I can’t speak to LA. I lived in Seattle and worked from Portland to Vancouver. It was an absolute shitshow and by all accounts it has just gotten worse in the 5 years since we left.I do not think that is accurate or fair at all. LA already has almost 500 shelters offering more than 20,000 beds per night. We spend between $600 million and a billion dollars every year on homeless services. We just approved an additional $250 million to expand the program that is providing hotel vouchers to unhoused people and purchasing hotels to be converted into permanent housing.
We are moving forward with a plan to convert the entire LA General Hospital complex into permanent housing. We have built tiny house villages all over the city. My VA campus has built and renovated several large buildings dedicated to housing and installed a tiny house village. Expanding to the state, we have spent something like $15 billion over the last five years and provided shelter to over half a million people.
As I noted in previous post, the number of homeless encampments around the city have dropped noticeably just in the last couple of years.
True story. Ed Murray, the pedophile former mayor of Seattle stood up in front of a chamber meeting and claimed that he had “fixed the homeless crisis in Seattle”. What he had actually done was move the encampment (using city workers) from under I-5 to a mile away closer to UW. Thousands of homeless, their tents and belongings were just relocated. As if no one would ever notice.
And try walking down a sidewalk in Portland. Impossible. They have ceased to exist.
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