Wants to help L.A.'s homeless by cracking down on them
By THE TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD
SEP. 11, 2019 3 AM
... If President Trump wants to come in as a partner to work on serious solutions with local officials who have spent years studying and fighting this terribly complex social problem, that would be great. In fact, Mayor Eric Garcetti has been to Washington numerous times asking for federal resources. If the federal government wants to stop its disinvestment in affordable housing or throw its support behind Rep. Maxine Waters’ bill to appropriate $13.27 billion in mandatory emergency funding over five years to federal housing programs, that would be helpful. In 2018, California had more than 129,000 homeless people. Today there are nearly 59,000 homeless people in Los Angeles County alone.
But, sadly, help is not what we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the president wants to conduct a sweeping “crackdown” on California’s homeless, razing encampments and moving homeless people into “government-backed facilities.” A Trump spokesman said that the president blames “liberal policies of overregulation, excessive taxation, and poor public service delivery” for homelessness and poverty in California, which he has called “a disgrace.”
We don’t know yet exactly what Trump’s plans are. But our fear is that he views homeless people the way he views undocumented immigrants seeking asylum — as dangerous, as a burden on society, as offensive to “real” Americans. In a July interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Trump made it clear that his concerns were not so much for the homeless themselves as for the people who work near them, for police officers on the beat and for foreign visitors who may come to visit. (They “can’t be looking at that,” he said.) ...
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-09-11/trump-seems-more-interested-in-cracking-down-on-homeless-people
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