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Sanctuary City Los Angeles Has 58,000 Homeless People
Published on March 1st, 2018
While President Trunmp and Congress debate the future of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Californian cities provide sanctuary to illegal aliens, there is another group of destitute people whose plight seems to be overlooked.
Los Angeles has an epidemic of homeless people. According to a recent report, the homeless population of L.A. has swelled to 58,000, a 46% increase from 2013 to 2017.
The Los Angeles Times described the homeless epidemic in today's editorial piece,
In downtown L.A., shop owners worry that customers will opt for suburban malls to avoid the panhandlers and glassy-eyed wanderers. In Venice, besieged businesses have banded together to share the cost of security guards and cleanup crews to clear garbage, bedding or worse from the sidewalks.Across the city, drivers exiting freeways routinely encounter homeless people on the off-ramps shuffling from window to window requesting money. Libraries, train stations and public parks have become refuges for homeless people. In many residential neighborhoods and commercial districts, encampments have become a seemingly immutable fact of life.
In the same piece, the author goes on to point out how L.A. could alleviate the problem.
The real, durable solution is to get homeless people into housing, which means building many more apartments (the point of Proposition HHH) as well as providing the outreach workers and services needed to move people off the streets and keep them off the streets (the point of Measure H).
The real question Californians should be asking themselves is… how it came to this? How could 58,000 homeless people blanket the streets of Los Angeles, while the state spends billions of dollars annually to provide services to illegal aliens?
Why is Los Angeles risking losing some federal funds due to its “sanctuary” status, while it wrestles with how to pay for housing and basic services for for tens of thousands of homeless people?
The plight of homeless people should not be overshadowed by DACA recipients or sanctuary cities. Californians deserve answers.
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