With its singular geographic beauty and sublime climate, California is hard to beat. Nearly 40 million people now call California home — making it the most popular state in the union.
But with so many people come many problems.
The place is getting pretty congested. Infrastructure is inadequate. Persistent droughts and increased demand have taxed fresh water supplies to critically low levels.
Housing is in short supply and excruciatingly expensive for most people. California’s median home price is over $537,000 and median rent is more than $2,400 a month. And those medians are bargains compared to housing prices along the coast.
Meanwhile, taxes are the highest in the nation, making it even more difficult for all but the wealthiest residents to pay the high rents and gas prices, and cover the escalating cost of water.
The state government, long dominated by one party, is notoriously profligate and expediently political. Only China’s Communist Party may be more exclusively entrenched than California’s Democratic Party.
Yet, like a bad marriage to a beautiful spouse, most Californians just can’t divorce the place. They endure the negatives rather than leave.
Another one of those negatives is a growing, ubiquitous horde of homeless people. California has about 12 percent of the nation’s population but 25 percent of the nation’s estimated 554,000 homeless.
The state suffers the highest homeless rate and number of homeless in America. While the past two years saw the nation’s homeless population actually decrease 13 percent, California’s increased 14 percent.
The state’s high cost of housing is cited as the main culprit for the increase, but the numbers above suggest that California may be shouldering an inordinate and inequitable share of the nation’s homeless.
This is supported by field research conducted in California’s coastal communities that found a substantial number of homeless come from elsewhere. As one homeless emigre interviewed in Santa Barbara put it, “I’d rather live on the streets here, than in Pittsburgh, wouldn’t you?”
Consequently, efforts to address the homeless problem by providing shelter and food have been as effective as addressing an ant infestation by placing sugar cubes around the house. No matter how many shelters are built, the line waiting to get in never seems to get shorter.
That is because the homeless find California as alluring as does most everyone else who lives here. Nevertheless, no one community or state should have to accommodate and endure an unlimited influx of homeless people. It is unhealthy, repellent and dangerous.
Last month, a Ventura man with his young daughter on his lap was randomly attacked and stabbed to death in a popular beachside restaurant, allegedly by a homeless man. Last week in Santa Barbara, a homeless man was arrested as a suspect in the brazen robberies of three downtown stores in broad daylight and the brutal beating and rape of a homeless woman.
Last year the state of California declared a health emergency after a dangerous outbreak of contagious Hepatitis-A among the homeless populations in Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Cruz.
Anyone who strolls through just about any downtown in California will find a gauntlet of panhandlers, crazies and foul-smelling vagrants.
Misguided charity and aimless empathy are not going to fix this, but concerted common sense might.
First, those who are homeless due to economics don’t have to be living on the streets or in their cars. They can relocate to states where the cost of living allows them proper housing. Not everyone can afford to live in California, nor should they. The state is already populated beyond its carrying capacity, and there is plenty of affordable housing east of Eden.
Many folks have made the sensible choice to leave. From 2006 to 2016 net out-migration from California to other states exceeded 1 million people. The vast majority of those — nearly 517,000 households — earned less than $50,000 a year.
Because many California employers have taken full advantage of the state’s vast amount of illegal immigrant labor, wage scales at the lower end of the economic spectrum have been depressed. This, along with increasing the demand on limited housing, is how illegal immigration exacerbates California’s homeless problem.
Taxpayers should not be subsidizing low-wage jobs so that employers can maximize profits by underpaying employees. If inadequate pay is a significant cause of homelessness, that is an issue involving free-market principles, employers and labor.
However, those principles are perverted by California’s desultory enforcement, or nonenforcement, of immigration law — most egregiously declaring statewide sanctuary for the state’s 3 million illegal aliens.
About a third of the homeless population is mentally ill. While Californians are the highest taxed people in America, their tax money is squandered on dubious things such as rapid-rail boondoggles and on unconscionably lavish government employee pensions. It would be more appropriate and beneficial to provide treatment and care for the state’s mentally ill — who are currently roaming the streets — than for public officials and employees to retire at an early age with full pay for life.
Meanwhile, communities should assist their own citizens who have, through no fault of their own, become homeless. Santa Barbara’s Transition House is a fine example of this.
But no community should be expected to accommodate every homeless person who comes along. Communities should actively discourage handouts to panhandlers and should apply all legal means available to expel the itinerant homeless.
— Randy Alcorn is a Santa Barbara political observer. Contact him at randyaalcorn@gmail.com, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.