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.”
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 is making people violent. “We are seeing behaviors from our guests that I’ve never seen in 33 years,” said Bales. “They are so bizarre and different that I don’t even feel right describing the behaviors. It’s extreme violence of an extreme sexual nature. I have been doing this for 33 years and never seen anything like it.”
In 2016 Bales lost the lower half of his leg to a flesh-eating bacteria from contamination on Skid Row.
According to Bales and other experts, California made homelessness worse by making perfect housing the enemy of good housing, by liberalizing drug laws, and by opposing mandatory treatment for mental illness and drug addiction.
Let's back up a step: homelessness is not "making people violent". They're violent because they're nuts and/or drug addicts (which is also a mental illness):
“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.
Most of the time what people mean by the homelessness problem is really a drug problem and a mental illness problem. ”The problem is we don’t know if you’re psychotic or just on meth,” said Dr. Partovi. “And giving it up is very difficult. I worked in the local jail, and half of the inmates in the women’s jail were Latinas in their 20s, and all were in there for something related to meth.”
Bales says things worsened ten years ago when L.A. and other California cities rejected drug recovery (treatment) as a condition of housing. “When the ‘Housing First’ with a harm reduction model people came in they said ‘Recovery doesn’t work,’” said Bales. “But it was after that when homelessness exploded exponentially.”
The so-called "solution" of providing ever-increasing "services" to the deranged isn't working. "Progressive" ideas seldom do. Yet a lot of people make their money by providing "services" as others lobby for more money.
The issues will never be solved by people with such a mind-set.
