and there are a lot of people getting rich of of this.
Will that include the gov’s mansion?
Hung
You stole my thoughts, but, the governor’s mansion already has one of the biggest retards on the west coast living there.
With an ego that large, I doubt there’s room for any more
Good, I hope the idiot governor slips on a pile and cracks his skull while walking the halls of the capital.
Those buildings will need lots of things to make them livable – even for the homeless – like beds, more toilets, showers, kitchen facilities, coffee makers, all kinds of supplies, repairs, etc., furnaces, air conditioners. If the gov’t is going to provide shelter, it may as well feed them too. There will be truckloads of food going in and out all day and night to feed the filthy doped-up buggers.
Guess who pays for it all? The gasoline taxes will have to be hiked way up to gouge the productive people of California even more.