…an Intimate Round Table [sic] discussion… This meeting is invite-only and intentionally small to learn and discuss strategies for BIDS [sic] that are addressing homelessness in way one [sic] or another so that we can include the City’s plan is [sic] inclusive of this perspective.
This is bad enough, that Garcetti solicits the intimate opinions of these delusional BIDdies, who not only just make stuff up about the homeless but whose ultimate homeless policy is terrorism. It’s bad enough, as we said, but the reasons are even worse:
Mayor Garcetti is very committed to working with CCA and the other BIDS to develop homelessness policies and practices that address homelessness without unintentional harm to our business community. In the long run, we need businesses to provide pathways out of poverty through self-sustaining wages and pride in individual ability and skills.
After all, what is the “harm” that BIDs have whined about? What are the “homelessness policies and practices” that BIDs don’t like? There are none, actually. The policies of the City of Los Angeles towards homeless people have been guided for more than a century by the wants, needs, desires, whims, and delulsions of this city’s zillionaires. There’s nothing the City won’t do to please these caucasian psychopaths.
They have passed LAMC 41.18(d), which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has called “one of the most restrictive municipal laws regulating public spaces in the United States.” They have the equally abhorrent LAMC 56.11, so off-the-chain that Federal Judge James Otero has enjoined the City from even enforcing it, not least because it was recently rewritten to Carol Schatz’s explicit criteria. Really, there’s nothing that businesspeople want that the City won’t give them. If it weren’t for the Federal Judiciary the City of Los Angeles would certainly have deported all of its homeless people off to Maricopa County to be subjected to the tender mercies of Joseph Arpaio or some such equally horrific fate.
The City of Los Angeles is so solicitous towards the wants of businessfolk that they recently put more than $100 million of federal money at risk rather than stand up to the hysterical whining of the zillionaires.
And what is this nonsense about how businesses are going to end poverty? If that was going to happen, it would have already been happening. The homeless we have are people for whom that’s not working out so well. In fact, it’s worth remembering here that every BID that Garcetti invited to this little KonKlave is a property-based BID. That means that its members are the owners of commercial real estate, not the owners of businesses. It’s well known that, at least in Los Angeles, homelessness is exacerbated by out-of-control development, destruction of affordable housing units, gentrification, and so on, mostly carried out by the members of the CCA and the City’s various property-based BIDs. These people are most certainly part of the problem, maybe even most of the problem. They’re not providing pathways out of poverty, they’re providing superhighways into it. They mostly seem to hate the homeless because their very existence devalues that most golden of all golden calves: property values. That Garcetti is letting them write his homelessness policies is, we guess, no surprise, but it’s a tragedy nevertheless.
Image of Alisa Orduna is ©2015 MichaelKohlhaas.org.
