Despite Democrat-controlled cities’ indulgent policy on vagrants and homelessness, their encampments just keep growing.
Not only are the rat-infested encampments a threat to public health, now they’re a threat to public safety as well.
Take Los Angeles for example.
The Los Angeles Times reports on May 12, 2021, that as the number of tents, makeshift shelters and campers on Los Angeles streets has surged, so has the scourge of fire. “In the three years since the Los Angeles Fire Department began classifying them, fires related to homelessness have nearly tripled. In the first quarter of 2021, they occurred at a rate of 24 a day, making up 54% of all fires the department responded to.”
A Times analysis of records shows that fires related to homelessness have doubled in all of the department’s 14 districts since 2018, the first year of complete records. The fires were most prevalent in downtown and South Los Angeles. But the numbers were also elevated in a swath across the north side of the city from Northeast Los Angeles to the east San Fernando Valley.
A fire in 2017 was traced to a cooking fire in a ravine near Sepulveda Boulevard. The blaze spread through Bel-Air, destroying six homes and damaging a dozen others.
Although the epidemic of fires is largely attributable to the built-in conditions for combustion in street camps — cooking stoves and campfires in close proximity to tent fabric and piles of other flammable material — as much as a third of the 15,610 fires related to homelessness in the past 3 ¼ years were classified as arson, i.e., intentionally set fires.
From the LA Times:
Many fires related to homelessness are intentional. Over the three years, such fires classified as arson have steadily comprised about one-third of the total. As fires related to homelessness have increased, though, the raw number of arson fires has more than doubled, to 2,258 last year — about one of every six fires in the city. Arrests are rare — 129 and 174 over the past two years, a clearance rate of about 6%. Though few arsons are solved, limited evidence suggests that the perpetrators are most often other homeless people. Three-fourths of those arrested identified themselves as homeless….
Impossible to quantify is the dread, hostility and loss of faith in government brought on by the surge in fires. Business owners are left wondering if a random blaze will scar or destroy their property.
Preliminary results from a study released by the Fire Department show that such fires have caused $185 million in damage since 2017, 22% of all fire damage in the city. That includes $80 million in damage last year and $12 million in the first quarter of 2021.
Read the rest of the news article here.
~E
This just makes me heartsick. No, not for the plight of the “homeless,” but for what the homeless perpetrate upon the rest of society, whether it is intentional or not intentional. We have so many bleeding heart liberals, who feel they are doing good by fostering the needs of these folks who have “fallen on hard times.” How is it that many of us have worked jobs, lived on the straight and narrow, but somehow we are all supposed to heap all this love, forgiveness, money, sympathy, etc on people who many, many of which don’t want to clean up their lives and get off whatever substance they are addicted to. Here in Portland as I was looking at the site “NextDoor” they are now selling tee shirts that say something like “Love the Drug Addicted” (I am just paraphrasing here.” All the love in the world will not cause someone to change their ways, unless they reach rock bottom. Unfortunately, I have a nephew who is homeless. Sad to say, I took him him, attempted to help him, but the end result was that he stole from me. He can just get by, without having to really pull his own weight. I got him out of my house, and now I have but occasional times of having anything to do with him. That these people would cause such tremendous upheaval to the rest of society in terms of monetary loss and emotional trauma–it is just beyond the pale.
Excellent article, thank you.
The city spends so much money on the homeless yet nothing ever gets resolved. What a waste of taxpayer money.
I used to live in Huntington Beach, when CA was still a beautiful state. Left for college and never to return. The amount of illegals there is in the millions now. (Used to be everyone wanted to go there, now many are fleeing – see Austin)
I live on the edge of the Cleveland Nat’l Forest in SoCal. Every fire that has threatened us with loss of our home or at least evacuation (& there have been MANY—at least 2 or more times each fire season) has been started by an illegal alien hideout/ campfire, or covert pot farm operation living arrangement/ campfire, OR….illegal dirt bike riders who wiped out and their hot exhaust set fire to the forest……and one time, an illegal target shooter whose ricochet sprayed sparks that started a fire….So tired of paying in dollars and in fear for these dregs who just take and take and take and never seem to have to PAY for it, one way or another. I’ve been counting the days until I retire and leave all this behind. Believe me, we’ve been studying states for years where there are locations with little chance of fire, flood, tornado, earthquake, gang violence, homeless encampments, 5 months of 110 degree days, drought, rolling blackouts, and the highest gasoline and utility prices in the nation, not forgetting some of the highest state, local and homeowner taxes in the nation.