A Photo Blog of the San Fernando Valley. With comment.
Because it’s Wednesday…and he has a plate of takeout at his feet, for which he needs to clear some room.
As of last month, any and all tickets for quality of life infractions in Los Angeles are null and void…if you are a street person. The rest of us have to pay our fines. LA is now operating with asymmetrical civilizational guardrails.
We need a new vocabulary for this since the old language of judgment is forbidden.
A masked brigade of thugs descended on a Van Nuys homeless encampment Saturday and administered an indiscriminate, day-long beatdown on garbage.
Wielding shovels and white uniforms they laid waste to waste, detritus of all forms: syringes, month old sweet and sour pork, used batteries and piss jugs fattened by sunlight.
No one invited them. Some brazenly wore MAGA hats, in defiance of local codes.
“I figured if I was ever going wear mine in LA, this would be the day”, said a woman from Santa Clarita.
Patrick, a self-described “red-pilled black man” drove from Loma Linda to get in on the action.
Looking at moments like a post-apocalyptic religious cult, they shamelessly swarmed the garbage field in plain view of its creators, the people of the tent favela a short distance away.
By afternoon, eight tons of garbage were dispatched into two giant containers. The field was scraped down to the gravel.
As their eco-system shrank by the minute, newly homeless rats burst from bags and scampered in circles in search of safety. Fresh dank dark places were in short supply.
Looming over the fascistic process of cleanliness was a mysterious leader named Scott who exerted a Svengali-like hold on the garbage beaters. “Thank you for helping out”, he would tell them as they removed their hazmat suits. “Thank you, Scott, for organizing this”, they would reply.
Then they touched elbows in lieu of shaking hands, as though speaking in code.
*before photo courtesy of Pacific Pundit
Gene Raymond Townsley — Arrested in Church Theft
“Angry Pacoima Churchmen Nab Suspect – Irate church members armed with baseball bats, garden tools and lead pipes last night captured a former parishioner of the Mary Immaculate Church in Pacoima after the church poor box was robbed of $2.09.”
Two bucks. To the courthouse with the Jonathan Rhys-Meyers doppelganger. Pretty was no panacea.
The 1959 rules were:
Do not steal.
Doubly so from the church.
The poor box? Gimme that shovel.
This is what I saw on the way to Trader Joes yesterday. Do you think everyone in Northridge decided one day this was going to be the new normal? But there they are just the same.
When I worked on Lord Bezos’ Farm, in the gourmet department, street people would wander in and calmly load their backpacks with premium wine and liquor and walk out the door with impunity. They made no attempt to conceal their theft. If we caught them and the total value was under $950, which it always was (occasionally, daringly, it would kiss up to the prosecutorial red line) the shift manager would turn them loose to return another day.
This is not forgiveness but licentiousness. No one voted for two sets of books, one for the law abiding and another for the Free State of Jones and its profiteers, but this is the mockery of compassion we now must endure.
If you think this benevolence extends to you, try being $100 in arrears to the city as a commuter and taxpayer. Count the days before the late penalties turn into bench warrants.
You don’t know my name, said Jean Valjean. I’m a thief.
Of course I do, said the Bishop, your name is Brother.
You forgot your candlesticks. Use this silver to become an honest man.
God has raised you out of darkness, I have saved your soul for God.
The priest’s gesture was effective because he spared Jean from a return to prison for life. Remove the gendarmerie from the equation and there is no grace, only pointless indulgence. No redemption, no Marius, no Cosette, no wedding.
I wonder what became of Gene Raymond Townsley?
The Bishop of Digne painting by Darin Ashby
Behold the good people of K-town, marching down Wilshire, in protest….
Against climate change? No.
Trump? No.
Kim Jong-Un?
A homeless shelter on Vermont.
This is the point of frustration we have reached in Los Angeles.
Faced with the abnormal being made permanent, the city is in rebellion.
There’s just one catch. With one city councilperson per 300,000 residents, rebellions can be safely ignored. The Koreatown shelter, mightily resisted in May, is quietly being moved downmarket to working-class linguistically divided Macarthur Park.
What are the odds Latinx Armenian Filipino Thai Middle Eastern White Hipster Van Nuys is going to escape a similar fate?
Lets put it this way, we are unable to get the palm weeds pulled in front of the Valley Government Center. The weeds don’t pay anybody. They don’t have a lobby. But in The Nuys they own the sidewalk. One can obtain Bitcoin at an ATM on Oxnard Blvd, then cross the street into a state of nature. Such are the contradictions we enjoy now.
Every time you see one of these guys understand there are people who do not live in your neighborhood making money off them. Your blight is another person’s meal ticket, shuffling about in rags. He has a power structure behind him. You do not.
Service providers with a stake in the outcome infiltrate public meetings with shills holding signs and nary a peep of contradiction do we hear from the Times. The lobbying by interested parties and the coverage of same by local media has become a feedback loop of assumed agreement.
Among the unexamined assumptions are these:
Is there a right to hop a bus to LA, squat on the sidewalk and declare residency?
Are such people entitled to free housing and health care?
Can Angelenos demand sobriety and labor in return for public assistance?
Housing is cheap and abundant across the U.S. Why is LA the solution?
Mr. UpintheValley votes No, No, Yes and Good Question to the above. My neighbors would as well. Which is why we do not hear the Issue of Issues debated in the city government. We get warnings instead. They will educate us about our misconceptions.
Who among us practices the inclusivity he preaches? Very few. If there is a person in the power structure downtown who has opened his home to a crack addict he has been awfully discreet about it.
Our ability to live Christ’s example is daily impeded by the dark river of social ills policymakers have created. The current is too strong to cast our nets as fishers of men, even in those off moments when we wish to. City Hall is breaking the bonds of fellowship between citizens. It has made us all a little harder, something we’re beginning to recognize in ourselves and resent.
Almost everything about Van Nuys has changed dramatically for the better in the past decade. Except for Shantytown, Inc.
As my friend Wise Andrew put it, we may be looking at the twilight of tolerance.
The Tenderloin, San Francisco, last week.
The Valley, yesterday.
You’re looking at two cities moving in opposing directions in dealing with derelicts.
I include the top photo in the name of thoroughness. It’s misleading. There are few people pitching tents on the street in San Francisco. Very few. This I can report after a thorough walking tour of the problem areas of the City. I didn’t see encampments. Nor blue tarp pallet houses, surrounded by whirlpools of plastic garbage. No wagon trains of ramshackle vehicles converted to housing lining the streets. There is nothing like Skid Row, not even under the freeway.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it: the City has a stumbling army of drug addicts in the Tenderloin/Mid-Market Street area, a smaller battalion in the inner Mission, and this is a highly visible problem, at times loud and threatening. But it is localized. Walk five blocks and you’re well out of it. I lived in and around SF for a decade, and the Tenderloin has always been like this.
Spending a few days up north was a shock to the system. San Francisco in my memory was the gold standard of street craziness and civic permissiveness. Compared to the shitstorm Los Angeles has inflicted on itself in the past decade it might as well be Canada.
There are structural reasons why things are the way they are and at the top of the list is the Jones agreement between Los Angeles and the ACLU permitting sidewalk camping in the wake of a 9th Circuit Court ruling in 2007.
We give them free phones.
We give them EBT cards.
We provide gold-plated healthcare, unavailable to rate-paying citizens.
We allow the 911 system to be used as a taxi service.
We allow shoplifting under $950.
We have issued a hall pass for all infractions from jaywalking to defecation.
But the granddaddy of broken windows, the original sin, is camping on the street. Offer up Los Angeles at a cost basis of zero, pay them to stay, place no limit to their number, then watch the Law of Incentives go to work.
William Bratton, then Chief of Police, wanted to appeal the Jones decision and had law and precedence in his favor. The Ninth Circuit held that addiction/alcoholism was an involuntary status, like cancer, and could not be criminalized. Sleeping on the street was involuntary conduct, protected by the eighth amendment. To say either of these floodgate opening premises would be viewed differently by a higher court would be an understatement. The City of LA was happy to take the opening the lower court offered to do what it wanted in the first place: pretend its hands were tied and create a sanctuary. Bratton was replaced with Charlie Beck, a careerist eager to parrot fashionable schemes.
The original injunction was limited in scope to Skid Row, and only to times when shelter beds were unavailable. In practice, it was applied citywide without discretion. Now it’s a billion dollar business, protected by a militia of interested parties. Since the passing of Props. H, and HHH, Los Angeles has hired over 1,000 additional employees at every level of homeless services.
Just try pulling the plug on those jobs and service grants. Why would you? The quarter-cent sales tax is with us now and the money will find a pocket to land in, and that pocket will go home to South Pasadena, where they have “No camping” signs at the city limits.
No other municipality in the Southland does this, not even Santa Monica anymore.
We have two populations sharing the same real estate: one based in civic responsibility and bound by the obligations of paying bills, living at the mercy of City Hall…the other feral, Free State of Jones.