Thursday, November 7, 2019

PELOSI'S STATE IN MELTDOWN - OAKLAND REMOVES 75 TRUCKLOADS OF TRASH LEFT BY HOMELESS - "Californians are increasingly pessimistic about the future of the state and are more worried about housing and homelessness than ever before."


Oakland California Removes 75 Truckloads, 250 Tons of Trash from Homeless Encampment

OAKLAND, CA - FEBRUARY 06: Fast food containers lie in the back of an Oakland Department of Public Works street cleaning team truck February 6, 2006 in Oakland, California. The Oakland city council committee is expected to vote on a measure Tuesday that would impose fees on all restaurants and …
Justin Sullivan/Getty
2:49

A columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted just how horrific the homelessness crisis is in California and and one Oakland encampment where over the past two weeks 75 trucks to hauled out a staggering 250 tons of trash.

Despite the obvious threat to public health and safety, the Chronicle report said that the estimated 60 to 80 people believed to live there can remain at least until January.
“And we still have 50 more tons to go,” Oakland City Councilman Noel Gallo said in the column. The encampment is in Gallo’s district and is located next to a Home Depot store.
And one official said the move is not designed to shutdown the encampment.
“It’s not a full closure, Joe DeVries, Oakland’s “point man on the homeless” said. “It’s a clean-and-clear.”
The Chronicle report said the city announced the move months ago after Home Depot expressed safety concerns for its customers:
The store even hired a private police squad care to patrol the parking lot and Gallo began leaning media tours calling the situation “out of control.”
Removing homeless camps, however, is tricky – both legally and politically. Homeless advocates routinely challenge such cleanups in federal courts as civil right violators. The city has won four out of four challenges so far, but each takes time and money.
Plus, in the past, city leaders have been reluctant to appear unsympathetic to the plight of the homeless, but that has change in recent months as fires at camps have become more frequent. 
Frequent may be an understatement as between January 1 and October 1, 158 confirmed fires related to homeless camps were reported in Oakland.
“The fire problem has become so acute that fire marshals have been assigned to homeless outreach teams,” the column stated.
“The risk to human life at the site due to fire danger is unacceptable,” Oakland Fire Marshal Orlando Arriola said.
“And this site is a perfect example of how impossible the situation has become for the public and the people living there,” DeVries said. “We had a utility pole get burned in one of the structure fires last month that knocked out power to the nearby traffic signals.
“Fire Marshalls did a walk-through of the site and found ‘extremely hazardous fire conditions” amid the broken-down cars, RVs, tents and make-do cabins,” the Chronicle reported.
And in an amazing plan revealed in the column the city moved people from the city-owned land to a privately owned lot so they could complete the trash collection and establish fire lanes before the homeless people are allowed to return.
DeVries compared the plan to good housekeeping.
“It’s a lot like vacuuming your living room,” DeVries said. “If you want to do it right you have to move stuff to one side while you vacuum the other side and vice versa.”
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CALIFORNIA IS A STATE WITH 15 
MILLION ILLEGALS  - NOW DO THE 
MATH ON THE HOUSING CRISIS AND 
HOMELESSNESS

Californians cite homelessness as top concern for first time ever, survey finds

By BEN CHRISTOPHER | CALmatters

PUBLISHED: October 7, 2019
Californians are increasingly pessimistic about the future of the state and are more worried about housing and homelessness than ever before.
And at least according to one major poll, they’re beginning to take it out on Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic state Legislature.
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at the Henry Robinson Multi-Service Center in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, May 21, 2019. Newsom announced the formation of the Homeless & Supportive Housing Advisory Task Force and has pledged $1 billion of the state budget to fight homelessness. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
In new survey results released today, the Public Policy Institute of California found that more likely voters now disapprove of Newsom’s job performance than approve.
But the new round of numbers are in sharp contrast to a survey released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, which found likely voters approving of Newsom by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points.
The PPIC poll also found that 1 in 4 Californians now point to housing and homelessness as the “most important issue facing people in California today.” Of the 1,700 adults surveyed, 15% listed “homelessness” as a top concern and 11% named housing.
Another 15% said “jobs and the economy.”
While jobs are a perennial concern for Californians, this is the first time the state’s homeless crisis was a top source of public angst, said PPIC president Mark Baldassare.
“We started polling in 1998. It’s never been tied for number one,” he said. “Democrats, Republicans, independents all had it in the first tier of concern.”
Those concerns are part of a broader feeling of “political and economic malaise” across the state, he said.
Roughly half of the respondents said that the state is headed in the “wrong direction.” Likely voters were even more pessimistic, with 54% offering a grim prognosis of the state’s future, including 60% of political independents.
And that seems to have translated into lower approval ratings for the state’s elected lawmakers.
Nearly a year into his first term, the poll found that 44% of likely voters disapprove of the governor. That’s the first time the survey has found more voters with a negative opinion of the state’s governor than a positive view since 2012.
The survey had other bad news for state lawmakers, one of whom happens to be running for president. An outright majority of likely voters (51%) said that they disapprove of the state Legislature and 46% disapprove of U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris.
residential support for California’s junior senator fell to just 8% among Democratic-leaning voters statewide — well behind Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, who were in an effective three-way tie for first place.
The poll ought to give the new governor a bit of public opinion whiplash.
On Monday, the Berkeley IGS poll reported that 60% of registered voters either strongly or somewhat approve of the governor’s job performance versus 39% who do not.
The much higher approval rate in the Berkeley survey is likely due to the fact that while the Public Policy Institute’s phone survey allows respondents to register no opinion, Berkeley’s online poll does not.
Even the Berkeley survey offered a mixed bag for the governor when you scratch beneath the surface: 42% of respondents said that they only “somewhat approve” of the governor.
“A lot of his approval is mild,” said Mark DiCamillo, who runs Berkeley’s poll. “It’s sort of like, ‘He’s okay.’ ‘I guess so.’”
There are other methodological differences between the two surveys, though both are respected and have established track records for accuracy. Even if well-designed and administered, individual polls may occasionally produce out-of-whack estimates just by random chance.
Today’s new polling also offers mixed news for supporters of some of the ballot measures likely to be on the 2020 ballots.
Asked about a $15 billion bond that would fund public school infrastructure construction and upkeep, 54% of likely voters in the Public Policy Institute survey said that they would vote for it. Supporters are still waiting for Gov. Newsom to sign a bill that would place the measure on the March ballot.
But likely voters are evenly divided (47% to 45%) on a proposal, often referred to as “split roll,” that would raise property taxes on large companies, resetting rates based on the current market prices of land and buildings. That idea is opposed by all of the state’s major business groups.
“Split roll clearly being under 50% is a difficult place to start, especially knowing that there is a ‘no’ side to that ballot initiative that is not shy about spending millions of dollars,” said Baldassare.

NYC Exports Homeless Across Country Without Telling Receiving Cities

Spencer Platt/Getty Images
 27 Oct 2019155
2:12

New York City is spreading its homeless crisis across the nation by quietly sending homeless people to other cities in the U.S., all without giving the receiving cities a heads up.

The city has deployed local homeless families to 373 cities across the U.S.— from Honolulu to Louisiana— with a year’s worth of rent as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “Special One-Time Assistance Program,” without alerting local officials in those cities, the New York Post reported.
The Post reported that city taxpayers spent $89 million on rent to ship 5,074 homeless families—or 12,482 individuals— out of the city since the program started in August 2017.
The families, initially housed in the city’s shelters, were sent to 32 states and far-flung locales such as Puerto Rico.
The city also doled out money for travel expenses through another city taxpayer-funded program called Project Reconnect, but there was no word on how much the city spent on this program.
The Department of Homeless Services defended the high costs of the program, saying that housing the homeless in city-run shelters costs $41,000 per family per year compared with the average yearly rent of $17,563 to transplant families elsewhere.
Even though the agency claims it is saving money, the cities on the receiving end of the program are reportedly not happy.
Newark city spokesman Mark Di Ionno said that the city—home to 1,198 families who are part of the program— is “in the process of passing an ordinance to ban New York from sending us SOTA clients.”
New York’s state senate also opened an investigation into New York City’s program to ship the homeless to cities in upstate New York.
According to the Coalition for the Homeless, 63,839 men, women, and children in New York City slept in homeless shelters for the night in January 2019.



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