Why California Keeps Making
Homelessness Worse
Forbes,
by
Michael Shellenberger
Original Article
Posted By: StormCnter,
9/12/2019 2:43:39 PM
On Tuesday, fifteen officials from the White House toured Skid Row in Los Angeles with the head of a local homeless shelter. “Four or five of them were from the Environmental Protection Agency,” Rev. Andy Bales of Union Mission church told me. “That’s because human waste flows into storm sewers.”
California is home to some of the world’s toughest environmental and public health laws, but skyrocketing homelessness has created an environmental and public health disaster. The 44,000 people living, eating, and defecating on the streets of L.A. have brought rats and medieval diseases including typhus. Garbage is everywhere. Experts fear the return of cholera and leprosy.
And homelessness
Reply 1 - Posted by:
earlybird 9/12/2019 2:51:15 PM (No. 178151)
Not all of California. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Sacramento. The left-wing bastions.
Some forget - or maybe they never realized? - how very big California is. Democrats hold about 40% of the registrations, the remainder of which are split between Republicans and No Party Preference registrants. Without even simple 51%, the Democrats are able to prevail. For now.
10 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
earlybird 9/12/2019 2:55:25 PM (No. 178156)
I wonder how many will read this far?
But attacking mental institutions had become hugely popular. In two hugely influential 1961 books, a psychiatrist argued that mental illnesses didn’t exist and a sociologist argued that the institutions themselves created mental illness. One year later, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a novel about a sane but socially maladjusted man who was drugged, electro-shocked, and lobotomized by a mental institution, became a best-seller. In 1967, the film “King of Hearts” depicted psychiatric inmates after World War II as living happily once freed from their asylum. In 1975, the year “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” became a hit film, Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish that mentally ill people had been better off in the Middle Ages when they could roam the streets without being shamed as deviant.
Over the next two decades, state mental hospitals would empty out. But the vast majority of released patients ended up homeless on the street. Congress had “encouraged the closing of state mental hospitals without any realistic plan regarding what would happen to the discharged patients,” notes Dr. Torrey, “especially those who refused to take medication they needed to remain well.”
And yet the reformers were becoming only more radical.
The entire article is worth a read...
11 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
earlybird 9/12/2019 2:58:59 PM (No. 178159)
Another bit of truth:
Today, many of California’s leading homelessness advocates insist that the current crisis is due mostly to the housing shortage.
Homelessness experts and advocates disagree. “I’ve rarely seen a normal able-bodied able-minded non-drug-using homeless person who’s just down on their luck,” L.A. street doctor Susan Partovi told me. “Of the thousands of people I’ve worked with over 16 years, it’s like one or two people a year. And they’re the easiest to deal with.” Rev. Bales agrees. “One hundred percent of the people on the streets are mentally impacted, on drugs, or both,” he said.
11 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
privateer 9/12/2019 3:26:05 PM (No. 178184)
The california creed: dangerous, diseased, useless psychos deserve YOUR money, because: socialism. Your lifestyle must be sacrificed to allow them to continue theirs, because: democrats.
9 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
worried 9/12/2019 3:37:23 PM (No. 178192)
If LA is that bad, San Francisco must be worse. The state government is responsible for much of what goes on. We all know how careful they are with money. FTA; "....funds that were supposed to go to seriously mentally ill were used for yoga and trauma and other laudable things." Instead of the mentally ill! Cut Californica loose, and get down to only 56 states!
3 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
StormCnter 9/12/2019 4:18:13 PM (No. 178211)
I'm not sure why an article about the destructive and dangerous homeless situation in California prompts a hot defense of the state as being large. The article was only about those large cities and the malfeasance of the Democrat governments over the years. Yup, it's large, but it's also a mess.
4 people like this.
EPA will have to declare LA a SuperFund site and send the remediation bill to the Dhimmi's. LA is polluted in every sense of the word.
1 person likes this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
jimincalif 9/12/2019 4:48:16 PM (No. 178224)
Good article. But leftist Californians are trying to spread the misery. Such as the 9th Circuit Martin v City of Boise case, cities can't actually prevent homeless from camping - despite the fact that most of the hardcore homeless don't want to go into any housing situation that requires them to live by basic rules.
I'm a lifetime Californian, but will be retiring the Idaho where our kids have gone seeking better opportunities. I just wish Idaho was not in the 9th Circuit!
3 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
Strike3 9/12/2019 5:31:35 PM (No. 178258)
Some mentally ill people may not be violent or dangerous but that does mean that they are fully functional and can handle all of the complexities of living a normal life. Institutions are not the best answer but it's better than living on the street - for all concerned.
4 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
NorthernDog 9/12/2019 6:49:26 PM (No. 178317)
Some are mentally ill and cannot hold down a job. Others (most?) have no incentive to clean up their act. I don't see the problem getting better anytime soon.
1 person likes this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
DVC 9/12/2019 7:03:23 PM (No. 178330)
Because leftists are ENTIRELY clueless about everything. They have inverted understanding of all things, so all their "fixes" to problems, will ALWAYS make the problem worse, never better.
2 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
nwcudagal 9/12/2019 7:47:49 PM (No. 178362)
I remember being in San Francisco in about 1978. I was 24 and my friends and I were headed to a Benihana restaurant. I remember having to watch out for disgusting things on the sidewalk. In 1967 my sister lived in San Mateo, and we went to China Town. I'm thinking that wasn't a picnic to get their either. I do remember going to Sausalito and had the best fish and chips ever. I have pictures of Haight Ashbury taken with my Mom's Brownie camera. God, I'm old.
2 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
vinegrower 9/12/2019 11:30:46 PM (No. 178438)
This is a very good piece. I nominate for a must read.
1 person likes this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
Timber Queen 9/13/2019 12:21:21 AM (No. 178450)
One of the big problems cited has been "progressive" leaders haven't updated/changed their thinking/policies about mental illness since the 1960's. They keep advocating the same "solutions" based on supposed "rights" despite decades of failure making the problem worse. I really feel for the people who spend their lives helping those that end up on the streets, only to have their jobs made more difficult by "activists" who like to spend other people's money on stuff like yoga. (Side Bar: What is it about yoga? Its Hillary's favorite topic and it was part of the job description for Epstein's girls.)
Involuntary "incarceration" for the mentally ill has been deemed by "progressives" as the most absolute evil government can commit. To them it equates to Hitler sending Jews to extermination camps. They have held to this guiding principle despite 50-plus years of absolute failure; inflicting untold pain on the mentally ill and their families, the people they "champion" with their "advocacy".
I had one thought throughout reading this article; Cloward-Priven. Their goal is to bring society to its knees so it can be remade, some would say "transformed", into their socialist/communist ideal. They don't want to solve the problems. They love the misery they cause because societal dysfunction is their goal. They are evil and must be exposed. We're fifty years on, I think we could build and staff better facilities than that depicted in the propagandist Cuckoos Nest. They won't let anyone try. Our mentally ill have the basic human right to be treated with dignity, not living on the street like dogs.
0 people like this.
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