With major cities firmly in one-party Democrat hands, homeless encampments are here to stay in America’s largest cities, and very likely, will get bigger.
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Two news stories laid out why this looks like the future of things to come, one out of New York and the other out of Los Angeles.
Today’s New York Post reported that Hell’s Kitchen’s sidewalks had basically converted into homeless encampments:
A sprawling homeless encampment near the Intrepid Museum in Manhattan has been vexing business owners and passersby for months — but the city is effectively running a valet trash service for its rough-sleeping residents rather than clearing the eyesore.
The steadily growing shantytowns — haphazardly strewn with all manner of bicycles, electronics and garbage — have taken over sizable portions of West 45th and 46th Streets along Twelfth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, between the museum parking lot and an Amazon warehouse.
“You see how it looks? How dirty it is? How can you eat food and the next corner is smelly, dirty, nasty, crusty, disgusting?” a food cart owner at the corner of Twelfth Avenue and West 46th Street told The Post, adding that the campsite has been chipping away at his business.
…and…
Liam James, who lives at the West 46th Street encampment, said the Mamdani administration was initially trying to clear everyone off the streets, but seems to have since shifted tactics to focus on sending sanitation crews to pick up trash and outreach workers for wellness checks.
So instead of clearing tents and improving everyone’s quality of life, drug-fueled homeless tents take precedence, as if homeless bums have now become the proprietors of public streets, with New York City at its service as its publicly funded trash valet. Mamdani isn’t interested in solving this problem. Obviously, he’d like it to continue, which raises questions about which NGOs he may be answering to. The more homeless, the more funding, such as these organizations operate.
In Los Angeles, these homeless NGOs even have teeth, with ready lawyers who work to stop any street cleanup:
WOAH 🚨 My jaw literally dropped listening to this
The Los Angeles Police Department came and tried to clean up Skid Row and in a response a nonprofit working with Mayor Karen Bass SUED THEM and stopped police from EVEN BEING ALLOWED TO ENTER
“LA CAN, which is another… pic.twitter.com/VEUuDkFof9
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The incident described, which happened at least five months ago, possibly a decade ago, based on my search, shows how powerful the homeless industrial complex is in Los Angeles, armed with funding, leftwing lawyers, and a will to keep the tents up until free homes are delivered as part of their demands to the city. The radical homeless lobby, known as L.A. Community Action Network, is quite a piece of work.
Oh, and as Spencer Pratt’s battered voters learned, they have a quite a voting machine [boldface added] to ensure that ‘their’ politicians stay in line:
In our early years, we were originally focused mostly on issues related to civil rights and preventing the criminalization of poverty, which remains a core project. Over the years, we added core projects addressing women’s rights (2001), the human right to housing (2002), and healthy food access (2004). LA CAN also has projects focused on economic development, civic participation and voter engagement, and community media.
While Downtown LA remains our home base, with a particular emphasis on the Skid Row community, in 2007 we expanded our housing and healthy food access work into South Central Los Angeles. Approximately 25% of our membership now lives in South Central LA.
LA CAN believes that power for low-income people and people of color is achieved through a large, active, and well-informed member base that utilizes a multitude of methods to advance our messages and goals. We have continued to build capacity and power over our history by actively recruiting new members on a weekly basis, retaining members through creative opportunities and benefits of membership, engaging in political education and regular leadership development activities, being present and active in every community or public decision-making process, participating in strong coalitions with shared principles, advancing bold demands and solutions, and by engaging in strategic negotiation processes only when power and influence has been established up front.
So Los Angeles can’t clear out homeless encampments even if they wanted to, any more than New York can.
The big problem here is that wretched socialist mayors hardly want to. Bass’s team put no fight into LACAN’s lawsuits, so the tents stay up, even if leftist politicians would benefit from a public display of competence. Mamdani, meanwhile, doesn’t even want to clean up the homeless encampments.
Which suggests that political forces benefiting from homelessness and tent encampments remain very powerful and have a stake in rendering big cities unliveable.
This is a terrible dynamic, and clearly cause for identifying and removing the incentives driving this. Homeless encampments can only get bigger so long as these politics and policies remain loaded with taxpayer and foundational money.
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