About Last Week…

California has a lot of homeless people.

California spends a lot of money on homeless people.

Well, you get what you pay for.

The state will spend $7.2 billion dollars this fiscal year. – that’s about $40,000 per homeless person.

The city and county of Los Angeles themselves will spend a combined $1.8 billion dollars – that’s about $26,000 per homeless person….sorry, Angelinos experiencing an unhoused state.

Every homeless person in the state is entitled to food stamps – that’s about $2,400 per year.  Every homeless person in the state is entitled to Medi-Cal – that’s a cost of about $8,600 per year (though the value to the recipient is much higher; the insurance, except for the limitations on which doctors a person can see, is quite good and doesn’t have any pesky co-pays.)

That does not include other local public expenses and the value of free and discounted services available.

What that means is that every homeless person in LA will have – at a minimum – $77,000 spent on them this year.

And then there’s temporarily housing the homeless.  Fleabag motels on the brink of failing health inspections that would have had a tough time getting $200 a week from a room are filled up at a $700 per week charge to the public, an added value to the person experiencing homeless…hell with it – vagrant – of up to $36,000 per year (no sharing rooms!)

And still it’s not good enough, say the vagrants, who often demand a bit more than a leg up, as it were. But many also have a point about the problems with confusing, dehumanizing, unstable programs like Mayor Karen Bass’s “Inside Safe.”

“Please, God, do not say ‘Inside Safe’ to any of us ever again.  Those words make us cringe” said one homeless person, while another added “Inside Safe, Outside Safer.”

Not only does the homelessness industry (not going to call it non-profit anymore) siphon off the lion’s share of the funds, it’s also riddled with incompetence and feather bedding that can lead to situations like the recent eviction of hundreds of homeless people because the “non-profit” in charge didn’t pay the rent.

All of this and still there’s more – the construction of free, supportive permanent housing.  There are billions in bond/tax funds in that particular pot, but very little has been done with it and what has actually been done has been done at an eye-watering cost (and quite often involved actually evicting people from their homes so they can be demolished to make room to build housing for the homeless).

The per-unit cost of “permanent supportive housing” has hit about $800,000, depending upon the project.

$800,000 for what typically amounts to something akin to an extended-stay hotel room: little kitchen, 500 or so square-feet total, etc.  

First, to build the units it would cost about $56 billion dollars, just to cover Los Angeles.  Second, the pace of construction would have to go to warp speed, practically quintupling the number of housing units currently being built each year,

Third, even in California $800,000 can still buy a nice, big suburban home.

And fourth – if you happen to know a builder or a developer, ask them what they could build for $800,000 and it would be a tad bit nicer than a near-efficiency flat. One told me that they were involved in the construction of a five star Las Vegas hotel recently and their per-suite (not the “whale” suites with the live-in butler, but still something with a separate bedroom or two, a kitchen area, and clocking in at about 800-square-feet with high-end fixtures and furnishings) cost was about one-third of that price.

To be blunt, the only homes that the billions of dollars being spent has built are the homes of the grifters in the homeless industry.

Speaking of homeless, there is a San Francisco Supervisor named Dean Preston who said homelessness is caused by capitalism and not by greedy landlords like, well, himself.

“I think what you’re seeing in the Tenderloin is absolutely the result of capitalism and what happens in capitalism to the people at the bottom rungs,” the local leader reportedly remarked in a new documentary by the UK outlet, UnHerd. 

“The biggest driver of why folks are on the street is because they lost their jobs, income or were evicted from their homes, usually for not being able to pay the rent. So you have major landlords literally causing folks to lose their homes, and real estate speculation making it impossible for folks to find an affordable place to live,” he reportedly said in the interview.  

Of course, Preston is rich, a landlord, his wife’s family owns a bunch of property, and protects his high-end neighborhood by what? Blocking new housing, let alone “affordable” housing.

According to the “Nimby Report,” Preston – advocate for the poor and downtrodden, hater of Elon Musk, proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, rich guy who went to a non-boarding New York school  that charges $61,900 per year for full day kindergarten – has blocked and/or opposed about 40,000 new homes.

To his credit, one supposes, he opposes almost every housing project he sees and does not discriminate against just low-income developments.  

He’s just evil, but not stupid: fewer new homes in the city does mean the ones he and his wife just happen to own are worth more.

Speaking of evil and stupid, the latest poll puts Rep. Adam Schiff in the lead in what has so far been the limp to replace DiFi/LaBu as California’s newest senator.

The latest Morning Consult poll for Politico gave Schiff 28%, put Steve Garvey in second at 19%, Rep. Katie Porter clocked in at 17%, and slotted Rep. Barbara Lee in fourth at 14%.  Two other Republicans,  Eric Early and James Bradley got 7% and Christina Pascucci was given 4%. 

That’s good news for Garvey – he has a shot at making it through the March primary and into the November run-off – and it’s good news for Schiff for a couple of reasons.

First, he’s in the lead so that’s nice (for him, not the rest of us.)  Second, he really really really wants Garvey to come in second so he can face an EVIL REPUBLICAN in November.  So do not expect to see Schiff’s campaign spend a single dime or a second of time criticizing Steve – you may even see Adam wearing a Garvey jersey at an event or two. Porter and Lee, starting in January, will begin facing their fire directly at Garvey to bump him out of the second spot.

Schiff may get his wish, though depending on how next year will go he may have wished upon the wrong star.

Speaking of wishing, there is the, um, anomolus case of the president of Harvard.  How does tis relate do Calfiornia?  Harvard relates to everything, or at least it thinks it does, and – depending upon how this particular mess plays out – may stop being terribly relevant at all.

Harvard University’s HR department offers a course on microaggression.  

Maybe they should offer one on macroaggression, too.

In the Harvard course, participants “(T)hrough small and large group discussion, participants will examine the differences between intention and impact and learn key strategies for addressing microaggressions in ways that foster shared understanding and growth.”

A bit ago, Harvard President – and accused serial plagiarist, viciously self-serving academic bureaucrat, non-scholar (she’s published eleven papers – typically that might get you in the door for a shot at an entry-level assistant prof job at a state school,) and destroyer of careers  of people who do not chant the DEI mantra that has made her rise possible – Claudine Gay testified in front of Congress about whether there was a possibility that she should consider showing a bit of concern that some of her students were calling for Auschwitz 2.0.

She said it depended upon the context. 

While it would seem calling for genocide should at the least be considered a macroaggression,  Gay could see neither the moral depravity nor the pathetic, self-serving hypocrisy of her having adamantine rules about things like accidentally mispronouncing a name – microaggression – while being able to wishywash away the universal, terminal and transgenerational threat of wiping out Jews as needing “context.”

Not only did she keep her job, she was given a strong note of support from the Harvard board, unlike her compatriot at the University of Pennsylvania who was tossed out faster than you can say intersectional oppression. Like Harvard, Penn was threatened with massive cuts in alumni donations; unlike Harvard, Penn has only a $16 billion dollar endowment that covers merely 18% of the cost of running the school.

Harvard’s got $50 billion in the bank and makes more than twice as much money from its endowment – 45% of operating costs – as it does from tuition – 20%. In other words, a few hundred million in lost donations here or there doesn’t mean that much to Harvard, but for Penn…see ya’, madam president.

Quick question:  I wonder how much of Harvard’s endowment is invested in Palestinian businesses or Palestinian Authority bonds or that planned, before the recent unpleasantness, sun, sea, and sand no Jews allowed Gaza resort?  I’m thinking it’s not that much.

And in case you are not convinced that a fish hates from the head down, Alaska Senator – and Harvard alum – Dan Sullivan was back on campus last weekend. He was in Boston, he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, for the Army-Navy football game so he took a wander over the Cambridge and was met with this when he stopped in at the library:

I returned to Harvard’s Widener Library last weekend — one of the world’s most famous libraries. What I found was shocking. . .https://t.co/ekHkYxuoD5

— Sen. Dan Sullivan (@SenDanSullivan) December 15, 2023

“When I walked upstairs to the famous Widener Reading Room, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Sullivan wrote.  “Nearly every student in the packed room was wearing a kaffiyeh. Fliers attached to their individual laptops, as well as affixed to some of the lamps in the reading room, read: ‘No Normalcy During Genocide—Justice for Palestine.’ A young woman handed the fliers to all who entered. A large banner spread across one end of the room stated in blazing blood-red letters, ‘Stop the Genocide in Gaza.’”

He continued: “If students were handing out fliers and hanging large banners in the Widener Library Reading Room denouncing, say, affirmative action or NCAA rules allowing men to compete in women’s swim meets, Harvard leaders would shut them down in a minute. But an anti-Israel protest by an antisemitic group, commandeering the entire Widener Reading Room during finals? No problem.”

Is that what Ms. Gay meant when she testified that ‘it depends on the context?’”

Thanks for reading the Globe!