PrairiePundit

 DC Daily Journal: ... “Gavin Newsom literally lost track of the $27 billion he spent on the homeless crisis,” Jones said, citing the report. “Today’s HUD report makes it clear that instead of solving the problem, Newsom’s endless spending ‘solution’ has only made it worse.” In response, Newsom’s office emphasized that the state has distributed $24 billion to local governments through various homelessness programs and rejected claims that the funds were mismanaged or unaccounted for. “All that money is accounted for,” Newsom’s office stated, addressing Jones’s accusations. “The audit showed that previously not all state programs required locals to report how those dollars improved homelessness… That’s been fixed. This administration has added strong accountability and reporting requirements for local governments that receive state funding.” The administration also pointed to broader national trends, noting that California’s homelessness increase was 3% in 2024, compared to a 21% na...

 Cal-Matters: Billions of dollars later, California’s homeless crisis persists under Newsom California liberals appear to not have an answer to the homeless situation in that state.  

 Headline USA: FBI Arrests Homeless Man for Allegedly Plotting to Bomb NY Stock Exchange 'YENER told UCE-1 he needed the wire to create the improvised explosive device and the light bulb to test its efficacy...' I recall having brushes with people like this when I worked in downtown Houston.  It was something that was not encountered when I worked in the suburbs. 

Kevin Kiley @KevinKileyCA The audit of homelessness spending in California is finally out, and the results are infuriating: "California spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness over the past five years but didn’t consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money actually improved the situation." I first asked for the audit in 2020, but Newsom intervened to kill it. Now we know why he didn't want his spending examined. Last year, Assemblyman Josh Hoover got the audit approved, and the findings released today are even worse than I expected. The audit found that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness "stopped tracking spending on programs and whether programs were working in 2021. It also failed to collect and evaluate outcome data for these programs." Even a Democrat State Senator decried the "lack of transparency at every level." Meanwhile, homelessness has increased by 32 percent in California over the last five years. It has incre...

 American Action News: Homelessness Surging In Blue City Despite Doling Out Hundreds Of Millions

 American Action News: San Francisco’s city attorney on Monday accused a nonprofit that has received tens of millions of public dollars to provide homeless services of stealing public funds. Providence Foundation, led by Patricia Doyle, allegedly “took over $100,000 of public money meant to benefit people experiencing homelessness” by submitting fraudulent invoices to San Francisco, according to a press release from the city attorney’s office. Doyle’s foundation has received roughly $100 million in contracts from the city, though its tax forms don’t include information on how much of its revenue went toward executive compensation, as is standard practice among nonprofits. “There’s a difference between having challenges with financial compliance and intentionally defrauding the City and its taxpayers,” City Attorney David Chiu said. “This nonprofit took over $100,000 of public money meant to benefit people experiencing homelessness. That cannot be tolerated.” ... San Francisco alr...

 American Action News: California Has No Idea How Much Its Homeless Programs Are Costing, Audit Finds ... The homeless population in California has grown from 118,552 in 2013 to 181,399 in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. California has allocated almost $24 billion to homelessness and housing services over the past five fiscal years, according to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office. ... If you subsidize it, you get more of it. 

KTBC: It's been more than two years since Texas passed a law banning camping targeted at homeless people. Gov. Greg Abbott signed HB 1925 in 2021. It makes encampments in public areas unlawful and could cost a person up to $500 in fines. Since then, the Downtown Austin Alliance said it's seen a change in the number of homeless people. "The number is down significantly from what it was back then," said Bill Brice, the senior vice president of investor relations for the Downtown Austin Alliance. The Alliance said in May 2021, it estimated about 800 people were living unsheltered in downtown Austin's public improvement district. In the fall, the Alliance said the numbers dropped after the city reinstated its camping ban and the state made it illegal. At the same time, the Heal Initiative launched, which helps homeless people find shelter and housing. "That really helps put a dent in the number early on," said Brice. Since then, the alliance said the numbers...

 Victoria Taft: Welcome to the West Coast, Messed Coast™ homeless drug camp, where you can still smoke your rent and live in a tent without the cops bothering you for the foreseeable future. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has doubled down on that “fanciful” and “egregious” Boise decision made in 2018 that put the onus on cities to find beds for homeless, drug-addicted urban campers before they could give them “the bum’s rush.” The court’s liberal wing voted not to rehear the case en banc and left standing a previous ruling denouncing Grants Pass, Oregon’s, recent ordinances to outlaw urban tent cities as unconstitutional. The city sought to have a larger panel of judges to hear its appeal. Leftists on the court said no way, and conservative judges on the court asked, in so many words, the crazy judges if they’d bothered to look out the window lately to see what they’d done. Reagan appointee Diarmuid O’Scannlain issued a dissenting statement calling the original ruling “a dubious...

 AP: Nearly 1/3 of the US homeless population lives in California. This veterinarian cares for the pets ... California is home to nearly a third of the nation's homeless population, according to federal data. About two-thirds of California's homeless population is unsheltered, meaning they live outside, often packed into encampments in major cities and along roadways. Nationally, up to 10% of homeless people have pets, according to an estimate from the advocacy group Pets of the Homeless. Stewart believes that number is greater. ... The homeless tend to gather in and around liberal cities.  Texas is seeing the increase near cities like Austin and Houston. 

 NY Post: Jamie Hammonds said city policies have pushed homeless into areas where the public can’t see them An Austin, Texas, resident is raising awareness of the city’s homeless problem and its unseen impact on greenbelt areas. Jamie Hammonds, an investigative filmmaker who runs the organization Documenting Austin’s Streets and Homeless, or DASH, shared videos Wednesday on Twitter, showing a homeless encampment in the Violet Crown Trail after roughly a year of neglect. “It’s destroyed. It will never be the same,” Hammonds tweeted . A real-estate agent concurred, saying the “environmental damage from these camps is immense.” The videos, shot by Hammonds Wednesday morning, show piles of trash littering the trail as far as the eye can see. Hammonds reported seeing cars, trailers, mountains of garbage, needles, human waste, and hundreds of homeless . Hammonds blamed city officials for worsening the problem. He argued that city policies have pushed people experiencing homelessness in...

 Washington Post: California shifts to an experiment in coercion to treat the homeless A new court system seeks to find a middle road between jail and ignoring the mentally ill, many of whom live on the streets. It appears to have abandoned facilities for the mentally ill with more of them living on the streets.  I suspect drug addiction in California has contributed to the problem.  See, also: Gov. Newsom sends National Guard and CHP to tackle San Francisco's fentanyl crisis

 Post Millenial: California holds half of all 'unsheltered' homeless people in US Six of the ten cities with the largest homeless populations in the US are in California. It has become a bigger problem because California no longer has consistently good weather.  The heavy rains and snowfall have to have impacted the homeless more.   ... "California accounted for half of all unsheltered people in the country (115,491 people). This is more than nine times the number of unsheltered people in the state with the next highest number, Washington," additionally, findings state that "California also had the highest rate of homelessness, with 44 people experiencing homelessness out of every 10,000 people in the state." ...

 Ventura County Star: Gov. Gavin Newsom, newly inaugurated Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and legislative leaders are pledging decisive action on California’s homelessness crisis, which raises a pithy question: Why did it erupt during a period of strong economic growth? The reasons often offered include a moderate climate, the availability of generous welfare benefits, mental health and drug abuse. However, a lengthy and meticulously sourced article in the current issue of Atlantic magazine demolishes all of those supposed causes. Rather, the article argues persuasively, California and other left-leaning states tend to have the nation’s most egregious levels of homelessness because they have made it extraordinarily difficult to build enough housing to meet demands. Author Jerusalem Demsas contends that the progressive politics of California and other states are “largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic pol...

 LA Mag: Skid Row Nation: How L.A.’s Homelessness Crisis Response Spread Across the Country In recent years, homelessness marked by meth abuse and tents has moved from the Southland to other cities. But will more housing really solve the crisis? It is mainly a Democrat's controlled cities problem predominately on the West Coast. You rarely see it here in Texas.

 NY Post: DC tent cities stain the nation’s capital Wherever liberals are in control there appears to be a homeless problem.  From West Coast cities to Washington DC  people are being allowed to camp by pitching tents on the sidewalks.  See, also: How ‘woke’ policies turned Downtown San Francisco into an urban drug-den

  Tweet See new Tweets Conversation Dinesh D'Souza @DineshDSouza Brought to you by the Democratic Party! If you want your neighborhood to look like this, vote Democrat Quote Tweet T Wolf  @Twolfrecovery · Oct 13 This isn't a shanty town in India. This is Oakland, CA. The crisis of our generation. #homelessness 11:19 AM · Oct 14, 2022 · Twitter for iPhone 3,682 Retweets 196 Quote Tweets 9,483 Likes This is what passes for "affordable housing" in poorly run Democrat cities. They clearly have unenforced zoning laws.