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Los Angeles Wasting Money on Homeless Encampment Cleanups

Los Angeles Wasting Money on Homeless Encampment Cleanups

Video has picked up rats roaming over rotting trash, which can lead to a breakout of numerous deadly diseases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM21yCBn8HI

We have followed the public health crisis is Los Angeles closely, as the homeless population explosion has led to conditions ripe for an outbreak of the disease typhus.

The area’s NBC4 Investigative Team has also covered the story, and assert that the city wastes tens of millions of dollars per year in clean-up efforts because LA’s homeless encampments quickly repopulate once cleaning ends.

Nearly 15,000 homeless encampment cleanups were conducted last year in Los Angeles, a process that begins with officers clearing people from the area before sanitation workers remove trash and other items.

The cleanups cost taxpayers millions of dollars, but some residents who live near the encampments said they are usually repopulated soon after sanitation crews are done. It’s a seemingly endless cycle that leads neighbors to ask whether there are better ways to spend that tax money.

A stretch of sidewalk tucked under the 405 Freeway in the shadow of the West Los Angeles skyline illustrates the reasons behind their frustration. At least once per week, the 40 people who call the area home are ordered out by police so city sanitation crews can get to work.

It takes hours to remove used needles, bottles of urine and piles of garbage, then powerwash the sidewalk.

But just minutes after the crews leave, the homeless encampment is re-populated and the sidewalk is once again littered with the hazardous byproducts of life on the streets.

“You’re wasting time, money, effort,” said Dylan, who lives in the homeless encampment near the 405 Freeway and Venice Boulevard.

Neighbors agree.

“It’s not a good use of our tax dollars,” said resident Roman Samiley.

The crew filmed giant rats roaming over mountains of garbage in a recent report.

Southern California’s residents should worry over the unwillingness of political leaders to make the necessary changes to address the root causes of homelessness. Furthermore, progressive politicos are in a rush to contribute to the reasons that will lead to a public health disaster.

For example, Governor Gavin Newsom indicated that the state’s disgrace is actually the nation’s in his announcement for another money-squandering task force to address the looming crisis.

Gov. Gavin Newsom called growing homelessness in California a national disgrace as he announced Tuesday that he is launching a task force to find solutions amid a housing crisis in the most populous state.

…Newsom made the announcement in Oakland, where county officials said the number of homeless people rose 43 percent over the last two years. Recent data from other counties has shown large increases, too.

As a bonus, Newsom proposed extending Medicaid to illegal immigrants, which should exacerbate the situation. Hopefully, the hospitals won’t run out of free typhus treatments.

Even more worrisome is the potential for an outbreak of diseases even worse than typhus. Cholera, typhoid, and Hepatitis A can potentially spread under these unsanitary conditions. But worse pathogens which, like typhus, can spread by rodents.

The steamship caused the last global outbreak of bubonic plague. Climate change could cause the next one.

Longer, hotter weather patterns are extending the breeding season of rats and rodents, leading to a steep increase in their numbers in places like Los Angeles, New York and Houston. Over the last decade, urban rat populations are up by 15% to 20% worldwide, thanks to a combination of climate changes and a greater preference among humans for urban living, increasing the amount of trash available for scavengers, according to estimates from Bobby Corrigan, a rodent control consultant and one of the nation’s leading rat experts.

The swelling number of rodents isn’t just an urban nuisance. More importantly, all those additional rats and squirrels can serve as hosts for fleas carrying the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis. The disease is already endemic among fleas that feast on rural squirrels in California, Arizona, Wyoming and other states. Climate change could make it possible for plague-carrying fleas to thrive in more places than they do now, bringing the disease into closer contact with humans.

The fact that the media is pre-blaming a plague outbreak on “climate change” is a potential warning signal that our politicians have no serious plan to address the lack of sanitation in our urban centers.

So, if a plague does arise, they will blame fossil fuels instead of a whole plethora of progressive policies that have led to giant rats roaming mountains of garbage.

Hopefully, there will be plenty of free antibiotics available when that particular disease strikes.

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Comments

Orange man bad

KOMO in Seattle had a documentary on Seattle dying. The illness is, of course, progressivism. The irony is that they demand so much from those that are productive and so little from those that don’t wish to. “Winning life’s lottery” or “those given much, much is required” is really the inverse.

    JusticeDelivered in reply to alaskabob. | May 23, 2019 at 12:54 pm

    An hour or so after cleanup send a fire pumper to wash down the trash. Repeat as necessary every few hours , day and night.

One of Portland’s long established AA meetings had to leave the church where they had been for 40+ years because the new minister was rightly concerned that their continued presence would encourage the movement of the homeless camps down SE12th. Free coffee and bathrooms. What could possibly go wrong?

    bear in reply to MajorWood. | May 23, 2019 at 6:38 pm

    For decades, I had to travel SE 11th and 12th avenues. The church you mention here was a haven for the bums from Burnside St., proudly proclaiming its support for the unsupportable. As you know, southeast Portland used to be the mecca for bums on the make. Now it has spread to the oh-so-chic northwest portland progressive set, who are suddenly shocked and trapped by their own stupidity and the democrat-lead sjw city government. They deserve to get everything they have encouraged.

The politicians need to stop treating homeless like children that we need to take care of.

1) Establish work farms away from cities where the homeless can live and work to earn a living.

2) Enforce vagrancy and other laws that make it impossible for homeless to live on the streets.

3) Charge rent for the homeless living in our cities and take money from their government benefits to pay for it and fines.

    Mac45 in reply to ConradCA. | May 23, 2019 at 12:23 pm

    Virtually all of the homeless population are chronic drug users. The majority of the homeless suffer from mental illnesses which make them a danger to themselves and others. And, none of them can take care of themselves.

    So, what is the Progressive answer? First, shut down all psychiatric institutions and turn people with disabling mental illness out on the streets. Then, legalize illicit drugs so that it is easier for more people to become debilitated. Next, have some liberal progressive jurist rule that people have some “right” to camp on public or private property regardless of whether sanitary facilities exist or not. And, finally, set up multi-billion dollar programs which manage to funnel 15-30% of their funding to the homeless and the rest to administrators, staff and crony vendors. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

      JusticeDelivered in reply to Mac45. | May 23, 2019 at 12:49 pm

      I think the best way to deal with druggies is to set up free drug dispensaries in locked down facilities and let them self administer all the drugs they want until nature takes its natural course.

      We cannot fix most addicts, they are self destructive and generally unsalvageable. So give them a choice, treatment or all the drugs they want.

        Why would we want to do that? We would have to construct or obtain the secure facility for the addicts. Then we would have to staff them. Then we would have to pay for the drugs. If we didn’t, the addicts, who can not earn sufficient money, legally, to maintain their habit and pay other living expenses, would have to be turned out on the streets to steal and rob to get a fix. Then they would move back into the publicly funded shooting gallery.

        If you want to do something along those lines, the easiest thing to do is to either incarcerate every person convicted three times of possession of a controlled substance to life in prison, without drugs, death or banishment from the US for life. Incarceration would cost around $45,000 a year and stimulate a huge industry. The death penalty would result in incarceration for about 5 years per inmate and voluntary deportation for life would cut that significantly. Banishment [voluntary deportation] would make our addiction problems someone else’s.

          healthguyfsu in reply to Mac45. | May 24, 2019 at 12:25 am

          Of those expenses, controlled, legal production of drugs administered in a facility are the lowest. Legal drugs are not at all expensive. The illegality and black market nature of drugs drives the price up.

          I’m not refuting that it is expensive, but I just wanted to point out that the drugs themselves are not terribly difficult to produce.

          Mac45 in reply to Mac45. | May 24, 2019 at 12:52 pm

          The drugs are not especially expensive to produce. However, if the government is buying or supplying them, the production costs are irrelevant. Remember the $100 hammers and $599 dollar toilet eats purchased by the US government? Then we have the hospitals charging $5 for an aspirin. Do you REALLY think that thee cost of drugs, administered in a government run or licensed facility are going to be CHEAP? And, exactly WHO do you think is going to pay for these drugs; the jobless homeless population?

    Mister Natural in reply to ConradCA. | May 24, 2019 at 6:04 am

    good idea.
    however it will take about a nanosecond for the lefties and their media accomplices to start calling them concentration camps

    jakebizlaw in reply to ConradCA. | May 24, 2019 at 10:51 am

    These are constructive suggestions. There seems to be very few solutions to homelessness offered by conservative and libertarian thinkers, unfortunately . (As an aside, I read a news article in Ireland where I am visiting that aptly terms it “rough sleeping”.)

      Mac45 in reply to jakebizlaw. | May 24, 2019 at 1:02 pm

      Libertarian thinker is an oxymoron. A true libertarian ideal is the total freedom of the individual from government control. Libertarian philosophy assumes that people will naturally behave in a responsible manner.

      Conservative solutions have never changed. They involve establishing reason rules for behavior within society, enforcing those rules and incarcerating those who refuse to live by those rules or who are mentally incapable of doing so.

      Homelessness became a problem due to pie-in-the-sky liberal Progressive ideas. The libs released the mentally ill into society and shut down the mental hospitals and institutions. The libe refuse to enforce the laws against vagrancy, offensive public acts [such as urination, defecation and sexual intercourse], public health violations, use of illicit drugs, theft, etc. The libs want someone else to fix the problem that they created, but they refuse to accept any solutions other than those which they propose.

      No, conservatives have solutions to the problem of homelessness. The libs, who created the problem simply do not want to hear them.

Don’t worry about it. mandatory vaccinations for all will take care of the problem.

Bitterlyclinging | May 23, 2019 at 1:24 pm

Weren’t rats one of the vectors in the Bubonic Plague?
What better way to join Mohammed’s adherents back in the Seventh Century than to have 1/2 your population or more wiped out by the Black Death.
Thank you, Democrats, for working so assiduously importing the country you want.

For the past few years I have followed a working terrier group online. They advocate using terriers, not poison, to eradicate rodents. Fascinating to learn about how efficiently working terriers are about killing rats. Articles have been posted in the group about the increase in rats in the Seattle, Portland and SF Bay Area over the last two years. Funny how it follows the increase of the homeless in those same areas. Must be just a coincidence.

    Subotai Bahadur in reply to B Buchanan. | May 23, 2019 at 5:23 pm

    It would work except for one thing. To many of the homeless, the terriers would be meat on the hoof.

    Subotai Bahadur

    bear in reply to B Buchanan. | May 23, 2019 at 6:45 pm

    Mr. B., the problem only starts with the rat population. During the 1300s, iirc, officials tried to end the plague by killing the rats. Unfortunately, the main vector for the plague was the fleas, which then sought other hosts (humans), making the death toll even higher.

    dunce1239 in reply to B Buchanan. | May 23, 2019 at 7:49 pm

    Terriers are very efficient rat killers and rats are very efficient at reproduction. Terriers are also very nice pets that are not big enough to kill children or adults.I have never read anything about rat reproduction rates but it is doubtless very high.

inspectorudy | May 23, 2019 at 5:15 pm

This is the same crowd that tells us how we should live! They KNOW that allowing millions of illegals into our country is the RIGHT thing to do! They know that killing a baby that is out of the womb and that has survived an attempted abortion should be murdered! They have the moral high ground, in their demented minds, to tell us that we are deplorables because we voted for Trump. Yet, they cannot run one single large city! Go ahead and try to pick one that is run by Dims and show me it is being run properly. San Francisco, Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angles, Detroit, Seattle, Newark, Boston, and last but not least NYC. There are more but for some reason no one mentions that they are all failed cities.

Subotai Bahadur | May 23, 2019 at 5:34 pm

Someone with an evil turn of mind, and access to rodents [dead or alive] infected with Yersinia pestis could leave some in those trash piles and start a real fecal whirlwind. And yes, the plague is endemic in a large part of the country and only kept in check with public health and sanitation methods that are being deliberately ignored in LA. It would not be that hard. And even if someone does not introduce it deliberately, the demographics mean that it will come eventually.

You would think that what passes for city government would be thinking of personal risk reduction, politically and epidemiologically. Typhus has already turned up in City Hall itself.

Felony stupid.

Subotai Bahadur

    healthguyfsu in reply to Subotai Bahadur. | May 24, 2019 at 12:28 am

    At present, Y. pestis can be treated effectively with antibiotics. It was so deadly in the middle ages because of lack of medical advance.

    On the other hand, if we want to create an antibiotic resistant superbug version, this would be the way to try and cultivate it in the wild.

Los Angeles, come for the weather, stay for the Hepatitis and Cholera.