Current leadership has the Golden State in the proverbial doom loop

Political change is crucial — It must start with enforcing the laws on the streets

Everything that is consuming California’s cities, from public defecation to drug dealing to camping in public spaces to violent crime and death on the streets, is the result of illegal activities. Yet from Sacramento to San Diego city governments have created a two tier legal system. One system, the one with which most people are familiar, applies to the vast majority of residents. If you drop trow in the middle of the street you’ll be arrested by any passing cop, and rightly so. Ditto if you terrorize your neighbors, cook meth in your home, or deface property.

There’s an entirely separate system when it comes to homeless people, the animating impulse of which is pure anarchy. The causes are myriad, including predatory nonprofits (more on that below), underfunded, demoralized police forces, and district attorneys who all too often place the interests of criminals above the rights of victims and the population at large. D.A.’s like L.A.’s George Gascon routinely release violent criminals without bail and refuse to prosecute. Many of them are homeless and many more use homelessness as a cover. Failed policies, and refusal to engage in compassionate enforcement, perversely incentivize the worst elements to prey upon those who already are in despair and hopelessness.

To be clear, and to state the obvious, a majority of homeless people deserve sympathy and empathy. Yes, many are victims of their own bad decisions. Probably most. Then again, bad decisions have underlying causes. Mental illness, addiction, alcoholism, domestic or family abuse, job loss, divorce, death of a loved one, any of these things can push an individual over the brink, much less a combination. Modern narcotics like synthetic meth, fentanyl, and “tranq” are so highly addictive that people can get hooked after a single dose. The point is, almost no one in their right mind chooses life on the street.

The Homeless Industrial Complex is not a conspiracy theory — it’s all too real, and it’s killing by the thousands

The average person’s natural impulse toward empathy is being exploited by a heartless, for that matter ruthless, political class and an ecosystem of predatory nonprofits, public bureaucracies, legal services organizations, and the omnipotent consultants. In state and federal courts this machine, which many have taken to calling the Homeless Industrial Complex, is enabled by the likes of the National Homeless Law Center and the ACLU, an organization that has strayed so far from its original mission as to be unrecognizable. The ACLU is behind court decisions like Martin v. Boise, which held that cities cannot enforce anti-sleeping laws overnight without providing shelter options. That decision has been warped to allow all public sleeping and loitering and is a central cause of the tens of thousands of effectively permanent encampments around the state.

These permanent encampments provide cover for all manner of exploitation, from sexual violence and sex trafficking to drug dealing, arson, even murder. Criminal gangs and cartels know that the camps are the perfect cover for their activities. So much for empathy. At this point it is no less than nauseating to watch executives at homeless nonprofits hoover up mid and high six figure salaries while executing policies that result in devastation for hundreds of thousands of people. Three hundred Californians die every week from fentanyl overdoses alone. That’s 15,600 souls annually, more than the number of Americans killed in Vietnam in the war’s deadliest year. Fentanyl is responsible for 40% of overdose deaths, meaning the total number is close to 40,000. Include deaths from alcohol abuse, exposure, infectious diseases, murder, and unknown causes (this is a hugely underappreciated, and underreported, number) and the true number of California homeless deaths is very likely more than 50,000 annually.

That’s very nearly the entire U.S. body count in Vietnam of 58,220. Every. Single. Year.

Yet while Vietnam brought down a sitting president, and rightly so, Governor Gavin Newsom may well be on the cusp of failing upward to the White House. It is perverse.

Newsom recently told ABC News that San Francisco’s crises are attributable to, “struggling to recover from the pandemic … struggling with the macroeconomic shifts, particularly as it relates to telework, as it relates to what’s the future of a downtown … and they’re in the process of rezoning, reimagining, and rebirth.” He is either profoundly delusional or irredeemably mendacious. The guy snorting fentanyl in the doorway of the San Francisco Federal Building isn’t reimagining anything besides the demons in his head.

One was brought down, the other is failing up

Speaking of Newsom, Americans should understand the extent to which he has played a pivotal, ongoing role in the state’s death spiral. As mayor of San Francisco he introduced a policy called “Care Not Cash.” The idea was that providing homeless people simple cash benefits led them to spend that money irresponsibly on drugs and alcohol. Instead, the city would provide services and support. And thus was born the Homeless Industrial Complex. Today there are many tens of thousands of people, probably hundreds of thousands, whose careers and livelihoods depend entirely or to a great extent on the perpetual existence of homelessness and human suffering. Nonprofit executives, consultants, lawyers, academics, medical professionals, and of course politicians, all of whom need homelessness to continue as long as possible, preferably until their pensions kick in.

According to Transparent California the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority employs nearly 800 people, of whom 125 make more than $100,000 a year. The new director, who formerly headed a nonprofit called St. Joseph Center that the all aspect report documented literally dumping an elderly, disabled, alcoholic homeless woman behind a trash can in an empty parking lot in the middle of the COVID crisis, makes a cool $430,000. That’s more than a $120,000 raise over her predecessor. Talk about failing upward. Eight years ago the agency had 153 employees, of whom only eight made six figures.

Should the City of Los Angeles meaningfully enforce laws when it comes to the homeless, homelessness would decline and a lot of those comfy six-figure salaries (and pensions and health insurance) would go away. And no one in their right mind puts themselves out of a job, least of all a cushy gig at an unaccountable government bureaucracy where failure is rewarded.

Whistleblowers and community advocates confirm the worst of California’s failed approach

The all aspect report has spoken with whistleblowers inside LAHSA. They describe a thoroughly compromised agency in which employees routinely failed to show up for work or only show up a few hours a day. They describe an agency in which actual work is literally discouraged, where individuals who show initiative are discouraged and even punished. One employee we spoke with was part of a team tasked with community outreach, including interfacing with L.A.’s 96 Neighborhood Councils. The individual with whom we spoke claimed they were the only one of some dozen to actually visit the councils. When they did, their reports and feedback were ignored. Staff turnover is also reportedly high, except for those in the upper pay bracket.

Likewise, there’s a stark disconnect between nonprofit rank and file, who consistently report low pay, poor management, and bad morale, and managers who make those six figures. A whistleblower at a Santa Monica nonprofit reports that in 2022, with COVID still raging, management spent just $120,000 on meals for homeless clients and more than $600,000 on executive meals and travel.

Back to the homeless woman St. Joseph Center dumped. We and others intervened and paid out of our own pockets to keep her in a motel for a month while we fought to find her housing or at least reliable shelter. When we asked her St. Joseph caseworker why he wasn’t more engaged he shrugged and said, “She’s a difficult client.”

If you can’t handle the needs of a disabled homeless woman in her 70s, you’re probably in the wrong line of work. Yet that same scenario plays out thousands of times a day.

It all starts coming into focus: What if LAHSA were to enforce workplace rules and hold its employees accountable? The organization might actually start functioning and addressing homelessness. What if the nonprofits, handsomely funded by easy taxpayer money, actually started paying their caseworkers a living wage, provided them with the support to do their jobs, and held them accountable? Just like L.A. enforcing laws that protect everyone, housed and unhoused, eventually, most of them would be out of a job.

So California remains trapped in a vicious cycle of self-interest and exploitation. The Homeless Industrial Complex spends enormous amounts of time and money justifying itself. Recently, members of a neighborhood group called The Santa Monica Coalition (full disclosure: I work with the Coalition) exposed a failed “harm reduction” program jointly run by the L.A. County Health Department, Santa Monica, and a nonprofit called Venice Family Clinic. The program’s cornerstone is syringe handouts. It costs Santa Monica taxpayers more than $2,000 per hour. A few hundred (maybe) go to three thoroughly unengaged employees who drive around in a van three hours every Friday, visiting parks and handing out needles, synthetic meth, Narcan, condoms, and hygiene kits.

Tellingly, we documented these employees engagements with homeless addicts – or rather, their near complete lack of engagement. They all but tossed the “harm reduction” kits out of the van and the addicts stumbled away. A mardi gras float from Hell.

Again, it all comes down to enforcement. The employees parked their van in a red zone, a handicapped space, and blocking a protected bike lane. They actually ignored the repeated orders of a Santa Monica police officer to move out of the bike lane (this all was captured on video). The van is a rolling example of failure and anarchy, and a damn expensive one at that.

The sad fact is that enforcement is the only option left. The Homeless Industrial Complex and California’s political class, starting with Newsom, has sank the Golden State so low that there is no longer any other choice.

The fact is, contrary to the false prevailing narrative, a huge portion of California’s homeless aren’t from California. They should be given bus tickets home and told that if they come back there won’t be a nice city park but a jail cell waiting for them. California should be suing other states, like Pennsylvania, that knowingly ship their homeless and addicts to us. Addicts themselves must be arrested for their own good (ask most any family member of an addict and they will practically beg for it) and subjected to extended civil hold periods while they get clean. Dealers, pushers, and pimps need to go to prison where they belong.

Most of all, to paraphrase JFK the Homeless Industrial Complex must be smashed and scattered to the winds. It is nothing short of predatory, and it is responsible for death on a scale rarely seen in the industrialized world. Cruel doesn’t begin to describe it.

Glimmers of hope

Of course, this is all easy to write about. But there is a glimmer of hope. More and more people, including us, are taking action. We are fighting for reform, we are exposing the inhumanity and hypocrisy, we are demanding accountability. We’ve helped get reform-minded candidates elected. We’ve brought together Neighborhood Councils to attack the Complex as a unified force. And we are starting to see success – small steps, but tangible progress.

The leaders and enablers of the Homeless Industrial Complex – they know who they are, again starting with Newsom – ought to be scared out of their wits, because we are coming for them. We are armed with reality. We are fearless.

And we have nothing left to lose but our state.