Homelessness is the number one issue for California voters heading into the 2020 presidential primary in March, according to a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), as reported by the Sacramento Bee .
More than 150,000 California residents are homeless,
according to the latest counts.
The poll finds a plurality of Democrats, Republicans and Independents likely to vote in the state’s March 3, 2020 primary election in agreement that homelessness is the most important issue for Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers to work on in 2020. Twenty-one percent of Democrats and Independents called it the top issue, compared to 29 percent of Republicans.
Housing affordability and the environment were the next highest priorities for likely Democratic primary voters, while Republicans were more concerned about immigration and taxes.
The Bee added: “Health care has become a lesser focus for Democrats, according to the poll.”
That is a stark contrast to the priorities of voters elsewhere in the country. According to a Gallup poll released earlier this week, Democrats nationwide consider health care the most important issue, followed closely by gun control and climate change. Overall, “healthcare, national security, gun policy, education and the economy” were cited as “extremely important” by over 30% of adults in the poll.
But California faces acute problems with homelessness. As Breitbart News reported last month, the state’s 16.4% increase in homelessness is “entirely” responsible for the nation’s overall 2.7% increase, according to federal statistics.
Governor Gavin Newsom is in the midst of a week-long focus on the issue, touring homeless facilities and discussing spending proposals in his recent budget.
The governor is currently fighting President Donald Trump on the issue — as on many others. Newsom has insisted on more federal funding for state housing projects.
As Breitbart News has reported , Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti recently adopted a more pragmatic approach, and has approached the federal government to work together in dealing with the city’s roughly 60,000 homeless people, including by possibly relocating some of them to unused federal property.
The California primary will take place on Super Tuesday, March 3, instead of in early June, as in previous years.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution , which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak .
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.
Surging California homeless 'crisis' offsets
drop in nation: HUD
|
January 07, 2020 05:45 PM
A 16% increase in
homelessness in California accounted for most of the 3% national increase,
putting more heat on the state’s lagging effort to curb the surge, according to
a new federal report.
The Housing and Urban
Development Department late Tuesday released its homelessness
report and counted 568,000 people without homes. Significantly,
it found that homelessness among veterans, youths, and families is down. For
veterans, it’s down 40% over the last 10 years.
The department, which
bases the numbers on a one-night national count of homeless people, said that
if California hadn’t seen such an explosion in homelessness, the national
number would not have increased.
Essentially, said a
senior HUD official, California’s increase “offset” the national trend
downward.
In the report, the
second “key finding” singled out California. It said: “While homelessness in
most states declined between 2018 and 2019, homelessness in California
increased by 16 percent, or 21,306 people. The large increase in California is
reflected in a nationwide increase of 3 percent, or 14,885 people experiencing
homelessness, between 2018 and 2019.”
HUD Secretary Ben
Carson also didn’t mince words in his memo included in the 2019 Annual Homeless
Assessment Report to Congress. He wrote, “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 (3%), which reflects a 16
percent increase in California, and offsets a marked decrease across many other
states.”
He added in a
statement, "California is at a crisis level and needs to be addressed by
local and state leaders with crisis-like urgency. Addressing these challenges
will require a broader, community-wide response that engages every level of
government to compassionately house our most vulnerable fellow citizens."
The administration has
been critical of California’s handling of the crisis, which is notable for tent
cities in downtown areas. California has blamed President Trump for the crisis,
but HUD recently
pushed back, claiming that the state is sitting on $450 million in
federal aid and doing nothing to slash regulations that have driven up the
price of a single low-income unit to $750,000.
Throughout the report,
California’s woes were highlighted. A sampling:
In terms
of absolute numbers, California has more than half of all unsheltered
homeless people in the country (53% or 108,432), with nearly nine times as
many unsheltered homeless as the state with the next highest number,
Florida (6% or 12,476), despite California’s population being only twice
that of Florida.
An
increase in the number of individuals experiencing homelessness,
specifically unsheltered individuals, drove the national increase in all
people experiencing homelessness. The number of unsheltered individuals in
California rose 21 percent between 2018 and 2019, an increase of more than
18,000 people.
Nearly
half of all people experiencing homelessness in the country were in three
states: California (27% or 151,278 people); New York (16% or 92,091
people); and Florida (5% or 28,328 people).
California
and New York had the largest numbers of people experiencing homelessness
and the highest rates of homelessness, at 38 and 46 people per 10,000,
respectively.
California
also had the highest percentage of all people experiencing homelessness
staying in unsheltered locations (72%).
California to house homeless
people on vacant state land
Gov. Gavin Newsom also wants to create a fund to build
housing for formerly homeless people
PUBLISHED: January 8, 2020 at 12:27 pm |
UPDATED: January 9, 2020 at 10:07 am
Cities will be able to open emergency homeless shelters on vacant
state land under a new executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom that escalates
his attempts to handle the growing crisis.
The order , which comes amid a surge in
homelessness throughout the state and growing concern about the issue from
residents, will require state agencies to identify by the end of this month
empty lots near highways, fairgrounds, decommissioned hospitals and other
spaces where cities, counties or nonprofits can provide space for people to
live temporarily.
The news, coupled with a new budget proposal from the governor to
spend more than $1 billion serving homeless people, comes as President Donald
Trump berates Newsom and other California Democrats for failing to do enough to
address the issue.
“The state of California is treating homelessness as a real
emergency — because it is one,” Newsom said in a statement. “Californians are
demanding that all levels of government — federal, state and local — do more to
get people off the streets and into services — whether that’s housing, mental
health services, substance abuse treatment or all of the above.”
“That’s why we’re using every tool in the toolbox — from proposing
a massive new infusion of state dollars in the budget that goes directly to
homeless individuals’ emergency housing and treatment programs, to building
short-term emergency housing on vacant state-owned land,” he continued.
In the order, Newsom said the state also would distribute 100
travel trailers and modular tents to local partners, who will receive help from
state crisis response teams if they agree to provide counseling and help
transition people into permanent housing.
A map of “excess” state-owned
property from the Department of General Services shows a number of Bay Area
locations that could potentially be considered, from Santa Cruz and San Jose
over to Hayward and San Lorenzo.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told reporters she felt “tremendous
excitement” about the announcement.
CLICK
HERE if you are having a problem viewing the video on a mobile
device
“I was very excited to see the
philosophy and experience of Oakland reflected in his recommendations,” Schaaf
said, pointing out that the city has worked with Caltrans to open cabins for homeless people on the agency’s land.
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, who spent months in tense
negotiations with Caltrans to lease land for tiny homes for the homeless, said
he hopes Newsom’s announcement will prompt the agency to be more collaborative.
“It’s a positive step,” Liccardo said. “What’s sometimes more
valuable than the resources is the deadline and by that I mean big cities
throughout the state have been scrambling to build various alternative kinds of
housing on vacant land. And it’s often been a challenge to get other agencies
to move at the speed that this crisis demands.”
Liccardo suggested that housing could even go on cloverleafs near
freeways.
“It seems to me like there’s a lot of wasted land,” Liccardo said,
“that we should absolutely be able to use.”
The budget, Newsom said, should include a new fund to both pay
rent for people facing homelessness and build housing for formerly homeless
people. Initially, the fund would be backed by $750 million from the general
fund, but the governor will call on nonprofits and businesses to kick in
additional money.
The fund would need to be approved by state lawmakers, which
wouldn’t happen until later this spring, but the governor’s executive order to
open up vacant land does not and is more immediate.
Still, the order relies heavily on local elected officials and
other community leaders being willing to manage the emergency shelters and work
to move people into more stable housing, which remains in short supply. And
they will be tracked on their efforts. The executive order calls for a system
to monitor how many people local jurisdictions help get into stable housing.
“We’re glad to see the governor interested in allocating
significantly more dollars to addressing our homelessness crisis,” said David
Low of Destination: Home, a San Jose-based nonprofit aimed at eliminating
homelessness. “It’s going to be equally important that we look at how we can
deploy those dollars in a way that supports our local strategies and will have
the most impact possible.”
In the last year, the state moved
to distribute $650 million in
emergency homeless aid to cities and counties across the state, with the final
payments going out this week. San Jose, which has seen homelessness spike 42 percent
over the last few years to more than 6,000 residents, was set to receive nearly
$24 million. Oakland and San Francisco, which also both saw major increases in
homelessness, were allocated more than $19 million each.
Yet despite such efforts, according
to data recently released by the
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, California has more than
151,000 homeless people, including more than half of the country’s unsheltered
population — a 16 percent increase over last year.
In addition to the $750 million fund, the governor’s budget
proposal calls for boosting Medi-Cal funding to address the healthcare needs of
chronically homeless people, particularly where mental health struggles,
addiction or other issues that could be addressed with healthcare have led
people to the streets. The budget also calls for around $25 million — which
would rise to about $364 million over six years — to fund a new pilot program
to put people with mental illness into care facilities in communities rather
than in big state hospitals.
The executive order and budget
proposal surface as a number of lawmakers in Sacramento put forward their own
ideas to tackle the state’s persistent housing and homelessness problems. Sen.
Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) recently brought back a controversial proposal to
force cities to build denser housing near transit stops and job centers. And
Sen. Jim Beall (D-San Jose) reintroduced a bill that would create a new ongoing funding source for
affordable housing.
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) applauded Newsom on
Wednesday for treating homelessness “as the all-hands-on-deck crisis that it
is.”
“Homelessness will require additional measures from local, state,
and the federal government,” Feinstein said in a statement. “I’m heartened that
California is stepping up; I will continue to fight for additional tools at the
national level as well.”
No comments:
Post a Comment