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Forums - General Discussion - Los angelezs is filled with homeless on drugs now or worser

Stuff like this is why, I prefer the european model.
With a social net, that catches people, helps them out and get them back on their feet, through support.

American society is crazy on so many levels.
The guns alone, and all the violence that brings.... messed up.

Imo, the american dream is dead.
And its no longer a place that I'd want to live.
Hollywood, during the 90's did their best to portray, america as this perfect place.
Social media, and everyone owning a phone to record with, has shattered that illusion.



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I see and hear about this all the time. I hear similar things about San Francisco, Seattle, Portland...west coast of the U.S. seems fucked.

This is video shot in New York by The Daily Show 10 years ago. I just found it 2 days ago. It has, I would say, more footage of people in crisis the one in the OP. At least in terms of people displaying the consequences of substance addiction and/or homelessness. Quality is terrible, so if you watch it, watch on the player on the site so it's smaller.



- "If you have the heart of a true winner, you can always get more pissed off than some other asshole."

America's time is over. Like the Roman empire, the US got complacent and lazy 30 years ago.

There are plenty of hard working people all over the world - why should they have a lower quality of life just because they don't live in the US?



Good thing this is the country of Jesus, who famously hated the poor. So everything is in order.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

I was in San Francisco a couple years ago. Felt like we landed in an episode of The Walking Dead. We'd even joke about it, already bad by day, there was this whole gathering behind our hotel below our window at night. Kind of creepy.

In LA I only went to Santa Monica and drove through Hollywood, where it wasn't as bad, I guess, but I suppose it's similar in Downtown LA or wherever.



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What has happened to California overall? Leaving the pandemic aside, that state should've been swimming in cash, yet all I keep hearing about them are problems with homelesness, energy crisis, repealing their civil rights laws...



You know it deserves the GOTY.

Come join The 2018 Obscure Game Monthly Review Thread.

Pretty horrible to witness but I'm also disgusted by the guy in the video. He almost seems to be enjoying himself while seeing people suffer.



56% of the homeless are in 5 of the 50 states (based on 2019 data),
CA - 151,278
NY - 92,091
FL - 28,328
TX - 25,848
WA - 21,577

(CA and NY both have crazy high cost of living.  Hawaii actually has a higher cost of living, but I guess their total population is lower).

Last edited by jlauro - on 13 December 2020

I've only lived in Los Angeles and California for 6 years, but maybe I can provide some perspective.

The first important thing to keep in mind is that any state or local spending must be voted on and approved by a ballot measure. California has a lot of "cash", but money raised through taxes can only be spent on what it is allocated for, which effectively ties the hands of elected officials. It is very easy for special interests groups with a lot of cash (such as corporations) to buy votes using public scare ads. This means that a lot of ballot measures get extremely watered down to please everyone, making them incredibly ineffective.... And often results in huge wastes of spending.

Second, incredibly strict building code and zoning laws have been hijacked by NIMBYs and Republicans to stall out construction of high density housing and increased transportation, by scaring everyone with the fear that it will lower their property values and invite undesirables (poor people) to their neighborhoods. Routinely all legislation to fix this at the state level has been stopped because Republicans still hold enough power to kill bills in process, because it's very easy to kill bills long before they reach the floor in California. Trying to keep Republicans and Democrats in particularly purple districts on board generally involves including measures meant to sabotage the bill even if it did pass.

Lastly, California has several disastrous laws that were put in place by Republicans back when they ran the state, that can only be removed by ballot measures and are widely still popular among the public. The chief culprit is 1978's prop 13, which effectively locks in commercial and residential property taxes at the rate they were evaluated at the year of purchase. This effectively is a poor and youth tax, where new property owners, who generally are young and have less wealth, take on a larger tax burden. But that's not even it's worst aspect. The biggest problem with prop 13 is that it encourages older people (in this case boomers) to not move, because buying a smaller retirement home would have a higher tax cost or because they intended to transfer their home to their children when they pass away. Kids can inherit the lower tax rate in California. This has effectively killed the natural life cycle of home ownership, and there are a lot of elderly people living in large homes that really would be better served by a young family with several kids.

What I think surprises a lot of people is that California is not as liberal as political opponents from out of state typically claim in their rhetoric. California has a lot of social liberals who are economically very conservative. People who own homes may know their property value is bloated, and they hate to see all the homelessness, but they don't want any solution that could correct THEIR property's value. It's incredibly selfish, because any real solution to address the California housing crisis is gonna lower property values. It's the whole "well, I got mine" attitude that makes people complacent.

It's also worth pointing out too, that because of California's nice weather, a lot of homeless choose to live outside or in their cars. Living in a shelter often risks giving up everything you own, and many people choose the sidewalk tent over a bed in a shelter.

That being said, I've lived in California for 6 years, and it's way nicer than where I grew up in the Midwest. Sure, I see the occasional homeless person, but I saw that too back in Indiana. What people don't realize is that Los Angeles is HUGE. The vast majority of it does not look like those videos at all.



Lived in California all my life, and while there's always been a huge homeless population, it seems to have gotten REALLY bad the past 5-10 years. The biggest culprits IMO are:

1.Gentrification
2.Drug trafficking
3.High rent
4.Inflated property values
5.High insurance premiums
6.High taxes
7.Prioritization of the entertainment industry
8.Mild weather