Los Angeles – scenes from the collapse of a city that’s lost control
latimes.com
latimes.com
This is just rooting for your favorite team and it doesn't illuminate what policies work or don't work.
A better way would be to survey the cities of the world, measure crime and homelessness, and systematically identify the policies that consistently deliver better results.
Opposition to laws and policies that set boundaries on the behaviour of drug addicts, like anti-vagrancy laws and forced rebab, comes only from Democrats.
Empowering public sector unions that make public servants less accountable and government less effective is promoted primarily by Democrats.
The creation of clusters of social housing that creates crime-ridden neighbourhoods that perpetuate anti-social and lawless behaviour, as well as government dependency, is done exclusively by registered Democrats.
Look at major cities with severe trash/homelessness problems, and how many of them are run by Democrats. In the short-term, a lot of Democrat policies help the people they set out to help. In the long run, they create government dependency and ghettos, and that harms far more people.
If you want law and order, Republicans are the party to vote for. The longer this reality is denied for political correctness reasons, the stronger the populist right-wing political backlash will be when it comes.
On the other hand, there are many big cities where Democrats think they will never lose to Republicans, and in some cases (e.g. Chicago) they're right. So there is less of a check on their power.
So, the better comparison to Democrats running a big city, would be Republicans running a state where Democrats haven't won state-wide elections in a long time.
That's how Republican candidates can lose the popular vote yet win the electoral college. I see no sign of the Democrats playing catch-up for 2020 and I think they are in for a rude awakening despite our current leader's seemingly low numbers because that guy brings out his base.
Which, given the Democrats urban emphasis, means it is biased against them, not as an accident or via a loophole, but by original design. I don't know that the Republicans deserve a lot of credit for seeing this, it was no secret, it was the original stated intention of giving each state 2 senators, and making electoral college votes equal senators plus representatives.
One does have to ask, though, why the Democrats have resolutely refused to acknowledge that this is how the electoral college works, and pay more attention to winning in rural and small states.
Nailed it. I lost almost all respect for Hillary Clinton when she refused to campaign there whilst Trump, all of my dislike for him and his ideology aside, campaigned there and truly earned every vote he got. Doubly so when her own husband, all of his failings aside someone insanely great on the campaign trail himself, urged her to do so.
This is just rooting for your favorite team...
I can attest to this. Long time ago, I lived in Minneapolis for a while and thought the place got worked over by liberals. Now I live in small town Wisconsin, and we got bent over by conservatives so bad that we're a regular feature in the national news and the butt of late night comedy jokes.
I was foolish when I was younger, and thought the liberal-conservative thing made a difference in politicians. It doesn't. You can get reamed by either one. In fact, you're most likely to get reamed when you're thinking in terms of the liberal-conservative dichotomy.
At least, that's been my experience. Your mileage may vary I guess.
Guess which party was in favor of it, and which was against it. This happened recently, within your living memory.
Supposedly liberal California overturned the courts ruling on this issue with prop 8 in 2008.
I think Republicans, being conservatives, definitely took longer to move on this issue than Democrats, but I think this is an area where the country as a whole shifted a lot over the recent past.
What is funny (at least to me) though is the huge peak in activity on Grindr during republican conventions. To be fair, the republicans as a group are way better on nuclear power despite denying climate change.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9aeen8/cleveland-was-bomb...
It's very clear that the modern Democratic party overall was in favor of legalizing gay marriage and that the modern Republican party overall was against it. And that, to this day, Democrats are still much better on LGBT issues than Republicans.
Once the tide turns (on almost any issue) both parties are pretty similar. It went that way with Civil Rights (when LBJ embraced it) and seems to be that way with gay issues today. Just this week President Trump tweeted a pro-gay message.
I think this one is over. There's not a big difference in what the parties are offering, as far as I can tell. It's not a big platform issue for either side.
Ye shall know them by their fruits: https://mobile.twitter.com/cmclymer/status/11345548023299153...
Make no mistake - LGBT rights are under direct attack by the Trump administration. We are likely to see major setbacks in the near future under the guise of “religious freedom.”
Take it from someone with a vested interest in the subject (I’m quite gay): this one isn’t over.
This one isn't over, unfortunately. Many Republican elected officials are still very hostile to LGBT rights, including continued pushes to discriminate against transgender people. Sexual orientation and gender identity are NOT protected classes in most states, and many Republicans are calling to protect discrimination against LGBT individuals under the guise of freedom of religion.
The gay people I know are very afraid of what today's Republicans are doing. It's simply not true that it's over.
What LA needs to do is setup cameras in those areas with license plate readers. Also LA has also always had a problem with illegal dumping. Maybe offer a tip line as well with cash rewards.
Cruise through the comments on this thread to see this "natural reflex" on display.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/...
There's no way to fix housing sufficiently to make it affordable to someone dealing with mental illness and living on the street: that problem has to be addressed separately, and directly.
People who live on the streets are more likely to become sick or traumatized, and sick people are more likely to recover if they've got somewhere safe and warm to sleep. It's not as simple as a single root cause.
I still don’t know what the solution is to address the mental health aspect of homelessness. It’s disturbing seeing disheveled people scream at the top of their lungs in the middle of FiDi after work and no one batting an eye.
You can drive north for nearly 8 hours from San Diego and still be in the state. You’ll go from inner city to cow pastures and onion fields and back again.
The City of Los Angeles doesn't have a composting program?
And in this case, the reason you'd illegally dump is because it's free, whereas commercial trash collection and composting services aren't (which is generally true in most cities).
California should be our wake up call to change, instead, we double down on the same policies.
To start with, any policy affecting a population that can move and be moved has to operate at the scope that those people are allowed to move. That means the taxing and funding distribution HAS to be on a national level. It probably also means that per-recipient funding needs to be proportional to the cost of living in a given area. (which SHOULD also be calculated realistically.)
This would at least stop "poor" communities from dumping a national problem on bigger cities that try to be more kind. It would also encourage longer term solutions over broken window / temporary bandaids.
It would also need to be systemic. There are a number of failures in society contributing to the issue.
* Single payer healthcare - everyone's covered.
* Actual mental healthcare (not just asylums)
* Everyone is a worthy being
* New New Deal - A job for all, with meaning and value.
* Identify and correct market failures.
And this came to a boiling point when a Chinese friend insisted the homeless situation was better in China. So I looked up the numbers. Adjusted for population, it isn't, and in fact it's slightly worse. That was a surprise to me. But it's less visible there because it's considered shameful.
I personally think everyone deserves a fully belly and a roof over their head. I think the rest is up to them. And I could go with medicare for all as an improvement over the current inequitable situation, but I think we could do better than that, yet I doubt we ever will. And that saddens me.
I can only see two that are well within the range that might be covered if all the other safety nets fixed individuals that had become injured or otherwise unable to work (this is assuming we have MUCH better tech, like Star Trek / Orville level tech, to actually repair all types of damage).
Housing: This is more a choice made by the irrational market, not so much by individual humans. Yes there is less expensive housing, but it's usually not located near jobs or has a high externality / transaction cost of somekind. Referencing the source article, Japan does have a fantastically run transit system that is also reasonably priced. That does extend the range of available locations.
Jobs themselves; do you think that job placement systems are not a better idea instead of being "hired" to "look" for a job (which should not be ANYONE's primary life skill!)? If an aptitude test shows that there is untrained area that skill could be acquired in, getting that skill might be the assigned 'job' instead. (retraining/education)
I don't tell people what to do with their lives and the thought of a well-intentioned bureaucracy doing so doesn't thrill me (perhaps from being placed in all the slow classes against my will as a child I am biased here). I like the free market for jobs. Empower people to make their own choices. Give them free community college even. But let them make their own minds up.
California could turn a lot of its secondary cities into job markets as well as suburbs for the major cities if they could build cost-effective mass transit. It seems incapable of getting that job done though so it seems like the only alternative is remote work, and without a cultural shift, that is piecemeal solution. Also look at what happened to SB50, shot down by effectively friendly fire from NIMBYs, not the conservatives.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/california-sb50...
The problem is that California, at all levels of government, refuses to fix its core issue: Housing, and the cost of living at a level to hold onto that house, is Too High. Ever notice how California is willing to try anything and everything to fix its homelessness crisis except intervene in the housing market in a meaningful way? In my view, California’s legislation in its current state is a band-aid, not a cure. But a band-aid is (temporarily) better than nothing.
Ultimately the free market (* I’ll concede an argument may be made that housing is not a truly free market, since municipalities have created strict zoning legislation to favor homeowners, but my point still stands), directly and indirectly, has failed everyone looking to build a permanent home and life in California (unless your definition of “success” includes a large population unable to afford a home where they live).
I’d imagine that without these “social programs, socialism, ... social justice policy” there would be many more homeless people than there currently are.
Housing, and the cost of living at a level to hold onto that house, is Too High
Merced OTOH is probably more of what you're thinking, and it has some really nice houses priced competitively with the suburbs of Dallas, but other than a new UC campus, there's not much else to recommend the place and it has a huge meth issue. But I do think the future of California is in places like this (and there are many more), but I have no idea how to make that future happen.