L.A. Mayor Garcetti Blames House Prices for Exodus, Ignores Crime and Mandates
Politicians never accept reality.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti blamed high housing costs for losing 160,000 residents during 12 months through July 1.
Garcetti never mentioned crime, COVID mandates, cost of living, homelessness, etc:
LA County lost 160,000 residents during the 12 months through July 1, the biggest population drop of any U.S. county, according to a U.S. Census report released last week. That accounted for almost two-thirds of the declines in California, the most populous state.
“You don’t have to be indigent, you don’t have to be homeless to feel that it costs a lot,” Garcetti said during an interview Friday at LA’s city hall. “If you ask me the question, what are the top three issues facing Los Angeles or California, I’d say in this order: housing, housing and housing.”
U.S. coastal cities saw the biggest decreases in residents during the pandemic. Aside from the cost of living, factors contributing to the urban exodus ranged from strict lockdown rules to high taxes and safety fears, including rising crime rates. A lower birth rate, slower foreign immigration and increased deaths also played a role.
LA County has 9.8 million people, making it the most populous county in America. Los Angeles has 4 million residents.
Homelessness has spiked in Los Angeles. It went from 23,000 in 2013 to 41,290 in 2020. It has spread to tourist spots, too.
A single-family home in the county costs around $773,490 in February. The median price is up 84% since Garcetti became mayor.
The Los Angeles Times tried to water down the rise in crime in LA because “violent crime is nowhere near its peak of the 1990s.”
Um, okay. It doesn’t change the fact that crime is up:
Homicides in Los Angeles hit 397 in 2021, the most in more than a decade and a 50% increase from 2019 — but well short of the 1,000 deaths reached during years in the 1990s.
LAPD Chief Michel Moore told the civilian Police Commission on Tuesday that robberies involving firearms were up 57% from 2020 and 60% from 2019 — with hundreds more incidents so far this year than last.
Through the middle of March, property crime was up more than 5% over last year, with car thefts again a major concern. Compared to this point in 2020, vehicle thefts are up nearly 44%.
In February, the Public Policy Institute of California found that “34% of Californians see violence and street crime in their local community as a ‘big problem.'” This is a record number and up 10 points from last year.
The survey also showed that 41% “view crime as a major worry, the highest in any region of the state.”
The Los Angeles Police Department even advised people not to wear expensive jewelry in public: “Over the last year there has been a marked increase of armed robberies involving victims wearing expensive jewelry while in public. If it is visible, it can be a target.”
Los Angeles has been the homeless capital of America since 1984. The city has spent billions to combat the problem, but you would never tell. Angelenos approved a $1.2 billion bond to create 10,000 housing units for the homeless. It’s been hampered by slowness and…rising costs:
Roughly 58 percent of the projects approved by the city are under construction, and nearly a third are in predevelopment stages.
Yet, construction costs are getting more expensive as the years drag on, endangering the lives of more than 40,000 people who remain homeless, the city controller found. The most expensive project, currently in predevelopment, will cost $837,000 per unit to build, while the average per-unit cost has grown from $531,000 in 2020 to $596,846 in 2021.
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Comments
“If you ask me the question, what are the top three issues facing Los Angeles or California, I’d say in this order: housing, housing and housing.”
He should run for mayor. If he became mayor maybe he could do something about it.
Hmmm. So, less people competing for housing drives housing costs up? What reality do these people live in?
Unfortunately the big venture capitalists have bought most of the real estate up amd aren’t selling it
It’s part of the reset…
Even in my rural area they are buying everything they can and driving housing costs through the roof.
It’s far worse than what is being reported.
The guy who shot the cop up in Everett Wa had 50 arrests.
I started digging into my own area and found that it takes getting CAUGHT for car theft 5 times before they will ever see the inside of a jail cell.
This is the heavy stuff. Take the lighter blight like perpetually driving drunk and w/out insurance and hitting people again and again- those turds will NEVER be held accountable and they are like fleas jumping around on the beach on a sunny day. Had a customer get hit by one of those people and she’s got neck injuries bugging her a year later.
If no one is there housing would be cheap.
My list is: Gascon, Garcetti, and Democrats.
Put your chits in the people’s choice jars before 4 PM, please.
No list would be complete without Newsom
Well, this list is for LA county. There are a lot of sane counties in CA where Newsom and the Sacramento Boys are pretty much the entire list.
Or, the hat in the Orderly Room. Some veterans will catch my drift.
Welcome to nimbyville
why don’t they just buy up a bunch of travel trailers and make them a homeless campground, they can easily make 20 ft ocean containers into low cost apartments, they can even be stacked on top of each other at a much lower price per unit.
Trailers? Way too good for the homeless.
Don’t know if you missed this news from before COVID, but due to the insane cost of housing in California, tech yuppies were buying RVs, parking them on the streets around Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. HQs, living in them, and commuting back and forth to work.
And now that COVID has ruined airline travel and cruises, you’re lucky to find an affordable RV for love or money
Yes, that is why people like Ben Shapiro moved out of LA after living there his entire life.
The rich people are moving out. While the high price of housing is part of the problem since those people are paying more in taxes than the mortgage would be in my area. It is that the bad neighborhoods issues are spilling out into the good neighborhoods and you are not even allowed to complain out loud about it.
You will own nothing and you will be happy
Umm, can I demonstrate how rent and price controls create shortages? And shortages create higher prices?
“We’re going to create affordable housing,” sez mental giant AOC. Later mental giant AOC sez “How come no one is building affordable housing?”
Until my dying day, I will be astounded by the fact that AOC got her degree in economics.
My grandson knows more about economics than she does, and he still wears Underoos.
Since when have college professors been courageous?
https://www.nytimes.com/1951/06/21/archives/college-instructors-afraid-to-teach-on-communism-professor.html
To f***ing shay mother f***er. 1951. They bleat academic freedom and cower in the corner as scared rabbits.
That was an insult to rabbits. I’ve hunted rabbits. I don’t know how they leave the house. That takes courage.
I wonder how many major companies, and even minor ones are now looking at MBAs from her same university and casting those resumes aside?
I only want to date her.
Downvote 🙂
Don’t date the ugly. Inside and out.
It isn’t all that hard to run a city if your priorities are focused correctly; public safety, good schools, fix the potholes, pick up the trash, minimal regulation and just enough taxes to pay for this plus a little bit of a rainy day fund.
So 160,000 homes become available and the price goes up? It doesn’t work that way.
But where I live we are seeing fleeing Californians paying a lot more than the prices in LA, just to get out.
LA is run for the benefit of land developers. The solution to everything always involves giving them more money. That is why homelessness has become a billion dollar industry here. And the solution? Driving the middle class out of their neighborhoods to make way for new development. Get people out of their cars with “road diets” that make every street a bottleneck. Expand the width of sidewalks to allow for more homeless encampments. Build facilities (actually villages) under highway overpasses for the homeless (or as the elected scumbags now call them, “unhoused citizens”) to spread the crime into the highways at the on/off ramps, not to mention the insane fires). Get people out of their cars and into public transportation (also called homeless hangouts).
And now we have billionaire land developer Rick Caruso running for LA mayor and likely to win.
BTW, Garcetti’s fantasy of becoming US Ambassador to India is crashing and burning over his perjury to Congress regarding the Jacobs sex scandal. The emptiest of empty suits is probably going to end up where so many corrupt politicians end up when busted: USC Board of Trustees.
First inflation was transitory, then it was good for the economy.
Then, we had inflation due to corporate greed, then it was the big bad oil companies who did it, then gas stations were price gouging.
Then Trump did it; It was only a matter of time before they said Putin did it,
Biden says he can’t do much about it while spending money everywhere,
Biden then begs Iran for oil, gives then $9 billion and trades a nuke for it.
Pelosi passes a trillion dollar bill to fix an economy they destroyed.
What am I forgetting?
The border. Not Ukraine’s, ours.