I'm very liberal on 95% of issues, but if there is one issue I lean conservative it's homelessness. I want them to get the help they need, I support programs to help them, but I do not want to see a homeless encampment s take over public parks or other areas. I don't want the trash and safety issues near where I live and near my family.
I know this will get me dumped on my the ultra leftists here, but I didn't think my feelings are unreasonable.
my unpopular opinion: homeless encampments in the US are a result of housing becoming unaffordable.
I'm not saying most people ended up in tent cities because they couldn't afford rent. usually people will sleep in their cars, find a spot in a shelter if one's available, crash with relatives etc. at least here (Seattle) most of those who live in big tent cities are homeless because of mental illness: drug addiction and/or psychosis.
but serious addiction isn't new. where did addicts live in the '80s? crack houses! before real estate turned into gold, there was plenty of mold-infested, aabestos-ridden, lead-painted substandard housing left abandoned or rented cheaply by slumlords. junkies could sleep there.
now, most of those buildings have been torn down and luxury condos rebuilt in their place, at least in the big cities.
I'm not pro-crack den. the old buildings were health hazards. but junkies can't afford the upscale housing that replaced them. they can barely afford tents.
I’m in Little Rock, Arkansas, which has plenty of vacant properties and plenty of homeless, they don’t cancel each other out anymore but it’s because homeowners are terrified of homeless people so they police neighborhoods and call that shit in. As well they should, we have fires all the time around me because of them.
Title is a bit missleading. He's also setting out $3billion for homeless facilities. Better than nothing, he'll probably criminalize homelessness even more than it already is at the same time.
I doubt the $3 billion will do much to reverse the damage California has done with their prison machine, cost of living crisis, and under funded public services. Unless they address the underlying issues the problems are not going to go away.
Yeah that $3 billion won't do squat. California spent $24 billion over a five year period and didn't track any of the money, how it was spent, or the outcomes. It's a safe bet that most of the money went to contractors charging extortionate fees for services while providing almost nothing in return, and probably quite a bit landing in the pockets of local politicians. It was basically a big scam to further enrich a bunch of greedy parasites. A few low-level idiots were charged with fraud and embezzlement of like $400k, but that doesn't even scratch the surface of corruption involved in that whole scheme.
Siebel Newsom was registered as a Republican until 2008, before re-registering as No Party Preference. Prior to registering as an independent voter, she accidentally registered with the far-right American Independent Party, before correcting her party to "decline to state".
I came here to say this sounds like something Trump or DeSantis would do. Disappointing it is Newsome. We need leaders with solutions, not bigger prisons. (I'm not sure what I would do, but I'm also not the Gov of California hoping to be in the Dem shortlist in 2028).
I mean, they've been trying other solutions and they obviously haven't been working.
Citizens don't like living near these and this issue is rallying people to the right.
I get that banning and sweeping sucks and is just moving people around, but if that ends up moving people from a highly visible area to a less visible area then it can go a long way for local businesses and tourism.
I don't think the first part is true but unfortunately I agree on the second part.
The west Coast in general has been struggling with this for a while and the compassionate approach hasn't shown the promised results.
Maybe it technically is, but visible homelessness is what gets people elected.
The solution is so simple. Its two pronged. Get them a place to live. Help them with their problems. Its what happened in this country until a republican took apart the system that was designed to do that. It had its problems but the solution shouldn't have been the abandonment of the national mental health system. This homeless problem is 100 percent tied directly to the utter failure of all politicians who ever supported cuts to the mental health system.
The reason they do it is also simple. They are terrified that everyone will know how bad they are on the inside. Not realizing that most of us already know.
Efficiency and progress is ours once more
Now that we have the neutron bomb
It's nice and quick and clean and gets things done
Away with excess enemy
With no less value to property
No sense in war but perfect sense at home...
Crazy how California is speed-running a transition from liberal to left to Authoritarian almost as fast as the Federal government is transitioning from conservative to right to Fascism.
Newsom was always a slimy neolib. He was just the lesser evil. The same story plays out constantly all over the US thanks to our broken two-right-wing-parties system, in which both parties are owned and operated by self-serving billionaires.
Not going to happen. Not because the conservative Democrats won't be able to hoodwink enough primary voters to believe the highest priority is accommodating what they think their shittiest neighbor could (but will not) tolerate, but because in doing so they'll lose the voters they actually need to win and Don Jr. will ascend to the throne.
It's just so weird that people of a certain mindset and philosophy would praise something they approved of in line with that mindset and condemn something they didn't in line with that mindset.