LA Mayor Blames “Racism” for City’s Huge Homelessness Problem

( Los Angeles, and California generally, is known for its homelessness problem. The state is home to the largest number of homeless people in the entire country, and instead of considering the possibility that Democrats in charge of the city and state might have done something wrong, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti recently blamed the problem on…institutional racism.

Mayor Garcetti made the baseless comments on Friday, seemingly ignoring the fact that California is among the only states that have seen homelessness increasing in recent years. Before the Chinese coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, President Donald Trump’s reforms and tax policies allowed businesses to grow and reduced unemployment to record low levels.

While the rest of the country was booming, California’s homelessness problem continued getting worse, but Garcetti thinks it’s because of racism.

“Institutional racism is a leading cause of homelessness in Los Angeles,” he said. “In Los Angeles County, where 8 to 9 percent of the population is African American, a third of all people experiencing homelessness are black.”

If it’s institutional, and it’s coming from the institutions he’s in charge of, does that mean Garcetti is racist too?

Garcetti bemoaned the “homelessness against black Angelenos” and argued that the problem of homelessness in his city goes all the way back to the discrimination that black veterans faced after the end of the Second World War. He said that black people struggled to buy property because of the banks, somehow implying the policies of the past affect people today.

The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, headed up by African American former neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, released figures in December 2019 showing how California is “entirely” responsible for the 2.7% rise in homelessness across the country. In the state, homelessness increased by 16.4%, despite other states seeing numbers decline.

Los Angeles County was one of the worst culprits for this, too. Homelessness numbers in the city region increased to almost 60,000 in 2019. This is despite the fact that Garcetti made dealing with homelessness a cornerstone of his election campaign.

On Friday, he also said that Los Angeles was “collectively grieving the lives lost due to racism in this country,” referencing the continued race riots initiated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter extremists.