Los Angeles' homeless crisis reaching third world country levels, local residents say
The homeless crisis in Los Angeles is reaching a boiling point with 36,000 homeless people, a 16 percent increase over the last year, according to a population count released last week.
L.A. residents are frustrated with Mayor Eric Garcetti and claim his inactions and failed leadership has led to people living in third world conditions. “It is time, Eric Garcetti, that you accept your failure and that you step down,” Leading Recall Effort’s Alexandria Datig said from the steps of City Hall on Wednesday. “We demand that you step down before the citizens of Los Angeles recall you.”
Garcetti held his own press conference on Wednesday, too, announcing new plans to deploy sanitation teams in the city to clean the streets and address homeless encampments. He admitted the city needs to do more to combat homelessness.
“Homelessness is a massive emergency in our city. It's a crisis unlike anything we've seen before,” Garcetti said. "A human-caused problem, no matter how many decades in the making, can be a human-solved problem as well.”
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Nonprofit organizations and businesses are working to tackle the homelessness and displacement. Google recently announced it will invest $1 billion to ease the high cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Salesforce founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff has also been a leading advocate for pushing a homeless tax measure to solve the homeless crisis in San Francisco. The Proposition C initiative, which imposes a corporate tax on businesses with over $50 million in revenue to fund the city’s homeless facilities and services, passed in November 2018.