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If you’re thinking of staying in a New York City hotel, don’t. Because you don’t know who stayed there before and it could be the same guy you see urinating on the street before going back to his crack pipe.
And some of those hotels, as I wrote previously, are owned by Islamic terrorist states and they’re hellholes.
Row Hotel, a classic Times Square hotel that promises “comfort and security while away from home” turned into another migrant hellhole. Messages at the formerly stylish hotel described everything from a 10-year-old girl drunk alone in the room to an intruder carrying a machete.
“Every day, we find about ten kids alone in their hotel rooms, either drinking or doing drugs. Weapons will be in the room,” a worker described.
The show goes on under Mamdani who’s going to spend $1.9 billion on hotels to house the homeless with no more time limit on how long they can stay.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has inked a new nearly $1.9 billion contract with the city’s hotel industry to provide emergency shelter to homeless families over the next three years, The Post has learned.
That’s a sizable chunk of the police or fire department budget. But New York City can’t compete with Los Angeles. Now when it comes to spending absolutely surreal amounts of money on homeless services.
A hotel near Venice Beach that the city bought to transform into homeless housing remains empty after years of drawn-out delays and a ballooning budget.
The former Ramada Inn on Washington Avenue has sat mostly vacant since 2020 as officials have scrambled to secure permits, subsidies and construction financing.
Now the price tag for the stalled project is approaching $20 million, after the city plunked down a relatively paltry $8 million for the property in 2020.
The skyrocketing tab to deliver the 32-unit project means rooms for the homeless will cost about $625,000 each.
I’ve spent a lot of time covering the sheer uncut insanity that is LA’s ridiculously corrupt homeless spending.
$625,000 per unit for the homeless isn’t even excessive.
The homeless services department currently has a $929 million contract with the Hotel Association, running from Jan. 1, 2025, to June 30, providing up to 10,651 hotel rooms for homeless families.
Los Angeles then launched a pilot program to build 8×8 aluminum sheds for the homeless for only $130,000 each and then tent encampments for the homeless for only $2,600 per tent each month.
My modest suggestion for solving the homelessness crisis is to arrest and lock up everyone involved in homeless services and give their houses to the homeless.
We’ve tried everything else. Let’s try something that can actually work.
There is only one way to deal with the homeless problem. I retired from the LA County Sheriff’s Department so I will isolate my opinion that I have held for 2-3 decades to just LA County, Also the first place I lived and where both sets of grandparents lived and both my parents grew up in was Venice, CA.
The only way to deal with the homeless crises is already on the books in LA City, The vagrancies laws. This is why Wayside was originally purposed for. Vagrants would be picked up by the cops and sent to Wayside to dry out and be trained in a trade. This had a great success rate. Wayside was later reproposed for multiple prisons and renamed Pitchess Detention Center.
Build a massive facility somewhere in the California desert. This is away from populated cities and it can house the perpetually persistent homeless.
They are assessed in three ways:
1. Those who lost their domicile because of finances and how do you get a job without an address and shower daily?
2. Addicts.
3. The insane who need to be institutionalized for the rest of their life.
Life is tough. Life is hard. But most people get this and ride along for life continually learning.
If you fall between the cracks, well, this is the hard way to get back, but get back you will.
This is not a prison sentence, just whatever it takes to clean up the streets and humanely fix a serious problem.
I’m surprised an epidemic from the homeless hasn’t broken out and spread in LA to the rest of the nation.
I no longer live in California. I always miss the ocean.
San Diego had a plan for 150 tiny homes (excessively expensive) but changed to a new location and 70 tiny homes, for $11 million. (over $157,000 each for tiny home sheds) Plus ongoing costs of $3 million annually.
LA, NYC; the USA does not have enough money to solve the homeless problem.
Because it cannot be solved. For all the reasons Muggs listed.
I too was an LEO for 34 years. My job was very involved in mental health and the homeless services.
I was able to help a few get on their feet. But plenty more remain. This is a fathomless problem.
Back in 2004, when I lived in Toluca Lake, I was getting a mid-career master’s degree. To get away from distractions, I got out of my home to study in the local library. At the North Hollywood Amelia Earhart Regional Library on Tujunga Avenue, they were very tolerant of homeless people. I often saw them looking at hard-core pornography on the computers. The last straw for me was when I saw one cleaning his anus in the drinking fountain. I then started going to the Studio City Branch Library at the corner of Moorpark Street and Whitsett Avenue. This neighborhood has many conservative Jewish families, and some of the mothers were volunteers at the library. They were not tolerant of any loitering, especially by homeless people. They regularly patrolled the computer area, and I never saw anyone viewing porn. This illustrates the need for local control, and it is by citizens pushing back against an incompetent city government that makes all the difference.
The solution to homelessness is NOT housing. The solution is addressing the mental-health and substance-abuse issues that caused homelessness in the first place. Homelessness is down nationwide but is up here in California. This is because the prisons are being emptied, mainly because of the passage of Proposition 47, of mentally ill inmates and those who have no skills with which to get jobs. Stop focusing on housing, and deal with the individual person instead. Putting these people into decent housing will not resolve the problems. It will only make them worse. Putting people with disordered habits into orderly housing in the hope that this will change their ways will not work. Unless the homeless commit to reform, they will bring their disorder into the new housing and even damage it.
There are so many homeless people because they do not have homes. HOMES, not housing, are what is missing. A house is a physical structure that shelters someone from the elements. A home is a social unit formed by a family living together in a place. The home holds the relationships that tie one to another in times of happiness and misfortune. It is a giant safety net that prevents the proliferation of the homeless plight.
Of the mentally ill that are homeless, they would be far better served by getting institutionalized care to ensure that they take prescribed medication. Expecting a crazy person to take prescription medications while living in a homeless encampment is doomed to failure. Also, the relationship between homelessness and mental illness goes both ways. Not only does mental illness help cause homelessness, but living out on the streets can cause mental illness. The cruelest thing we can do is to leave these people outdoors to fend for themselves.
Homes keep people from becoming homeless. A healthy family is always the best place to turn in times of trial. Every homeless person is someone’s child, someone’s sibling, or someone’s parent. This vital social unit is the only real solution to the scandalous legions of homeless found all over the nation. If we want to get religious about it, 1 Timothy 5:8 tells us, “Whoever does not provide for relatives, and especially family members, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
This is a human problem, NOT a housing problem.