Insane: The LA City Council just voted to hand more parks to the homeless

What kind of city councilman facilitates more grime, dysfunction and public disorder in his own district?The kind named Hugo Soto-Martínez.The LA councilman, a loony socialist, convinced the full council to lift restrictions on homeless camping in more than a dozen parks and public spaces in Hollywood and Silver Lake areas.Council members on Tuesday voted 10–3 to indulge the crazy, strip police of a tool to keep neighborhoods clean and invite drugs and squalor to spread through Hollywood.It’s insanity on steroids.The council should be shifting the homeless into treatment and accountability programs, not letting them commandeer more public spaces.Among those hurt by the council’s inane homeless policies? Hard-working Angelenos — and the homeless themselves.Residents, for their part, are taxed for millions of dollars in Band-Aids that enrich “nonprofits” but do little to alleviate homelessness.They also pay to scrape up the messes that encampments invariably produce. And then there are the costs to quality of life: the parks overrun not by kids but by stupefied addicts, the sidewalks strewn with human waste, the crime and drug deals that spread near encampments.All of scant concern, apparently, to Soto-Martínez and the merry band of lunatics (aka some 50 activist groups) that reportedly implored him to lift encampment bans in his district.The sad thing is, an invitation to dwell in public spaces does no favors for the homeless themselves. Homeless people, many plagued by addiction and/or mental illness, need structure and treatment — not carte blanche to entrench their own misery in drug-strewn encampments, at a high cost to those around them.

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