Politics

LA’s Gigantic Homeless Problem Could Derail Anti-Trump Mayor’s White House Bid

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Los Angeles’s chronically high homeless rate is threatening to torpedo the political career of Mayor Eric Garcetti as the virulently anti-Trump Democrat mulls a possible White House bid in 2020.

Mayor Eric Garcetti is searching for solutions to Los Angeles’ unsheltered homeless problem as the Democrat continues mulling a 2020 presidential. Analysts argue the city’s ever-increasing number of transient citizens could cost him if he runs for higher office.

“If there’s any hope of running for president, that’s the problem he has to fix,” Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a public policy professor at the University of Southern California, told The Los Angeles Times. “It taints his legacy as mayor, and it’s also a risk if he wants to move up.”

Garcetti, who has made no bones about his plans to take on Trump, aims to get half of the city’s more than 25,000 homeless people into shelters before the end of his term. He has traveled across the country, talking jobs and infrastructure, while drawing a distinction between himself and Trump.

Yet the homeless population has exploded under Garcetti’s stewardship while national economic indicators show strong growth during Trump’s presidency. The homeless population has ballooned to 49 percent since 2013, when Garcetti was first elected. People are falling into homelessness inside the city limits faster than officials can handle.

Several factors are to blame for the upsurge, Gracetti said in an interview Friday. Surging rents and rising inequality, the opioid crisis and lighter criminal penalties have pushed greater numbers of people onto the streets, he said.

“It is a bigger problem than it’s ever been,” Gracetti, who traveled to Iowa in April to dispel notions about California being too elitist for common folk, said. “We’ve had the right strategies, but we’ve never had the master plan, and we’ve never had the resources.” Most of his solutions involve spending hundreds of millions of dollars on emergency shelters.

The mayor pushed a record $430 million into the city budget in 2018 to curb homelessness. Garcetti is also providing $20 million to city council districts to build shelters within a six-month window. He’s offering those communities an additional $17 million in sanitation and cleanup funds. His city’s problems are not that much different than those plaguing the rest of California.

Economic pressures like steep housing prices and gas taxes are causing middle-class families to leave California in droves and head toward red states. Those migrating from the coastal state are making way for places like Las Vegas and Arizona, where housing prices are relatively cheap compared to California.

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