Los Angeles has been dumping nearly one billion dollars a year into its homelessness crisis, and Skid Row looks exactly the same as it did ten years ago. If you are wondering how that is mathematically possible, California GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton recently took a walk through Skid Row and stumbled onto an answer that is somehow worse than garden variety government incompetence. As USA Journal reported, there is an organization called LA CAN, the Los Angeles Community Action Network, that has been filing lawsuit after lawsuit to block the city from clearing encampments, removing drug users from public sidewalks, and doing basically anything that might accidentally reduce the problem.
Their legal argument is a real piece of work. They claim that homeless individuals camping illegally on public sidewalks have personal property rights that police cannot violate by, you know, enforcing the law. And the courts have entertained this theory long enough for LA CAN to win repeated injunctions against cleanup operations. When Hilton walked through Skid Row and asked why police were not clearing the tent cities he was navigating around like an obstacle course, the answer was that LA CAN had obtained court orders preventing it.
Hilton posted about the visit on social media, writing: "I've been to Skid Row in Downtown LA many times. This was the most infuriating trip yet. Newsom, Becerra, Bass: How can you sleep at night knowing this is happening on your watch?"
Now here is the part where you follow the money and everything clicks into place like a depressing little puzzle. LA CAN exists because homelessness exists. Money flows to the organization because of the crisis. The moment homelessness gets meaningfully reduced, the donations dry up, the relevance evaporates, and the organizational purpose vanishes. So LA CAN deploys lawyers to make sure that never happens. It is a business model disguised as compassion, and business is booming.
The organization even has a choral group called the Freedom Singers, composed of formerly homeless individuals, that appears on national television to raise LA CAN's profile and drive donations. Let that sink in. People who escaped homelessness are now raising money for an organization that is legally fighting to keep other people stuck in the exact condition they got out of. That is the kind of irony that would get rejected from a screenplay for being too on the nose.
According to reporting from Hilton's walkthrough, Karen Bass's office actively coordinates with LA CAN. The same organization that is blocking the city's own cleanup efforts. Bass holds press conferences about her commitment to solving homelessness while apparently working with the group making sure it stays unsolved. Gavin Newsom crisscrosses the country pretending California is fixable. Meanwhile, a billion dollars a year goes into a system designed to produce exactly zero results.
Politicians campaign on solving the crisis. Nonprofits fundraise off the crisis. Lawyers litigate to preserve the crisis. And residents get to live with the consequences of all three. One billion dollars annually and the sidewalks are still covered in tents. At this point, calling it a homelessness problem is generous. It is a corruption problem wearing a very sad disguise.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
