Hello, All!

As a native Californian, it pains me to see my home state go down the crapper
like it has.  This is an excellent opinion piece, IMNSHO, about what's going
on.

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From:
https://www.amgreatness.com/2019/01/27/the-de...
es-californias-idiocracy

(That's one long wrapped URL.)

The Destruction of Venice Beach Epitomizes California's Idiocracy

   By Edward Ring | 2019-01-27T20:57:58+00:00 January 27th, 2019

   Venice Beach, California, used to be one of California's great places. A
   Bohemian gem, nestled against the sand between big Los Angeles and the
   vast Pacific Ocean. Rents used to be a little lower in Venice compared to
   other coastal neighborhoods. The locals mingled with surfers, artists,
   street performers, and tourists. People from suburbs further inland
   migrated to Venice's beaches on sunny weekends year-round. Venice was
   affordable, inviting, inclusive. That was then.

   Today, Venice Beach is off limits to families who used to spend their
   Saturdays on the sand. It's too dangerous. On the sand, beached seaweed
   now mingles with syringes, feces, broken glass, and other trash, and the
   ocean has become the biggest outdoor toilet in the city. More than 1,000
   vagrants now consider Venice Beach their permanent home. At the same time
   as real estate values exploded all along the California coast, the
   homeless population soared. In Venice, where the median price of a home is
   $2.1 million, makeshift shelters line the streets and alleys, as the
   affluent and the indigent fitfully coexist.

   What has happened in Venice is representative of what's happened to
   California. If progressives take back the White House in 2020, it will be
   America's fate.

   Laws Raise Costs
   California's cost-of-living is driving out all but the very rich and the
   very poor, a problem that is entirely the result of policies enacted by
   California's progressive elite. They reduce to two factors, both
   considered beyond debate in the one-party state. First, to supposedly
   prevent catastrophic climate change, along with other environmental
   concerns, California's restrictive laws such as the California
   Environmental Quality Act, the Global Warming Solutions Act, and
   Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act make it expensive and
   time consuming to construct new homes. These laws also decrease the
   availability of entitled land, which further increases costs to
   developers.

   At the same time, California has become a magnet for the welfare cases of
   America and the expatriates of the world. According to a 2018 report
   (presenting 2015 data, the most recent available) issued by the U.S.
   Department of Health and Human Services, of the 4.2 million recipients in
   America of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Supplemental
   Security Income, an amazing 43 percent of them live in California. That's
   more than 1.8 million people. According to the liberal Public Policy
   Institute of California, as of 2016, California was also home to 2.6
   million undocumented immigrants. Could California's promise of health
   coverage for undocumented immigrants, or sanctuary state laws, have
   anything to do with this?

   When you enact policies to restrict supply (to save the planet) and
   increase demand (invite the world to move in), which is exactly what
   California has done, housing will become unaffordable. Supply oriented
   solutions are relatively simple. Stop protecting all open space,
   everywhere, from development. Invest in public-private partnerships to
   increase the capacity of energy, water, and transportation infrastructure,
   instead of rationing water, "going solar," and "getting people out of
   their cars." Reform public employee retirement benefits instead of
   incessantly raising taxes and fees to feed the pension funds. It's that
   simple.

   Unfortunately, in California, nothing is simple. In 2006, the notoriously
   liberal Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Jones v. City of Los
   Angeles ruled that law enforcement and city officials can no longer
   enforce the ban on sleeping on sidewalks anywhere within the Los Angeles
   city limits until a sufficient amount of permanent supportive housing
   could be built.

   And what is "permanent supportive housing" for the more than 50,000
   homeless people in Los Angeles? In 2016, 76 percent of Los Angeles voters
   approved the $1.2 billion Measure HHH to "help finance the construction of
   10,000 units of affordable permanent-supportive housing over the next 10
   years."

   The passage of Measure HHH raises many questions. Most immediately, why
   hasn't much of the money been spent? As reported by NPR's Los Angeles
   affiliate in June, "so far only three of 29 planned projects have funds to
   begin construction." Worse, the costs have skyrocketed. According to the
   NPR report:

     When voters passed the bond measure, they were told new permanent
     supportive housing would cost about $140,000 a unit. But average per
     unit costs are now more than triple that. The PATH Ventures project in
     East Hollywood has an estimated per-unit cost of $440,000. Even with
     real estate prices soaring, that's as much as a single-family home in
     many places in Southern California. Other HHH projects cost more than
     $500,000 a unit.

   Demand Outpaces Supply
   Spending a half-million dollars to build one basic rental unit to get a
   homeless family out of the rain sounds like something a bloated new
   bureaucracy might achieve, and even in high-priced California there's no
   other way to explain this level of waste. What about the private sector?

   A new privately funded development company, Flyaway Homes, has debuted in
   Los Angeles with the mission of rapidly providing housing for the
   homeless. Using retrofitted shipping containers, the companies modular
   approach to apartment building construction is purported to streamline the
   approval process and cut costs. But the two projects they've got underway
   are not cheap.

   Their 82nd Street Development will cost $4.5 million to house 32 "clients"
   in a 16 two-bedroom, 480 square foot apartments. That's $281,250 per
   two-bedroom apartment. The firm's 820 W. Colden Ave. property will cost
   $3.6 million to house 32 clients in eight four-bedroom apartments. That's
   $450,000 per apartment.

   Is this the best anyone in L.A. can do? Because if it is, it's not going
   to work.

   Let's accept the far fetched notion that $5 billion could be found quickly
   to construct housing for the 50,000 homeless people in Los Angeles, and
   this could be finished within a few years. Does anyone think the growth in
   subsidized housing would keep pace with the growth in the population of
   homeless? Why, when California is a sanctuary state, a magnet for welfare
   cases, and has the most forgiving winter weather in America?

   One may take issue with the whole concept of taxpayer subsidized housing,
   but that is almost beside the point. There are more urgent strategic
   questions that aren't being honestly confronted in California. For
   example:

   Why is the national average construction cost per new apartment unit
   somewhere between $65,000 and $85,000, yet it costs five to 10 times that
   much in Los Angeles?

   Is it wise to have subsidized housing that is of better quality than the
   apartments that many hard working Californians occupy and pay for without
   benefit of subsidies?

   Why has there been no serious attempt to get useful statistics on the
   homeless population, in order to apply different approaches depending on
   who they are? For example, how many of them are mentally ill, or
   criminals, or substance abusers, or sexual predators, or undocumented
   immigrants, or willfully homeless with other housing options, or hard
   working sane people who have encountered hard times (yes,
   "intersectionality" would exist among these categories)?

   Why not immediately allocate open land to create campsites where the
   homeless can move their tents and belongings, to get them off the streets?

   Why not then study the refugee camps set up around the world, an activity
   where U.S. NGOs have in-depth expertise, and replicate these in areas of
   L.A. County where there is cheaper, available land? These semi-permanent
   structures are far less expensive than solutions currently offered.

   Does inviting millions from impoverished, politically unstable nations
   help those nations, when for every person who makes his way to California,
   thousands remain? And if not, why not directly help the people who are
   staying in those nations, which would be far more cost-effective?

   Wouldn't it make more sense to moderate the inflow of unskilled workers
   across the border into California, in order to eliminate the oversupply of
   cheap labor which depresses wages? Wouldn't that be better than mandating
   a higher minimum wage?

   Doesn't offering welfare and subsidized housing to people capable of work
   make it unlikely they will ever seek work? While striking a balance is a
   compassionate necessity, has that balance perhaps been violated, since
   California is home to 43 percent of America's welfare recipients?

   When will California loosen restrictions on land development and building
   code mandates, in order to bring the cost of new housing construction back
   down towards national averages?

   When will the elected officials in a major California city stand up to the
   litigants who use the Ninth Circuit to impose rulings such as Jones v.
   City of Los Angeles, and take a case to the U.S. Supreme Court? While many
   homeless people have genuine stories of hardship and bad luck, must we be
   forced to cede to all of them our most desirable public spaces?

   No Good Resolution in Sight
   What has happened in Los Angeles is a perfect storm of progressive
   pressure groups and rent-seeking bureaucrats and profiteers, working
   together to amass money, power, and prestige. If they were efficiently
   solving the problem, that would be just fine. But they aren't, and until
   they accept tough answers to tough questions, they never will.

   As Venice Beach continues to reel from the impact of the homeless
   invasion, Los Angeles city officials are fast-tracking the permit process
   to build a homeless shelter on 3.2 acres of vacant city-owned property
   less than 500 feet from the beach. This property, nestled in the heart of
   Venice's upscale residential and retail neighborhoods, if commercially
   developed, would be worth well over $200 million. Shelter capacity? About
   100 people.

   In a less utopian, less corrupt society, that single property could be
   sold, and the proceeds could be used to set up and monitor a tent city
   housing thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. But not in
   California. Under the warm sun, against the indifferent ocean, the
   idiocracy endures.
===

Later,
Sean

--- FleetStreet 1.27.1
 * Origin: Outpost BBS Local Console (1:18/200)