Venice Beach. (Photo: Venice resident posted @ConservativeTreehouse)
How the Homeless Industrial Complex Plans to Destroy Venice Beach
The City of Los Angeles intends to use bailout funds to buy distressed properties and use them to house the unhoused
By Edward Ring, April 22, 2020 2:05 am
You can’t ensure the rule of law when you permit people to wander the streets stoned out of their minds, or sprawled across park benches in a heroin stupor, or drinking and carousing all night long, urinating and defecating everywhere.
“I intend on putting in another proposal in the next week or two that asks the city to look at the federal bailout or stimulus funds we’ll be getting as a result of this crisis…and using some of that to either buy hotels that go belly up or to buy the distressed properties that are absolutely going to be on the market at cheaper prices after this crisis is over. And use that as homeless and affordable housing. It’s going to be a hell of a lot cheaper to purchase stuff that is already there and move people in there than if we start from scratch. A lot of good stuff is being done.”
– Mike Bonin, LA City Council member, 11th District, remarks at 4/18 virtual town hall
It isn’t often you’ll find a politician revealing so explicitly what they’re intending to do, especially when it involves the displacement of an entire well-established community. Nor is it often, if ever, that something so tragic and disruptive as a disease pandemic comes along to hasten the accomplishment of such a nefarious objective.
The policies being enacted in California, and in Los Angeles in particular, to help the “unhoused” find shelter, have little to do with helping the “unhoused.” If they did, the problem would have been solved years ago. Venice Beach provides an excellent case study in how everything being done to help the “unhoused” has a hidden agenda.
The key to understanding this hidden agenda is to recognize that a Homeless Industrial Complex has arisen in California that acquires power and profit by pursuing an utterly dysfunctional strategy. In Los Angeles, for example, instead of rounding up homeless people, sorting them according to their various challenges – drug addiction, alcoholism, criminality, mental illness, laziness, or just bad luck – and moving them into supervised camps in low cost areas of Los Angeles County, the Homeless Industrial Complex has grown into a voracious leviathan, devouring billions in taxpayers’ money. And for all practical purposes, and with all that money, they have just made the problem worse.
This is because you can’t ensure the rule of law when you permit people to wander the streets stoned out of their minds, or sprawled across park benches in a heroin stupor, or drinking and carousing all night long, urinating and defecating everywhere, and then permit them to receive free food and bedding in a shelter two blocks from the beach with no curfew and no restrictions on behavior. But that’s what they did in Venice Beach.
Furthermore, you can’t get the tens of thousands of homeless living in Los Angeles into shelters of any kind, when you’re spending over $8 million to build a shelter with 154 beds, but that’s what they did in Venice Beach. And you can’t move these homeless from that temporary shelter into “permanent supportive housing” in a new structure containing 140 apartments at an estimated total project cost of over $200 million. But that’s what’s planned for Venice Beach.
The members of the Homeless Industrial Complex know this. But they don’t care, because public bureaucracies get funding to expand, and “nonprofit” corporations and their for-profit subcontractors get public funding and tax incentives. These perks are far more lucrative when the “solutions” they construct are on high value land, even though locating supportive housing and shelters in inexpensive areas would solve the problem.
The Next Step – The Destruction of a City
Which brings us back to Council member Bonin’s revealing comment: The City of Los Angeles intends to use bailout funds to buy distressed properties and use them to house the unhoused.
There are all kinds of problems with this. Here’s what’s happened, and what’s coming next:
The homeless could have been kept off the streets. But the public authorities and their allies in the Homeless Industrial Complex hid behind insufficiently challenged court rulings and legislation that made it prohibitively expensive to house all the homeless, and almost impossible to treat them or hold them accountable.
The current pandemic has crushed the economy, and has been equally devastating to both small landlords and renters. But how have elected officials responded? They have clamped down on landlords, making it impossible to evict tenants, or raise rent, and are even considering mandating a 25 percent rent reduction. While there is some moral justification for these measures during these extraordinary times, what sort of reciprocal relief has been offered landlords? Nothing. No property tax relief, much less grants or low interest loans. “Distressed properties.” Indeed.
For years developers have been eyeing the residential paradise that remains intact on the blocks immediately behind the Venice Beach boardwalk. Armed with phony legislative mandates to protect “sprawl,” and “greenhouse gas,” which has prevented construction of entire new cities along California’s 101, I-5 and 99 transportation corridors, developers hope to demolish these beachfront neighborhoods and fill them with multi-story, multi-family units.
As an aside, but essential to any discussion of the homeless crisis, California’s environmentalist inspired legislative mandates are the reason that developers can no longer make a profit building affordable homes without subsidies. These laws caused California’s housing shortage and were a major factor in causing California’s homeless crisis. They should be revised or repealed.
While there is room for legitimate debate over how cities should manage densification, some of which would still be inevitable and mostly beneficial even if Californians did not live under the oppression of urban containment, what is happening in Venice Beach is not legitimate. It is economic war.
The elected officials in Los Angeles have allowed the homeless population in Venice Beach to become dangerously out of control. Trespassing, theft, disturbing the peace, vandalism, public intoxication and worse are all crimes that are now ignored. The people living in Venice Beach, working hard to pay rent or mortgages, were besieged before this pandemic began. Now, in a cruel twist of injustice, they are under “lockdown,” as the still unrestricted and unaccountable homeless become further entrenched.
Purchasing “distressed” properties will never get house all of the “unhoused,” because Venice Beach’s natural attributes of perfect weather, endless beach, and big sky sunsets over the Pacific cannot be altogether destroyed no matter how much the neighborhoods are blighted. In a place like Venice Beach, if you buy houses and give them away, more “unhoused” will come. To squeeze the property owners in Venice Beach while displaying compassion without conditions to the homeless is a travesty. But blight can be useful.
Once Venice Beach acquires a critical mass of blighted and distressed properties, and manage to “house” a sufficient number of the formerly “unhoused,” two things will happen. The blight will empower the city to declare entire square blocks as subject to eminent domain, and the lowered average income per census tract will qualify developers for low income tax credits. At that point, bring on the bulldozers, and say goodbye to a city, a way of life, and whatever incentives may have remained for hard working property owners to work hard and own property.
Council member Bonin and his comrades must feel very proud to have seized this moment.
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You’re using ‘industrial complex’ wrong. `
Well, there IS a certain industriousness to their indolence. And, Lord knows they’ve got more than their fair share of complexes.
That’s an interesting criticism. How? Would you mind elaborating? One doesn’t often find such an accurate dictionary definition as this. And it’s catchy, too. Maybe too catchy for your taste.
“The industrial complex is a socioeconomic concept wherein businesses become entwined in social or political systems or institutions, creating or bolstering a profit economy from these systems.”
sounds about right.
Best read two informative, in-depth articles on these organized white-collar criminals: https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/31/how-trump-can-declare-war-on-the-homeless-industrial-complex/ and https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/13/americas-homeless-industrial-complex/
Great article, which tells it exactly like it is re: the so-called “homeless” and their handlers.
Lowering the rent 25% will also force a 25% reduction in property values and 25% less property tax revenue to the state. This means there will be 25% less money to support the homeless. It’s a giant race to the bottom.
Thats a great analysis . Your right. By dropping the tax rate 25%, the dolts will get much less money for their beloved government industrial complex.
This is an excellent article. During the 10 years that I lived in Venice Beach (1978-1987) , I personally witnessed early morning releases of detained homeless people by the Santa Monica police over the border into Venice.
Although redevelopment has ended in California, the governor has indicated that emergency acquisitions of hotels and other housing units may be authorized. The “emergency” of homelessness will be solved by state-owned housing. The regional plan for LA https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/travel/the-sustainable-city-plan-of-los-angeles will show you what the real focus of Garcetti and his gang is: transformation—code for destruction of the existing single family housing. Get ready for more high density housing and more of it paid for with your property taxes and transportation dollars.
For more info see our lawsuit against regional governance and videos/interviews I’ve done with major news outlets and independent mediaj.
Thank you
Rosa Koire
Post Sustainability Institute
The crazy plan should be applied in Brentwood, Pacific Palisades where is donors leave behind tall fences and gates, and in mar Vista where he lives
I like your idea! That would slow it down, wouldn’t it?
nope. he is the corrupted minority parasite in our midst. we don’t want him in our neighborhood, many did not vote this scoundrel/mongrel in. those that paid into his system are getting bit in the ass, now.
Yes, I do understand that Bonin is widely despised by his own constituency, and like many local politicians in California (my own representatives, in fact) he plows ahead doing what he wants in spite of energetic (and impressive) community blowback.
There will be a lot of distressed properties after the State and the City screw them over with lock down. Of course these morons are not even thinking loss of tax base.
Shameful. Further indication of how far California has sunk into the abyss.
I just saw this article while trying to find another article, in which Eric Garcetti is outed for paying $345,000 for a post-and-beam house in a low income neighborhood, (Echo Park,2000)while keeping it for a limited amount of years for tax reasons, then listing the same house for $1.65 million !(2015) Oh the rank hypocracy of the Garcettis and their ilk !! Why isn’t that treasonous bastard being audited, along with the rest of City Hall ?? I can remember a time when there were no homeless people in and around Los Angeles, because in my youth during the 60’s and 70’s, there were as many places to rent as there were people-at the time. Since 1980, at the latest, no moderate, or low income apartments were getting built, yet the population of the area and Southern California increased rapidly. No housing was getting built to keep up with the swelling population, so demand outstripped supply, and rents became high, and stayed there for 42 years. Add to this the insane policies of shipping our jobs and manufacturing overseas, and you have the perfect storm for creating homelessness. The only hint in the good old days of this ever becoming possible, was that movie from 1972, ” Soylent Green.” people lived and died in the streets, while the elites hid behind their walled estates, and corporations ruled. Oligarchy and Fascism combined. How prophetic that movie turned out to be ! Mr. Ring, we need to return to the infrastructures and economy we had after the Great Depression was over. Nazi Germany rounded up their homeless nd put THEM in camps, as you advocate today. So did the Weimar Republic. The idiots running the Homeless Industrial Complex today, are traitors from BOTH PARTIES. They have such entrenched corruption, and have barred accountability, while playing the residents and homeless of Venice Beach and other communities against each other- instead of turning this deserved wrath against all the different entities who profit from this travesty. Google ” profiting off the homeless” and you will see for yourself.
Once cleared of single family homes, and with nominal cosmetic properties dedicated to “homeless”, the developers will be free to build stack and pack condos. Condos get sold at high prices, new owners pay property tax. Everybody’s happy. Politicians grabbing land from current property owners by bankrupting then foreclosure, then profiting directly and for their cronies. It’s how all the elite make their living. What do you propose to do about it?
Awareness of what’s going on and good people screaming bloody murder about it, people like those posting comments here, is a fine start. People like Mike Bonin probably have no idea, when they pull this outrageous stuff, how many angry activists they are creating out of citizens who were previously minding their own business. But usually Bonin and his ilk do these things in the dark. Not in this case where it has been dragged out into the sunshine for inspection.
I do believe this whole event 201 is a huge push toward AGENDA 21…hence the 201. Rosa Koire has many informative videos on the subject and plan of the NWO global elites. Green bike paths, sustainability, getting people out of their cars, stack and pack housing, climate action plans for every city, 0 carbon emissions…and then of course there is the great Greta with her dramatic overkill on the subject of climate change fearing the childern of the world to do their part for the planet….yeah, well if people don’t wake to all these manipulated narraitves and push back hard, expect more and worse. i always think of the movie dr. zviago lately when i read these stories and the KGB video where the guy tells how the communists take over nations
Former KGB Agent Yuri Bezmenov Explains How to Brainwash a Nation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0
Rosa Koire, Wolfeboro NH, Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POf_NqfotRQ
I do believe this whole event 201 is a huge push toward AGENDA 21…hence the 201. Rosa Koire has many informative videos on the subject and plan of the NWO global elites. Green bike paths, sustainability, getting people out of their cars, stack and pack housing, climate action plans for every city, 0 carbon emissions…and then of course there is the great Greta with her dramatic overkill on the subject of climate change fearing the childern of the world to do their part for the planet….yeah, well if people don’t wake to all these manipulated narraitves and push back hard, expect more and worse. i always think of the movie dr. zviago lately when i read these stories and the KGB video where the guy tells how the communists take over nations
Former KGB Agent Yuri Bezmenov Explains How to Brainwash a Nation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0
Rosa Koire, Wolfeboro NH, Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POf_NqfotRQ
Last Days Scenario : 2Ti 3:13 But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.
The first order of business is to help people whose lives predatory capitalism has ruined. Once everyone is equitably lifted into the boat, it can be steered into the future.
As usual it’s property owners getting kicked to the curb with $$$$$ homeless agenda. I have a nice 1 bedroom Ocean view apt., for rent in Cardiff. With the Government mandate I am not going to bother to rent it out knowing it’s legal for potential tenants to scam me. With all $$$$$ spent on homeless i see no change other than more on the street
Government at its worst! The liberal Nazis insist they know what is best and insist on imposing their will on a community which despises their self serving plans . Plans which will most likely have the opposite effect of their alleged intent.
All this is true. Allowing the government to be the landlord for these “distressed properties” will just create slums. The government tries to force compliance of codes on “slumlords”, many of whom can not afford to pay for these upgrades(that were not required when built), but when they are the land lord, do you think they will renovate these places? Any 3 story building that has tenants has to have an elevator(or escalator). This is a huge expense, is the government going to police itself here? Most of these distressed properties have vermin problems, they have for years. When these critters have been here for decades, it is not easy to get rid of them, just go to any older city and look at their old buildings.
Retrofitting to universal codes is expensive – going from lath and plaster to wall board, using nominal size lumber where the old lumber was milled to different dimensions, installing dual pane windows as retrofit in place of site built windows form 100+ years ago, just replacing the electrical panels, running Romex instead of 2 wire systems is a lot of work, rebuilding the floors to put a bathroom and shower/bath in every apartment would cost almost as much as building new. The county has land they can build on that is not at the jewel areas on the coast. I can’t afford to buy at the beach, why should we give the indigent the best?
I say let’s move all of California’s homeless to the border and house them in giant tents. It can be similar to what Sheriff Joe had going on in Arizona. It worked for criminals, so it will work for the homeless too. And let’s face it, most of them are criminals anyway. Plus, they can help the Border Patrol scare off the would be illegal aliens. I mean, after seeing them would you want to live in the United States? Think about it. They can throw their feces and urine at the invaders instead of our good citizens. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. It’s the ultimate win-win!