ROGER SIMON: Why Are There So Many Homeless in Los Angeles?

I left Los Angeles for Nashville slightly over a year ago.  When I call friends back in my former home (for 50 years), most of them tell me I got out just in time.

Actually, they’re wrong.  I should have gotten out ten or even fifteen years before.  The handwriting was on the wall.  “California dreamin’: pace Mama Cass, ‘was no longer a ray-al-it-tee.”  It hasn’t been for a long time.

Now everybody knows about 36,000 homeless on the streets of LA, over 60,000 in the county, replete with human feces and syringes littering the sidewalks, along with rats, typhus and even rumors of Bubonic Plague.

And those figures are what we’re told.  No one, if you can trust the comments sections in the LA Times or the Next Door app for my old Hollywood neighborhood, remotely believes them.  They could three or four times the number. And how do you take a census of the homeless anyway?  They are inherently nomadic.

Read the whole thing.