Moonbattery Makes Mess in LA’s Venice

Leftist demagoguery often features denunciations of inequality. Yet nowhere will you find starker inequality than in cities run by leftists. Los Angeles is a case in point. Particularly in Venice, with a median home price of $1.9 million, liberal policies have nurtured a burgeoning population of derelicts:

[R]esidents are now grappling with a quality-of-life issue that defies their own liberal ideals.

These “liberal ideals” largely caused the problem. There is work in this economy for those who want it. Thanks to a culture of self-indulgent entitlement, some prefer to sleep in a tent.

Residents who live near the encampments say mail regularly goes missing. Break-ins have jumped. Hypodermic needles and human waste are appearing on sidewalks and at local playgrounds. Residents have complained to police about harassment and even physical assaults.

Amazon packages are not likely to sit unattended on Venice porches for long.

“It was six months of terror, absolute terror,” says radiologist Maria Altavilla, who lives in east Venice. She says that the period of increased health and safety concerns coincided with the expansion of the homeless encampments the past year. She recently arrived home with her two children to find a woman shooting up in her yard.

She might have been targeted for not being ideologically on board with homelessness.

Several residents shared an unconfirmed theory — suggested to them by a local patrolman — that certain assailants were using the social media app NextDoor to monitor which residents are most vocal about their opposition to encampments and then targeting those individuals for retribution.

The rage is due to boil over…

“Honestly, I think we are a step and half away from vigilantism,” says a talent manager who has lived in the area for two decades.

The runaway homelessness in California is often blamed on stratospheric housing costs, which are driven in turn by draconian environmental restrictions that prevent construction. But there are other factors:

A 2006 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Jones v. City of Los Angeles required that law enforcement and city officials no longer enforce the ban on sleeping on sidewalks anywhere in the city until a sufficient amount of permanent supportive housing could be built. Further complicating matters were two state ballot measures that voters overwhelmingly approved in 2016 — Propositions 47 and 57 — which decriminalized certain felonies to misdemeanors in an effort to address the state’s overburdened prison system.

Big Government attempts to solve the problems it creates by throwing money at them, thereby making them worse. Making homelessness a more viable lifestyle by subsidizing it has the same effect in Los Angeles as up the coast in San Francisco. Since there is no shortage of jobs lately, the only thing missing is personal responsibility — the bane of moonbats.

On a tip from Ellen O.

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