"When we hear stories about the
homelessness in California and elsewhere, why don't we hear how illegal aliens
contribute to the problem? They take jobs and affordable housing,
yet instead of discouraging illegal aliens from breaking the law, politicians
encourage them to come by lavishing free stuff on them with
confiscated dollars from this and future
generations." JACK HELLNER
MEXIFORNIA IN
METLDOWN: First,
illegal immigration is the problem. CA has spent hundreds of billions
on illegal aliens and their bills — public schools, free meals at
school, special bi-lingual teachers, healthcare, housing allowances,
low income energy assistance, aid to families with dependent children,
prisons, cops, courts, public defenders, welfare, food stamps, and
a hundred other gov handouts. And don’t forget lower college tuition
for illegal immigrants. WAYNE ALLYN ROOTOakland homelessness prevention program surpasses goals, keeps 4,000-plus housed
‘Keep Oakland Housed’ helps residents pay rent, fight evictions
OAKLAND — A new program designed to reach Oakland residents before they become homeless has blown past its initial goals, serving more than 2,100 households since its inception, Mayor Libby Schaaf said Monday.
Keep Oakland Housed, launched in 2018, provides emergency financial assistance to residents who have fallen behind on their rent, and offers legal assistance to those faced with eviction lawsuits. Because of those efforts, 2,117 households — representing more than 4,000 individuals — did not end up on the streets during the first half of the three-year pilot program, according to an analysis by the program administrator, the San Francisco Foundation.
“That is incredible,” Schaaf said Monday during a news conference at City Hall. “It just shows what a partnership can do when we come together to take on this humanitarian crisis of homelessness as well as displacement. We want to keep Oakland Oakland, and that starts with keeping Oaklanders in Oakland.”
Schaaf touted the program’s initial success as the city is grappling with a major crisis of homelessness. The number of unhoused residents increased by nearly 50% between 2017 and 2019, according to the city’s latest point-in-time count, and encampments resembling shanty towns have taken over empty lots, while tents and RVs line city streets. Monday’s update on Keep Oakland Housed comes days before Schaaf is set to give her State of the City address Friday at the Oakland Museum of California.
Keep Oakland Housed is a partnership between Bay Area Community Services, Catholic Charities of the East Bay and East Bay Community Law Center, and is funded by donors including Kaiser Permanente, the San Francisco Foundation and Crankstart — a charity run by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael Moritz and his wife, novelist Harriet Heyman.
The partners initially launched the program as a $9 million effort, but its budget has since grown to $12 million thanks to additional donations. Schaaf said Monday she intends to ask the City Council to add $1 million in city funds.
Even while applauding the difference Keep Oakland Housed has made so far, its leaders acknowledged there is much more to do.
“This is not a silver bullet,” said Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation. “And I think what we all know is it is one thing, and very important, to address the critical challenges that come up when folks become homeless. But it is infinitely cheaper and easier to keep people housed.”
The households that approach Keep Oakland Housed for help on average need less than $3,000 each to stave off eviction and homelessness, Schaaf said. That’s a tiny sum when compared to the enormous cost of housing and healing someone who already is homeless, she said.
But despite the program’s early focus on prevention, program leaders on Monday announced Keep Oakland Housed will shift its focus going forward.
While the program initially catered to renters with valid leases who were at risk of eviction, it now will expand to include residents who have lost their stable housing and generally would be classified as already homeless. Schaaf called the switch the “most efficient and frankly humane” strategy to address homelessness.
“With what we’ve learned, we can now better target people who are truly at the highest risk of falling into homelessness,” she said. “People who aren’t facing an eviction because they no longer have a tenancy. They are couch surfing. They are living in their cars. They are staying in motels.”
The partners also lowered the income cap for program participants from 50% of the area median income — or $61,950 a year for a family of four — to 30% — or $37,150 for a family of four.
Before the program expires next year, Schaaf hopes to come up with a state or regional-level plan to extend it — possibly using some of the $750 million Gov. Gavin Newsom hopes to set aside for homelessness services in his 2020-21 budget.
“We have to,” Schaaf said. “This has been far too successful, far too cost-effective for us not to extend this and begin funding it with public money, and to encourage other jurisdictions to do the same.”
During the program’s first year — July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019 — Keep Oakland Housed provided legal services to 1,014 households — more than double the initial goal of 400.
Of the households that received eviction defense services, just over half successfully resolved their cases, 3% had an unsuccessful or unknown outcome, and the rest of the cases are still pending. Keep Oakland Housed funds allowed East Bay Community Law Center to triple the size of its housing program, said Executive Director Zoë Polk.
Keep Oakland Housed also provided emergency financial assistance to 779 households, according to the San Francisco Foundation’s analysis. That’s more than triple the 250-household goal.
One of those recipients was 77-year-old Inez Washington, a retired physical education teacher who has lived for nearly 20 years in an apartment next to Lake Merritt. Her rent kept increasing, and while dealing with the death of her mother, Washington fell behind on her payments. She reached out to Catholic Charities — part of Keep Oakland Housed — and the organization paid her back rent, allowing her to keep her apartment.
“My prayers had been answered,” Washington said.
Kaiser to help house Oakland homeless encampment residents
The company has said addressing homelessness is key to improving community health
(Laura A. Oda/Bay Area News Group)
Leon Johnson and Max Copeland move a coffee table out of their tent on the Broadway side of Mosswood Park in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, June 26, 2018.
Dozens of people living in a homeless encampment in North Oakland are set to receive help finding stable housing in the coming weeks.
As part of a partnership with the city, Kaiser Permanente will give funding to the organization Operation Dignity to house 50 residents of a homeless encampment along Broadway near Mosswood Park — steps from the healthcare giant’s Oakland medical center.
“We cannot stand by as an increasing number of individuals and families find themselves calling the streets of Oakland their home,” Janet Liang, regional president for Kaiser Permanente Northern California, said in a statement. “Addressing homelessness is crucial to improving the health of the communities we serve.”
Around 30 residents have already moved into temporary housing — many in nearby motels — and are receiving help from the nonprofit with locating more permanent homes, along with subsidies to cover moving expenses and other support.
In the last couple of years, recent data suggest, Oakland’s homeless population has ballooned by 47 percent to more than 4,000 people. And city and state officials have faced mounting pressure from residents and advocacy groups to do more to address the issue.
“We need to act swiftly and with a sense of urgency to keep the residents and families of Oakland housed in the midst of the Bay Area housing crisis,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a statement.
“This latest initiative with Operation Dignity and Kaiser Permanente is yet another example of how Oakland is working with our community partners to provide adequate housing and alleviate some of the economic and social burdens of homelessness.”
It’s not the first time Kaiser and Operation Dignity have partnered. Both have supported the city’s Northgate cabin community, where the city has put up Tuff Sheds to provide transitional housing to formerly homeless people, and other city efforts. And Kaiser said recently it would contribute $25 million to a statewide fund to target homelessness
“Through our work with the City of Oakland and the contributions of Kaiser Permanente, our housing navigators are able to work with each encampment resident to determine the best affordable housing options,” Marguerite Bachand, executive director of Operation Dignity, said in a statement.
People began moving from the encampment into temporary housing in December, Bachand said in a phone interview, and all 50 residents should be indoors by next month. The organization will help people navigate the bureaucracy of getting an ID so they can get into permanent housing, make sure people have fresh food and help connect people with healthcare and jobs.
“It’s a really good partnership,” she said.
Tom
Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants
California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs
NYT Boosts Investors'
Campaign for More Immigrant Workers, Consumers
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as
impoverished Americans wait
Los Angeles County Pays
Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
Tom
Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants
13 Jan 20202,348
8:12
Tom
Steyer, the billionaire investor and Democrat 2020 candidate, wants Americans
to provide cheap housing to illegal immigrants.
“A Steyer Administration will …
ensure that all undocumented communities have access to affordable and safe
housing,” Steyer said in his immigration proposal.
Steyer’s offer of housing is combined with promises to provide
illegals with free healthcare, plus workplace training and cultural
celebrations:
A Steyer administration … [will] provide a safe platform for
immigrants to share their culture and celebrate their heritage, foster
opportunities for public service that support new Americans, and coordinate
with Federal agencies and the private sector in order to build workforce
training and fellowship opportunities for immigrants with professional
qualifications from their home nation to help them leverage their specialized
skills in the American marketplace.
Steyer made his promise of cheap housing to illegals even though
housing costs for many Americans forces them to rent or buy cheaper housing far
from work and friends, and are being forced to give up hopes for larger
families.
But those housing costs are high partly because the federal
government welcomes one million new legal immigrants into the nation’s cities,
neighborhoods, and schools. That is a huge inflow — four million young
Americans turn 18 each year.
But Steyer is a billionaire investor, so illegal migrants will
not be moving into his very expensive and well policed neighborhood. The New
Yorker magazine described his house in 2013:
President [barack Obama] flew to San Francisco on April 3rd for
a series of fund-raisers. He stopped in first at a cocktail reception hosted by
Tom Steyer, a fifty-six-year-old billionaire, former hedge-fund manager, and
major donor to the Democratic Party. Steyer lives in the city’s Sea Cliff
neighborhood, in a house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
Any inflow of migrants will be a
boon to Steyer’s fellow investors who gain from the extra workers, consumers,
and renters. For example, one gauge of real estate investments shows a 50 percent gain since 2015,
even as Americans’ wages and salaries rose by only about 15 percent.
Meanwhile, Steyer’s home state is
experiencing record housing prices and record homelessness as today’s illegals
enjoy the state government’s offer of sanctuary, jobs, and welfare. The federal
housing agency reported January 7 the state has about 108,000 homeless:
This year’s report shows that there was a small increase in the
one-night estimates of people experiencing homelessness across the nation
between 2018 and 2019 (three percent), which reflects a 16 percent increase in
California, and offsets a marked decrease across many other states.
…
In terms of absolute numbers, California has more than half of
all unsheltered homeless people in the country (53 percent or 108,432), with
nearly nine times as many unsheltered homeless as the state with the next
highest number, Florida (six percent or 12,476), despite California’s
population being only twice that of Florida.
In September Breitbart News reported the Census Bureau showed how the state’s housing costs are
pushing Americans into poverty:
The September 10 study shows 18.2 percent of California’s
population is poor, far above the 13 percent poverty rate in Arkansas, 16
percent in Mississippi, and the 14.6 percent in West Virginia.
…
By 2017, for example, the government’s pro-migration policies
had added 11 million people to the state’s native population of 29 million
people. The huge inflow means that one-in-four residents are immigrants.
Numerous studies have shown many
millions of foreigners want to migrate into Americans’ society. For example,
another five million Central American residents want to migrate into the
United States, according to a Gallup survey published
right after the 2018 midterm elections.
Gallup also noted “three percent of the world’s adults — or
nearly 160 million people — say they would like to move to the U.S.”
California's poverty rate is worse than
Alabama & Mississippi, says Census Bureau. The major cause of this huge
change is immigration policy which spikes housing costs & shrinks wages --
and delivers huge gains for investors in real-estate & corp. shares. http://bit.ly/2mgvBlW
California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs
Steyer’s promise to welcome illegals
is echoed by the other investor billionaire in the Democrats’ primary, Mike
Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. In January, he promised to make
illegals comfortable with Americans’ money, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Well, it’s a no brainer. You give [a] pathway to citizenship to
11 million people. We’re not going to deport them anyways, it’s outrageous. If
you look in New York City, we make sure that people felt comfortable,
regardless of their immigration status, to come and get city services. I was
always determined that they would not be afraid to come. Somebody could need
like life-threatening things and does not get medical care. This is not a game.
You’ve got to make sure that they’re okay.
Housing costs in Bloomberg’s New
York are very high because it has huge populations of illegal and legal immigrants. The result is that it has
a homeless population of roughly 92,000, and also the nation’s highest rate of homelessness, at 46 homeless for every 10,000 people.
High housing costs also make it
difficult for Americans to move into towns and cities that have better-paying
jobs, according to a 2017 study about the rising wealth gap in the United States. Americans “are frozen where
they live,” said Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, at a
January 9 meeting.
But nearly all of the Democrats in the 2020 election have called
for more migrants — without showing any concern for the impact on Americans’
housing costs.
“We could afford to take in a
heartbeat another two million people,” Joe Biden told Democrats at an August event in Des Moines, Iowa. “The idea
that a country of 330 million people is cannot absorb people who are in
desperate need … is absolutely bizarre … I would also move to
increase the total number of immigrants able to come to the United
States.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s
immigration plan, for example,
is titled “A Fair and Welcoming Immigration System.” It says:
We need expanded legal immigration that will grow our economy,
reunite families, and meet our labor market demands … s president, I will
immediately issue guidance to end criminal prosecutions for simple
administrative immigration violations … As President, I’ll issue guidance
ensuring that detention is only used where it is actually necessary because an
individual poses a flight or safety risk … I’ll welcome 125,000 refugees
in my first year, and ramping up to at least 175,000 refugees per year by the
end of my first term.
The impact of federal immigration
policy on Americans’ housing costs is taboo among establishment reporters. But
those costs were touted by a group of investors lobbying Congress to raise
housing prices by importing more immigrants. A booklet by the Economic
Innovation Group says:
The relationship between population growth and housing demand is
clear. More people means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less
demand … As a result, a shrinking population will lead to falling prices and a
deteriorating, vacancy-plagued housing stock that may take generations to clear
…
The potential for skilled immigrants to boost local housing
markets is clear. Notably, economist Albert Saiz (2007) found a 1% increase in
population from immigration causes housing rents and house prices in U.S.
cities to rise commensurately, by 1%
On January 9, Donohue noted New
Yorkers blocked the plan by Amazon and the city government to build a new corporate
headquarters in the city. The residents protested the development plan partly
because it would have driven up rents and housing costs, said Donohue. “It
is a very potent issue,” he observed.
A lobbying group for investors admits mass migration helps investors in
major coastal cities but 'fails' Americans in heartland & rural towns. So
it urges less immigration? No - it urges more migration to spike family housing
prices outside major cities! http://bit.ly/2VCZYUt
NYT Boosts Investors'
Campaign for More Immigrant Workers, Consumers
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as
impoverished Americans wait
Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so
many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free
public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated,
unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those
are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier.
Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold
awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these
emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal
immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is
there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban
Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals
prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do
it yesterday.
The plan would scrap Clinton-era regulations that allowed illegal
immigrants to sign up for assistance without having to disclose their status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing
have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all
applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)
database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other
welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification,
though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our
citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of
past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public
housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens
attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off
of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and
some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member
being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped
across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next
day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on
government housing. Plus lots
of cheesy news coverage about how
heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to
find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these
programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact
being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the
virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice"
for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are
stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal
technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law.
But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as
they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the
impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed
by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the
media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Los Angeles County Pays
Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid
nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That
figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy
population, according to Fox News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other
state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in
California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants
reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with
children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los
Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food
stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9
billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than
60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in
2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior
fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of
the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can
cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things
like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution
making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal
protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In October 2017, former California governor
Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made
California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice
Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A
federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan.
1, 2018.
According to Center for
Immigration Studies, “The new law
does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer
notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the
popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police
from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined
the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants
did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is
just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the
expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One
California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens,
including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities
easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal
Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal
immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116
billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after
deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF
ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY,
THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY
LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million
non-citizens now live in the United States.
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