Homeless

35 Reasons Why You Should Move Away From California

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a “reboot” button for an entire state? Because the truth is that if an entire state ever needed to completely start over it is the state of California. At this point it has become the epicenter for just about everything that is wrong with America, and each year it just keeps coming up with new ways to become an even worse cesspool of social decay and depravity. Millions of people have already left the state, and millions more are thinking of leaving. One recent survey found that 47 percent of all Californians are thinking about moving out of the state in the next five years, and a different survey discovered that 53 percent of those currently living in the state would like to leave. If about half the people in your state are seriously considering leaving, it is safe to say that things have gone horribly wrong. But instead of changing course, those running California continue taking the state down a very self-destructive path.

It is such a shame, because California should be one of the greatest places in the world to live. The weather is wonderful most of the year, the state still possesses extraordinary natural beauty, and the tech industry provides plenty of high paying jobs.

When I was growing up, millions of young Americans dreamed of moving there and living “the California dream”, and when I was a young man I seriously explored the possibility of moving there myself.

And the truth is that a lot of great things have come out of the state. The following comes from a recent article by Ann Coulter…

In the last century, every great thing started in California: surfing, jeans, Disneyland, tax revolts, McDonald’s, movies, car culture, the Grateful Dead, right on red turns, Merle Haggard, skateboarding, Apple computer, and the last two elected Republican presidents not named “Bush.”

But now I don’t know why anyone would want to live there.

If you currently live in California, I am about to tell you a whole bunch of reasons why you should leave. In fact, if I could get everybody to leave the state, I would.

However, if you feel specifically called to stay, then that is what you should do. Without a doubt, light is needed the most where things are the darkest, and California needs as much light as it can get right now.

Unfortunately, I believe that it is too late for the state as a whole. It is headed for a date with destiny, and most of the nearly 40 million people that live there have absolutely no idea what is coming.

If you live in the state and you do not know what you should do, I would get out while you still can. The following are 35 reasons why you should move away from California…

1. Incredibly high taxes. At this point, California has the highest marginal tax rate in the entire country.

2. Absurd housing costs.

3. The median home value in the state is now more than half a million dollars, and that is about twice as high as the national average.

4. It has been estimated that it now takes approximately $350,000 a year to live a middle class lifestyle in the city of San Francisco.

5. Endless wildfires.

6. Epic mudslides.

7. Horrific traffic jams.

8. Los Angeles has the worst traffic congestion in the entire world.

9. The education system is awful.

10. Medical tyranny.

11. One of the highest poverty levels in the United States.

12. Thousands of drug addicts are literally pooping in the streets.

13. Almost half of all the homeless people in the entire nation live in California.

14. The state is literally being overrun by millions of rats.

15. Los Angeles has been ranked as the second most rat-infested city in the country.

16. At this point things are so bad that even Los Angeles City Hall is being overrun by rats.

17. Illegal immigration is out of control, and the sanctuary cities in California are making things even worse.

18. Rising gang activity.

19. High crime rates.

20. There is now a law in California that protects shoplifters. So for those that enjoy shoplifting, this might actually be a reason to move into the state.

21. The drug war that has been raging in Mexico is increasingly spilling across the border.

22. California has been ranked as the worst state in the nation to do business year after year.

23. California is also one of the most litigious states in the entire country.

24. The once pristine beaches in the state are now being “completely overrun with fecal bacteria”.

25. Nancy Pelosi.

26. Kamala Harris.

27. Governor Gavin Newsom.

28. The lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the secretary of state and the state treasurer are all Democrats.

29. Democrats make up nearly two-thirds of the California State Senate.

30. Democrats make up more than two-thirds of the California State Assembly.

31. Both of the U.S. senators and 46 out of the 53 members of the House of Representatives that California sends to Washington are Democrats.

32. Much of the population is openly hostile to those that identify as conservatives.

33. California has been on the cutting edge of America’s moral decay for decades.

34. There have been more than 100,000 earthquakes in the state so far this year.

35. One day the “Big One” will hit California, and the geography of the state will be dramatically altered. The devastation will be unlike anything we have ever witnessed, and the death toll will be unimaginable.

If Donald Trump wins the next presidential election, there is a group of activists in California that plan to get a “Calexit” referendum on the ballot for the following election.

Those activists don’t want to be part of a country that would elect Trump two times, because they consider their values to be completely and utterly incompatible with Trump’s values.

But what is happening in this nation is far bigger than just Trump.

To me, it would be wonderful if the rest of the nation decided that their values were completely and utterly incompatible with California’s values. We desperately need to turn America around, and the way to do that is to head in a completely opposite direction from the way that California is going.

Sadly, it does not appear that is going to happen. California may be racing ahead of most of the rest of the country, but our final destination will be the same.

About the Author: I am a voice crying out for change in a society that generally seems content to stay asleep. My name is Michael Snyder and I am the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I have written four books that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned) By purchasing those books you help to support my work. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but due to government regulations I need those that republish my articles to include this “About the Author” section with each article. In order to comply with those government regulations, I need to tell you that the controversial opinions in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the websites where my work is republished. This article may contain opinions on political matters, but it is not intended to promote the candidacy of any particular political candidate. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. Those responding to this article by making comments are solely responsible for their viewpoints, and those viewpoints do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of Michael Snyder or the operators of the websites where my work is republished. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.

It Is Time To Go: Over Half Of All California Voters “Have Considered Leaving The State”

Why in the world does anyone still want to live in California? Great weather and good paying jobs are the two biggest positives that residents often point out, but the high cost of living and the absolutely ridiculous housing prices often eat up all of the extra money that Californians think that they are making. In fact, it was recently reported that it now takes approximately $350,000 a year to live a middle class lifestyle in the city of San Francisco. If you have a ton of money, it can partially insulate you from the problems that are increasingly ravaging the state, but unless you never go out in public nothing is going to insulate you completely. Cities all over the state are degenerating into drug-infested, crime-ridden hellholes that are literally being overrun by millions of rats. California has some of the worst traffic in the entire world, unchecked illegal immigration is causing a whole host of social problems, and gang activity has become a massive problem. On top of everything else, California is being constantly hit by wildfires, mudslides, earthquakes and other natural disasters. In fact, scientists tell us that it is just a matter of time before “the Big One” hits, and that is probably one of the best reasons to leave California while you still can and never look back.

Yes, there are some California residents that continue to insist that it is a great place to live.

But if California is so wonderful, why have more than half of all California voters “considered leaving the state”? The following comes from the Los Angeles Times…

Just over half of California’s registered voters have considered leaving the state, with soaring housing costs cited as the most common reason for wanting to move, according to a new poll.

Young voters were especially likely to cite unaffordable housing as a reason for leaving, according to the latest latest UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times. But a different group, conservatives, also frequently suggested they wanted to leave — and for a very different reason: They feel alienated from the state’s political culture.

With the way the state is being run, conservatives have been moving out of California in large numbers for years. In fact, I have a number of really good friends that left the state for political reasons and will never return.

On the other hand, California’s reputation for handing out free goodies has been a magnet for another class of people. Today, almost half of all homeless people in the entire nation live in the state of California, and this has become such a huge crisis that it literally makes headlines all over the globe.

For example, the following comes from an article in a British news source…

Cali Carlisle admits she is a heroin addict — ‘but in a healthy way,’ she insists, even if the visual evidence belies that claim.

Her nose is the brightest shade of red imaginable. She constantly picks at scabs all over her body. Her home is a makeshift bed beneath Interstate 80 in Sacramento.

And Monday was her 26th birthday. Not that you would ever guess. Anyone looking at her would think she is at least 15 years older.

This is the cold, hard reality of the glorious drug lifestyle that so many go to California to experience.

Every year, thousands upon thousands of young people that once had bright futures ahead of them end up on the streets, in prison or dead due to this raging epidemic.

And one of the places where it is the worst is in the capital of the state itself. Not too long ago, a salon owner in Sacramento made headlines all over the nation when her rant about homelessness on social media went viral…

“I just want to tell you what happens when I get to work,” stated Liz Novak, a local salon owner, to the media about what she’s had to deal with trying to conduct business in Sacramento.

“I have to clean up the poop and the pee off of my doorstep. I have to clean-up the syringes. I have to politely ask the people who I care for – I care for these people that are homeless – to move their tents out of the way of the door to my business.”

She ultimately had to move her salon completely because it became clear that things were not going to get better any time soon.

In the state of California today, virtually everything has been defiled.

At one time, California was teeming with natural beauty. But today the entire state has become a trash dumpster, and that includes California’s once pristine beaches. Just check out what Dr. Drew Pinsky recently told Laura Ingraham…

“There is an organization out here called Heal the Bay which keeps tabs on safety of our beaches in Southern California, from Orange County to Ventura. Since the rains last Winter, [Heal the Bay] has been giving our beaches C’s to F’s, and F means completely overrun with fecal bacteria. What comes with that are other things like syringes, Hepatitis A and other infectious diseases.”

On top of everything else, seismic activity is a constant threat.

There have been more than 1,500 earthquakes in California and Nevada over the past 7 days, and these days that is considered to be a slow week.

Of course most of the earthquakes are very small, but scientists assure us that one of these days “the Big One” will hit the state. When that day arrives, the geography of the state will be radically changed, and the death and destruction will be off the charts.

We live at a time when our planet is being greatly shaken, and many believe that what we have seen so far is just the beginning.

The coastline of the state of California lies directly along the infamous “Ring of Fire”, and scientists have been persistently warning us that the San Andreas fault is “locked and loaded” and could possibly “unzip all at once”.

It is such a shame what has happened to the state. California should be one of the most beautiful, prosperous and enjoyable places to live in the entire world. Unfortunately, Californians have been making exceedingly poor choices for decades, and the consequences of those decisions will be extremely bitter indeed.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time. Of course the most important thing that we can share with people is the gospel of Jesus Christ, and if you would like to learn more about how you can become a Christian I would encourage you to read this article.

For Countless Americans, Living In Their Vehicles Has Become “The New Normal”

Once again tonight, countless numbers of Americans will sleep in their vehicles, and this is a problem that is getting worse with each passing year. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the homeless population in the United States hit 552,830 in 2018, but many believe that the true number is actually a lot higher. Because in order to accurately count the homeless you have got to find them first, and many homeless do not want to be found. But even if the HUD figure is accurate, it is still a great national tragedy to have such a high number of homeless, and a large percentage of those homeless Americans are living in their vehicles.

Since they can move around so easily, counting those that are living in their vehicles can be exceedingly difficult to do. But we do have a few numbers, and they are definitely alarming.

A survey that was conducted in the Seattle area last year found that the number of people living in their vehicles had risen 46 percent over the past 12 months. And according to a report that was just recently released, approximately 16,500 people are currently living in their vehicles in the city of Los Angeles. The following comes from the Los Angeles Times…

Two years ago, Los Angeles began testing an alternative to homeless shelters called safe parking, giving people living in their cars a secure spot to sleep at night.

The first site was quickly deemed a success, so the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority agreed to fund nine more lots in the pilot program, with promises to expand.

Earlier this year, before the release of new data showing more than 16,500 people living in their vehicles, the authority put out a request to providers across the county to help them make good on that promise.

Many that are living in their vehicles don’t even consider themselves to be homeless.

In fact, if you were to ask them if they were homeless some of them would openly deny it. For example, 21-year-old Matthew Bodo was living in his vehicle for almost two years while attending a local college in California, and during that time he “strongly disagreed with calling myself homeless”…

Matthew Bodo, 21, was homeless for nearly two years while attending Foothill College in the Northern California community of Los Altos Hills. He worked 14 hours a day as a valet for Tesla, parking employees’ cars, but couldn’t meet the requirement by many landlords that his monthly income total three times the monthly rent.

“I was completely and totally embarrassed by it at first,” Bodo says. “At the time, I strongly disagreed with calling myself homeless because I thought a car could be considered a home, but now I see it as one and the same.”

Many people don’t realize this, but homelessness has become quite an epidemic among America’s college students. Just check out these numbers…

A survey of nearly 86,000 students taken last fall by The Hope Center for College, Community and Justice found that homelessness affected 18% of respondents attending two-year colleges, and 14% of those attending four-year institutions.

In the state of California alone, approximately 399,000 community college students reported “some period of homelessness in the previous year”, and 20 percent of them indicated that they had slept in their vehicles.

So what is the California state government doing to address this crisis?

Well, they just passed a bill “that would require every community college in the state to provide a safe parking lot where homeless students can sleep in their cars overnight.”

Yup, that should fix the problem.

Of course I am being facetious. What homeless Americans really need it a permanent roof over their heads, because it is exceedingly difficult to operate in our society without one.

Homeless Americans that are living in their vehicles often do not count as being officially “unemployed” and they often have a very difficult time receiving government benefits because they lack a permanent mailing address.

When someone is homeless, it really can seem like they have “totally dropped off the map”, and turning things around when you are totally out of resources can be an exceedingly difficult thing to do.

In addition to the growing number of Americans that are living in their vehicles because they are out of options, the RV Industry Association says that there are also now a million Americans living in their RVs full-time.

Of course a lot of Americans are living in their RVs by choice, but others are doing it because a traditional home is not an affordable alternative at this point.

In recent years, housing costs have risen far more rapidly than wages have, and this has forced an increasing number of Americans on to the streets. According to a report that came out earlier this year, the average American wage earner cannot afford to buy a home “in more than 70 percent of the country”…

Even with rising wages and falling mortgage rates, Americans can’t afford a home in more than 70 percent of the country. Out of 473 U.S. counties analyzed in a report, 335 listed median home prices more than what average wage earners could afford, according to a report from ATTOM Data Solutions. Among them are the counties that include Los Angeles and San Diego in California, as well as Miami-Dade County in Florida and Maricopa County in Arizona.

Until things change, the number of Americans sleeping in their vehicles will continue to grow.

And instead of trying to address the root issues, many of our lawmakers have decided that it is far easier to pass laws making it illegal to sleep in vehicles…

A recent survey by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP), which tracks policies in 187 cities, found the number of prohibitions against vehicle residency has more than doubled during the last decade.

“Much like outdoor camping and sleeping bans, city-wide restrictions on living in vehicles may leave no lawful place where homeless people may live in a community,” NLCHP said in a recent report. “Bans that permit vehicle impoundment, or that result in impoundment flowing from unpaid tickets or other enforcement of such bans, can cause homeless people to lose their shelter, transportation, and personal belongings in one fell swoop – with no realistic option to retrieve or replace them.”

Laws such as those are highly immoral.

How could you sleep at night if you knew that you were taking away the only shelter that a family might have?

We like to picture homeless people as disheveled older men, but the truth is that a significant percentage of the homeless in America today are families with children.

Tonight, thousands upon thousands of American families will once again huddle in their vehicles and try to get some sleep. Many of them are desperately hoping for a brighter future, but the truth is that America is becoming colder and more heartless with each passing day.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Which Major West Coast City Is Being Overwhelmed By Rats, Drugs, Crime, Piles Of Garbage And Hordes Of Homeless People?

Can you name the major west coast city that has become a rotting, decaying hellhole and is being completely overwhelmed by rats, drugs, crime, piles of garbage and hordes of homeless people? Of course San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, “all of them” and “any of them” would all be correct answers, but in this article we are going to talk about Los Angeles. Once upon a time, millions of young Americans flocked to “sunny L.A.” in order to experience “the California Dream”, but these days Los Angeles seems to be on the cutting edge of many of our most critical societal problems. L.A. has been known for Hollywood, the porn industry and world class traffic congestion, but now it is also becoming famous for “rat-infested piles of rotting garbage”…

Rat-infested piles of rotting garbage left uncollected by the city of Los Angeles, even after promises to clean it up, are fueling concerns about a new epidemic after last year’s record number of flea-borne typhus cases.

Even the city’s most notorious trash pile, located between downtown LA’s busy Fashion and Produce districts, continues to be a magnet for rats after it was cleaned up months ago. The rodents can carry typhus-infected fleas, which can spread the disease to humans through bacteria rubbed into the eyes or cuts and scrapes on the skin, resulting in severe flu-like symptoms.

Today, approximately 18.7 million people live in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and many fear that the rat population may exceed the human population at this point.

When garbage and filth are everywhere, rats can breed exceedingly quickly. In fact, under ideal conditions two rats can become 482 million rats in just three years.

So you would think that L.A. would want to get this rat problem under control, but an NBC Los Angeles investigation discovered that “there is no plan or program to control the growing rat population”…

But in Los Angeles, the I-Team learned there is no plan or program to control the growing rat population that feasts at trash piles like the one on Ceres Avenue.

“It’s something that we’ll look into,” said Pepe Garica, of Los Angeles’ bureau of sanitation.

Lovely, eh?

In a previous article, I noted that the rats have now even conquered Los Angeles City Hall…

Officials at Los Angeles’ City Hall are considering ripping all of the building’s carpets up, as rats and fleas are said to be running riot in its halls.

A motion was filed by Council President Herb Wesson on Wednesday to enact the much needed makeover amid a typhus outbreak in the downtown area.

Wesson said a city employee had contracted the deadly bacterial disease at work, and now he’s urging officials to investigate the ‘scope’ of the long-running pest problem at the council building.

Meanwhile, the homeless population continues to multiply as well.

The number of homeless people living in L.A. has risen by at least 75 percent since 2012, and authorities cleaned up nearly 15,000 homeless encampments last year alone…

Nearly 15,000 homeless encampment cleanups were conducted last year in Los Angeles, a process that begins with officers clearing people from the area before sanitation workers remove trash and other items.

The cleanups cost taxpayers millions of dollars, but some residents who live near the encampments said they are usually repopulated soon after sanitation crews are done. It’s a seemingly endless cycle that leads neighbors to ask whether there are better ways to spend that tax money.

In other words, Los Angeles is cleaning up an average of 41 homeless encampments every single day.

Overall, Los Angeles spent a whopping 619 million dollars on the homeless problem last year, but it just continues to get even worse.

Of course wherever there is homelessness there is crime, and those that live in downtown L.A. are getting fed up…

“Everyone living, working in, or visiting downtown has noticed the rapidly deteriorating conditions,” downtown resident Catherine Tomiczek told the committee. She said a friend was beaten and robbed on the street and a neighbor was stabbed in her building.

Councilman Paul Krekorian, who heads the committee, said he would request the information sought by the group. Major crimes downtown increased 6.7 percent this year compared with the same period in 2018, according to LAPD crime data through April 13.

Much of the violent crime is fueled by the drug trade, and according to DEA agent Bob Thomas Los Angeles is definitely a national hub for drug activity…

In a middle class neighborhood in Los Angeles a house is surrounded by crime tape. A young man had lost his life to drugs inside.

It’s happened a record 72,000 times last year in the United States and Los Angeles is a big part of the problem.

“Drug cartels send their stuff to LA, where it’s distributed across the nation,” DEA agent Bob Thomas said.

Further up the California coastline, northern California is being absolutely overwhelmed by a meth epidemic that is completely out of control. Just consider these shocking numbers…

Since 2011, emergency room visits related to meth in San Francisco have jumped 600% to 1,965 visits in 2016, the last year for which ER data is available. Admissions to the hospital are up 400% to 193, according to city public health data. And at San Francisco General Hospital, of 7,000 annual psychiatric emergency visits last year, 47% were people who were not necessarily mentally ill — they were high on meth.

“As California goes, so goes the nation” is a phrase that people like to use, but we better hope that it isn’t true, because California is going down the toilet.

And as our planet continues to become increasingly unstable, scientists assure us that it is only a matter of time before “the Big One” hits the state. Earlier today, northern California was shaken by a magnitude 3.8 earthquake, and one of these days a truly catastrophic quake is coming.

In recent years, approximately five million people have packed up and moved to another state, and you can’t really blame them for leaving.

At this point I can’t really think of any reason why anyone would want to live in California.

Can you?

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Homelessness In New York City Is The Worst That It Has Ever Been

The mainstream media continues to try to convince all of us that the U.S. economy is “booming”, but meanwhile the number of homeless people is setting all-time record highs in major cities all over the nation. The recent article that I published about how wealthy elitists on the west coast are freaking out as hordes of homeless people take over their neighborhoods received a tremendous amount of attention, but nobody has a worse problem with homelessness than New York City does. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, approximately 14 percent of all the homeless people in the entire country currently live in New York City…

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s most recent assessment report, the number of people experiencing homelessness has been rising. The HUD’s annual survey found that on a single night in January 2018, there were a total of 552,830 homeless people across the country. New York City had 78,676 — or about 14 percent of the nation’s homeless population.

That number, 78,676, was a brand new all-time record high.

And more records are being broken during the early part of this year.

On Tuesday, the Coalition for the Homeless issued a brand new State of the Homeless report for 2019. According to that report, the number of people living in homeless shelters in New York City has been breaking record after record…

If found that in February 2019, an average of 63,615 men, women, and children slept in New York City shelters each night, just shy of the all-time record set in January.

While the number of families decreased slightly, the number of homeless single adults continues to increase.

An all-time record 18,212 single adults slept in shelters each night in February 2019, up 150 percent from 2009. Between September 2018 and April 2019, the number of single adults in DHS shelters reached a new nightly record high 32 times, according to the report.

If this is what an “economic recovery” looks like, then I shudder to think what will happen when the next recession hits.

Overall, “an all-time record 133,284 unique individuals spent at least one night in a New York City DHS shelter” during fiscal year 2018.

That represents a 61 percent increase since fiscal year 2002.

Obviously very little of the money being made on Wall Street is trickling down to those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. The stock market may be soaring, but more people than ever in New York do not have a place to sleep at night.

In the State of the Homeless report, Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo both received an “F” for their handling of the homelessness crisis. Obviously this did not please either of them, and both of them are trying to defend their records.

For example, Mayor de Blasio can point to the fact that he just got judicial approval to open a homeless shelter on Billionaire’s Row in midtown Manhattan…

New York City officials received the go-ahead to open a homeless shelter in an old hotel in midtown Manhattan – one which happens to be back-to-back with one of the most luxurious and expensive condo buildings in the world.

A coalition of homeowners on West 58th Street sought an order to block a move by the city and its agencies to open a shelter in the former Park Savoy hotel at 158 West 58th. Among other things, they argued that the building was not up to fire safety codes and that it would create a public nuisance.

Apparently this new homeless shelter literally “stands back-to-back against the iconic One57 apartment building” where Michael Dell purchased a $100 million condo a few years ago.

And just like on the west coast, the wealthy residents of this neighborhood are quite upset about their potential new neighbors…

The West 58th Street Coalition, on its Facebook page, says its neighborhood is “under threat” by the shelter plan.

“While we understand the need to shelter the city’s homeless, we believe the residents on our block deserve to be consulted before one of our buildings is filled with recently released parolees,” the coalition wrote in an April 2018 position statement.

It is easy to laugh at the plight of these condo owners, but there is nothing funny about America’s rapidly exploding homelessness crisis.

In the old days, strong family units provided a national safety net that the federal government could never match. If someone was having a really hard time, another member of the extended family would take them in. But today the traditional family unit is under attack from a thousand different directions, and many homeless people literally don’t have anyone that they can turn to.

In addition, more Americans are hooked on legal and illegal drugs today than ever before in American history, and that is greatly contributing to the homelessness crisis. A very large percentage of the homeless are addicts, and this is particularly true on the west coast.

Of course many that are living on the streets have simply had a run of bad luck. Unless your family is independently wealthy, it is likely that you have had some tough times in your own life. We should never look down on those that are hurting, because with a few bad breaks many of us could end up on the streets ourselves.

We live at a time when literally everything in our society seems to be coming apart. And unless a miracle happens, things are going to get much, much worse in the months and years ahead.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Wealthy Elitists Freak Out As Hordes Of Homeless People Take Over Their Neighborhoods All Over The West Coast

The elite are very “tolerant” of the homeless until they start showing up in their own neighborhoods. Even though the mainstream media keeps telling us that the U.S. economy is “booming”, the number of Americans living on the streets continues to grow very rapidly, and this is particularly true in our major west coast cities. More than half a million Americans will sleep on the streets of our cities tonight, and they need help, care and shelter. Sadly, as economic conditions deteriorate that number is likely to double or even triple. Of course many among the elite are all in favor of doing something for the homeless, as long as they don’t have to be anywhere around them.

For example, let’s talk about what is going on in Los Angeles. No city on the west coast has a bigger problem with homelessness than L.A. does, and many in the homeless population enjoy camping out on the beautiful beaches in the L.A. area at night.

But of course many of the elite that paid millions of dollars for beachfront property are not too thrilled about this. Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten was a key symbol of anti-establishment rebellion in the 1970s, but now he is freaking out because homeless people are making life very difficult for him and his wife in Venice Beach, and what he recently told Newsweek’s Paula Froelich is making headlines all over the nation…

He told her the homeless situation in his swanky LA neighborhood is so bad that thieves are tearing the bars from the windows of his multimillion-dollar home, lobbing bricks, setting up unsightly tent cities and littering the beach with syringes.

“A couple of weeks ago I had a problem,” the former punk prince opined. “They came over the gate and put their tent inside, right in front of the front door. It’s like . . . the audacity. And if you complain, what are you? Oh, one of the establishment elite? No, I’m a bloke that’s worked hard for his money and I expect to be able to use my own front door.”

It is more than just a little bit ironic that a man that used drugs, sex and rock and roll to shoot to global fame now sounds like a tired old crank that just wants to get the hippies off of his front lawn.

And he also says that the beach in front of his home is almost unusable because of all the needles and human poop in the sand…

Rotten added of the punks: “They’re aggressive, and because there’s an awful lot of them together they’re gang-y. And the heroin spikes . . . You can’t take anyone to the beach because there’s jabs just waiting for young kids to put their feet in — and poo all over the sand.”

Well, Johnny might as well become accustomed to his new neighbors, because the situation is only going to get worse as our national homelessness crisis intensifies.

In Los Angeles, the number of homeless people that have died has risen 76 percent over the past five years, and this has happened during supposedly “good economic times”.

So how bad will things get when the economy really starts going downhill?

Up the coast in San Fransisco, some wealthy residents are fighting tooth and nail to keep a proposed homeless shelter out of their wealthy neighborhood. The following comes from CBS News…

Some San Francisco residents are turning to crowdfunding to raise money to fight a proposed homeless shelter in their wealthy neighborhood. As of Monday morning, the effort had raised over $80,000 of its $100,000 goal.

Calling itself “Safe Embarcadero for All,” the organizer is appealing to residents of South Beach, Rincon Hill, Bayside Village, East Cut and Mission Bay, saying the money will be directed to a legal fund to pay for efforts to fight the homeless shelter. San Francisco Mayor London Breed has sponsored legislation to fast-track the building of the Navigation Center, which would house 200 homeless people a stone’s throw from Google’s San Francisco offices and Gap’s headquarters.

How wonderfully “tolerant” of them, eh?

Of course it is hard to blame them. The streets of San Francisco are littered with thousands upon thousands of used syringes, and the number of official complaints about human feces in the streets is going up with each passing year.

But instead of changing course, it looks like San Francisco officials will probably extend their free syringe program…

San Francisco officials are debating if they should continue a needle exchange program that has left city streets littered with hazardous waste.

We have made an uncomfortable observation on social media: Thousands of needles are scattered on city streets, most likely came the Department of Public Health’s needle exchange program.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors expects to approve a seven-year extension of the exchange program, could cost taxpayers a whopping $26 million.

Overall, the city handed out 5.8 million free syringes in 2018, and a large number of those were simply thrown on to the streets when addicts were done using them.

Up in Seattle, neighborhood after neighborhood has been taken over by homeless encampments, and many residents are saying enough is enough…

In the past two weeks, Seattle Is Dying has garnered 38,000 shares on Facebook and nearly 2 million views on YouTube. The report has clearly resonated with anxious, fearful, and increasingly angry Seattle residents. Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s—Seattle voters may have reached the point of “compassion fatigue.” According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.” The city council insists that new tax revenues are necessary, including a head tax on large employers, but only 7 percent of Seattle voters think that the city is “not spending enough to really solve the problem.” For a famously progressive city, this is a remarkable shift in public opinion.

With all of the money that they have, you would think that the major cities on the west coast would be showing the rest of the nation how to deal with homelessness, but instead things continue to get worse with each passing year.

And of course what we have seen so far is just the beginning. During the next recession, the homelessness crisis will be far, far worse than it is today.

America should not have more than half a million people living in the streets, but we do, and those in power do not seem to have any solutions.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Nobody Does It Better: The Amount Of Human Feces On San Francisco Streets Is Going Up Every Single Year

Sometimes the best metaphors come from real life. Today, San Francisco has eclipsed Los Angeles and has become the most important city in America’s most heavily populated state. It is the central hub of our tech industry, in many ways it is one of the epicenters of our national moral decay, and the most powerful Democrat in the entire country calls it her home. So somehow it seems appropriate that the city is literally covered in human feces, and the problem is getting worse with each passing year.

In 2011, there were 5,547 reported incidents of human feces found on the streets of San Francisco, and by 2018 that figure had risen to 28,084. The following numbers originally come from the San Francisco Department of Public Works…

2011: 5,547
2012: 6,338
2013: 8,793
2014: 10,644
2015: 13,326
2016: 18,276
2017: 20,668
2018: 28,084

And the important thing to remember is that these numbers only represent “reported incidents”. As Business Insider has noted, the true amount of human feces on the streets “is likely even higher”…

Notably, this is a chart of only documented reports — the actual amount of feces on San Francisco’s streets is likely even higher than these statistics suggest.

“I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed told NBC in a 2018 interview. “That is a huge problem, and we are not just talking about from dogs — we’re talking about from humans.”

If all of this crap is a metaphor, would could it be a metaphor for?

One of the things that initially came to my mind is that it could be a political metaphor. San Francisco gave us Nancy Pelosi, and as Speaker of the House she is currently the most powerful Democrat in the entire nation. And without a doubt, she certainly represents an ideology that is taking America straight down the crapper.

But of course the Democrats certainly don’t have a monopoly on corruption. Here in Idaho, there are prominent Republicans that are giant moral sleazebags, and even the “good conservatives” won’t say anything about the corruption because they are concerned about the political ramifications.

San Francisco’s human feces problem could also be a metaphor for our tech industry. In particular, social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter have been hit by scandal after scandal in recent years, and the extreme censorship that they have been hitting us with has been absolutely nauseating. So it would definitely not be too much of a stretch to equate the current state of the tech industry with a giant pile of crap.

Last but not least, could it be possible that all of this poop is a metaphor for the moral decay that is emanating out of San Francisco? Certainly Los Angeles, New York and Washington D.C. are playing starring roles in our national moral decay as well, but there is something about San Francisco that seems to attract the worst of the worst.

As I noted the other day, San Francisco handed out 5.8 million free syringes in 2018 alone. And in a recent article by John Stossel we are told that addicts can shoot up in full public view and the police won’t even do anything about it…

San Francisco is a pretty good place to “hang out with a sign.” People are rarely arrested for vagrancy, aggressive panhandling or going to the bathroom in front of people’s homes. In 2015, there were 60,491 complaints to police, but only 125 people were arrested.

Public drug use is generally ignored. One woman told us, “It’s nasty seeing people shoot up — right in front of you. Police don’t do anything about it! They’ll get somebody for drinking a beer but walk right past people using needles.”

Each day in San Francisco, an average of 85 cars are broken into.

Could you imagine trying to raise young children in an environment like that?

At this point, addicts are even shooting up in the bathrooms of San Francsico’s public libraries…

In San Francisco, dozens, sometimes hundreds, of homeless people like Martinez come to the libraries daily. Around the Bay Area, that number runs into the thousands.

This can be a problem, when someone who’s mentally ill rants in the aisles or addicts shoot up in the bathroom. But many libraries around the nation have learned to keep those issues to a minimum — thanks largely to a pioneering program in San Francisco that stationed a social worker on-site to help the desperate, instead of just keeping a lid on them with police interventions.

It has been said that “as California goes, so goes the nation”. So you may be able to take solace in the fact that these things are not happening in your area yet, but as our nation continues to go downhill it is just a matter of time before virtually everywhere is just like San Francisco.

The only way that we are going to take our country back is if we stand up and do something. Unfortunately, there is so much apathy among good people out there these days, and meanwhile there is a tremendous amount of passion among those that would like to take America even further down the crapper.

You are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem. And unfortunately there is no time to waste because our society is deteriorating a little bit more with each passing day.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

San Francisco, Los Angeles And Seattle: 3 Formerly Beautiful West Coast Cities Have Literally Been Transformed Into Hellholes

Once upon a time, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle were three of the most beautiful cities on the entire planet. I know that this is hard to imagine today, but there was a time when millions of people eagerly moved out to the west coast for a better quality of life. Sadly, the reverse is true today. Millions of people are moving away from our major cities on the west coast because of the hellholes that they have become. A former Seattle police officer that was recently interviewed by a reporter from KOMO News was very honest about the fact that he would never want to raise a family in Seattle because of the hellhole that it has become. Every night he saw the worst of Seattle firsthand, and he finally felt forced to quit because city officials would not allow him to effectively do his job. An explosion of homelessness in our major west coast cities has fueled a wave of crime, drugs and human degradation unlike anything we have seen before, and in many cases our law enforcement officials have their hands tied and are literally being prevented from cleaning up the streets.

Right now, more than half a million people are homeless in the United States. As the economy gets worse, that number will continue to rise.

Many homeless Americans are law-abiding citizens that have just had a tough break. Everyone gets knocked down in life at some point, and we need to do all that we can to help those law-abiding citizens get back on their feet.

But because of their ultra-liberal policies, some of the major cities on the west coast have become magnets for drug addicts, serial criminals, sex offenders, illegal immigrants and people that have simply heard about all of the “free benefits” that are being offered. As a result, the streets of those cities have become a showcase for the social decay that is sweeping across our nation.

Let’s start with San Francisco. According to one report, it is home to more than 28,000 homeless people, and that would make San Francisco the city with the third largest homeless population in the United States.

Others feel like that number is way too low, and the truth is that it is exceedingly difficult to count the homeless.

After all, how are you supposed to accurately count people that don’t want to be counted?

What we do know is that San Francisco is a huge magnet for drug addicts. The city handed out 5.8 million free syringes in 2018, and that number would seem to suggest a homeless population far in excess of 28,000.

And as all those drug addicts aimlessly wander through the streets, many of them use those streets as their own personal toilets. Over the past 8 years, more than 118,000 reports of human feces in the streets have been filed with city authorities…

Since 2011, there have been at least 118,352 reported instances of human fecal matter on city streets.

New mayor, London Breed, won election by promising to clean things up. However, conditions are the same or worse. Last year, the number of reports spiked to an all-time high at 28,084. In first quarter 2019, the pace continued with 6,676 instances of human waste in the public way.

In addition to endless piles of poop, the drug addicts are also endlessly committing property crimes in order to pay for their drug habits.

Each year, there are more than 6,000 property crimes per 100,000 residents in San Francisco. That is about four times the rate of property crime that New York City has reported.

Mayor Breed would like to get a lot of these homeless people off of the streets, but finding a place to put them has been problematic. Residents of one wealthy liberal neighborhood are currently fighting like mad to keep a proposed homeless shelter away from their gated mansions…

A wealthy liberal neighborhood in San Francisco whose residents cast the most votes for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election is fighting against a proposal to build a new homeless shelter near their gated mansions.

Mayor London Breed has sponsored legislation to fast track a homeless shelter that would house 200 people. However, wealthy liberals living in the affected area have set up a GoFundMe to stop the project which has already hit $80,000 of its $100,000 target.

Things are certainly not any better in Los Angeles.

According to the same report mentioned above, L.A. has nearly twice as many homeless people as San Francisco…

Los Angeles has the second largest population of people exploring homelessness, according to a new report.

The LA area contains 55,200 homeless people, according to data released by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

The homeless population in L.A. has surged 75 percent in six years, and this has happened during a time when the economy has been relatively stable.

So how bad are things going to become when the economy starts getting really bad?

When I was running for Congress, one of the people that came to help the campaign had spent a lot of time in some of the worst parts of Los Angeles. He told me about the public drug use, the constant crime and the human degradation that is seemingly everywhere. This greatly saddened me, because Los Angeles was once a magnificent city. In fact, at one point in my life I wanted to live there.

But not anymore. Today, millions of people are leaving California and never looking back because of the utter hellhole the entire state has become.

Further up the coast, the city of Seattle is experiencing similar issues. Not too long ago, a veteran Seattle reporter named Eric Johnson produced an hour-long documentary entitled “Seattle Is Dying”, and if you have not seen it yet I would strongly recommend taking the time to watch it.

Since it was first released, it has been viewed almost 2 million times on YouTube…

In the past two weeks, Seattle Is Dying has garnered 38,000 shares on Facebook and nearly 2 million views on YouTube. The report has clearly resonated with anxious, fearful, and increasingly angry Seattle residents. Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s—Seattle voters may have reached the point of “compassion fatigue.” According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.”

One of the moments in the documentary that really touched me was when a concerned resident described how drug addicts have been leaving needles and human waste in the graveyard near his home. The homeless have erected tents all around the graveyard, and he can clearly smell urine whenever he walks down the streets.

He would like to fix things, and he is fed up enough that he has decided to run for city council. But he is facing an uphill battle, because Seattle has been entirely taken over by socialists. The following comes from Mac Slavo…

The entire video is about an hour long, but it is pretty easy to see where Seattle continues to go wrong. A heavy tax burden, regulations that push out businesses, and a power-hungry group of totalitarian sociopaths have been slowly eroding the city. The decay of Western civilization can be seen up and down the entirety of the West coast. Some say it’s by design, others disagree. But the commonality is that all of the cities are being pushed into poverty by illusions and lies of socialists. Calling Seattle anything other than a leftist’s paradise would be inaccurate. The city has all of the laws the socialists want, yet it’s killing itself because of it.

In life, the decisions that we make have consequences, and San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle are now experiencing the consequences of decades of incredibly foolish decisions.

But of course they are far from alone. All across the country there are thousands of communities where social decay is exceedingly evident, and it is getting worse with each passing year.

If we want to change the trajectory of our future, we have got to start doing things differently.

Because if we keep doing the same things, we are going to keep getting the same results, and our country is going to continue falling apart right in front of our eyes.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

California Nightmare: Over Half Of The People Living In The State Wish They Could Leave

This just shows what can happen when you let crazy people run a state for several decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, the possibility of moving to the west coast was “the California dream” for millions of young Americans, but now “the California dream” has turned into “the California nightmare”. According to a brand new survey, 53 percent of those living in California are considering leaving the state, and there are certainly lots of reasons to hit the road and never look back. The cities are massively overcrowded, California has the worst traffic in the western world, drug use and illegal immigration both fuel an astounding amount of crime, tax rates are horrendous and many of the state politicians appear to literally be insane. And on top of all that, let us not forget the earthquakes, wildfires and landslides that are constantly making headlines all over the world. Last year was the worst year for wildfires in California history, and these days it seems like the state is hit by some new crisis every few weeks.

But none of those factors are the primary reason why so many people are eager to leave.

According to a brand new survey by Edelman Intelligence, the main reason why so many are considering leaving the state is the high cost of living…

A growing number of Californians are contemplating moving from the state — and not due to wildfires or earthquakes but the sky-high cost of living, according to a survey released Wednesday.

The online survey, conducted last month by Edelman Intelligence, found that 53 percent of Californians surveyed are considering fleeing, representing a jump over the 49 percent polled a year ago. The desire to exit the nation’s most populous state was highest among millennials, the survey noted.

Thanks to absolutely ridiculous construction restrictions, it has become increasingly difficult to build new housing units in the state. But meanwhile, people from all over the world continue to move there because they are attracted by what they see on television.

As a result, the supply of housing has not kept up with demand, and prices have shot through the roof in recent years. The following numbers come from CNBC…

Statewide, the median home value in California was $547,400 at the end of 2018, while the U.S. median home value was $223,900. By comparison, the median home value in New York state stood at $289,000 and $681,500 in New York City; New Jersey was $324,700.

Yes, there are a lot of good paying jobs in California, but you better have a really, really good job to be able to afford mortgage payments on a home worth half a million dollars.

Of course many Californians find themselves greatly stretched financially by out of control housing costs, and so more of them than ever are moving in with roommates. In fact, one recent report found that the number of married couples in the U.S. that are living with roommates “has doubled since 1995”…

The number of married couples living with roommates has doubled since 1995, according to a recent report from real estate site Trulia. About 280,000 married people now live with a roommate — and that’s particularly true in pricey cities like those on the West Coast.

The reason: Housing costs a ton. In Honolulu and Orange Country, Calif., the share of married couples with roommates is between four and five times the national rate. San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Seattle also have sky high rates of married couples with roomies. Those same cities all have well above average rental and housing costs (Trulia notes that housing costs in all these markets have risen more than 30% since 2009), with residents of uber-pricey San Francisco requiring more than $123,000 in income to live comfortably, one study showed.

In addition to housing costs, many Californians are greatly frustrated by the oppressive levels of taxation in the state.

At this point, the state has the highest marginal tax rate in the entire country…

At 12.3 percent, California led the 50 states in 2018 with the highest top marginal tax rate, according to the Federation of Tax Administrators. And that doesn’t include an additional 1-percent surcharge for those Californians with incomes of $1 million or more.

Ouch.

But at least the weather is nice.

Yesterday, I wrote an article entitled “Rats, Public Defecation And Open Drug Use: Our Major Western Cities Are Becoming Uninhabitable Hellholes”, and it sparked something of a firestorm. More than 1000 comments have already been posted on that article, and a few hearty individuals actually tried to convince the rest of us that life on the west coast is not actually all that bad.

I’m sorry, but if your city has far more intravenous drug users than it does high school students, that is not somewhere that I would want to raise a family…

According to a report from the Chronicle, San Francisco now has more intravenous drug users than high school students. San Francisco, which operates 15 high schools, currently has 16,000 students enrolled grades nine through twelve.

By comparison, the northern California city currently has 24,500 “injection drug users.” That is approximately 8,500 more drug users than high school students.

As I mentioned yesterday, the city of San Francisco gave out 5.8 million free syringes to drug users last year.

When you have such widespread drug use, people are going to commit a lot of crime and they are going to do some really weird things. Just consider the following example…

Authorities are searching for a man seen on security footage licking the doorbell of a California home and relieving himself in the family’s yard.

Police have identified the man as Roberto Arroyo, 33, and say that he spent three hours around the Salinas home of Sylvia and Dave Dungan.

The couple had been out of town, during the strange incident, but their children were sleep inside the family’s home. They noticed something amiss when they woke up to multiple alerts from their surveillance system, which notifies the homeowners whenever there is movement near the front door.

A lot of really good people used to live in California, but they left because of stupid stuff like this.

In fact, quite a few of my best friends are people that have moved out of the state within the last 10 years.

Over the past decade we have seen a mass exodus out of California. And according to Kristin Tate, the author of a new book entitled “How Do I Tax Thee?: A Field Guide to the Great American Rip-Off“, the “upper-middle class” has been moving out of the state faster than anyone else…

The largest socioeconomic segment moving from California is the upper-middle class. The state is home to some of the most burdensome taxes and regulations in the nation. Meanwhile, its social engineering — from green energy to wealth redistribution — have made many working families poorer. As California begins its long decline, the influx outward is picking up in earnest.

Overall, approximately 5 million people have packed up and permanently moved out of California within the last 10 years.

Unfortunately, the entire nation is slowly becoming just like California, and if we don’t turn things around eventually there will be no place left to go.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Rats, Public Defecation And Open Drug Use: Our Major Western Cities Are Becoming Uninhabitable Hellholes

Almost everyone that goes out to visit one of our major cities on the west coast has a similar reaction. Those that must live among the escalating decay are often numb to it, but most of those that are just in town for a visit are absolutely shocked by all of the trash, human defecation, crime and public drug use that they encounter. Once upon a time, our beautiful western cities were the envy of the rest of the world, but now they serve as shining examples of America’s accelerating decline. The worst parts of our major western cities literally look like post-apocalyptic wastelands, and the hordes of zombified homeless people that live in those areas are too drugged-out to care. The ironic thing is that these cities are not poor. In fact, San Francisco and Seattle are among the wealthiest cities in the entire nation. So if things are falling apart this dramatically now, how bad will things get when economic conditions really start to deteriorate?

Let’s start our discussion by looking at the rat epidemic in Los Angeles. Thanks to extremely poor public sanitation, rats are breeding like mad, and at this point they have even conquered Los Angeles City Hall…

Officials at Los Angeles’ City Hall are considering ripping all of the building’s carpets up, as rats and fleas are said to be running riot in its halls.

A motion was filed by Council President Herb Wesson on Wednesday to enact the much needed makeover amid a typhus outbreak in the downtown area.

Wesson said a city employee had contracted the deadly bacterial disease at work, and now he’s urging officials to investigate the ‘scope’ of the long-running pest problem at the council building.

People from all over the world are drawn to Los Angeles because of what they have seen on television, but it is truly a filthy, filthy place. The number of homeless has been rising about 20 percent a year, public drug use is seemingly everywhere, and there are mountains of trash all over the place. Needless to say, rats thrive in such an environment, and the epic battle that one L.A. journalist is having with rats was recently featured in the L.A. Times…

Eastside, Westside, north and south, they’re everywhere. If you’re a rat, the California housing crisis has not hit you yet and it never will.

At our house, it sounded like the rats were having relay races in the ceiling, and they don’t wear sneakers. Your eyes blink and your leg twitches as you drift off to sleep knowing that if the plague comes back, you are living at ground zero.

In our garden, they devoured entire heads of lettuce. They destroyed my squash just before it was ripe and ready to eat. They stole my tomatoes, cilantro and Anaheim chili peppers. Were they bottling their own salsa?

But let’s not be too hard on Los Angeles, because the same things that are going on there are happening in major cities all over the western portion of the country.

For example, a massive rat infestation recently forced authorities to close a shockingly filthy homeless encampment under a bridge in Salem, Oregon…

Amid the trash, human despair and anguish, one weeping woman prepared to leave the most recent place she knows as home without any real inkling of where she’ll go next.

Terry Balow, an outreach worker with the Salvation Army, has been here for the darker moments of living life under a bridge — anger, mental illness, drug use and human frustration boiling over at times everywhere one looks.

Yet it was a rat infestation and concern about human health that prompted the city of Salem to move the campers out.

“It just grew and grew and got worse,” Balow said. “It’s badder than people can imagine.”

Yes, there have always been homeless encampments in this country, but in modern times we have never faced anything on the scale that we are facing now.

More than half a million Americans are homeless right now, and that number continues to grow. And as it grows, communities will increasingly be forced to make some tough decisions.

I am quite eager to talk about San Francisco, but before we get to the City by the Bay, let’s take note of something that just happened in Denver.

If you are into public defecation, you will be very happy to learn that Denver just made it legal…

First, the obvious: The Denver City Council has voted unanimously to decriminalize a number of offenses, including defecating in public. Also, urinating in public. Camping on public or private land without permission. Panhandling. And lying across public rights-of-way, such as sidewalks.

Democrat Mayor Michael Hancock and city officials explained the new ordinances are designed to protect immigrants — legal and the other kind — from “unintended consequences.” These consequences were fines and longer jail terms, as has been customary in most places for violating the behavioral norms of civilized American society.

If only America’s founders could see us now.

They would be so proud.

Speaking of public defecation, San Francisco has become world famous for the piles of human poop that constantly litter their streets. During one seven day stretch last summer, a total of 16,000 official complaints were submitted to the city about human feces.

Blessed with such beautiful natural surroundings and so much wealth, San Francisco should be a great place to visit, but that definitely is not the case.

When reporter John Stossel recently visited San Francisco, he was stunned by what he found…

San Francisco is a pretty good place to “hang out with a sign.” People are rarely arrested for vagrancy, aggressive panhandling or going to the bathroom in front of people’s homes. In 2015, there were 60,491 complaints to police, but only 125 people were arrested.

Public drug use is generally ignored. One woman told us, “It’s nasty seeing people shoot up — right in front of you. Police don’t do anything about it! They’ll get somebody for drinking a beer but walk right past people using needles.”

In San Francisco they actually give out free syringes to drug addicts, and it is being reported that they handed out a total of 5.8 million free syringes in 2018.

That is a lot of syringes.

They also try to get the syringes back in order to prevent the spread of disease, but that hasn’t been too successful…

There’s just one problem – well, more than one – despite spending an extra $1.8 million last year in an effort to retrieve needles, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the department handed out about 2 million more syringes than it got back… many of which are now washing around the streets of one of the richest cities in America (along with the feces of their users).

And with so much public drug use going on, it should be no surprise that crime is completely and totally out of control. Here is more from John Stossel…

Each day in San Francisco, an average of 85 cars are broken into.

“Inside Edition” ran a test to see how long stereo equipment would last in a parked car. Their test car was quickly broken into. Then the camera crew discovered that their own car had been busted into as well.

It has been said that “as goes California, so goes the country”, and if this is where the rest of the nation is headed then we are in serious trouble.

When Bill Blain recently visited San Francisco, he was so horrified by what he encountered that he felt he must write about it…

I hope my American hosts will forgive me for raising this, but the squalor we saw in The City was frightful. San Francisco has always been one of favourite US cities, but the degree of homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse we saw on this trip was truly shocking. Walking round SF on a Sunday Morning and we saw sights we couldn’t believe. This must be one of the richest cities in the world – home to 4 of the 10 richest people on the planet according to Wiki. I asked friends about it, and they shrugged it off.. “The City has always attracted the homeless because of the mild weather,”.. “It’s a drug thing”.. “its too difficult”… “you get used to it..”

Well, I didn’t.

I found it quite shocking the number of folk sleeping rough on the sidewalks, the smell of weed and drug impedimenta everywhere, the filth, mental illness and degradation on view just a few meters from the financial centre driving Silicon Valley. It’s a city where the destitute seem to have become invisible to the Uber hailing elites. We found ourselves hopping on one of the beautiful F-Route Trolley Buses to find nearly every seat occupied by someone lugging around their worldly possessions around in a plastic bag. It was desperately sad.

San Francisco has a new mayor, and they are going to spend millions upon millions of dollars to try to clean up the streets.

But it won’t be easy to turn things around, because more drug users and homeless people are moving into the city every single day…

And San Francisco is generous. It offers street people food stamps, free shelter, train tickets and $70 a month in cash.

“They’re always offering resources,” one man dressed as Santa told us. “San Francisco’s just a good place to hang out.”

So, every week, new people arrive.

We like to think that we are setting a positive example to the rest of the world, but the truth is that they are laughing at us.

America is in an advanced state of decay, and it is getting worse with each passing year.

If we keep doing the same things we will keep getting the same results, and right now there are no signs that the overall direction of this nation will change any time soon.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

More Than Half A Million People: America’s Homelessness Crisis Is Rapidly Exploding On Both Coasts

The homelessness crisis in the United States is getting a lot worse, and it is happening at a pace that is absolutely frightening. Did you realize that more than half a million Americans are homeless right now? One out of every four homeless Americans actually has a job, but thanks to rapidly rising housing prices they are not able to afford a place to live. So every night in this country, hundreds of thousands of people are sleeping in shelters, in their vehicles or on the streets. It is a national crisis that isn’t going away, and during the next economic downturn it is only going to intensify.

I have written about our exploding homelessness crisis on numerous occasions, but I had no idea that the numbers had gotten so large until I came across this article…

Recent estimates indicate that more than 550,000 people experience homelessness in the US on any given night, with about two-thirds ending up in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs, and one-third finding their way to unsheltered locations like parks, vehicles, and metro stations. According to the Urban Institute, about 25% of homeless people have jobs.

I find that it is difficult for me to wrap my head around pain and suffering on such an immense scale. Americans often think of the homeless as drug-addicted men that don’t want to work, but the truth is that about a quarter of the homeless population is made up of children.

And things are getting particularly bad on both the east and west coasts.

Recently, Jake Tapper of CNN confronted Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti about the fact that homelessness in his city has risen by 50 percent…

You were screamed at for four hours this week at a town hall on homelessness. Homelessness is nearly up 50 percent in your city since you became mayor, according to the Los Angeles Times. Now there’s a typhus outbreak likely due to the booming number of rats attracted by all the food and human waste on Skid Row and other places. Some critics may be saying why are you campaigning for Democrats in the midterms and traveling when you have this huge crisis in your backyard?

If the U.S. economy really was “booming”, the truth is that homelessness in Los Angeles would not be up by 50 percent. This is how Garcetti responded to Tapper’s question…

I think they’re linked together and I welcome a national conversation in Washington, D.C. where you see more homeless per capita, than you see in Seattle, in San Francisco, you see in red and blue cities. We have a a mental health crisis. Mayors can’t avoid that. A lot of people told me never touch the issue of homelessness. I am so passionate about it. People are dying on our streets from opioid addiction. I’m so proud of our voters in Los Angeles who passed two largest matters to combat homelessness. This is what people say is an unsolvable problem and I’m committed to solving it.

He is committed to “solving” this crisis, and yet it has gotten 50 percent worse while he has been mayor?

And this guy dreams of someday becoming president?

It can be argued that things are even worse in San Francisco. Thanks in large part to mountains of dirty needless and human feces, the city now spends 65 million dollars a year cleaning up the streets…

San Francisco’s housing crisis is also (of course) a homelessness crisis, and homelessness crises beget public defecation crises — and San Francisco has a serious public defecation crisis.

The city spends $65 million/year cleaning up the streets, a figure that is so high because of the quantities of feces, urine, and dirty needles that find their way onto San Francisco’s streets. And despite the $65 million, San Francisco’s streets are very, very dirty.

I know that San Francisco has become known as the human feces capital of the country, but somebody is still getting fleeced on that deal.

If San Francisco wants to give me 65 million dollars a year, I will make sure that their streets are clean enough to eat dinner on, and I will install fresh smelling flowers on every street corner.

Whoever is getting the 65 million dollars right now is doing an absolutely terrible job, because there are literally piles of poop all over the place. In fact, one recent investigation found 300 piles of human feces in downtown San Francisco alone.

Meanwhile, things have gotten so bad in Seattle that one official is proposing to spend 3 million dollars on a “mass shelter tent”…

At the urging of local public health officials, Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda is proposing that the city of Seattle spend $3 million to open a “mass shelter tent” with 75 to 100 temporary beds for people living on the street.

Announced as part of the Seattle City Council’s ongoing budget deliberations, the request only includes the capital cost of setting up the tent, not the operating costs. City officials estimate it would cost an additional $2 million to run, likely bringing the total up to around $5 million for the year.

Once again, this seems like an enormous waste of money.

If you spend 3 million dollars to house 100 people, that means that you would have to spend 30 million dollars to house 1000 people.

And so what is going to happen when these cities have tens of thousands of people sleeping in the streets during the next economic downturn?

The homelessness crisis continues to escalate on the east coast as well. In New York, the percentage of New York City students that are homeless has doubled over the last decade…

Data from the New York State Techincal and Education Assistance Center for Homeless Students (NYS-TEACHS), a project of Advocates for Children of New York (AFC), revealed a record 114,659 students were in temporary housing for the 2017-18 school year, up almost 3% from 111,562 in the 2016-17 year.

That equates to roughly 10% of all students enrolled in NYC schools are homeless. The figure is so shocking that it is more than double the rate from the GFC 2007-08 era.

Government studies have shown that students without homes “are less likely to meet grade-level standards for reading and math, and graduate from high school on time,” said New York Daily News.

And in New Jersey, homelessness is up 9 percent compared to last year…

A new report finds homelessness rose sharply in the Garden State last year.

According to just-released data compiled by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, there are 9,303 men, women and children who are homeless in New Jersey this year, which is a 9 percent increase from 2017.

The mainstream media keeps touting how well the U.S. economy is doing, but if that was really accurate we wouldn’t be seeing numbers like these.

Yes, a small sliver of the population has been thriving in recent years, but most of the population has been struggling and the middle class continues to shrink. Sadly, we have gotten to a point where even the most basic housing is out of reach for many Americans…

Of 3,007 counties in the US, a worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour can afford a one-bedroom rental in only 12. In San Francisco, where the median house price is over $1.5 million, a single mother earning the minimum wage would have to work 120 hours per week to meet her basic needs. And even outside of high-cost regions, nearly two-thirds of US households lack the savings to cover a $500 shock such as a car repair or health-care expense. For these families, one bad turn can result in homelessness.

The cost of living has been surging year after year, and our wages have not even come close to keeping up. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “Middle Class Destroyed: 50 Percent Of All American Workers Make Less Than $30,533 A Year”.

If the things that you have read in this article have made you angry, that is good, because people should be getting very angry about our exploding homelessness crisis.

Hundreds of thousands of people are deeply suffering in this country every single night, and that should not be happening in the greatest nation on the planet.

Unfortunately, most of our politicians are all talk and no action, and the homelessness crisis is likely to get a whole lot worse as the U.S. economy continues to deteriorate.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

The Last Days Warrior Summit is the premier online event of 2018 for Christians, Conservatives and Patriots. It is a premium-members only international event that will empower and equip you with the knowledge and tools that you need as global events begin to escalate dramatically. The speaker list includes Michael Snyder, Mike Adams, Dave Daubenmire, Ray Gano, Dr. Daniel Daves, Gary Kah, Justus Knight, Doug Krieger, Lyn Leahz, Laura Maxwell and many more. Full summit access will begin on October 25th, and if you would like to register for this unprecedented event you can do so right here.

Middle Class Erosion: 33 Million Americans Will Not Travel During The Holidays Because They Can’t Afford To Do So

We have repeatedly been told that the U.S. economy is “booming”, but meanwhile the middle class in the United States continues to be hollowed out. The financial bubbles that the Federal Reserve has created have been a great blessing for those at the very top of the economic pyramid, but most of the country is still deeply struggling. According to one survey, 78 percent of all full-time workers in the U.S. live paycheck to paycheck, and that doesn’t even include part-time workers or those that are unemployed. We have also been told that unemployment is “low”, but the real numbers tell us that there are more working age Americans without a job in 2018 than there was at any point during the last recession. Most of the people that my wife and I know are struggling, and I continually get emails from readers all over the country that are struggling. The sad truth is that the middle class is slowly but surely dying, and more people are falling into poverty with each passing day.

And we got more evidence of this fact on Tuesday. According to one new survey, 33 million Americans will not travel during the holiday season because they simply cannot afford to do so…

Wallet Hub’s Winter Travel Survey has revealed a disturbing trend: 33 million Americans won’t travel this winter because they can’t afford it.

I have been warning about the effect that rising interest rates would have on the economy, and rising rates are being blamed for this travel slowdown. The following comes from MSN…

However, Americans are still feeling the pinch of the pocketbook—part of that has to do with rising interest rates.

“U.S. consumers will be shelling out billions of dollars in extra charges they otherwise could be spending on other things such as travel,” said Mark A. Bonn, director of the resort and vacation rental management program at Florida State University. “This makes it difficult to travel now, let alone after the holiday spending has ended.”

But of course the truth is that most Americans were deeply struggling long before interest rates started to rise.

Those of us in our prime working years can try to work even harder to make ends meet, but when you are elderly and on a fixed income, there is little that can be done.

According to the Sacramento Bee, 9 million elderly Americans across the country “can’t afford to eat”, and in one of their recent articles they featured the plight of 71-year-old Floridian Janet Burke…

Burke is one of the nearly 9 million elderly people at risk of hunger in the United States. In Florida, with the highest percentage of people 60 and older, more than 750,000 elderly need food assistance, according to experts.

The problems confronting the elderly have become one of the hot topics for candidates this election year. Candidates in South Florida have pointed to the needs of the elderly as one of the key concerns voiced by voters.

More than 100 million Americans receive assistance from the government each month, but many citizens do not believe in receiving any help and so they just quietly suffer as they search for a way to make things better.

Today, I would like to share with you a testimony from someone that has been there. My good friend Daisy Luther knows what it is like to barely survive from month to month, and the way that she described those struggles in one of her most recent articles was extremely poignant…

Let’s talk about poverty.

I don’t mean the kind you’re talking about when your friends invite you to go shopping or for a night out and you say, “No, I can’t. I’m poor right now.”

I don’t mean the situation when you’d like to get a nicer car but decide you should just stick to the one you have because you don’t have a few thousand for a down payment.

I don’t mean the scene at the grocery store when you decide to get ground beef instead of steak.

I’m talking about when you have already done the weird mismatched meals from your pantry that are made up of cooked rice, stale crackers, and a can of peaches, and you’ve moved on to wondering what on earth you’re going to feed your kids.

Or when you get an eviction notice for non-payment of rent, a shut-off notice for your utilities, and a repo notice for your car and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about any of those notices because there IS NO MONEY.

If you’ve never been this level of broke, I’m very glad.

I have been this broke. I know that it is soul-destroying when no matter how hard you work, how many part-time jobs you squeeze in, and how much you cut, you simply don’t make enough money to survive in the world today.

If the U.S. economy really is “booming”, then why are millions upon millions of American families struggling like this?

Sadly, it is because the truth is that the U.S. economy is not “booming”, and we continue to get more indications that another major economic downturn is imminent.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Blueprints have been proposed that would mean much better days ahead for America, but most Americans seem quite content with the status quo.

Most Americans seem to want corrupt politicians in Washington, a Federal Reserve system that is bankrupting future generations, an exploding national debt, a deeply oppressive system of taxation and a bloated national government that is becoming more monstrous with each passing day.

In this day and age, “liberty” and “freedom” are seen as antiquated concepts that are standing in the way of “progress”, and more government always seems to be the “solution” that is proposed whenever any crisis arises.

If we truly want to turn America around, we need to return to the values and the principles that once made this nation so great, and right now that simply is not happening…

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

The Last Days Warrior Summit is the premier online event of 2018 for Christians, Conservatives and Patriots. It is a premium-members only international event that will empower and equip you with the knowledge and tools that you need as global events begin to escalate dramatically. The speaker list includes Michael Snyder, Mike Adams, Dave Daubenmire, Ray Gano, Dr. Daniel Daves, Gary Kah, Justus Knight, Doug Krieger, Lyn Leahz, Laura Maxwell and many more. Full summit access will begin on October 25th, and if you would like to register for this unprecedented event you can do so right here.

The American Dream Is Getting Smaller, And The Reason Why Is Painfully Obvious…

Over the past decade, an unprecedented stock market boom has created thousands upon thousands of new millionaires, and yet the middle class in America has continued to shrink. How is that even possible? At one time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the planet, but now the gap between the wealthy and the poor is the largest that it has been since the 1920s. Our economy has been creating lots of new millionaires, but at the exact same time we have seen homelessness spiral out of control in our major cities. Today, being part of the middle class is like playing a really bizarre game of musical chairs. Each month when the music stops playing, those of us still in the middle class desperately hope that we are not among the ones that slip out of the middle class and into poverty. Well over 100 million Americans receive money or benefits from the federal government each month, and that includes approximately 40 percent of all families with children. We are losing our ability to take care of ourselves, and that has frightening implications for the future of our society.

One of the primary reasons why our system doesn’t work for everyone is because virtually everything has been financialized. In other words, from the cradle to the grave the entire system has been designed to get you into debt so that the fruits of your labor can be funneled to the top of the pyramid and make somebody else wealthier. The following comes from an excellent Marketwatch article entitled “The American Dream is getting smaller”…

More worrying, perhaps: 33% of those surveyed said they think that dream is disappearing. Why? They have too much debt. “Americans believe financial security is at the core of the American Dream, but it is alarming that so many think it is beyond their reach,” said Mike Fanning, head of MassMutual U.S.

Almost everyone that will read this article will have debt. In America today, we are trained to go into debt for just about everything.

If you want a college education, you go into debt.

If you want a vehicle, you go into debt.

If you want a home, you go into debt.

If you want that nice new pair of shoes, you don’t have to wait for it. Just go into more debt.

As a result, most Americans are currently up to their necks in red ink…

Some 64% of those surveyed said they have a mortgage, 56% said they had credit-card debt and 26% said they have student-loan debt. Many surveyed said they don’t feel financially secure. More than a quarter said they wish they had better control of their finances.

You would have thought that we would have learned from the very hard lessons that the crisis of 2008 taught us.

But instead, we have been on the greatest debt binge in American history in recent years. Here is more from the Marketwatch article…

It makes sense that debt is on Americans’ minds. Collectively, Americans have more than $1 trillion in credit-card debt, according to the Federal Reserve. They have another $1.5 trillion in student loans, up from $1.1 trillion in 2013. Motor vehicle loans are now topping $1.1 trillion, up from $878.5 billion in 2013. And they have another nearly $15 trillion in mortgage debt outstanding.

That is one huge pile of debt.

We criticize the federal government for running up 21 trillion dollars in debt, and rightly so, but American consumers have been almost as irresponsible on an individual basis.

As long as you are drowning in debt, you will never become wealthy. In order to build wealth, you have got to spend less than you earn, but most Americans never learn basic fundamentals such as this in our rapidly failing system of public education.

Many Americans long to become financially independent, but they don’t understand that our system is rigged against them. The entire game is all about keeping consumers on that debt wheel endlessly chasing that piece of proverbial cheese until it is too late.

Getting out of debt is one of the biggest steps that you can take to give yourself more freedom, and hopefully this article will inspire many to do just that.

To end this article today, I would like to share 14 facts about how the middle class in America is shrinking that I shared in a previous article…

#1 78 million Americans are participating in the “gig economy” because full-time jobs just don’t pay enough to make ends meet these days.

#2 In 2011, the average home price was 3.56 times the average yearly salary in the United States. But by the time 2017 was finished, the average home price was 4.73 times the average yearly salary in the United States.

#3 In 1980, the average American worker’s debt was 1.96 times larger than his or her monthly salary. Today, that number has ballooned to 5.00.

#4 In the United States today, 66 percent of all jobs pay less than 20 dollars an hour.

#5 102 million working age Americans do not have a job right now. That number is higher than it was at any point during the last recession.

#6 Earnings for low-skill jobs have stayed very flat for the last 40 years.

#7 Americans have been spending more money than they make for 28 months in a row.

#8 In the United States today, the average young adult with student loan debt has a negative net worth.

#9 At this point, the average American household is nearly $140,000 in debt.

#10 Poverty rates in U.S. suburbs “have increased by 50 percent since 1990”.

#11 Almost 51 million U.S. households “can’t afford basics like rent and food”.

#12 The bottom 40 percent of all U.S. households bring home just 11.4 percent of all income.

#13 According to the Federal Reserve, 4 out of 10 Americans do not have enough money to cover an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing the money or selling something they own.

#14 22 percent of all Americans cannot pay all of their bills in a typical month.

This article originally appeared on The Economic Collapse Blog. About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

The Number Of Americans Living In Their Vehicles “Explodes” As The Middle Class Continues To Disappear

If the U.S. economy is really doing so well, then why is homelessness rising so rapidly? As the gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase, the middle class is steadily eroding. In fact, I recently gave my readers 15 signs that the middle class in America is being systematically destroyed. More Americans are falling out of the middle class and into poverty with each passing day, and this is one of the big reasons why the number of homeless is surging. For example, the number of people living on the street in L.A. has shot up 75 percent over the last 6 years. But of course L.A. is far from alone. Other major cities on the west coast are facing similar problems, and that includes Seattle. It turns out that the Emerald City has seen a 46 percent rise in the number of people sleeping in their vehicles in just the past year…

The number of people who live in their vehicles because they can’t find affordable housing is on the rise, even though the practice is illegal in many U.S. cities.

The number of people residing in campers and other vehicles surged 46 percent over the past year, a recent homeless census in Seattle’s King County, Washington found. The problem is “exploding” in cities with expensive housing markets, including Los Angeles, Portland and San Francisco, according to Governing magazine.

Amazon, Microsoft and other big tech companies are in the Seattle area. It is a region that is supposedly “prospering”, and yet this is going on.

Sadly, it isn’t just major urban areas that are seeing more people sleeping in their vehicles. Over in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, many of the homeless sleep in their vehicles even in the middle of winter…

Stephanie Monroe, managing director of Children Youth & Family Services at Volunteers of America, Dakotas, tells a similar story. At least 25 percent of the non-profit’s Sioux Falls clients have lived in their vehicles at some point, even during winter’s sub-freezing temperatures.

“Many of our communities don’t have formal shelter services,” she said in an interview. “It can lead to individuals resorting to living in their cars or other vehicles.”

It is time to admit that we have a problem. The number of homeless in this country is surging, and we need to start coming up with some better solutions.

But instead, many communities are simply passing laws that make it illegal for people to sleep in their vehicles…

A recent survey by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP), which tracks policies in 187 cities, found the number of prohibitions against vehicle residency has more than doubled during the last decade.

Those laws aren’t going to solve anything.

At best, they will just encourage some of the homeless to go somewhere else.

And if our homelessness crisis is escalating this dramatically while the economy is supposedly “growing”, how bad are things going to be once the next recession officially begins?

We live at a time when the cost of living is soaring but our paychecks are not. As a result, middle class families are being squeezed like never before.

A recent Marketwatch article highlighted the plight of California history teacher Matt Barry and his wife Nicole…

Barry’s wife, Nicole, teaches as well — they each earn $69,000, a combined salary that not long ago was enough to afford a comfortable family life. But due to the astronomical costs in his area, including real estate — a 1,500-square-foot “starter home” costs $680,000 — driving for Uber was a necessity.

“Teachers are killing themselves,” Barry says in Alissa Quart’s new book, “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America” (Ecco), out Tuesday. “I shouldn’t be having to drive Uber at eight o’clock at night on a weekday. I just shut down from the mental toll: grading papers between rides, thinking of what I could be doing instead of driving — like creating a curriculum.”

Home prices are completely out of control, but that bubble should soon burst.

However, other elements of our cost of living are only going to become even more painful. Health care costs rise much faster than the rate of inflation every year, food prices are becoming incredibly ridiculous, and the cost of a college education is off the charts. According to author Alissa Quart, living a middle class life is “30% more expensive” than it was two decades ago…

“Middle-class life is now 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago,” Quart writes, citing the costs of housing, education, health care and child care in particular. “In some cases the cost of daily life over the last 20 years has doubled.”

And thanks to the trade war, prices are going to start going up more rapidly than we have seen in a very long time.

On Tuesday, we learned that diaper and toilet paper prices are rising again…

Procter & Gamble said on Tuesday that it was in the process of raising Pampers’ prices in North America by 4%. P&G also began notifying retailers this week that it would increase the average prices of Bounty, Charmin, and Puffs by 5%.

P&G is raising prices because commodity and transportation cost pressures are intensifying. The hikes to Bounty and Charmin will go into effect in late October, and Puffs will become more expensive beginning early next year.

I wish that I had better news for you, but I don’t. We are all going to have to work harder, smarter and more efficiently. And we are definitely going to have to tighten our belts.

Many middle class families are relying on debt to get them from month to month, and consumer debt in the United States has surged to an all-time high. But eventually a day of reckoning comes, and we all understand that.

The U.S. economy is not going to be getting any better than it is right now. So it is time to be a lean, mean saving machine, because it will be important to have a financial cushion for the hard times that are ahead of us.

Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

“Hungry 4 Success”: Homeless man is handing out resumes instead of asking for money

(NBC2) A California homeless man is receiving an outpouring of support after a photo of him holding a unique sign was posted on Twitter.

Jasmine Scofield saw 26-year-old David Casarez outside with a sign that read “Homeless, hungry 4 success, take a resume.” She tweeted his photo and a copy of his resume and asked for any leads. “Please RT so we can help David out!” she said.

Since Friday, the Tweet has been retweeted and liked more than 100 thousand times.

Police Officer Helps A Homeless Man Shave His Beard So That He Can Get A Job

(City of Tallahassee Police Department) My daughter just sent me this picture and called to tell me the story, I had to share….she went to the gas station and saw this officer shaving a homeless man’s beard. A minute later the officer went into the store and Hannah walked in after him and saw him cleaning himself up because he was hot and sweaty. She offered to buy him a drink and got talking. Apparently the officer was at McDonald’s next door and this gentleman went in looking for a job. He was told they wouldn’t hire him unless he shaved his beard. So the officer went and got some clippers and shaved the man’s beard so he could go back and get a job! I am so proud to live in a community where our deputies and officers are such wonderful people. Good job Tallahassee Police Department!!!

Police Union President Laments That Portland Has Become A “Cesspool” As West Coast Cities Struggle With An Unprecedented Surge In Homelessness

Even though it has always been kind of crazy, at one time Portland, Oregon was quite an attractive place to live, but now those days are long gone. Today, the city streets are strewn with garbage, drug paraphernalia and human feces. Mentally ill homeless people and drug addicts wander about like zombies, and there are certain areas of the city that you absolutely do not want to visit at night. In essence, the city is slowly becoming a post-apocalyptic version of its former self, and those that love the city are seething with frustration. Of course Portland is simply experiencing the same surge in homelessness that so many other west coast cities are struggling to deal with. As housing prices have risen dramatically, many on the lower end of the income scale have been priced out of the market entirely, and an increasing number of people are being forced to sleep in vehicles, in shelters or on the streets.

The president of the police union in Portland has had enough. His officers are overwhelmed by the needs of the homeless on a nightly basis, and he is calling on the mayor to finally do something to resolve this crisis. The following is the first paragraph from a statement that PPA President Daryl Turner just released…

Our City has become a cesspool. Livability that once made Portland a unique and vibrant city is now replaced with human feces in businesses doorways, in our parks, and on our streets. Aggressive panhandlers block the sidewalks, storefronts, and landmarks like Pioneer Square, discouraging people from enjoying our City. Garbage-filled RVs and vehicles are strewn throughout our neighborhoods. Used needles, drug paraphernalia, and trash are common sights lining the streets and sidewalks of the downtown core area, under our bridges, and freeway overpasses. That’s not what our families, business owners, and tourists deserve.

If that sounds familiar, that is because many other west coast cities are dealing with the exact same issues right now.

For example, new San Francisco Mayor London Breed recently admitted that there “is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen”…

“There is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here,” Breed told KNTV. “That is a huge problem and we are not just talking about from dogs — we’re talking about from humans.”

The streets of San Francisco are littered with a “dangerous mix of drug needles, garbage, and feces”, KNTV’s investigative team reported in February after surveying the city’s streets.

And a lot of other San Francisco residents have noticed the exact same thing. In fact, during one recent seven day period 16,000 complaints were submitted to the city about human feces.

Sounds like a great place to live, right?

It is important to keep in mind that San Francisco supposedly has a “booming economy” and some of the highest real estate prices in the entire nation.

If this is happening in a “prosperous area”, what are things like in major cities where things are not so prosperous?

Down in L.A., there was a nearly 26 percent increase in homelessness in 2017, and overall homelessness in L.A. has risen 75 percent over the past 6 years.

Let that sink in for a moment.

During this supposed “economy recovery”, our second largest city has seen homelessness go up 75 percent.

Sadly, it is estimated that 25 percent of the nation’s entire homeless population now lives in California…

While it’s tough to say precisely how many Californians are experiencing homelessness, the federal Housing and Urban Development Department estimates the number statewide at 130,000 on a given night. That’s 25 percent of the entire nation’s homeless population. Since 2016, California experienced a larger increase in homelessness than any other state.

At one time, L.A.’s “skid row” was limited to a single street, but now it goes on mile after mile. I just have to share with you the following excerpt from an excellent article about what life is like for those living on this famous stretch of real estate…

Most of its 2,000 residents sleep in tents or under tarps. Those with more status occupy the sides of streets shaded by trees. Location, location, location. The lowest caste sleep on cardboard or nothing. Some people rent tents for a few bucks a night.

There are no liquor stores so businessmen buy alcohol from shops a few miles away and sell it at a steep mark-up. Loan sharks collect debts by taking control of the debit cards issued to homeless people by government agencies.

A guy sits at a table on the sidewalk selling cigarettes and joints. The city has installed sidewalk restrooms. Ruffin pointed to one and figured people inside were shooting up or smoking. Meth, heroin and crack are the scourges of choice. Needles litter the gutter, as does a dead rat. On another block, homeless entrepreneurs chop and assemble bicycles for sale.

And let us not forget about Seattle. Homeless encampments have become so pervasive in “the Emerald City” that authorities started building “tiny house villages” for the homeless out of desperation. But these “tiny house villages” are a lot more depressing than they sound…

In the nearby neighborhood of Wallingford, a newly erected outpost of small wooden shacks offer shelter for 22 of Seattle’s homeless residents. This is a “tiny house village,” sanctioned by the city as a kind of middle ground between living at a street address and on the street. The buildings sit in the corner of a parking lot across from a seafood restaurant, shielded from view by a metal fence. Each shack, painted with one of the bold colors of a Crayola starter pack, offers electricity and a roof sturdier than the tents in Seattle’s increasingly common homeless encampments. Every resident is issued a window fan for the occasional hot day, and the people here hope to receive heaters before winter. But the small collections of potted petunias and pothos that sit in front of their temporary homes are unlikely to survive the city’s harshest months.

Unfortunately, this is probably only just the beginning of this crisis. Homelessness always explodes during a recession, and many believe that we are rapidly approaching another one. West coast cities are really struggling to deal with this crisis right now, and it is hard to imagine how they will deal with the tsunami of human suffering that is coming their way once economic conditions begin to sour.

Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

41 Million Americans Are Living In Poverty This Christmas

Even though the stock market continues to set new record high after new record high, poverty is exploding all over America. It is being reported that 41 million people are living in poverty at this moment, and 9 million of them do not receive a single penny of income from anyone. Once you have been unemployed for long enough, you don’t qualify for unemployment payments any longer, and once you are on the street there is nowhere for other governments programs to send a check to. I have previously discussed the rising epidemic of homelessness in our nation, but most people don’t want to think about that sort of a thing these days. Even though New York City has the most homeless since the Great Depression, and even though homelessness in Los Angeles is at an all-time record high, most people want to pretend that everything is just fine.

Well, the truth is that everything is not just fine.

A reporter from the Guardian recently traveled with a special UN envoy to some of the most impoverished areas of the United States. His report is extremely eye-opening, and I wanted to share a short excerpt from his story. This portion of his article is about a 41-year-old woman named Ressy Finley who is desperately trying to stay alive on the mean streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles…

Ressy Finley, 41, was busy sterilizing the white bucket she uses to slop out in her tent in which she has lived on and off for more than a decade. She keeps her living area, a mass of worn mattresses and blankets and a few motley possessions, as clean as she can in a losing battle against rats and cockroaches. She also endures waves of bed bugs, and has large welts on her shoulder to prove it.

She receives no formal income, and what she makes on recycling bottles and cans is no way enough to afford the average rents of $1,400 a month for a tiny one-bedroom. A friend brings her food every couple of days, the rest of the time she relies on nearby missions.

She cried twice in the course of our short conversation, once when she recalled how her infant son was taken from her arms by social workers because of her drug habit (he is now 14; she has never seen him again). The second time was when she alluded to the sexual abuse that set her as a child on the path towards drugs and homelessness.

Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency because the number of homeless is rising so rapidly, and so have nine other cities along the west coast. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “As America Gives Thanks, Homelessness Continues To Set New Records In Major Cities All Over The Nation”.

The sad thing is that there are more than a million homes sitting empty in America right now. As economic opportunities have dried up, many communities in the middle part of the nation are becoming “ghost towns”, and it is getting worse with each passing day…

There are nearly 1.4 million vacant residential properties across the country — abandoned, not for sale, mostly unoccupied homes. With vacant properties comprising as much as 30% of residential properties, some neighborhoods are starting to feel like ghost towns.

Many believe that the answer to the decline of the middle class and the growth of poverty is even more socialism.

But if you want to see where that road leads, just look at what is happening in Venezuela. People are eating cats and dogs, and just today there were a whole bunch of mainstream news articles about how children are literally starving to death.

No, the real answer is to do what made our economy so great in the first place. Between 1872 and 1913, we didn’t have an income tax or a central bank, and it was the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

What we have today is not free market capitalism. We have gone very far down the road toward government-controlled socialism, and it has created a giant mess.

If we want to have a healthy middle class again, we need to have a society that promotes entrepreneurs and the creation of small businesses. Today we are literally choking the financial life out of entrepreneurs and small businesses, and when I am elected to Congress I am going to fight as hard as I can to change that.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

As America Gives Thanks, Homelessness Continues To Set New Records In Major Cities All Over The Nation

If the economy is doing just fine, then why is homelessness at levels not seen “since the Great Depression” in major cities all over the country? If the U.S. economy was actually in good shape, we would expect that the number of people that are homeless would be going down or at least stabilizing. Instead, we have a growing national crisis on our hands. In fact, within the past two years “at least 10 cities or municipal regions in California, Oregon and Washington” have declared a state of emergency because the number of homeless is growing so rapidly.

Things are particularly bad in southern California, and this year the Midnight Mission will literally be feeding a small army of people that have nowhere to sleep at night…

Thanksgiving meals will be served to thousands of homeless and near-homeless individuals today on Skid Row and in Pasadena and Canoga Park amid calls for donations and volunteers for the rest of the year.

The Midnight Mission will serve Thanksgiving brunch to nearly 2,500 homeless and near-homeless men, women and children, according to Georgia Berkovich, its director of public affairs.

Overall, the Midnight Mission serves more than a million meals a year, and Berkovich says that homelessness hasn’t been this bad in southern California “since the Great Depression”…

Berkovich said the group has been serving nearly 1 million meals a year each year since 2013.

“We haven’t seen numbers like this since the Great Depression,” she said.

And of course the official numbers confirm what Berkovich is claiming. According to an article published earlier this year, the number of homeless people living in Los Angeles County has never been higher…

The number of homeless people in Los Angeles has jumped to a new record, as city officials grapple with a humanitarian crisis of proportions remarkable for a modern American metropolis.

Municipal leaders said that a recent count over several nights found 55,188 homeless people living in a survey region comprising most of Los Angeles County, up more than 25% from last year.

If the California economy is truly doing well, then why is this happening?

We see the same thing happening when we look at the east coast. Just check out these numbers from New York City…

In recent years the number of homeless people has grown. Whereas rents increased by 18% between 2005 and 2015, incomes rose by 5%. When Rudy Giuliani entered City Hall in 1994, 24,000 people lived in shelters. About 31,000 lived in them when Mike Bloomberg became mayor in 2002. When Bill de Blasio entered City Hall in 2014, 51,500 did. The number of homeless people now in shelters is around 63,000.

For New York, this is the highest that the homeless population has been since the Great Depression, and city leaders are trying to come up with a solution.

Meanwhile, things are so bad in Seattle that “400 unauthorized tent camps” have popped up…

Housing prices are soaring here thanks to the tech industry, but the boom comes with a consequence: A surge in homelessness marked by 400 unauthorized tent camps in parks, under bridges, on freeway medians and along busy sidewalks. The liberal city is trying to figure out what to do.

Are you noticing a theme?

Homelessness is at epidemic levels all over the U.S., and this crisis is getting worse with each passing day. Some communities are trying to care for their growing homeless populations, but others are simply trying to force them to go somewhere else. They are doing this by essentially making it illegal to be homeless. In some cities it is now a crime to engage in “public camping”, to “block a walkway” or to create any sort of “temporary structure for human habitation”. These laws specifically target the homeless, and they are very cruel.

Many of us tend to picture the homeless as mostly lazy older men that don’t want to work and that instead want to drink or do drugs all day.

But the truth is that women and children make up a significant percentage of the homeless. In fact, the number of homeless children in our country has increased by about 60 percent since the end of the last recession.

And there are thousands upon thousands of military veterans that are homeless. For example, a 34-year-old man named Johnny that served in the Marine Corps recently used his last 20 dollars to buy fuel for a woman that had run out of gas and was stranded along I-95 in Miami…

Pulled over on the side of I-95, McClure, 27, was approached by a homeless man named Johnny. She was apprehensive at first, but Johnny told her to get back into her car and to lock the doors while he walked to get her help. He went to a nearby gas station, used his last $20 fill a can and brought it back to fill up her car.

Grateful, but without a dollar to repay him, McClure promised she would come back with something.

In the weeks since, she’s returned to the spot along I-95 where Johnny stays with cash, snacks and Wawa gift cards. Each time she’s stopped by with her boyfriend, Mark D’Amico, they’ve learned a bit more about Johnny’s story, and become humbled by his gratitude.

Deciding that they wanted to do even more for Johnny, they started a GoFundMe page for him and have since raised approximately $250,000.

So it looks like there is going to be a happy ending to Johnny’s story, but the truth is that more people are falling into homelessness with each passing day.

If things are this bad now, how much worse will they become as the economy really starts slowing down? Already, we have shattered the all-time yearly record for retail store closings, and we still have more than a month to go. The following is from a CNN article entitled “Is This The Last Black Friday?”…

A record number of store closures — 6,735 — have already been announced this year. That’s more than triple the tally for 2016, according to Fung Global Retail and Technology, a retail think tank.

And there have been 620 bankruptcies in the sector so far this year, according to BankruptcyData.com, up 31% from the same period last year. Prominent names such as Toys R Us, Gymboree, Payless Shoes and RadioShack have all filed this year, and Sears Holdings (SHLD), which owns both the iconic Sears and Kmart chains, has warned there is “substantial doubt” it can remain in business.

Sadly, analysts are projecting that the number of store closings could be as high as 9,000 next year.

Yes, there are some areas of the country that are doing well right now, but there are many others that are not.

Let us always remember to have compassion on those that are struggling, because someday we may be the ones that end up needing some help.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Is America Becoming A Police State Where Churches Can’t Feed The Homeless And Kids Can’t Set Up Lemonade Stands?

What would you do if authorities ordered your church to stop feeding the homeless? And what would you do if your 5-year-old daughter was ordered to get government permission before setting up a lemonade stand? Well, these things are actually happening in America today. With each passing day, America goes further down the road toward becoming a police state. Just yesterday, I wrote about a young mother that was threatened with arrest in California for not properly vaccinating her children. We have entered a time when government bureaucrats are micromanaging all of our lives, and it is time for us to say that enough is enough.

The bigger government gets, the more oppressive it tends to become. But most people don’t understand that there is an inverse relationship between liberty and the size of government. The more government grows, the less freedoms we have, and this is true on the federal, state and local levels.

For example, all over America laws are being passed that make it illegal to feed the homeless. Every new law, rule or regulation restricts our liberties and freedoms in some way, and in this case these sorts of laws restrict our freedom to help our neighbors in need.

Earlier today I came across another example of this. A church in Malibu, California has just been ordered to stop giving food to the homeless…

A Malibu church that has helped the homeless for years has been told to stop feeding people down on their luck.

CBS2’s Craig Herrera spoke to the people at the United Methodist Church about the request.

At various times, the church can serve as many as 70-100 people. They have been serving the meals on Wednesdays since 2014.

Sadly, this feeding program is being shut down right after Thanksgiving when people will need it the most.

This is really a pet peeve for me. I don’t care how many laws they try to pass, if I see someone in need I am going to try to feed them. Helping those that are hurting is always the right thing to do, and the government control freaks that are trying to shut this feeding program down should immediately resign from their positions.

Another pet peeve of mine is when authorities try to shut down lemonade stands run by young children. This happened yet again just the other day in Porterville, California…

In Porterville, California, a five-year-old girl who set up a lemonade stand to raise money to buy herself a new bike has been told four months later that she needed a business license to do it.

Her mother received the warning in a citation from city hall which asked her to send back $59, the local fee for applying for a new license plus a fine.

Thankfully the authorities apologized in that case, but in many other cases around the nation that has not happened.

Our founders wanted to create a nation where individual liberties and freedoms would be maximized. That is why they intended for government to be limited, but over time we have swung the pendulum completely in the other direction. We desperately need to rediscover the benefits of limited government, and that is one of the key pillars that I am running for Congress on.

If we continue to go down the path of big government, eventually we will end up like other “socialist paradises” around the globe.

For instance, China has become such a police state that they are actually instituting a “citizen score” for every single person in the country…

China has already implemented its Citizen Score on a voluntary basis but this month government officials released details about how the program will operate in 2020 when it becomes compulsory for all Chinese citizens.

For those who may be curious, think of the Citizen Score, sometimes referred to as a trust score, as akin to a credit score but one that encompasses every conceivable aspect of one’s life. Buy video games and your score drops because the government assumes you are idle, buy diapers and it rises because you seem more stable.

Get a traffic ticket or speak out about the government, and your score drops, but earn a degree or support the Party and your score might rise. Miss paying your bills or don’t support your parents and your score will suffer. Read books that the party doesn’t deem ideologically sound or watch foreign movies, and your score will take a hit.

Is that the kind of society you want?

If not, we have got to fight for the future of America while we still can, because the left very much wants to take us down that road.

I do not want a Big Brother police state micromanaging all of our lives, and you shouldn’t either.

America is supposed to be “the land of the free”, and it is time for us to fight to make that a reality once again.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

It Is Becoming Illegal To Be Homeless In America As Houston, Dallas And Dozens Of Other Cities Pass Draconian Laws

Should we make homelessness against the law and simply throw all homeless people into prison so that we don’t have to deal with them? Incredibly, this is actually starting to happen in dozens of major cities all across the United States. It may be difficult to believe, but in many large urban areas today, if you are found guilty of “public camping” you can be taken directly to jail. In some cities, activities such as “blocking a walkway” or creating any sort of “temporary structure for human habitation” are also considered to be serious crimes. And there are some communities that have even made it illegal to feed the homeless without an official permit. Unfortunately, as the U.S. economy continues to slow down the number of homeless people will continue to grow, and so this is a crisis that is only going to grow in size and scope.

Of course the goal of many of these laws is to get the homeless to go somewhere else. But as these laws start to multiply all across the nation, pretty soon there won’t be too many places left where it is actually legal to be homeless.

One city that is being highly criticized for passing extremely draconian laws is Houston. In that city it is actually illegal for the homeless to use any sort of material to shield themselves from the wind, the rain and the cold…

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner is taking a similar approach—his anti-encampment ordinance makes it illegal to use “fabric, metal, cardboard, or other materials as a tent or temporary structure for human habitation.” This ensures that the Houstonian homeless are vulnerable not just to the elements, but also to the constant threat of the police. Officials cite one of the most common justifications for crackdowns on the homeless: neighborhood safety (a more socially acceptable way of talking about the not-in-my-backyard mentality).

With all of the other problems that we are facing as a nation, it stuns me that there are politicians that would spend their time dreaming up such sick and twisted laws.

According to one news report, the homeless in Houston are now officially banned from doing all of the following things…

1. They can’t block a sidewalk, stand in a roadway median or block a building doorway. (AKA they can’t panhandle).

2. They also can’t do any of these things — blocking walkways — under state law that already existed.

3. They can’t sleep in tents, boxes or any other makeshift shelter on public property.

4. They also can’t have heating devices.

5. They can’t carry around belongings that take up space more than three feet long, three feet wide, three feet tall.

6. People can’t spontaneously feed more than five homeless people without a permit.

If I was a homeless person in Houston, I would definitely be looking to get out of there.

But where are they going to go?

Things are almost as bad in Dallas. In fact, it is being reported that the police in Dallas “issued over 11,000 citations for sleeping in public from January 2012 to November 2015.”

When you break that number down, it comes to 323 citations per month.

Of course some people have tried to challenge these types of laws in court, but most of the challenges have been unsuccessful. For example, just check out what recently happened in Denver…

Three people who were contesting Denver’s urban-camping ban were found guilty on Wednesday, April 5, at the Lindsey-Flanigan courthouse. The defendants — Jerry Burton, Randy Russell and Terese Howard — were determined to have unlawfully camped on November 28, 2016, and to have interfered with police operations at one location. All three were sentenced with court-ordered probation for one year and between twenty and forty hours of community service.

The case challenged Denver’s unauthorized-camping ordinance, which has been divisive ever since Denver City Council approved it in 2012.

Since the courts are generally upholding these laws, this has just emboldened more communities to adopt anti-homelessness ordinances. According to one report, dozens of major cities have now passed such laws…

City-wide bans on public camping (PDF) have increased by 69 percent throughout the United States. What used to be seen as an annoyance is now prohibited, forcing fines or jail time on those who certainly can’t afford it. The only nationwide nonprofit devoted to studying this, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, has been tracking these changes since 2006. Their findings? There are a scary number of laws passed that ironically make it costly to be homeless.

For example, in 33 of the 100 U.S. cities they studied, it’s illegal to publicly camp. In 18, it’s illegal to sleep in public. Panhandling is illegal in 27 cities.

In 39 cities, it’s illegal to live in vehicles.

As I have warned repeatedly, we are seeing hearts grow cold all around us. Instead of doing everything that they can to try to help those in need, communities are trying to make them go some place else, and those that try to feed and help the homeless are being harshly penalized.

Sadly, all of this comes at a time when homelessness is on the rise all over America. In a previous article I pointed out that in New York City the number of homeless people recently hit a brand new all-time high, and things have gotten so bad in Los Angeles that the L.A. City Council has formally requested that Governor Jerry Brown declare a state of emergency.

We tend to think of the homeless as bearded old men with drinking problems, but the truth is that many of the homeless are children.

In fact, the number of homeless children in the United States has risen by about 60 percent since the end of the last recession.

If this is how we are going to treat some of the most vulnerable members of our society while things are still relatively stable, how are we going to be treating one another when the economy completely collapses?

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

Oregon Woman Freezes To Death After Being Evicted For $338 In Late Rent Payments

Homeless Woman - US Uncut

(By Whitney Webb of Trueactivist.com) Though Portland is often known for its quirkiness and microbreweries, the scourge of urban homelessness is quickly marring the reputation of Oregon’s largest city. Last Saturday, 52 year old Karen Lee Batts became the second person to die on Portland streets within the first week of 2017 due to hypothermia. Batts had been found in the Smart Park parking garage Saturday night when Portland Police arrived on the scene, responding to a report that a woman was taking off her clothes and struggling in the freezing weather. Though Batts’ actions may seem strange, it is actually common for sufferers of late stage hypothermia to frantically undress themselves as they begin to feel extremely hot due to nerve damage. Police responding to the scene arrived too late for Batts, who had already died from exposure to the cold.

However, Batts had not been homeless for very long. Public records indicate that Batts had been evicted from her apartment complex for low-income seniors in October. Batts had been evicted because she owed $338 in rent to Cascade Management, Inc. and Northwest Housing Alternatives, LLC, the companies which managed the housing unit. Batts was evicted on October 14th for being at least one week late with her rent payment for August and was sent a 72-hour notice a month later informing her of the balance she owed. The building managers sued to evict Batts on October 6th and they won the case by default when Batts did not show up to her court hearing.

Local KATU-TV news contacted Northwest Housing Alternatives for comment and they responded that Batts had lived in the housing complex since 2007, but had undergone a “change” as of late. They also asserted that “there were a variety of lease violations that were either damage of property or late payments, also incidents against staff and other tenants.” The organization’s Executive Director, Martha McLennan, told the Williamette Week that they had tried to help Batts before she was evicted. “We hate these sorts of situations,” McLennan says. “But unfortunately, when someone decline services, there’s not much you can do. And I can say there were dozens of attempts to help.” The Oregonian also reported that Batts had long struggled to maintain a permanent residence and had previously been evicted from another affordable housing building in 1996.

Whether or not her landlords attempted to help her before kicking her out on the street, Batt’s death was completely preventable. The homeless, arguably the most marginalized and voiceless group in the United States, are consistently ignored by city governments, many of which have criminalized the very act of being homeless. Not only that but other city governments, in order to further reduce the visibility of the homeless and push them further to the sidelines, have also criminalized offering food to the homeless in public as well as other types of aid. The unfortunate and tragic fate of Karen Batts is indicative of, not a local problem, but a national one as all levels of government – along with many everyday Americans – would prefer to throw the homeless out with the garbage instead of recognizing them as human beings with inherent rights.

Seven Arrested For Feeding Homeless In Public Park

Homeless and cold

(By Whitney Webb of Trueactivist.com) Since 2008 economic crisis, homelessness in the United States has been on the rise, particularly in cities and urban areas. Though most local and city governments are well-aware of the issue, many have decided to criminalize the homeless instead of working to alleviate their hardships or resolve the underlying problems which contribute to the phenomenon. Not only that, but many have also sought to criminalize those activists and good samaritans who offer food and services to the homeless when over-burdened homeless shelters and food pantries cannot.

This past Saturday, activists in Tampa, Florida experienced firsthand the unpleasant consequences of lending a much-needed hand to the local homeless community when they were arrested for offering free food in a public park. Members of Food Not Bombs, a group that shares free vegan/vegetarian meals in protest of war and poverty, had gathered in Lykes Gaslight Park to offer the homeless hot coffee and bagels as winter temperatures began to take a turn for the worse. Though there was no violence, illicit substances, or bad behavior of any kind, the gathering was considered illegal by Tampa authorities. Though it is not explicitly illegal to feed the hungry in public in Tampa, one must have a special and costly permit from the city government in order to do just that. The permit allows groups or individuals to feed the homeless twice a week, but – in addition to the cost of the permit itself – the city also demands one take out a specific insurance policy, which can be prohibitively expensive for many would-be activists.

Those working with Food Not Bombs were well-aware that their actions were technically illegal as they had been warned earlier in the week to cease food-sharing activities. However, they held their Saturday event as planned, which ultimately led to the arrest of a total of seven activists. Police arrived at the scene and gave the activists three minutes to cease feeding those in need. Then they moved in, arresting those who continued to serve the food despite orders to cease and desist. A homeless man was also arrested when he reached for a last-minute bagel. A spokesperson for Food Not Bombs has since said that it “has not planned to stop sharing food with the homeless and hungry and will continue to defy unjust laws that criminalize compassion and mutual aid,” adding that “compassion should never be criminalized.”

Tampa, Florida has a history of clamping down on those who seek to share free food and necessities with the homeless. Over a decade ago in 2004, three activists with Food Not Bombs were arrested for feeding the homeless. In 2011, members of a local church were also warned not to feed the homeless. This case, in particular, drew scrutiny at the time as it was largely suspected that Tampa’s city government was looking to “clean up” downtown before the 2012 Republican convention was set to be held there. Another Florida town, just 40 minutes south of Tampa, is also well-known for its poor treatment of the homeless. Sarasota, Florida has repeatedly topped the list of meanest cities for the homeless due to city ordinances criminalizing sleeping in public or private places, which essentially criminalizes the very existence of the homeless. However, the poor treatment of the homeless and those who seek to help them is not just a problem in Florida but a national one. The priorities of city governments throughout the country all too often ignore the most marginalized and the most voiceless among us. Though some cities are trying to reverse this trend, activists such as those working with Food Not Bombs must continue to lead by example in order to expose the immorality of banning acts of basic human kindness.

Unhappy Holidays: Houston Police Force Homeless People To Throw Away Food

homeless-photo-by-psyberartist

On Thursday, the Houston Police Department targeted a group of homeless advocates who were attempting to hand out hot food and gifts to the homeless.

Local activists attempting to hand out food and gifts were shocked on Thursday afternoon when Houston police forced the homeless to throw away the donations.  Around 1 pm on Thursday,  several individuals met in downtown Houston to distribute plates of hot food, blankets, and other supplies to the city’s growing homeless population. Soon after, Houston police arrived on the scene of two different intersections where the homeless advocates were giving out gifts and food.

According to witness testimony posted on Facebook, the police instructed the homeless to throw away everything they had been given. “Not only were the police called, but they brought a large waste management truck and are forcing the homeless to throw away their food, pillows and other items,” reads one post.

War On The Homeless: Cities All Over America Are Passing Laws Making It Illegal To Feed And Shelter Those In Need

homeless-man-public-domain

If you want to be a “Good Samaritan” to the homeless in your community, you might want to check and see if it is legal first. All over the country, cities are passing laws that make it illegal to feed and shelter the homeless. For example, in this article you will read about a church in Maryland that was just fined $12,000 for simply allowing homeless people to sleep outside the church at night. This backlash against homeless people comes at a time when homelessness in America is absolutely exploding. In a previous article, I shared with my readers the fact that the number of homeless people in New York City has just set a brand new all-time high, and the homelessness crisis in California has become so severe that the L.A. City Council has formally asked Governor Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency. Sadly, instead of opening up our hearts to the rapidly growing number of Americans without a home, way too many communities are trying to use the law to force them to go somewhere else.

For nearly two thousand years, churches have been at the forefront of helping the poor and disadvantaged, but now many communities are trying to stop this from happening. Earlier today, I was absolutely stunned when I came across an article that talked about how a church in Dundalk, Maryland has been fined $12,000 for allowing the homeless to sleep outside the church at night…

“I showed up Wednesday morning to find a citation on the door that said we’re going to be fined $12,000 and have a court date because we have unhoused homeless people sleeping outside the church at night,” said Reverend Katie Grover with the Patapsco United Methodist Church.

Grover added that the men and women who sleep outside their doors do so because they have nowhere else to go and because they feel safe there.

“We feel we here as a church that it’s scriptural mandate that’s it an imperative to care for the least, the last, the lost, the poor, the hungry,” she said.

The authorities in Dundalk say that the church is running a “non-permitted rooming and boarding house”, and the severity of this fine is likely to put the church in significant financial difficulty if it is forced to pay it. You can watch a local news report discussing this story on YouTube right here…

Of course Dundalk is far from alone. All across the U.S. laws have been passed that specifically target the homeless. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, the following are some of the most typical ways that the homeless are targeted…

  • Carrying out sweeps (confiscating personal property including tents, bedding, papers, clothing, medications, etc.) in city areas where homeless people live.
  • Making panhandling illegal.
  • Making it illegal for groups to share food with homeless persons in public spaces.
  • Enforcing a “quality of life” ordinance relating to public activity and hygiene.

There are some people that have been feeding the hungry for decades that now find that their work has been suddenly made illegal. For instance, down in Houston a Good Samaritan named Jay Hamberger is outraged that the help that he has been providing to the homeless for 27 years has now made him an outlaw…

Jay Hamberger has been bringing food to Houston’s homeless for 27 years. He feels the city is infringing on his right to help others by requiring him to have prior permission to distribute food on public and private property.

“I’ve done it with impunity for 27 years now, and I’m the most law-abiding outlaw, because what I’m doing is illegal,” Hamberger said. “My understanding is that there’s no legal way to make this right with the city.”

This is just another example of how our society is being strangled to death by control freaks.

If I see someone that is desperately hungry and I want to give that person food, then I am going to do it no matter what the law says.

Unfortunately, as the homelessness crisis continues to escalate these types of laws are only going to increase. Even in supposedly “tolerant” areas of the country we are seeing draconian measures being implemented. For example, just check out the new ordinance that was just passed in Los Angeles…

LA legislators passed an ordinance that would ban people from sleeping in cars and recreational vehicles (RVs) near homes, parks and schools. Advocates see the ordinance as the latest move to criminalize homeless people.

The Los Angeles City Council voted in favor of the ordinance on Wednesday. Banning people from sleeping near homes, schools and parks in their vehicles, would, if signed into law, only make it legal to sleep overnight in cars and RV’s in industrial or commercial districts from 9:00pm to 6:00am.

As millions of Americans have fallen out of the middle class in recent years, we have seen an explosion in the number of people living in cars, trucks and recreational vehicles. This is something that I addressed in my recent article entitled “Living In A Van Down By The River – Time To Face The True State Of The Middle Class In America“. During this time of the year many that live in their vehicles head for warmer climates, and cities like Los Angeles are responding to the influx of homeless people by trying to force them to go somewhere else.

And this “war on the homeless” has actually been ramping up for quite a while. Just check out these numbers from the Washington Post…

Cities have enacted a wave of crackdowns and new laws against panhandling, camping and other activities associated with homelessness. They say such efforts help preserve the renewed vitality, curbing crime, health problems and behaviors that bother residents and disrupt business.

Between 2011 and 2014, the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty found that bans on sleeping in cars shot up 119 percent, citywide camping prohibitions jumped 60 percent, anti-loitering laws increased 35 percent and anti-begging laws increased 25 percent in a survey of 187 cities.

Homeless people do not have a permanent address, and there is always a temptation to try to force them to go somewhere else so that they become someone else’s problem.

But the truth is that we have a massive national crisis on our hands. The number of homeless children in this country has increased by 60 percent since the end of the last recession, and the number of homeless people sleeping in shelters has risen to record levels in major cities on both the east and west coast.

And considering the fact that about two-thirds of the country is currently living paycheck to paycheck, how bad will things get once the next major recession strikes?

Poverty is growing all over the nation, and at the same time hearts all over America are growing very cold.

I truly fear for what this country is going to look like just a few years from now.

About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The Most Important News. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Homeless For The Holidays

child-sitting-in-door-and-crying-public-domain

Could you imagine spending the holidays in a homeless shelter, in a tent city surrounded by drug addicts and prostitutes, or in a sleeping bag on the cold, hard streets of an urban jungle? Unfortunately, that is what real life looks like for an increasing number of Americans. Most of the time when we think of “homeless people”, the image that comes into our minds is one of a grizzled old man asking for some spare change, but the truth is that vast numbers of women and children in our country do not have anywhere to live. In fact, Poverty USA has reported that last year a grand total 1.6 million U.S. children stayed either in a homeless shelter or in some other form of emergency housing. And you never hear the mainstream media report this number, but the truth is that the number of homeless children in the United States has risen by 60 percent since the “end” of the last recession. For the moment the wealthy are getting wealthier, but meanwhile things have just continued to get harder and harder for those that are struggling to survive in this economy.

In Wal-Mart parking lots and campgrounds all over America tonight, you will find formerly middle class families that are living in cars, trucks and recreational vehicles during this holiday season. Most of them will never complain and will try to put on a happy face outwardly, but inside the worry and fear are eating them alive.

As the weather gets cold, many homeless Americans head for warmer climates, and this is one of the factors that is fueling the unprecedented homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. The following comes from L.A. Weekly…

By nearly every metric, Los Angeles has the worst homelessness crisis of any city in America. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, there are more people suffering from chronic homelessness in L.A. than anywhere in the country, and their number is growing at a faster clip than those in New York City.

One homeless man in Los Angeles has decided to do what he can to make the best of his circumstances. He has transformed a depressingly bleak area underneath a freeway underpass into his own “personal paradise”…

A homeless man who turned a freeway underpass into his personal paradise by furnishing it with a make-shift jacuzzi and four-poster bed has become a viral hit and unlikely tourist attraction.

Ceola Waddell Jr, 59, began living in the underpass in L.A.’s 110 freeway near Coliseum six months ago.

He has since foraged two porcelain toilets, discarded refrigerators, couches and two beds to transform the space into his personal refuge.

You can’t help but smile when you read what Mr. Waddell has done, but the truth is that the homelessness crisis in the state is rapidly getting way out of control. In fact, Los Angeles is swamped by so many homeless people at this point that the L.A. City Council has asked California Governor Jerry Brown to officially declare a state of emergency.

On the east coast things are getting really, really bad as well.

You may find this hard to believe, but the number of homeless people in New York City has never been higher…

The number of homeless people living in New York City has reached a record-high.

The Department of Homeless Services reported there were 60,252, up 200 in two weeks.

Now, some are saying the city’s current plan to combat homelessness isn’t working.

So why is this happening?

The stock market is at an all-time high and the mainstream media keeps telling us that things are getting better, and yet poverty just continues to rise.

Other than the very wealthy, the truth is that things are not getting any better for virtually everyone else. In fact, it has been reported that over half of all New Yorkers “are teetering on the brink of homelessness”…

More than half of all New Yorkers are teetering on the brink of homelessness — without enough cash in the bank to cover them in the event of a disaster or lost job, a troubling new study has found.

Nearly 60 percent of all New Yorkers don’t have enough emergency savings to cover at least three months’ worth of household expenses like food, housing and rent, according to a recent report from the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development.

This is one of the reasons why I am always encouraging my readers to build up their emergency funds. Sadly, the cold, hard reality of the matter is that most of the country is only a couple of paychecks away from losing everything.

To give you an idea of how deep the suffering can be this time of the year for those that have already lost it all, I want to share with you a story of a precious little dog named Ollie…

When Ollie was found, his fur was matted and so long you couldn’t see his adorable little eyes. He was clearly in need of dire help.

A woman and her sister saw Ollie outside her apartment, shivering in the freezing cold. They brought him in and quickly called the Michigan Humane Society to help take care of the dog.

Once Ollie was brought in, it was discovered just how sick he is. Had he not been rescued, he would have suffered a very painful death alone in the streets.

Very few people could come across a hurting dog like Ollie without helping him out, but what about the countless numbers of our fellow Americans that no longer have a warm home and will spend the night shivering in the cold?

Look, the truth is that you don’t have to have a whole lot of resources in order to make a difference. In Tennessee, there is a group of elderly women that refer to themselves as “the bag ladies” that are turning old plastic bags into sleeping mats for the homeless…

It all starts with cutting plastic bags into strips, tying those strips together, and rolling them into a ball.

The Bag Ladies call it “plarn,” instead of yarn. They then crochet the “plarn” into mats.

It takes 600 bags to make an 18 square foot mat. So far, this year, they have used 52,000 bags to make 88 mats.

“This is not young ladies doing this. This is older ladies with the arthritis,” said Akin.

How marvelous is that?

A single act of kindness can make a world of difference.

In the months ahead, temperatures are only going to get colder and economic conditions are only going to get tougher for those that are already living in poverty.

I would encourage all of us to think about what we can do to make a difference for those that are deeply hurting this time of the year.

About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The Most Important News. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Tent Cities Are Springing Up In Cities All Over America As The Economy Deteriorates

Homeless

Just like during the last economic crisis, homeless encampments are popping up all over the nation as poverty grows at a very alarming rate. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than half a million people are homeless in America right now, but that figure is increasing by the day. And it isn’t just adults that we are talking about. It has been reported that that the number of homeless children in this country has risen by 60 percent since the last recession, and Poverty USA says that a total of 1.6 million children slept either in a homeless shelter or in some other form of emergency housing at some point last year. Yes, the stock market may have been experiencing a temporary boom for the last couple of years, but for those on the low end of the economic scale things have just continued to deteriorate.

Tonight, countless numbers of homeless people will try to make it through another chilly night in large tent cities that have been established in the heart of major cities such as Seattle, Washington, D.C. and St. Louis. Homelessness has gotten so bad in California that the L.A. City Council has formally asked Governor Jerry Brown to officially declare a state of emergency. And in Portland the city has extended their “homeless emergency” for yet another year, and city officials are really struggling with how to deal with the booming tent cities that have sprung up…

There have always been homeless people in Portland, but last summer Michelle Cardinal noticed a change outside her office doors.

Almost overnight, it seemed, tents popped up in the park that runs like a green carpet past the offices of her national advertising business. She saw assaults, drug deals and prostitution. Every morning, she said, she cleaned human feces off the doorstep and picked up used needles.

“It started in June and by July it was full-blown. The park was mobbed,” she said. “We’ve got a problem here and the question is how we’re going to deal with it.”

But of course it isn’t just Portland that is experiencing this. The following list of major tent cities that have become so well-known and established that they have been given names comes from Wikipedia…

Most of the time, those that establish tent cities do not want to be discovered because local authorities have a nasty habit of shutting them down and forcing homeless people out of the area. For example, check out what just happened in Elkhart, Indiana…

A group of homeless people in Elkhart has been asked to leave the place they call home. For the last time, residents of ‘Tent City’ packed up camp.

City officials gave residents just over a month to vacate the wooded area; Wednesday being the last day to do so.

The property has been on Mayor Tim Neese’s radar since he took office in January, calling it both a safety and health hazard to its residents and nearby pedestrian traffic.

“This has been their home but you can’t live on public property,” said Mayor Tim Neese, Elkhart.

If they can’t live on “public property”, where are they supposed to go?

They certainly can’t live on somebody’s “private property”.

This is the problem – people don’t want to deal with the human feces, the needles, the crime and the other problems that homeless people often bring with them. So the instinct is often to kick them out and send them away.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t fix the problem. It just passes it on to someone else.

As this new economic downturn continues to accelerate, our homelessness boom is going to spiral out of control. Pretty soon, there will be tent cities in virtually every community in America.

In fact, there are people that are living comfortable middle class lifestyles right at this moment that will end up in tents. We saw this during the last economic crisis, and it will be even worse as this next one unfolds.

Just like last time around, the signs that the middle class is really struggling can be subtle at first, but when you learn to take note of them you will notice that they are all around you. The following comes from an excellent article in the New York Post…

Do you see grocery stores closing? Do you see other retailers, like clothing stores and department stores, going out of business?

Are there shuttered storefronts along your Main Street shopping district, where you bought a tool from the hardware store or dropped off your dry cleaning or bought fruits and vegetables?

Are you making as much money annually as you did 10 years ago?

Do you see homes in neighborhoods becoming run down as the residents either were foreclosed upon, or the owner lost his or her job so he or she can’t afford to cut the grass or paint the house?

Did that same house where the Joneses once lived now become a rental property, where new people come to live every few months?

Do you know one or two people who are looking for work? Maybe professionals, who you thought were safe in their jobs?

Don’t look down on those that are living in tents, because the truth is that many “middle class Americans” will ultimately end up joining them.

The correct response to those that are hurting is love and compassion. We all need help at some point in our lives, and I know that I am certainly grateful to those that have given me a helping hand at various points along my journey.

Sadly, hearts are growing cold all over the nation, and the weather is only going to get colder over the months ahead. Let us pray for health and safety for the hundreds of thousands of Americans that will be sleeping in tents and on the streets this winter.

*About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*

French homeless forced to wear ‘yellow triangles’

Homeless - Photo by Andy Burgess

Authorities in France’s second-largest city have come under fire for issuing its homeless with ID cards that detail their health issues.

Human rights groups and government ministers have slammed the “yellow triangle cards”, comparing them to the Nazi-era Star of David that was sewn onto Jewish people’s clothes during the Holocaust.

“This is scandalous, it’s stigmatizing,” Christophe Louis, president of the homeless charity Collectif Morts de la Rue, told The Local.

“Wearing something that shows the whole world what illnesses you have is not only discriminating but it also breaches all medical confidentiality,” he said, adding that the symbolism in the design of the card is outrageous.

“Being identified by either a star or a triangle is horrific,” he said.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

Crackdown on homeless in cities across the U.S. is ‘close to ethnic cleansing’

Homeless - Public Domain

His face riven with lines forged by years on the streets, Gil reaches into the top pocket of his shirt and fishes out a wedge of grimy papers. These are the precious records of his life, documents the rest of us keep in a filing cabinet at home. Eventually he finds what he is looking for, a yellow slip that looks like a parking ticket.

That, as it happens, is about right, although Gil is not a man of many possessions and certainly not a car. He does, however, have size 13 shoes. In his hands is a police citation written a few weeks ago when an officer found him sitting on the kerb with his feet touching the road. “Feet in Roadway Disturbing Traffic,” it reads.

This is Fort Lauderdale, in Broward County, Florida, between Miami and Palm Beach, and Gil’s ticket – he gives his first name only – could be Exhibit A in what civil rights activists say is a creeping and insidious campaign by this and many other American cities to drive the homeless out of their midst by a combination of police harassment and increasingly draconian new ordinances that make being homeless a criminal offence.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

Whistleblower: Los Angeles Planning to Forcibly House Homeless Citizens in Camps

Homeless - Photo by Andy Burgess

A whistleblower who claims to work inside the Los Angeles Department of Health Services has told Infowars that L.A. officials are planning to forcibly remove homeless people from the streets later this summer and house them in facilities which they will not be permitted to leave.

The source, an office clerk within the LADHS, said that during a policy meeting on the morning of June 18th last month, his supervisor announced that the Los Angeles County Dept. of Health Services had struck a deal with the government to open up “low cost housing” facilities for homeless people, otherwise known as “FEMA camps.” The source said that his supervisor ordered staff not to use the term “FEMA camps.”

The program is focused around removing or relocating homeless people from the streets of downtown L.A., starting with Skid Row.

“We will approach them on the street asking if they need or want help usually offering food to get their direct attention, if they come into the office it makes our jobs twice as efficient,” said the supervisor. “In most cases the decision is already made for them unless they become combative or belligerent in which case we send them in for a 72 hour psych evaluation and then transfer them while under sedation or heavy medication to the “facility.”

The supervisor stressed that the program would be “humane,” that it would help clean up the streets, and that the citizens being processed into the housing units would receive medical treatment, an RFID chip, room and board, but that “they cannot leave.” The supervisor elaborated that the facility was not a prison, but that its population would be kept there “for their own health and safety.”

(Read the rest of the story here…)

‘Homeless spikes’ Installed To Keep Homeless From Sleeping Near Luxury Apartments In London

Homeless - Photo by psyberartist

Metal spikes have been installed outside a block of luxury flats in London to deter homeless people from sleeping there.

But the installation of the studs has provoked criticism from some after a picture was uploaded to Twitter, the social networking site.

Users said the use of the studs meant homeless people were being treated the same way as pigeons, as similar metal spikes are used to deter them.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

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