This article was originally published by Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse Blog.
Once upon a time, some of the most beautiful cities in the entire world were on the west coast, but now those same cities are degenerating into drug-infested cesspools of filth and garbage right in front of our eyes. San Francisco is known as the epicenter for our tech industry, and Los Angeles produces more entertainment than anyone else in the world, and yet both cities are making headlines all over the world for other reasons these days.
Right now, nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless population lives in the state of California, and more are arriving with each passing day. When you walk the streets of San Francisco or Los Angeles, you can’t help but notice the open air drug markets, the giant mountains of trash, and the discarded needles and piles of human feces that are seemingly everywhere. If this is what things look like when the U.S. economy is still relatively stable, how bad are things going to get when the economy tanks?
In San Francisco, the homeless population has grown by 17 percent since 2017, and when a UN official recently walked the streets she was absolutely horrified by what she witnessed…
When Leilani Farha paid a visit to San Francisco in January, she knew the grim reputation of the city’s homeless encampments. In her four years as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing, Farha has visited the slums of Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Jakarta, and Manila. The crisis in San Francisco, she said, is comparable to these conditions.
I have never been to Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Jakarta, or Manila, and so I will just have to take her word for what the conditions are like there.
But how can this be happening in one of the wealthiest cities in the entire country?
Sadly, to a large degree, San Francisco has done this to itself. Every single day drugs are openly bought and sold at “an outdoor market of sorts” right in the heart of the city, and authorities know exactly where it is happening…
To drill down on the epicenter of the crisis, a recent New York Times inquiry set out to find the dirtiest block in San Francisco. After asking statisticians to compile a list of streets with the most neighborhood complaints regarding sidewalk cleanliness, the Times landed on a winner: Hyde Street’s 300 block, which received more than 2,200 complaints over the last decade.
A visit to the block yields a harrowing sight of drug addicts and mentally ill residents, many of whom are part of the city’s overwhelmingly large homeless population. During the day, drug users host an outdoor market of sorts, selling heroin, crack cocaine, and amphetamines along the sidewalks.
They could shut down the drug dealing if they really wanted to do so.
And anywhere the illegal drug trade is thriving, you are also going to have a lot of property crime. At this point, no city in America has a higher rate of property crime than San Francisco does…
San Francisco is the nation’s leader in property crime. Burglary, larceny, shoplifting, and vandalism are included under this ugly umbrella. The rate of car break-ins is particularly striking: in 2017 over 30,000 reports were filed, and the current average is 51 per day. Other low-level offenses, including drug dealing, street harassment, encampments, indecent exposure, public intoxication, simple assault, and disorderly conduct are also rampant.
Meanwhile, things are not much better in Los Angeles. In fact, many would argue that L.A. is in even worse condition.
The homeless population in the city has risen 16 percent since last year, and it is taking over neighborhood after neighborhood. Los Angeles was once one of the most beautiful cities in the entire world, but now it is rapidly being transformed into a hellhole…
If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks, he would have been considered unhinged. After all, the city that gave us the modern freeway system is not supposed to resemble Justinian’s sixth-century Constantinople. Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse. Hygienists warn that permissive municipal governments are setting the stage — through spiking populations of history’s banes of fleas, lice, and rats — for possible dark-age outbreaks of plague or worse.
Skid Row is the epicenter of the homeless problem in L.A., and I highly recommend that you do not go down there to check it out for yourself.
It is hard to believe that people are actually living this way in America in 2019. This is what one reporter witnessed during his visit to the neighborhood…
If you want to know how bad the homelessness crisis has gotten in California, just turn to 4 squares miles east of Main Street in downtown Los Angeles. The area, known as Skid Row, has long been inhabited by the city’s poorest residents. These days it resembles something akin to a nightmare.
Residents sleep in tents surrounded by discarded needles and feces, their belongings tucked into trash bags and shopping carts. Some shade themselves with tarps or use nearby light poles to connect to power. Others have contracted typhus from rats scurrying across the sidewalk. One resident was even found bathing in the water from a broken fire hydrant.
This is where the rest of the country is headed if we are not very careful. Bad policies have bad consequences, and our leaders have been taking us in the wrong direction for a very long time.
And instead of getting to the root of our problems, most of our politicians seem to think that engaging in bizarre social experiments will somehow solve our problems.
For example, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is convinced that we can solve the homeless problem by building tiny housing units in the backyards of private homeowners…
As part of this mission, the city is pursuing a pilot program, made possible by a $1 million Bloomberg Philanthropies grant, that would help homeowners install backyard units on their properties. In exchange for a $10,000 to $30,000 stipend, homeowners would be able to charge a small rent to homeless tenants, who would pay their share through vouchers or their own income. The city also plans to institute a matchmaking process that pairs owners and tenants.
“Our homeless crisis demands that we get creative,” the mayor said. If the backyard pilot works, he added, the idea could be adopted anywhere.
So if you live in Los Angeles, soon you will be able to bring the needles and piles of human feces from Skid Row into your own backyard.
Meanwhile, homeless people keep dropping dead night after night in Los Angeles. Just check out these staggering numbers…
A record number of homeless people — 918 last year alone — are dying across Los Angeles County, on bus benches, hillsides, railroad tracks and sidewalks.
Deaths have jumped 76% in the past five years, outpacing the growth of the homeless population, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of the coroner’s data.
Year after year, this homelessness crisis is only getting worse.
The fabric of our society is literally coming apart right in front of our eyes, and we can all see what is happening, and yet our leaders seem absolutely powerless to fix it.
If we continue on this trajectory, what is our nation going to look like in a few years?
Just something to think about…
Michael Snyder is the author of the book Get Prepared Now!: Why A Great Crisis Is Coming & How You Can Survive It
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it’d bring great joy to me to hear Pelosi was sentenced to having to tongue-wash the sidewalks of SF
And with unrestricted immigration (invasion) every city and town in the US is destined for the same fate. The collapse is upon us. Now you know how the Romans felt. It gets worse. Much worse.
And leftist politicians are proud of this too. One of the democratic socialist is just vying to bring this to all of America.
Do yourself a big favor next year and be sure to vote for sanity.
California politicians should focus on improving conditions where they are and stay out of national issues. They were elected to do a job by their constituents and to not use their offices to get into national government.
“In exchange for a $10,000 to $30,000 stipend, homeowners would be able to charge a small rent to homeless tenants, who would pay their share through vouchers or their own income. The city also plans to institute a matchmaking process that pairs owners and tenants.”
“Rural tenancy —
Rural tenancy refers to a type of sharecropping or tenancy arrangement that a landowner can use to make full use of property he may not otherwise be able to develop properly. A “tenant” or non-landowner will take residency on the property of the landowner and work the land in exchange for giving the landowner a percentage of the profits from the eventual crop.”
There is generally some kind of menial labor and emotional abuse, under the crisis housing grant, already — basically amounting to idealized portrayals of what was called slavery, in this country, in which black people liked to be slaves.
In the (fictional) ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, when the albatross is put around his neck, the leadership was supposed to discipline the workers, morally, under workhouse labor conditions.
In general, there is no chance of earning your freedom, in the rate of pay or kind of work involved.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism
Apple orchards often require severe pruning in order to save the trees.
The invasion never ends.
Sometimes the orchard is so infested with disease that the entire orchard must be cut down and plowed under. I think we are there.
h ttp://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/pruning-peasants-private-war-and-maintaining-the-lords-peace-in-late-medieval-germany/
This is what happens when “Progressives” get control of state and local governments. For every working, tax-paying American citizen, this is the wake-up call of all wake-up calls. The only problem is that the true nature of these horrific situations is very much under-reported by the leftist MSM.
Sooner, rather than later, Atlas will shrug. The Kalifornia Soviet Republic, for example, wasted billions of tax dollars on a ridiculous “light rail” system which went nowhere. While the Cosmic White and Latino/Latina Marxists in Sacto continue to fiddle, their Rome is burning to the ground. Working families are leaving the state in droves.
The same is true here in Northern Idaho, which is seeing an influx of WA expatriates from the disintegrating Blue Hive called Seattle. These Red-diaper-doper babies will reap what they have sown. For those of you still trapped behind enemy lines, I hope and pray you have a plan to survive.
I have seen a dozen or so braceros, tossing small armloads split firewood, onto the teeny, flatbed of a nursery business’ golfcart, mostly hitting the ground, and wayward women, aged in dog years from their drug abuse, almost before the age of majority. I have seen handicapped with a short arm, wild eyes, and conspicuous speech impediments, doing the work.
Should they be given literal work to do, or money to spend, or where should they end up.
Short of electing these same people into high office, Democrats have the answer for where universal basic income would be spent.
If the stipends run out, and these same people have to feed themselves, they will finally be subject to objective morality.
You are, here, reading about practical things and planning. I’m telling you, the 99% are not made that way.
How can anybody call the media leftist when they fully support the endless war machine across the board. They also support predatory capitalism producing the ever higher cost of living. Homelessness will continue to explode nationwide because media and government do not care.
I just read an article quoting from the Israel Times, claims that the so-called “‘white’ supremacist”, James Fields that is infamous for his having run his car into a crowd, precipitating the death by heart attack of one Heather Heyer, is the son of a woman whose maiden name is Bloom; who is, according to the Times of Israel, one of their own, making her son one of them.
Oddly, supposedly, James Fields grandfather, identified by the Israel Times as one of them, murdered his wife, James Fields’ grandmother.
I couldn’t help notice the similarity between the names Bloomberg and Bloom.
Charlottesville is a very weird situation. The claims that a helicopter went down earlier in the day are suspicious, as are the incident with the car and the reports of the death of Heather by heart attack.
I didn’t believe that this was a hoax but I am wondering if it is a false flag.
Many people who were there have been given extremely long sentences for relatively minor infractions. I’m thinking that the whole thing was a setup. White people demonstrating to keep a statue of an American historical figure; has been turned into a something entirely different than what it really was. And the incident with Fields is what has legitimized hatred and vengeance toward the marchers whom were simply acting in accordance with the freedom to assembly guaranteed by the Constitution, and marching peacefully expressing their beliefs. All of which is protected under the Constitution and the laws of the USA.
.
If that’s how San Franciscans choose to live, fine. I have no right to tell them how to live and they have no right to tell me how to live.
If we truly believe in Liberty, why are we making so much of this?
The problem is that this filth and cancer will spread and ultimately ruin what is left of this sinking ship.
Montana, I don’t think that those people are regular San Franciscans. Most homeless are drug addicts, and/or mentally ill people. That’s why they aren’t in shelters. The shelters do not tolerate bad behavior. The government doesn’t want to pay for the incarceration of these folks. When they get arrested, the police take them to an emergency room. The hospital will only hold them for 72 hours, then they release them back onto the street. What we’re looking at there, is a very large, open air staging area for the mentally ill.
I have some personal observations.
I grew up in SE Los Angeles county.
I’m very familiar with Los Angeles,
Seattle, San Francisco, Portland
and other west coast cities due to
family, personal, and professional ties.
The whole problem is simple,
it is called Democrats.
Until we get rid of Democrats, it will
only get worse.
The reason these cities have degraded
so much is that people like me
abandoned them.
I’m quite certain that all major cities in America
will meet the same fate.
Get out while you can.
We live outside of a small Southern town and we are seeing an increase in homelessness as well. We feed 140+ families every two weeks at our church and are now running out of food because 170+ are showing up. This is summer in Florida and usually the homeless bums go north to Yankee land fur Hurricane season.
Watch out fur dem hogs, gators, and hurry-canes!
Seminole,
No good deed will go un-punished…
All wild beasts will gather in increasing numbers for a free feed.
Just ask Yogi and BooBoo
A good serve of personal responsibility would go a long way in teaching a man to fish.
I am confused about something:
“Deaths have jumped 76% in the past five years, outpacing the growth of the homeless population, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of the coroner’s data.”
If the death rate is outpacing “the growth” of the homeless population, why is the homeless population increasing?
Kosh; because of freebies! No work required…
New title for an old song; “I left my heart in San Francisco = I left my poop in San Francisco” . WHO KNEW?
The kindest thing you can do is put some fentynal into a water bottle and distribute it to the homeless. A quiet death high on opioids is the best we can do now.
For the women under 40, force them to shower and excercise and earn their keep in the sex industry.
America has become soft and ALL these people would have their asses kicked in most countries around the world. Hell, in a lot of places local kids would just set them on fire or kick the crap out of them.
Thank to the DemoRatic Party we have a socialist utopia in California.
California was never the same after the “hippie movement”.
Florida is the east coast California.
The smart one used the broken fire hydrant to take a bath.
I am pleased by the decline in the quality of life in the People’s Republic of Kalifornia. I wish I could find a way to accelerate it. It will take a complete economic disaster for the dimwitted leftists in that state to finally see and acknowledge that their ridiculous ideology is to blame. Only then will there be hope of any turn around.
With the massive influx of Third World refugees metastasizing across our southern border and the exponential growth of the homeless living in squalor, can an American pandemic be very far behind?