This summer, Fox News‘ Barnini Chakraborty embarked on an ambitious project to chronicle the crisis in four West Coast cities; Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.
“In each city, we saw a lack of safety, sanitation, and civility,” writes Chakraborty. “Residents, the homeless and advocates say they’ve lost faith in their elected officials’ ability to solve the issue. Most of the cities have thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem only to watch it get worse.”
The wealthy in many of these areas epitomize the wealth disparity Progressives claim they want to fix as they drive around in their luxury cars in their $2,000 suits.
THE INVESTIGATION
Two investigators looked into the Bay Area’s three largest cities to determine what happens to the millions of dollars trying to house homeless people. What they found was that most of the money does NOT funnel down to programs and services that get people off the streets.
In San Jose, the city spent $14 million on homelessness and $12 million of it went toward rental subsidies, administrative costs, and crafting plans for new affordable housing developments.
The remaining $2 million went toward running homeless shelters and providing clothing, food, and medical care to people without a home.
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In Oakland, nearly $24 million is set aside in the annual budget for homelessness issues, but only $4 million goes directly to help people living on the streets get into permanent housing.
The report says there are more than 4,000 people living on the streets of Oakland, roughly 6,000 people homeless in San Jose, and about 8,000 homeless individuals in San Francisco.
If the money went directly to the suffering people, most or all would likely be housed and fed. The government could just send them a check, eliminate the bureaucratic middlemen, and the results would likely be better.
IT’S THE BUSINESS OF THE WELL-MEANING LEFT
If the government forces this issue with these ‘caring’ middlemen, you would see them raise their costs and expenses to secure more government funding. It’s a business, after all.
Some use it for political purposes. For example, out here on Long Island, when we walked around with ballots, we found the people running some of the groups getting the homeless and drug-addicted to fill out voter absentee forms.
In May, new data revealed that homelessness in San Francisco had jumped 17% since 2017, but it’s actually 30%. They changed the definition of homelessness and used the federal one instead of their own which brought the reported increase down. That is one way to get the numbers down.
Progressive policies create or add to the problem with the best of intentions in many cases.
Proposition 47, for example, is a self-inflicted wound anyone could have predicted.
Supported by the California Democratic Party and championed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the referendum was passed by a wide margin in 2014. They reduced certain so-called non-violent felonies to misdemeanors in order to free up resources for cops and prosecutors to go after serious, violent offenders. This included downgrading fraud, forgery, shoplifting, and grand theft as long as the total value of the stolen property was less than $950.
It also included illegal drugs.
The area became a magnet for drug addicts and petty thieves.
Then there are the medieval diseases making a comeback.
Thank the big government and the welfare businesses they support.
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