L.A. Raises Sales Tax to 11% Over Stolen ‘Homeless’ Billions

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

In Los Angeles County, spring is in the air and so are higher taxes. Beyond the usual punishing ritual of April 15, county residents also now face some of the highest sales taxes in the country.

Sales taxes in the area have shot up from 9.75% to as high as 11.25% to fund still more services for the ‘homeless’. The permanent sales tax increase is supposed to raise $1 billion a year to replace the stolen billions spent by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

Families will pay even more for food so that LA’s politicians and nonprofits can steal even more.

In 2016 and 2017, LA voters approved $4.6 billion in homeless tax hikes on themselves that included a sales tax increase and Measure HHH, a $1.2 billion bond measure to build 10,000 housing units for the homeless, that taken together were supposed to end homelessness.

“We need to seize this opportunity to make good things happen,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas promised at a ‘victory party’ for the massive spending package. “It is very, very important that we do this work in a way that the voters of the city feel they have done something good and going forward they will be rewarded by our results.”

Ridley-Thomas, who led LA’s homeless policies, and championed HHH, was charged with bribery and corruption. After his arrest, Ridley-Thomas vowed that he would continue “addressing the homeless and housing crisis.” The charges against the close ally of Mayor Karen Bass involved a scheme in the same USC social work school that also gave Bass a free “unsolicited $95,000 tuition award”. Ridley-Thomas was sentenced to 42 months in prison, but continues appearing at public events with Mayor Bass while appealing his conviction.

“Ridley-Thomas was at the center of L.A.’s fight against homelessness. What happens now?” the LA Times wondered, quoting Va Lecia Adams Kellum, the future head of the LA Homeless Services Authority who has now been forced to resign after $2.5 billion in unaccounted spending.

Ridley-Thomas had claimed that through Measure HHH, “we can help 45,000 men, women and children move from homelessness to stable housing in the next five years.”

“Within the next three to six months, with all the work we’ve done, we will see an improvement,” Councilman Jose Huizar promised. “And in two years … we’ll see a significant reduction in people living in the streets.”

Huizar, one of the “architects” of Measure HHH and had co-authored the Comprehensive Strategic Plan to Combat Homelessness, was sentenced to 13 years in prison for soliciting $1.5 million in bribes from developers including trips and prostitutes. The money included a $600,000 bribe from a fugitive Chinese real estate developer to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit.

The number of homeless not only didn’t go down, but shot up, and despite billions of dollars, the annual shortfall was being estimated at $270 million. Homeless housing was being approved at a cost of $479,000 an apartment and total development cost for Measure HHH hit $869 million.

By 2020, the average cost of apartments for the homeless was at $531,000 and by 2022, a city audit found that one project was running to $837,000 for each unit. An audit blamed “a lot of consultants”. After 4 years of this, only 228 apartments for the homeless had been built.

Los Angeles then launched a pilot program to build 8×8 aluminum sheds for the homeless for only $130,000 each and then tent encampments for the homeless for only $2,600 per tent each month. The homeless services complex had managed to take something the homeless were already doing for themselves and charge as much for it as a decent apartment rental.

The 2018-2019 city budget included $430 million in homeless spending (more than $300 million on road maintenance) and the 2024-2025 budget is up to $961 million in homeless spending.

The Los Angeles homeless count for 2019 was 35,550 homeless. The 2024 count found 45,252 homeless in the city. LA County’s homeless population had risen from 58,936 to 75,312 during that same period. The county’s 2024 Homeless Initiative was at nearly $600 million in spending.

After billions raised and spent to end homelessness, the crisis was worse than ever. More money was being spent and more homeless were popping up everywhere in a vicious cycle.

But what no one could find out was where all the homeless billions were going.

An audit of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which gets money from the city, county and the federal government, found that it couldn’t account for $2.5 billion in spending. It also illegally refused to release information about $800,000 in payouts over abuses at the agency.

LAHSA CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum, a crony of Mayor Karen Bass, who was being paid $430,000 a year, blamed the problems on COVID, and claimed that the billions spent with no paper trail or receipts were “an essential investment that contributed to achieving critical public health and service delivery outcomes.” That may have included the multi-million dollar contract she had signed with her husband’s nonprofit. A spokesperson claimed that she had only “inadvertently” signed the contract.

Critics said that LAHSA’s homeless count can’t be trusted, making it impossible to know how bad the problem that the agency’s nearly billion dollar budget was supposed to tackle really is..

Despite Mayor Bass’ protests, Kellum has resigned from LAHSA as the organization is wound down, but Gov. Newsom had previously appointed her to the Department of Housing’s ‘No Place Like Home Program Advisory Committee’ where there’s no sign that she’s being ousted.

The LA City Council mistrusts Bass so much that it’s refusing to fund her ‘homeless’ program. Most of last year’s $1.3 billion homeless budget, including $150 million from the ‘mansion tax’, was never spent because LA is taxing residents to fight homelessness faster than it can spend the money.

The LA County Board of Supervisors which had initiated the audit to seize control of the homeless program and its vast pot of cash from the mayor’s office are assembling a new county agency to spend it all. Measure A replaced the previous Measure H with a permanent sales tax.

And Los Angeles County residents walked into stores and are surprised that they’re suddenly being charged as much as 11% in sales tax to fund the latest plan to end homelessness.

Supervisor Jance Hahn praised LA voters for being “willing to continue to tax themselves” with Measure A to end homelessness. In reality, less than 2 million, or barely 1 in 5, of LA County residents, had voted for Measure A’s highest sales taxes in the country. And with LA elections and their notorious ballot harvesting, it’s unclear how many of those votes are even real.

Can the LA County Board of Supervisors be trusted any more than the city? Hahn and other BOS members had targeted former Sheriff Alex Villanueva after he raided the home of their former colleague Supervisor Sheila Kuehl in another nonprofit corruption investigation.

Supervisor Hahn had accused the sheriff of “using his office to go after political opponents”.

The Board of Supervisors seized power over the sheriff’s department making its members immune to any future raids. While the Supervisors amass control over another nearly billion dollar budget that promises to end homelessness once and for all, families are struggling with their higher sales taxes on top of the already high price of food and other necessities.

Homelessness keeps rising, homeless taxes keep rising and the money disappears.

Over the last 5 years, California spent $24 billion on ending homelessness. A statewide audit found that no one knew whethether the money was doing anything. The California Interagency Council on Homelessness didn’t even bother to analyze any spending after 2021.

When it comes to homeless spending, $24 billion can disappear as easily as $2.5 billion.

Meanwhile after the worst fires in LA history, partly caused by an underfunded fire department, Los Angeles is spending more money on ‘homelessness’ than on the fire department. The two are more related than you might think because the ‘homeless’, in reality drug-addicted mentally ill vagrants, are responsible for starting at least 17,000 fires in just one year.

Homeless fires made up a third of all LA fires last year.

Several of those proved devastating and the cause of some of the serious blazes that threatened the city and made worldwide news over the winter still remain unknown.

Mayor Bass is promising to counter that with even more homeless spending.

“We know that the cost of doing nothing is far greater,” her spokesman claimed.

And as long as LA voters continue to believe that, the endless homeless spending will continue, the homeless encampments will go on rising and the homeless fires will go on burning. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

 

The Whole Idea Behind Homeless Advocacy Is To Not Solve The Problem

September 02, 2023Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Perhaps it is a little early for another update here on the “homelessness” situation in San Francisco. (My last update was about six months ago in March 2023.). But there is a good reason for an update now: At least a few people seem finally to be catching on that the basic idea behind “homelessness” advocacy is to exploit an issue that brings forth great human empathy to generate vast taxpayer funds and then to not solve the problem. The spending continues and increases without limit. There is way too much money — for advocates — in “homelessness” for the problem ever to get solved, or even to decrease materially.

Two recent pieces from Bay Area writers commenting on the situation are: Sanjana Friedman at Pirate Wires, August 17, “San Francisco's Homeless Ticking Time Bomb”; and Susan Dyer Reynolds in the Marina Times August edition, “Fraudenbach: How the Coalition on Homelessness is holding San Francisco hostage.”

From the intro to Friedman’s piece:

The hardest thing you’ll ever have to comprehend in terms of San Francisco’s government is the city’s leaders aren’t incompetent. This is what they want. . . . Once acquainted with the basic facts of the crisis, including the incredible sum of money dedicated to solving the problem, the average San Franciscan concludes the city must be run by morons. . . . Even with supportive services, the numbers don’t add up. This is because the average person assumes the small cabal of activists who run the city’s bloated homeless industrial complex want to temporarily shelter and rehabilitate the homeless. They do not.

(Emphasis added.). So, what do they want?

The goal of San Francisco’s activist government is to provide every person who moves to the city with a free, one-bedroom apartment for the rest of their life.

Needless to say, that goal is completely impossible to achieve.

My March 2023 post recounted the story of the big 2018 referendum, where San Francisco voters approved a payroll tax on city businesses to raise an additional $300 million per year to address the homelessness crisis, and to finally solve it once and for all. The $300 million got added to prior spending of about $285 million, close to doubling prior city spending on the homelessness issue. Note that these figures only include spending on the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), and do not include other amounts of government spending on the homeless individuals, including cash grants, welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and much more.

Friedman has the latest numbers on homelessness headcount and spending put out by the city, which as she states “don’t add up.” The number of “homeless” in the city is given as 7,800, of which 4,400 sleep in the streets and 3,400 in shelters. (These numbers are based on a survey taken in 2022, which is more recent than the 2021 data used in my March post.). In a city of just over 800,000 people, this is just shy of 1% of the population. Spending this year for HSH is said to be $672 million. If spent on the 7,800 identified as homeless, that would come to more than $86,000 per head — a fantastic sum, given that none of the money actually goes to the supposed beneficiaries in cash. Rather, all of it is spent on the Homeless Industrial Complex to provide shelters and “services.” (The homeless people get cash and in kind benefits from other programs outside of this budget.)

But Friedman goes on to say that more than half (56%) of the budget of HSH does not go to the current homeless population, but rather to provide something called “permanent supportive housing” (PSH) to some 9,000 people who were previously homeless. That would be approximately $3500 per month for each of these people. Friedman describes the deal they get:

[T]here are no PSH-wide income maximum or minimum cutoffs, and no PSH-wide requirement that the tenant show progress in becoming financially independent, such as by working an ever-increasing number of hours, or even regularly looking for a job. If you're hopelessly addicted to drugs, SF will essentially enable your addiction in perpetuity, or for as long as you want.

If the remaining 44% of the $672 million is dedicated to the 7,800 currently on the streets or in shelters, that would come to about $3200 per month for each of them, the majority of whom live on the streets. Again, that $3200 is only for “homelessness” services, and does not include food, clothing, medical care, or anything else, all of which are provided by other government handouts.

Anyway, some 9,000 got the PSH apartments, and promptly another 7,800 turned up for the next round.

And, from Reynolds’s piece:

San Francisco’s homeless advocates believe money is the answer, with organizations coaching new arrivals to say they’re “from San Francisco” while helping them navigate the system. The “nonprofits” themselves complete what has become a billion-dollar industry chasing its own tail, with 59 providers receiving $240.6 million in fiscal year 2019–20, according to the latest audit by the city’s budget and legislative analyst.

Money may not be the answer to the homelessness problem, which never improves no matter how much is spent. However, it is clearly the answer for the advocates, who are pocketing money by the hundreds of millions. Remember, of that $240.6 million mentioned in Reynolds’s piece, exactly zero goes to the homeless individuals. All of it goes to the service providers. (The other $400+ million of the HSH budget also does not go to the homeless people, but rather to the government workers.)

Reynolds’s piece culminates with this quote from ex-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown:  

“[The homelessness problem] is not designed to be solved. It is designed to be perpetuated. It is to treat the problem, not solve it.”

He sure got that one right. There is way too much money in homelessness for the problem ever to be solved.

The Richest Homeless in the World

Daniel Greenfield June 02, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Last year, Davon Brown, a former fashion model turned homeless activist, conned his way into an LA Ritz-Carlton luxury suite alongside Jed Parriot, the son of a producer on Grey's Anatomy.

It was May Day, Brown was wearing a blazer and sunglasses. The former fashion model and son of a wealthy producer were there to ‘occupy’ a luxury suite for the homeless. And demand that the city take over hotel rooms and hand them out to the population of junkie vagrants.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti held a press conference and assured Brown that he would get him a room. When the son of the Grey's Anatomy producer was asked how to spell his name, he sneered, "“Parriott, like Marriott—which has 900 empty rooms.”

Jed, a Democratic Socialists of America activist, appears to live in a $1.3 million home in Silver Lake owned by a trust controlled by his parents: a prolific TV producer and a TV actress.

The trust also appears to own at least one other home, with 4 bedrooms, in the city.

Later that year, Davon Brown, still handsome, neatly groomed, and with the sleek physique of a gym rat, was at the center of the Echo Park homeless encampment. LA had just renovated the park in a hip neighborhood when it was taken over by the homeless and hopelessly befouled.

Brianna Moore, a talented 18-year-old concert violinist with offers from MIT, decided to get involved in the summer of protests. After a series of Black Lives Matter marches, she joined the homeless cause, and died in an Echo Park tent after taking cocaine laced with fentanyl.

The death of the sweet-faced white teenage honor student accomplished what months of complaints by local residents did not. But as LA authorities prepared to remove the encampment, Davon and Jed were once again at the center of things.

Davon’s publicist was hyping him in Hype Magazine as a champion for the homeless while promoting his new single. Jed showed up in a BMW X5 and sneered at local homeowners, “We need to be really telling these property owners, ‘Sorry, you’re going to have to tough this out.’”

Echo Park was finally evacuated this year, but Davon’s Instagram is filled with shirtless photos and glamor shots, many of which appear to come from Echo Park. And DSA-LA is touting Davon as “our unhoused comrade”. Meanwhile LA keeps trying to solve its “homeless crisis”.

The latest solution is a tent encampment filled with $2,600 tents.

When the homeless crisis first took off, LA voters had approved a $4.6 billion package of homeless tax hikes. The taxes were not on the homeless, but on the people who still had homes. The people who were taxed out didn’t become homeless, they just left California.

And the Homeless-Industrial Complex quickly got to work finding homes for junkie vagrants in the way that only Los Angeles and its corrupt social justice welfare state can manage to do.

The first apartments cost an average of $479,000 a unit. Some went as high as $650,000 a unit. But that wasn't good enough. Two years later, the cost of an average unit hit $531,000, with some apartments going up to $746,000. Building an apartment in Los Angeles for a crackhead was costing more than the price of a mansion in some parts of the country.

Despite all those high prices, only 228 apartments were actually built in four years.

City Controller Ron Galperin performed an audit on the $1.2 billion allocated for the homeless in 2016, and blamed the lack of progress on "red tape" and "a lot of consultants".

Unable to build apartments for less than the cost of a mansion, Los Angeles launched a pilot program to build 8x8 aluminum sheds for the homeless for only $130,000 each. The average cost of a home in LA is $500 per square foot. The aluminum sheds with 64 square feet of space managed to completely blow that away. But the no-bid contract probably helped.

Since apartments were too expensive and even tiny homes cost too much, LA turned to tents.

The homeless had been setting up their own tent encampments for free. So the city launched a pilot program to have the government set up tents for the homeless for only $2,600 per tent.

That’s $2,600 a month.

Each tent in a parking lot near the 101 freeway in East Hollywood costs twice as much as the rent on a local apartment. It actually costs more than the average month’s rent in LA. You can find two-bedroom apartments in Beverly Hills that cost less than a government homeless tent.

Say what you will about self-constructed homeless shacks, they don’t cost $2,600 a month.

Not only is the government setting up homeless tent cities across Los Angeles, but taxpayers are now also on the hook for $2,600 for every tent.

Controller Galperin explained that, "doing nothing also costs a lot of money."

Government employees know that’s very true.

The government tent city was outsourced to Urban Alchemy, a social welfare non-profit that has raised eyebrows by scoring million dollar contracts in San Francisco and Los Angeles to offer cleaning services, showers for the homeless, and tent cities. Urban Alchemy gets these contracts under the name of its financial sponsor: Hunters Point Family.

Urban Alchemy CEO Lena Miller explained that it all costs so much money because her organization employs "long-term offenders" and pays them $19 an hour.

Only California Democrats could pay criminals to service junkies in tent cities that cost more than most apartments. But only California Democrats could set up shacks that cost more per square foot than most houses and apartments for the homeless that cost more than luxury suites. Nothing is too good for the homeless and their publicists and consultants in California.

While a lot of money gets spent, nothing really gets done.

LA keeps trying to scale down its solutions, but ends up spending more the smaller the solution.

The city tried to set up portable toilets which cost $339,000. Over a hundred thousand of that money goes to bathroom attendants. But over in Sacramento, the state’s capital, a homeless bathroom cost $1 million. When the Guggenheim Museum unveiled a solid gold toilet as one of its art exhibits, it was estimated to cost over $1 million. The homeless could have had a gold toilet for the cost of the free government toilets that they’re getting from the welfare state.

But they could have also had luxury condos with gyms and swimming pools for the cost of the apartments that are being built, but never actually get built, to house them.

California’s homeless are the richest homeless in the world. And while they may never see any of the money that gets spent on them by the Democrat Homeless-Industrial Complex, the cash bleeds into the pockets of the professional bleeding hearts who are getting rich off the poor.

The homeless tent cities aren’t going anywhere. They’re making too much money.

There will still be junkies lying in their own filth in tents under the freeway, but where they once did so for free, taxpayers will now be paying $2,600 a month for them to lie in their own filth.

That’s why no one except the homeless can afford to live in Los Angeles.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

Tags: California, homeless, Los Angeles, recent

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

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