I think this is a dominating perspective for a lot of people. A few neighborhoods in LA and SF get infinitely more news coverage than the thousands of quiet urban places where nothing spectacular is going wrong, which creates an illusion of widespread despair.

I’m not saying crime or homelessness don’t exist, but urban LA is just not representative.

It is shocking that the richest state in the history of the world can’t figure out how to help the people with nowhere to go.

Skid Row has been in LA since the 30s. The problem is largely that there's a lot of vested interest in painting Californian Urban Areas as bad and so negative coverage focuses on the Tenderloin, Union Square, and Skid Row.

Those people are there because of the help. Every time a municipality expands support for the homeless and addicted they get more homeless addicts. Surrounding areas will in fact put people on buses and ship them out to towns where there is more support.

This is why Housing First is such a brilliant idea. Give them help, but require them to be stably housed (i.e. on a viable path out of long-term homelessness) before they can access the help.

My town set up an apartment building specifically to house the "chronically" homeless. It cost a fortune to build (something like twice the cost per square foot as normal, or maybe more). The rationale was exactly that, give them stable housing so they can work on their addictions and life skills.

Fast forward five years, the place is a shithole. Roach-infested, apartments severely damaged and filthy, needles and garbage everywhere. Police, fire, and EMS spending a disproportonate amount of resources there.

People who are chronically homeless and addicted do not know how to live in houses. If you give them housing they will destroy it or they people they associate with will destroy it.

Sobriety has to come first. Some people won't accept that. At some point you have to stop accomodating their behavior and just say "no, that is not an acceptable way to live, and you can't do that here."

I'm not sure what's the problem is. They're getting individual apartments, right? If someone makes their assigned apartment a shithole, they should get kicked out of the program. Offer them rehab and therapy in a supervised community setting, like you say.

The results have been that much of that housing ends up with the same problems homeless shelters do.

So you visited once? My anecdotal experience is I grew up in LA in the 80s and 90s. My middle school was shot at on three occasions I can remember. We weren't allowed to wear red, blue, or Raider's jerseys because the school district was so scared of kids getting shot for being suspected gang members. Six different intersections directly in front of elementary and middle schools near my neighborhood had no stop lights, until so many kids got hit by cars and killed that the parents finally demanded it enough that the council did something about it. My sister's best friend was murdered, smothered in her sleep by her mom's boyfriend. My second sister's best friend's mom had a fake identity because she survived getting attacked by the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez. There was a black girl found tied to a fence and burned alive near my house whose name I never learned. My dad was punched by some guy at his birthday party where he met my mom and his friends took that guy into the concrete river ditch and shot him. As far as they tell me, no one ever got in trouble and I don't even think the authorities gave a shit. My dad was also shot in the chest with a shotgun, had his thumb cut off in shop class, broke his collarbone in football practice and didn't even get medical care for it. My uncle drowned in a river. My best friend from preschool died from touching a stray cat. My buddy in drafting class freshman year shot himself because he got a bad report card and was tired of how many times his dad beat him for something like that. I was kind of a goth and a bunch of my friends all gave themselves HIV because they were dumbasses who thought they were real vampires and drank each other's blood in the middle of a damn AIDS epidemic. In elementary school, we were often not allowed to have recess because air pollution was so bad that it wasn't safe to play outside. The nightly local news was so damn repetitive, because it was every single week an 8 year-old trying to buy ice cream from the ice cream truck getting caught in gang crossfire and shot in the head. Always the same little girl, always buying ice cream. Felt like it happened a thousand times. I was a pretty lucky kid that never got picked on, but you know why? My school had no idea what to do with someone who learned math as easily as I did, so they let me teach a remedial class when I was 12. The other kids I was helping were mostly gang bangers who came to really like me and beat the ever living shit out of any other kid that looked at me funny.

I never understand these kinds of sentiments on the Internet. Was nobody actually alive in the 90s? Have no memories? All rich white kids who grew up sheltered in the suburbs? Is Hacker News just super European and it was way better there? I get that California closed all of the state mental hospitals 35 years ago and now you have to actually see crazy people shitting on the street near your office building, but the overall reality is so immeasurably better than it was then that you guys make me feel like I'm being Mandela Effected. I somehow slipped into the timeline where Los Angeles and San Francisco weren't gang-infested murdervilles suffering from drug and disease epidemics with barely breathable air 40 years ago but were actually paradises.

Like you're talking about the Walk of Fame? Hollywood Blvd has been public drug use, street walkers, sex shops, theaters where Pee Wee Herman might cum on you, for as long as it's existed. Pretty Woman wasn't making it up except they weren't actually as attractive as Julia Roberts.

Thank you for your perspective, it does adjust mine heavily. Yes, I am a European, and your depiction of LA makes the post soviet 90s of Eastern Europe look somewhat tame in comparison. We had shootings and violence, but not nearly to the same extent.

Yet my point still stands, how can the worlds richest state not fix this?