California’s a real mess. They have the highest number of homeless people in the country; the state’s tax rates are crushing what’s left of the middle class, and most middle-class Californians can’t afford to buy a home to raise a family in.
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But if you’re “a person experiencing homelessness,” soon you’ll be able to move into a 278-unit luxury apartment tower with a gym, a cafe, and a TV lounge with a lovely view of the downtown area (I’d question just how ‘lovely’ that view is, but that’s just my preference talking) and the San Gabriel mountains. All of this is funded, at least in part, by the California taxpayers.
The 19-story tower, which is set to open this month in Los Angeles’ Skid Row neighborhood, will provide sprawling views of downtown and the San Gabriel Mountains, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“We’re trying to make our little corner of the world look and feel a little better,” Weingart Center Assn. Chief Executive and President Kevin Murray told the outlet.
Murray, who devised the plan, launched it in 2018 alongside the affordable housing developer Chelsea Investment Corp. The tower will become the largest permanent supportive housing project in Los Angeles.
Well, if it cleans up some of the Bidenville encampments along Skid Row, we can suppose that’s worth doing. But here’s the onion:
The 278-unit building for formerly homeless people will offer a slew of amenities in addition to a floor for caseworkers and property managers. These benefits include a café, a courtyard, a gym, an art room, a soundproof music room, a computer room and library, a TV lounge and six large balconies.
A commercial kitchen in the building will also serve a 600-bed shelter next door.
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Now wait just one doggone minute here. A cafe? A courtyard? A gym, art room, music room, a computer room and a library? A TV lounge and balconies from which, presumably, to enjoy those lovely views? A commercial kitchen, the food from which we assume will be provided to the residents, along with everything else, at no cost to them? How many Californians who are paying their own way have amenities anywhere close to this? The last time I rented a place in California, in Silicon Valley, it was in a development billed as a “luxury apartment complex,” and I paid $5,000 a month for an 800-something square-foot, one-bedroom apartment. The complex had a pool and a gym. No cafe, no computer room, no art room, no TV lounge, no stunning views. It was a five-minute walk from the Silicon Valley start-up I was working with, and a ten-minute walk from a city park that was covered with tents, makeshift huts built from pallets and cardboard, and a few ancient RVs parked on the curbs. That was in 2017.
But wait! There’s more!
The building is one of three towers. The other two will be built on the perimeter of Weingart’s nonprofit headquarters.
The first tower includes 228 studios and 50 one-bedroom apartments. Each unit will come with a television.
The project is expected to cost approximately $165 million and will receive financing from Proposition HHH, state housing funds and $56 million in state tax credits. Each unit is projected to cost $600,000.
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$600,000 per unit? Are the walls covered in gold and silver? Proposition HHH, passed earlier this year, is an enormous tax-and-spend drain on the California economy in an attempt to address the homeless problem. And how is that working out for them?
See Related: Newsom’s Making CA’s Homeless Problem Worse, and So Are His Sycophants Like San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria
San Francisco Opens First Taxpayer-Funded ‘Free’ Food Market—What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
This is unconscionable, that these homeless people will live so much better than the taxpayers who will be paying for all this.
But here’s the real kicker, and I will offer a prediction: Within a few months, a year or two at the most, these units will be trashed, likely uninhabitable. The Tragedy of the Commons will apply, for one thing; when nobody owns something, nobody cares about it, and in putting the sweepings of the streets of Skid Row into these buildings isn’t going to result in the most stable, conscientious tenants. While we would like to think (and certainly do hope) that some of these folks will be grateful for the opportunity to turn their lives around, there will be others who will live in these buildings precisely as they have lived on the streets – carelessly, thoughtlessly, in the squalor of their own making.
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Why California can’t, instead, put some resources into determining how to create jobs in the once-Golden state? How about lowering taxes, slashing some of the state’s onerous regulations, and opening the doors once again to the business spirit that California was once noted for? Isn’t that a better solution than filing the homeless away in luxury apartments at taxpayer expense?
Amazingly, California’s voters haven’t thrown Newsom and his ilk out of office – but then, a lot of the people who would vote against them have left.