New York City Will Hospitalize Mentally Ill People Involuntarily

This really is the direction we need to go on this, and kudos to Mayor Adams for having the balls to push forward with the program.

At the New York Times, "New York City to Involuntarily Remove Mentally Ill People From Streets: Mayor Eric Adams directed the police and emergency medical workers to hospitalize people they deemed too mentally ill to care for themselves, even if they posed no threat to others."

And from the Letters to the Editor:

To the Editor:

Re “New York Aims to Clear Streets of Mentally Ill” (front page, Nov. 30):

It is many years overdue but, finally, Mayor Eric Adams has courageously acted to bring relief caused by the failed policies that have long harmed mentally ill people in New York City.

By ordering involuntary hospitalization, he is replacing an immoral and scandalous indifference to severe chronic illness with a humane and moral approach.

Claiming autonomy and personal choice as reasons to keep severely mentally ill people who lack competence on our streets makes no sense. Allowing the sick to “rot with their rights on” may appeal to single-minded civil libertarians, but it is deeply disrespectful to the dignity and kindness that mentally ill people deserve.

While the lawsuits will surely fly, the real challenge is to find enough money, beds and providers to ensure that homeless (and incarcerated) men and women with severe mental illness receive care, not a cardboard box.

Arthur Caplan

Ridgefield, Conn.

The writer is a professor of bioethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

To the Editor:

Mayor Eric Adams’s plan to involuntarily hospitalize homeless people with no indication that they are a threat (to anything besides his city’s image) is discrimination veiled in compassion.

Addressing the well-being of the unhoused would involve improving the root structural issues leading to poverty and the inability to afford rent. Poor mental health is often a side effect of housing insecurity and being put on the margins of society.

Forcing someone into a hospital system not designed for long-term stays, and that is already strained, does not fix this issue. Slapping a bandage on a bullet wound, or temporarily removing the homeless from the street, does not a compassionate policy make.

I don’t see a mental health crisis as much as I see a desperate need for appropriate and affordable housing.

Loren Barcenas

Chapel Hill, N.C.

The writer is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health.

To the Editor:

As a disability rights lawyer, I’ve represented many clients with mental illness. I’ve also witnessed the tragedy of three immediate family members suffering from schizophrenia, including both my parents in the 1960s and 1970s.

Choices about involuntary treatment can be excruciating. Psychiatric drugs sometimes have severe side effects. Worse, America has failed to ensure that hospitals provide safe, clean, therapeutic treatment settings. I’ve visited psychiatric hospitals that no one would want a family member to be forced to stay in; my mother died in one when I was a teenager.

That said, we’ve also done a disservice to mentally ill people through revolving-door hospitalization that both frustrates family members and dumps at-risk patients back into the community, untreated, where they often face homelessness or worse.

Mayor Eric Adams’s call for workable plans to connect discharged patients with ongoing care can work only if safe, high-quality care is available. For the sake of America’s most vulnerable people, officials must see that it is.

David Scott

Columbus, Ohio

 

It's Time to Mandate Treatment of the Dangerously Mentally Ill

From Michael Shellenberger, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "What happens when we leave people with psychosis to their demons? Ask the families of Alison Russo-Elling, Nathaniel Rivers, and Michelle Go":

Last Friday in Queens, New York, Peter Zisopoulos, 34 years-old, described by his neighbors as an “odd, quiet loner,” suddenly set upon Lt. Alison Russo-Elling, 61, a veteran paramedic walking back to her station after lunch. He knocked her down then stabbed her to death in a frenzy. He is now being held at the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, awaiting clearance from doctors that he is stable enough to face arraignment on murder charges. Zisopoulos, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was hospitalized in 2018 after allegedly making anti-Asian threats.

This attack is eerily like the one on that took place the afternoon of July 21, in the Bronx, when Nathaniel Rivers, 35, and his wife, the parents of a young son, were sitting in their car near their home, sharing a pizza, waiting for the rain to pass.

Suddenly, 19-year-old Franklin Mesa came over to Rivers’ car window in an agitated state. Words were exchanged, briefly, before Mesa thrust a knife into Rivers’ chest. Rivers’ wife got out of the car, picked up a pry bar and clobbered Mesa. But it was too late: Mesa had mortally injured Rivers, who died a few minutes later.

Mesa, who has been charged with Rivers’ murder, is said by his family to have schizophrenia. He was well known in the neighborhood for “hostile, aggressive” encounters. Police said he was arrested last year for twice punching somebody in the face. Mesa reportedly once tried to prevent a young mother from getting on a bus.

And yet it appears that nobody made sure Mesa was taking his psychiatric medicine, which his sister said he had been on since he was 15. Had Mesa been properly medicated, Rivers almost certainly would still be alive today.

These horrifying deaths rekindle the national debate over how to prevent violence by the seriously mentally ill. Between 2015 and 2018, 911 calls reporting emotionally disturbed people have jumped by nearly 25 percent in New York City. The share of homeless people in New York with serious mental illness, usually defined as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, has most recently been estimated at 17 percent.

Consider the case of Martial Simon, a 61 year-old mentally ill homeless man, who early this year confessed to pushing 40 year-old Michelle Go onto the subway tracks, where she was killed by an oncoming train. Go was a manager at Deloitte who was lauded for her extensive volunteer work with struggling New Yorkers, including the homeless. Simon has spent decades bouncing between jails and hospitals. Declared mentally unfit to stand trial for the murder of Go, Martial is now being held at a psychiatric facility.

Years before, his sister saw something like this coming, and she pleaded with the authorities to prevent it. “I remember begging one of the hospitals, ‘Let him stay,’” she said, “because once he’s out, he didn’t want to take medication, and it was the medication that kept him going.”

The medical system was warned, by Simon himself, that exactly this was coming. As the New York Times reported: “A homeless advocate who saw Simon’s medical records reports that Simon even told a psychiatrist in 2017 that it was only a matter of time before he pushed a woman onto the subway tracks.”

Though it is difficult to get an exact estimate, a large body of research makes clear that people like Zisopoulos, Mesa, and Simon are just three among hundreds of cases of people in New York alone—to say nothing of cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and others—in which mentally ill people off their medication have assaulted or killed people. And if you think the problem is getting worse, you are right...

RTWT.

 

Young and Homeless in Rural America

It's hard out there. 

At the New York Times, "Most social services come through the schools — but it can be impossible to get to them":

One evening in June, Scott Cooper, a high school football coach in rural southern Ohio, received a text from Blake, one of his linebackers. Blake, who was 17, would miss practice the next day, and so would his brother Lee Jr., who was 15. Another text followed with an explanation: Their family had to move, and right away. They didn’t know where, but it would probably mean leaving River Valley High School.

In Cooper’s view, the brothers, each soft-spoken, each over six feet tall, had real promise. They’re “good kids,” he said, “very respectful, and their upside as players is very high.” They would show up on weekends to help make goody bags for team fund-raisers or sandwiches for a charity event. Sometimes they would stay after scrimmages with their mom, dad, little sister and two younger brothers, helping Cooper’s wife hand out hot dogs from a flowered crock pot until the sky streaked pink and the stadium lights popped on.

The family, including an older brother who had graduated from high school, had left their last home suddenly as well, just 18 months earlier. Before moving to Gallia County, they lived in Portsmouth, about an hour’s drive west, where the boys’ father, Lee, worked in landscaping and their mother, LeAnn, collected workers’ compensation after injuring her back as a home health aide. With a population of about 20,000, Portsmouth was hit particularly hard by the opioid epidemic and its fallout. The family rented a government-subsidized house between an abandoned building and a house where drug deals took place at all hours, LeAnn said. The neighbors rummaged through their trash and dumped needles and buckets of human waste in their yard. The sexual trafficking of children for drugs had become a significant local problem. Fearing for their safety, the family fled in December 2020. (I have used middle names or initials to protect the privacy of the families I met.)

Once they left subsidized housing, the family, like an increasing number of Americans, struggled to find a place that they could afford. They crowded in with LeAnn’s mother, then her sister, and as they searched, the children tried to keep up with their studies at their old schools. They had switched to remote learning during the pandemic, but rural internet access is spotty, and they often couldn’t log on. After three months, the family gave up on finding a place of their own and reluctantly moved to Gallia County, to live with Lee’s dad. Lee had a very troubled relationship with his father, and the family was not optimistic about the move. “It was a last resort,” LeAnn said grimly.

For a while, the arrangement worked better than expected. The kids enrolled in new schools, with Blake and Lee Jr. landing at River Valley High. They got good grades, and Blake wowed everyone with his beautiful tenor voice in show choir. In the spring, he started dating a girl he met in rehearsals for a school production of “Bye Bye Birdie.” Over time, LeAnn said, they “got back into who they used to be.”

But the situation with Lee’s father became volatile. The night Blake texted Cooper, his grandfather had thrown the family out. They had nowhere to go. Cooper wanted to help but didn’t know where to start. He asked the principal what to do, and he said: Ask Sandy. She’ll know.

Sandra Plantz, an administrator at Gallia County Local Schools for more than 20 years, oversees areas as diverse as Title I reading remediation and federal grants for all seven of the district’s schools, including River Valley High. In recent years, though, she has leaned in hard on a role that is overlooked in many districts: homeless liaison. Her district serves just under 3,000 students but covers some 450 square miles of an area that doesn’t offer much in the way of a safety net beyond the local churches. The county has no family homeless shelters, and those with no place to go sometimes end up sleeping in the parking lot of the Walmart or at the hospital emergency room. As homelessness increased in the county in recent years, Sandra and her husband, Kevin, a juvenile probation officer, found themselves at the center of an informal advocacy team.

In 2018, Kevin and a few other local law-enforcement agents started a group they called Code 10 Ministries to raise money to pay for motel stays for families in immediate need of shelter. When Cooper reached out to Sandra, she asked Kevin to have Code 10 pay for two rooms for two nights for Blake’s family at the Travelodge, a grim hotel across from the county fairgrounds.

Sandra then introduced the family to the process of applying for HUD housing. Subsidized housing from HUD is effectively a lottery; nationally there are only 36 units available for every 100 families who qualify, and the requirements can be hard to navigate. Plantz told them that purchasing their own motel room could set back the clock on when they could qualify as “HUD homeless” — vulnerable enough for long enough to be eligible for housing assistance. She found a woman from her church who would pay for a few more nights instead.

No one could afford to keep paying for the motel rooms, but neither did anyone want to see the family move to a tent in a park, which was an option they had been weighing. Cooper’s wife wanted to let the littlest children sleep at their house, but Plantz advised that this, too, could compromise their status as officially homeless. Cooper had an old camper he was fixing up for the county fair in August — just to get out of the sun on long days — and he offered it to the family. It had no water, working bathroom or propane tank for the stove. The oldest boys had to duck their heads every time they stood up, and they all slept on the floor or in the family’s minivan. June became July, then August, and no better housing option emerged. When the new school year began, Blake and Lee Jr. headed back to River Valley High — and a few weeks later, the family finally moved into HUD housing.

Families like Blake’s don’t fit easily into the “homeless industrial complex,” as some advocates for homeless youth and families have taken to calling the funding mechanisms, rules and priorities that determine the fates of millions of Americans who struggle with housing insecurity every year. The system is focused largely on adults experiencing homelessness in cities, and it is not well equipped to address the types of homelessness experienced by children and families, especially in rural areas. The limited data that exists suggests that rural students face homelessness in roughly the same proportion as their urban counterparts — and with far less in the way of a support system. In this vacuum of resources, schools sometimes offer the only form of help available to homeless families. Over the course of reporting in rural Ohio, I spoke with school officials, homeless advocates, students and their families. I met young people living in trailers that stank of sewage, mothers sexually harassed by predatory landlords, families who could not take their children to the doctor because they could not afford gas for the long trip. For all of them, the stakes of precarious housing were high. Homeless students have the worst educational outcomes of any group, the lowest attendance, the lowest scores on standardized tests, the lowest graduation rates. They all face the same cruel paradox: Students who do not have a stable place to live are unable to attend school regularly, and failing to graduate from high school is the single greatest risk factor for future homelessness...

‘Crime Is a Construct': My Morning With the Park Slope Panthers

From Suzy Weiss, at her sister's Substack, Common Sense, "A Brooklyn man with politics ‘to the left of Lenin’ tries to organize a neighborhood watch. It didn’t go quite as planned":

In the last couple of months in Park Slope—the baby bjorn-wearing capital of bourgeois-bohemian New York—a thief absconded with $200,000 worth of jewelry in a smash and grab, three boys stole a bunch of iPhones off of subway riders, a ticked off customer attacked the owner of a bike store, $6,000 was stolen from an auto shop, and a beloved pet was catnapped from a bodega on Seventh Avenue.

But it was the death of a golden retriever mix named Moose that activated the residents of the South Brooklyn enclave.

Early in the morning on August 3, Moose and his owner—Jessica Chrustic, 41—were out on a walk when a homeless man who lives in the park gave chase. He hit them both with a large stick and threw a container of urine on Moose, while muttering about immigrants taking over the park. The dog died a few days later from internal injuries, after two emergency surgeries. The man who killed him is still at large.

A few weeks later, on August 20, Kristian Nammack issued a call to action on Nextdoor, a social media site for local organizing: “Do we want to organize a community safety patrol, and take our park back? Think what the Guardian Angels did to take back the subways in the 70s/early 80s. We may also get to wear cool berets. I’m being serious.”

Nammack, 59, had been part of the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, and his financial consultancy firm focuses on themes of “climate, renewable energy, gender lens, racial equity, economic advancement.” “How about PARK SLOPE PANTHERS as a group name?” he suggested. When I got to the inaugural Park Slope Panthers meeting—held last Saturday in Prospect Park, near where Chrustic was attacked—there were six people, including Nammack. We were overlooking a sloping meadow that was bathed in sunshine and filled with giggling kids and hipster couples on dates. It was one of those early fall days that reminds you why you’re willing to live in a city with more rats than human beings. Nammack was handing out pale yellow t-shirts that said “Park Slope Panthers” with a logo—two “P”s nested together—printed on the front.

Nammack explained that while we were all there because of Moose, there were other things to be concerned about. It seemed like there were more homeless people sleeping in the park, in the subway station, and on the trains and streets. There was more garbage everywhere in the neighborhood, more crappy vape shops and stores that sold Delta-8 weed, and more delivery guys on bikes blasting faster through crosswalks. Packages, bikes, and catalytic converters were getting stolen. Nammack told the group how he’d tried to help a local store owner while a group of 15-year-olds robbed his store. One of the teens had a knife.

The group—a few older, white women who love their pets; a young white man who said he was there for the sake of his younger sister’s safety; a forty-something Asian woman who wanted to “elevate Park Slope culture as a whole”—nodded along.

The Venn diagram for Park Slopers and Democratic voters is pretty much a circle. No one wanted to be labeled Park Karens. This made the whole crime-fighting thing a bit awkward: “It’s about finding a way that’s non-biased to report these things and have people feel like it’s safe here,” said Emily, one of the Panthers.“You don’t want to fall into that stereotype of privilege.”

A group of four who looked to be in their early twenties—three women and one man—rolled up about 15 minutes into the meeting. “Are y’all the Park Slope Panthers?” The one who asked was dragging a speaker on wheels and playing electronic music, presumably to drown out the meeting. “We are super not into you guys having your meeting or doing anything in the park.”

The young activist—who was white, wore glasses, grew up in Park Slope, and had a medical-grade face mask on, like his three comrades—was also super not into the cops, or anything resembling the cops. When Nammack told him we were taking turns introducing ourselves, the activist informed Nammack that he wasn’t “super into abiding by the structure that you’re setting up.”

Nammack asked them to just move along. When the glasses kid replied, “Yeah, we’re not going to do that,” Nammack invited them to sit, prompting the group of Conscientious Interrupters to decamp to a nearby tree to game plan. The park was filling. There were barbecues and birthday parties underway. Eventually the young activists decided to join the circle.

“What’s with you calling yourself the Panthers?” said another dude who had just appeared wearing a black hoodie and looking to be in his forties. He seemed more of a weathered activist, a bit more hardcore than the kids, and he didn’t want to wait his turn. He said his piece, followed by another newcomer named Damien, who wanted to join the group rather than protest it.

Nammack picked up the thread again. Back during the Occupy Wall Street days, he informed us, they took turns speaking. “I think it’s your turn, then your turn, then your turn, then your turn, then your turn,” he said. When it was his turn to introduce himself, Nammack said, “I have a non-profit and two companies. I’m too busy to run a neighborhood watch group, but I can’t help but be community-concerned.” He was from Long Island and had lived in Sweden, which he loved because it was “less hierarchical.” Nammack said he was “left of Lenin” when one of the activists accused him of being a vigilante. (When Tucker Carlson reached out to have Nammack on his show, he told Carlson to “fuck off.”)

As far as the name, and the fortysomething dude’s problem with it: “There’s two statues of panthers at an entrance to the park,” Nammack pointed out, gesturing toward the two limestone pedestals designed by Stanford White. The panthers had been sculpted by Alexander Phimister Proctor, and had been there since 1898.

Didn’t matter. “Using the Panthers as your group’s name is kind of abhorrent to me,” said one of the girls. She was white, wearing cut-off jean shorts, loafers with socks, and a Baggu purse. “It feels antithetical to what the Black Panthers would stand for.” The next girl to speak said her name was Sky. She, too, was white, and had also grown up in the neighborhood: “It’s easy to be wrong about who you’re going after, particularly when those are some of the few black people still living in the neighborhood, and they’ve been pushed out on the streets by all white, ultra-wealthy people.”

“We can be the tigers!” suggested Dionne, the middle-aged woman next to me. Sweet Dionne...

Keep reading.

President Biden's Primetime 'Soul of the Nation' Address Demonizes Tens of Millions of Americans (VIDEO)

If you're going to attack "MAGA Republicans" in a primetime address to the nation on the Donald Trump GOP's threats to democracy, just know that you're literally attacking millions upon millions of voters who pulled the lever for the Donald in 2020 (not to mention 2016). 

No, not everyone who voted for Trump was MAGA, and Old Joe (Stalin?) duly slides that in as an afterthought. No, he attacked the movement for America First principes as the most dangerous threat to our nation today. Really? That movement includes untold red-blooded patriotic Americans who have nothing to do with any of the "violence" the president decries. Biden makes no clear distinction. I mean, shoot, you don't need to put "MAGA" in front of "Republicans." They're all evil for leftist totalitarians. 

Anyone with a brain knows this is all politics, not abouit saving the union from incipient fascist tyranny. Biden's screed was a pre-midterm salvo to demonize the opposition, MAGA or not. That's it. The media's the bullhorn: You know, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" and all the other bullshit posituring by our elite betters in America's newsrooms. It's disgusting and should be repudiated, and with luck it will be in November. Don't trust the polls. Sure, leftists have been mobilized by the pro-life Dobbs ruling in June, but it's not the poor and down and out, who are destitute, homeless, mentally ill, drug-addled, and on Medicaid, public assistance, and SSI. 

Nope, it's white, wealthy "progressive" women. They're the one's who're pissed off, and they're driving this so-called surge of pro-choice voter agitation. They don't give a shit about the poor. They're craven virtue-signalers who claim they're better than you (they're not). 

Biden? His speech? THIS IS WHY AMERICANS HATE POLITICS.

See, Roger Kimball, at the Spectator, "Biden Declares War on Half the Country":

The malignant and divisive spirit of his speech will not soon be quelled.

Joe Biden’s speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on Thursday was one of the most remarkable in living memory. By “remarkable,” I hasten to add that I do not mean “good.” On the contrary, it was a breathtaking act of what the psychoanalysts call “projection,” blaming others for the bad things you do yourself.

The speech itself was a malignant act of demagoguery that will have colonels and generalissimos everywhere catching their breath with envy. The neo-totalitarian stage set, replete with red lighting effects and military personal flanking the shouting, gesticulating Biden, was right out of central casting. Next time, perhaps Biden will wear epaulettes along with his signature aviators.

The speech was billed as a reflection on the “soul of the nation.” Remember, Biden was sold to the country as Mr. Normality, as someone who would bind up the nations’s wounds after four years of the bad, horrible, no good, unacceptable, supremely divisive Donald Trump.

It hasn’t worked out that way, notwithstanding Trump’s occasional zingers and rhetorical molotov cocktails that have kept the fires of outrage burning. In this respect, Biden’s speech typified the new Democratic dispensation, according to which the world is divided sharply in two. The good guys are those who espouse the Democratic agenda. The bad guys are anyone who dissents. What we are seeing, in fact, is the promulgation of a neo-Manichean philosophy. That heretical sect, named for a third-century A.D. Parthian seer called Mani, was an astringently dualistic creed that divided the world into light and dark, the saved and the damned. According to the creed of Biden and the elites who formulate his thoughts and speeches, the radical Democratic agenda of climate change, “green” intimidation, wealth redistribution, and sexual perversion is the gospel of light. Outer darkness is occupied by people who espouse such traditional American values as hard work, frugality, patriotism, individual liberty, and the canons of private property that guarantee those rights. It is a strange and unforgiving religion, one whose primary sacrament is excommunication. Ultimately, as some wag put it, its goal is a world in which everything that is not prohibited is mandatory.

That is the background. You often hear the world “democracy” uttered in these heady precincts, usually in the now-noxious phrase “our democracy” (translation: their prerogative”). As I note in a column on “Joe Biden and the Sovietization of America” for the October edition of the Speccie, it is a world in which “democracy” really means “rule by Democrats.” To the question “was the election fair,” what you need to know in order to answer is who won. If it was the Democrats, then the election was fair. If the Democrats lost, then the election was stolen.

In any event, Biden’s speech consisted of a series accusations directed at “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans [who] represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”

Lest you think that attack on 74 million Trump supporters was an aberration, note that a week earlier at a Maryland fundraiser, Biden had insisted that the problem for those wishing to conserve the “soul of America” was “not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the…semi-fascism” of the MAGA agenda.

The sweeping denunciation of half the country was perhaps the thing that caught the alarmed attention of most observers. Also important was that element of projection I mentioned. Biden’s brief against Trump and “the entire philosophy” of MAGA rested primarily on three accusations...

 Keep reading.

Record-Breaking Heat in Southern California (VIDEO)

It was 100 in Irvine today. 

I stayed in, lol.

At the Los Angeles Times, "100-degree temps on tap as heat wave comes to SoCal":

The punishing heat wave in Southern California will deliver triple-digit temperatures, elevate fire danger and increase the chance of heat-related illnesses Thursday and Friday, officials said.

A heat advisory in the Los Angeles area is in effect until 6 p.m. Friday for the coastal plains and valleys, the Santa Clarita Valley and the Santa Monica Mountains. Temperatures could soar at least 15 to 20 degrees above normal, reaching 100 degrees or higher in some areas.

Burbank, for example, is expected to climb to 100 degrees Thursday and Friday, according to Kristen Stewart, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. A normal high temperature for the area this week would be about 72 degrees.

Stewart said several temperature records may be broken Thursday and Friday in areas such as Long Beach, Burbank, downtown Los Angeles and LAX.

Anaheim on Wednesday broke its temperature record for the day at 96 degrees — 5 degrees higher than the previous April 6 record set in 2005, the weather service said.

A heat advisory is also in effect until 6 p.m. Friday across large swaths of San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange and San Diego counties, where similar conditions are expected.

Officials said heat-related illnesses are possible among the elderly, infants, outdoor workers and the homeless population, as well as those participating in outdoor activities. Residents should take extra precautions, seek shade and air conditioning and stay hydrated. Children and pets should never be left in cars...

Still more.

 

Slow-Motion Suicide in San Francisco

From Michael Shellenberger, "The city is carrying out a bizarre medical experiment in which they are helping homeless drug addicts use drugs. ‘It’s handing a loaded gun to a suicidal person":

Something very different is happening in San Francisco. The city is carrying out a bizarre medical experiment whereby addicts are given everything they need to maintain their addiction—cash, hot meals, shelter—in exchange for . . . almost nothing. Voters have found themselves in the strange position of paying for fentanyl, meth and crack use on public property.

You can go and witness all of this if you simply walk down Market Street and peek your head over a newly erected fence in the southwest corner of United Nations Plaza. You will see that the city is permitting people to openly use and even deal drugs in a cordoned-off area of the public square.

The city denies that they are operating a supervised drug consumption site. “This site is about getting people connected with immediate support, as well as long-term services and treatment,” a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Emergency Management told the Chronicle.

The official line is that they are running what they call a “Linkage Center” in a building next to the open drug market in the plaza. The idea is that the center is supposed to link addicts to services, including housing and rehab. When Mayor London Breed announced it, she promised it would get people into treatment so they could stop using drugs, not simply hide their use.

But city officials have told me that in the 19 days that the site has been open, just two people total went to detox so far. And they serve some 220 people per day.

“In that tent on Market Street everyone is shooting dope,” complained a senior employee of a major city service provider, speaking of the scene at the plaza. “It’s insane. All the staff standing around watching them. It’s fucking ridiculous. I don’t know how anybody thinks that helping a drug addict use drugs is helping them.” “What’s happening is that everyone that comes in gets a meal, can use the bathroom, gets drug supplies (needles, foil, pipes) and signs up for a ‘housing assessment,” a person with firsthand information about the operation told me over text message. “But there’s no housing. So nothing happens. They just get added to a list.”

The parents whose children live on the streets are adamant that the status quo is broken. “I agree with the Linkage Center,” Gina McDonald told me. Her 24-year-old daughter Samantha is a heroin and fentanyl addict who has been on and off the streets for the last two years. “But allowing open drug use does not help. It’s handing a loaded gun to a suicidal person.”

If you appreciate groundbreaking reporting about important stories that are overlooked, please consider becoming a subscriber. Last Thursday I returned to the Linkage Center to find out what, if anything, had changed since I first visited. I saw (and video recorded) much more drug use within the supervised drug consumption site, and much more drug dealing around it, than I had two weeks ago...

RTWT.

 

Malik Faisal Akram, Terrorist in Colleyville Siege, Bought Gun 'On the Street', Biden Said (VIDEO)

The president called the siege an "act of terror." 

At the Dallas Morning News, "British hostage taker at Colleyville synagogue bought gun ‘on the street’, Biden said":

President Joe Biden said Sunday the British national who held four people hostage inside a Colleyville synagogue was armed with a gun apparently “purchased on the street.” The president said the hostage-taker spent his first night in Texas at a homeless shelter, and speculated that he might have gotten a gun there. Also on Sunday, Greater Manchester police in England said they detained two teenagers in connection with the gunman who took four people hostage for more than 11 hours over the weekend in Colleyville.

Greater Manchester police tweeted about the arrests but released few details about why counterterrorism officers detained the teens. It was unclear what connection, if any, the teens had to 44-year-old British national Malik Faisal Akram, who died after Congregation Beth Israel Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and the three other hostages escaped unharmed and authorities swarmed the building. Authorities have not said how how Akram died.

The FBI said early Saturday that Akram appeared to be the sole suspect. A spokeswoman for the Dallas office referred questions to British authorities and said the FBI hadn’t changed its statement. British law gives police wide latitude to make arrests during a terrorism investigation and diplomats counseled against drawing any conclusions.

Biden, speaking from Philadelphia, said Akram might have been in the U.S. for only a few weeks. Citing a senior law enforcement official, NBC Nightly News reported that Akram arrived in the U.S. at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Dec. 29.

“This was an act of terror,” Biden said, adding that he doesn’t know why Congregation Beth Israel was targeted, or “why he insisted on the release of someone who’s been a prisoner for over 10 years” and used “anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli” language.

He said there were no bombs that authorities know of, despite the attacker’s claims that he planted some.

Biden said he had spoken with Attorney General Merrick Garland and they were working to “address these types of acts.” The president said he’d “put a call in to the rabbi” but indicated they hadn’t connected yet.

Biden also praised law enforcement. “They did one hell of a job,” he said. “Thank God. Thank God.”

An 11-hour standoff

Colleyville police were called to the synagogue in the 6100 block of Pleasant Run Road about 10:40 a.m. Saturday.

The synagogue was holding its Shabbat service, which began at 10 a.m. The service was streamed live on Facebook, and a man could be heard speaking. At times the man sounded angry and said he was going to die. The livestream was removed just before 2 p.m.

FBI negotiators were in constant contact with the hostage-taker throughout the day, officials said. Shortly after 5 p.m., authorities were seen bringing a hostage, a man in black yarmulke out of the building.

A loud bang was heard at the synagogue just after 9 p.m. Authorities said that was around the time that the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team breached the building.

Video from WFAA-TV (Channel 8) showed people running out a door of the synagogue, and then a man holding a gun opening the same door just seconds later before he turned around and closed it. Moments later, several rounds of gunfire could be heard, followed by the sound of an explosion.

Cytron-Walker said Sunday that the experience was traumatizing. He said in a statement that the hostage-taker grew “increasingly belligerent and threatening” towards the end of the standoff, adding that he feels grateful to be alive and “we are resilient and we will recover.”

He credited security training that his congregation has received over the years for helping him and the other hostages get through the situation.

“Without the instruction we received, we would not have been prepared to act and flee when the situation presented itself,” Cytron-Walker said.

‘Lady al-Qaeda’

During the standoff, Akram demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman serving an 86-year sentence for shooting at two U.S. military officers during an interrogation. Her lawyer, Marwa Elbially, said Sunday that his client condemns Akram’s actions, and “unequivocally condemns all forms of violence.”

“We are all thankful that the hostages were safely released and that no one was harmed,” Elbially said during a virtual news conference.

Siddiqui is being held at a federal prison in Fort Worth, about 20 miles southwest of the synagogue.

Faizan Syed, director of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that Siddiqui’s family and those campaigning for her release from prison did not know the hostage-taker.

“We want to make it very clear that the actions of this individual do not represent Dr. Siddiqui, her family or her campaign and we want to deter anybody who might have sympathies for her campaign to not take these types of actions in the future,” Syed told reporters during the news conference with Siddiqui’s lawyer. “This is something that is appalling, heinous and against the wishes of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.”

Saleema Gul, a representative of The Aafia Foundation, added the Houston-based group’s sympathy for the hostages and their families.

“We do not condone the incident that took place yesterday, or any other means to secure Dr. Aafia’s freedom other than through advocacy and legal means,” Gul said. In September, pro-ISIS British preacher Anjem Choudary launched a campaign calling for Siddiqui’s release. “The obligation upon us is to either free her physically or to ransom her or to exchange her,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.

The post asserted that Siddiqui was the victim of “huge injustice” and that he aimed “to call on those who have the ability to free her from captivity.”

The architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, described her to interrogators as a top al-Qaeda courier and financier, though her supporters discount that and say his statement was the result of torture. U.S. officials came to describe her as “Lady al-Qaeda,” and the FBI placed her on its list of seven most wanted terrorists in 2004. She was caught four years later and convicted in 2010 of trying to shoot two interrogators.

Militants have tried to use hostages as leverage to secure her release for over a decade.

An outpouring of support

Rabbi Andrew Marc Paley of Temple Shalom, a Reform congregation in Dallas, said in an email to his congregation that authorities asked him to help care for the hostages after they escaped.

Paley said the first hostage released was an elderly man who was reunited with his daughter.

“I was able to speak to both of them and both were obviously relieved and in general good spirits,” the rabbi wrote.

Paley said he then met with the rabbi’s wife, Adena Cytron-Walker, and one of their daughters, as well as relatives of the other hostages.

After the rescue, he hugged Cytron-Walker, saying later he was “a little dazed and surprised” but smiling.

Concerns about rising anti-semitism

The U.S. Department of Justice released data in the fall showing a 42% increase in hate crimes nationally since 2014. The data identified Jews as the most targeted religious group in America.

In 2018, a gunman killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Tree of Life, while yelling anti-Semitic slurs. Paley said the Colleyville attack brought to the surface feelings of anger and sadness that “this terrible event is sadly not new to the Jewish community.” Rabbi Jeffrey Meyers of Tree of Life said in a statement his heart was heavy seeing the Colleyville attack.

“While everyone is physically safe, they are also forever changed,” Meyers said. “My own community knows too well the pain, trauma and lost sense of security that comes when violence forces its way in, especially into our sacred spaces.”

Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas wrote in a tweet that while the immediate crisis is over for Congregation Beth Israel and the Jewish community, “the fear of rising antisemitism remains.”

Rabbi Gary Zola, a professor at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, said he hopes there comes a point where people aren’t afraid to go into synagogues, mosques or churches because of incidents like the Colleyville standoff. He urged people to speak up and work together...

 

Irvine Great Park

This is a great piece. Of course, I live in Irvine so it's of natural interest to me.

That said, I had no idea about the raw politics surrounding this issue. It's pretty fascinating, actually. 

At LAT, "Irvine’s ultimate NIMBY fight: A cemetery for veterans deemed an undesirable blight":

In Irvine, every detail is intentional.

From the lush parks to the sparkling pools of its master-planned villages, the city offers a perfect balance of nature and suburban life.

Even the street names in its Great Park neighborhoods, which have popped up over the last decade around the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, were developed in consultation with a feng shui master.

But there’s one amenity that Great Park neighbors say will never fit: a veterans cemetery.

A nearly decade-long battle over a military cemetery in the city has pitted veterans, residents and politicians against one another, with every side asserting support for their preferred location and myriad reasons why the plan hasn’t advanced.

The hostile reaction to the cemetery has stunned veterans, who point out the military’s historical role in the area — both with the El Toro base and the nearby Tustin base, both of which closed in the 1990s. To them, the cemetery is a fitting tribute to those who served, and Irvine’s central location would benefit loved ones who want to visit.

“The opinion on Irvine from veterans ranges from negative to hostile, with profanity thrown in,” Vietnam veteran Bill Cook said. “You’d think Irvine started with an F when I talked to these people.”

But the push to honor veterans proved no match for powerful forces in Irvine: a developer who had other plans, residents who worried about traffic and property values, and a sense that a cemetery simply didn’t fit into the community’s ideas for a place where homes now regularly sell for more than $1 million.

“When you buy a million-dollar home, you don’t want to open up your door and have a cemetery right there,” former Irvine Mayor Christina Shea said. “It just kind of gives a sense of sadness and a continual reminder of death and your own mortality. I wouldn’t buy a home next to a cemetery. I want a golf course, a lake, a park or something like that.”

In a county often criticized for its “not in my backyard” mentality, Irvine has long railed against anything that doesn’t fit with its idea of a master-planned community. When the El Toro base was decommissioned in 1999, residents successfully beat back a proposal to turn the land into an airport, instead opting to transform it into a park with athletic fields, a water park and plenty of open space. In 2018, a plan for a homeless shelter at the Great Park was nixed after vehement opposition.

The controversy over a cemetery has been brewing since at least 2014, yet veterans — thousands of whom settle every year in Orange County after retiring from the military — say they’ve largely been sidelined from discussions. Instead, they’ve been met with consternation from the Great Park’s closest neighbors and hand-wringing from the city’s politicians, they say.

Some are so frustrated by years of delays and fighting over a location that they’ve scouted a site on county land in Anaheim Hills instead. The Orange County Board of Supervisors gave the project a major boost on Tuesday by allocating $20 million from the county’s general fund for site development. The Anaheim City Council this month showed unanimous support for the cemetery.

In the years following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military sought out the land that would eventually become the El Toro base as a place for Marines to train for battle in the Pacific Rim. Tens of thousands of service members and civilians moved through its gates annually, turning the base into a mini-city complete with homes, a church and a school.

For more than 50 years, El Toro played a critical role in conflicts across the world, including Vietnam and Desert Storm. It’s where men and women leaving for deployment said goodbye to their families — sometimes for the last time...

When I was just ten years old, when my family used to drive south from the City of Orange to San Juan Capistrano to visit my uncle and his family, we could see the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro from the 5 freeway, and the Tustin Marine Corps airbase is right next to Irvine where I live. When I was a kid you could see the "Huey" helicopters from the base flying all around Orange County, especially near the beaches.

Enough about that. Obviously this piece brings back a lot of memories.

Still more.

Floods in Germany (VIDEO)

At the Guardian U.K., "‘Like a bomb went off’: survivors of Germany’s worst floods in 200 years relive their agony":

It looks like a bomb went off. Everything’s destroyed. There’s nothing left of the city centre,” said Michaela Wolff, a winemaker from one of the German towns worst hit by last week’s catastrophic flooding.

Her family vineyard and guesthouse, the Weingut Sonnenberg, would normally be filled with tourists descending the red wine trail. This weekend it was filled with desperate refugees from homes destroyed when the Ahr burst its banks on Wednesday after days of heavy rain.

“We have water and we have electricity. The gas has been shut off, but we have more than most,” she said. “It’s chaotic, absolutely chaotic.”

Floods across western Germany and Belgium have killed at least 160 people, and the worst-hit area is the Ahrweiler district, which includes Wolf’s town of Bad Neuenahr.

Ninety-eight deaths have so far been confirmed there, among them 12 in a home for disabled people. Many more people are missing and the toll is expected to rise.

Thousands have also been made homeless, and the economic fallout from lost homes and businesses and the cost of repairing infrastructure is likely to run to billions.

Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler is a historic spa town surrounded by picturesque vineyards and populated by many small-scale vintners. Days of unrelenting rain earlier this week sent a wave of water several feet high down the Ahr, which divides the town in two.

The roads were left buried in water and mud, cars were tossed on to their sides in the square, and parts of buildings were swept away. One house was left gaping open to the street as if a bomb had blown away its front wall.

Wolff’s wine cellar was the only one in town to survive the wall of water, and it was a narrow escape: “The water stopped just centimetres from our doorstep. We had incredible luck.” Since the flood began receding, she has been working around the clock with her family to help with local clean-up and rescue efforts.

Beyond the terrible human toll, the damage to infrastructure, including roads, bridges and railways, is likely to take months to repair. The fallout is already prompting a political reckoning about the costs of climate change, with the Netherlands prime minister Mark Rutte on Friday directly blaming changing weather patterns for the intensity of flooding...

It's always global warming, right? 

Still more.

And ICYMI: "What They Haven't Told You about Climate Change."

COVID Rent 'Moratorium' Screws Queens Landlord --- and More

My wife has been been hammering these rent "moratoriums" since practically Day 1 of the corona-lockdown. I mean, tenants can't pay back thousands upon thousands in back rent, so who pays? We all will, taxpayers, of course. 

Now that's some sneaky-ass socialism. 

At NYT, "A Landlord Says Her Tenants Are Terrorizing Her. She Can’t Evict Them":

For more than a year, Vanie Mangal, a physician assistant at a Connecticut hospital, called relatives to tell them that their loved ones were dying of Covid-19, watched as patients gasped their final breaths and feared that she herself would get sick.

Ms. Mangal found no respite from stress when she went home. She is a landlord who rents the basement and first-floor apartments at her home in Queens, and for the past year, conflicts with her tenants have poisoned the atmosphere in her house.

The first-floor tenants have not paid rent in 15 months, bang on the ceiling below her bed at all hours for no apparent reason and yell, curse and spit at her, Ms. Mangal said. A tenant in the basement apartment also stopped paying rent, keyed Ms. Mangal’s car and dumped packages meant for her by the garbage. After Ms. Mangal got an order of protection and then a warrant for the tenant’s arrest, the woman and her daughter moved out.

All told, Ms. Mangal — who has captured many of her tenants’ actions on surveillance video — has not only lost sleep from the tensions inside her two-story home but also $36,600 in rental income. “It’s been really horrendous,” she said. “What am I supposed to do — live like this?”

In years past, Ms. Mangal, 31, could have taken her tenants to housing court and sought to evict them. But during the pandemic, the federal government and many states, including New York, imposed eviction moratoriums to protect renters who had lost their income. The moratoriums have been widely praised by housing advocates for preventing millions of people from becoming homeless.

At the same time, those broad protections have created tremendous financial — and emotional — strain for smaller landlords like Ms. Mangal, who often lack the deep pockets to survive without payments. And in New York City, there are a lot of those small landlords: An estimated 28 percent of the city’s roughly 2.3 million rental units are owned by landlords who have fewer than five properties, according to JustFix.nyc, a technology company that tracks property ownership.

Landlords can seek pandemic financial assistance, and the federal government has allocated $46.5 billion for emergency rental relief. But the aid has been slow to flow to property owners, and it comes with certain strings attached: It requires the landlord to allow a tenant to remain and not raise the rent for a year after the aid is received. Ms. Mangal has not applied for those reasons.

Further complicating matters, while the moratorium technically allows landlords to evict unruly tenants, a review of court records and interviews with landlords suggest that in practice, it is all but impossible to do so.

“Some people like to say these cases are outliers, but it is more common than people think,” said Joanna Wong, a Manhattan landlord and a member of the Small Property Owners of New York, a landlord group. “I agree with the spirit of the protections, but not how they were passed. It created this situation where there is a subset of people who were not intended to be protected who ended up being protected.”

The federally imposed tenant safeguards expire this month, but New York extended a separate statewide moratorium for an additional month, through August.

New York’s housing courts are preparing to reopen for in-person hearings soon after the state moratorium is lifted, but it could take many months, and most likely longer, for the backlog in cases to clear. Even before the pandemic, an eviction case could take up to a year to be adjudicated.

Before the outbreak, New York City landlords filed between 140,000 to 200,000 eviction cases every year against tenants, who often found themselves on their own in court, without legal counsel, fighting to stay in their homes.

While most cases were resolved without a court-ordered eviction — 9 percent of the cases in 2017 resulted in an eviction, the city said — tens of thousands of New York City residents still lost their homes every year, while the rest had their names added to “tenant blacklists” shared among landlords.

Across the country, more than seven million households are behind on rent because of unemployment and lost wages, including about 500,000 in New York State, according to the census. Renters nationwide owe $5,600 on average in unpaid rent, according to a Moody’s report...

Clearing Venice Beach (VIDEO)

Kinda harsh evictions, actually. 

The police and city workers were rousting homeless folks at 2:00am, for supposedly as that time there were few other people around. That said, it seems to me evicting the homeless at that time of morning is a form of harassment and terrorism. 

It's gotta be done, of course, but a little more humanity for these folks, many of whom have psychiatric health issues. Sheesh.

At LAT, "Block by block, tent by tent, city crews remove homeless campers from Venice Beach."

Ursula was asleep on a beanbag under an umbrella on a patch of sand, just feet from the public bathrooms on Venice Beach when three LAPD officers shined flashlights on her and told her to move. It was just after 2 a.m. Thursday.

She told them she’d been given a hotel room the day before and had come back for the shopping carts teeming with possessions she left behind. But the effort left her too tired to return to the hotel.

“You’re going to have to get up and exit this area,” one officer said — as sanitation workers stood off to the side, ready to sort her belongings from trash.

“The park is closed.”

For more than three hours, a crew of about a dozen Los Angeles sanitation and recreation and parks workers accompanied by several officers from the Los Angeles Police Department went to work on Ocean Front Walk, sweeping up detritus from one portion of a homeless encampment that has set Venice on edge for months.

A tarp here, a blanket there. Bottles and cans and other consumer waste. But after all was said and done, after the eastern horizon had begun to glow with the impending dawn, they had moved only two people — Ursula and a man who had been reluctant to leave behind his paintings. The rest had left earlier in the week.

It was a case study in how difficult, and complicated, it can be to move unhoused people when the goal is to avoid the kind of blunt-force dispersal that the city carried out this spring at Echo Park Lake.

The crews had come back for a second consecutive morning, mopping up after last week’s deadline to clear the southern portion of the homeless camps from Windward to Park avenues, a stretch of about 650 yards. St. Joseph Center reported that it moved 72 people from the boardwalk to shelter or housing last week. City Councilman Mike Bonin, who represents Venice, said Thursday that about 90 people had been given shelter of some sort...

Still more at that top link.

 And I guess things didn't go so well. See, "L.A. delays the next phase of removing homeless people from Venice boardwalk."

What Comes Next for Portland? (VIDEO)

At the New York Times, "After a Year of Protests, Portland Is Ready to Move On. But Where?":

PORTLAND, Ore. — Defund the police? City leaders in Portland tried it. A unit in the fire and rescue bureau, one of the first of its kind in a major city, began this year taking some 911 calls about people in crisis, especially those who are homeless.

Instead of police officers with flashing lights and guns, a paramedic and a social worker would drive up offering water, a high-protein snack and, always and especially, conversation, aiming to defuse a situation that could otherwise lead to confrontation and violence. No power to arrest. No coercion.

“Having someone show up and offer you goods rather than run you off is different, and people respond to it — it softens the mood,” said Tremaine Clayton, a burly, tattooed veteran of 20 years at the fire and rescue bureau who helps run the program.

But this spring, just as the project was preparing for a major rollout into more neighborhoods, there was another plot twist: The new policing alternative was itself mostly defunded. The city decided on a go-slow approach, and the promised $4.8 million expansion evaporated.

Portland, the Oregon city of bridges, bike lanes and left-leaning idealists — beloved, abhorred and caricatured in just about equal measure — is wrestling mightily with the question of what it means to make a city safe and, as it gradually opens up from the Covid-19 shutdowns, to feel safe, too. It is an issue that many American cities are addressing as the economic and societal disruptions of the past year linger and resonate.

Violent crime, especially homicide, has spiked in most urban areas during the pandemic, and many police departments are facing new scrutiny about training and bias since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis a year ago.

But here in the nation’s 25th-largest metropolitan area, with about 2.5 million people, there is an additional factor that ripples through every public policy choice, and that even the city’s top prosecutor said has to a degree warped the debate about what to do to rebuild a city that Portlanders want and love.

A hardened core of street activists, many of them professing opposition to authority in general, has dug in and shows no signs of going away. (Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, has asked people to stop calling them protesters, but rather what they call themselves: anarchists.) Their numbers are now down to perhaps 25 to 75 on any given night, compared with hundreds in late 2020 and the many thousands who marched last summer in protests after Mr. Floyd’s murder.

But they have shown themselves at times to be violent — one was charged with attempted murder after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the police — destructive of property and highly adaptable, using social media tools and other strategies to divert the police from the targets they select.

Direct actions are promoted on social media with the phrase “No gods, no masters,” a 19th-century anarchist term that indicates a rejection of all forms of authority. More traditional protesters from Black Lives Matter and other movements who try to curtail violence are now ridiculed as “peace police” by the anarchists, who mostly consist of young, white men.

Demetria Hester, a member of Moms United for Black Lives, continues to push for defunding the police but disagrees with the current call for dismantling the entire political system. “Breaking windows is performative,” she said. “That satisfies them at night, but they don’t have a plan.”

Some prominent Black leaders have been formally distancing themselves, with some calling the anarchists’ rejection of gradual progress just another symbol of privilege that Black people do not have.

“Being able to protest every night is a white privilege, being able to yell at a police’s face is a white privilege,” said Gregory McKelvey, a prominent Black organizer who ran the mayoral campaign last year for Mr. Wheeler’s opponent, Sarah Iannarone. “Most Black people across the country do everything they can to avoid cops.”

Still, Mr. McKelvey has empathy for those who feel that taking to the streets is their only outlet. “These are people who have felt like they’ve had no agency or power in their life or in the political system,” he said. “They want to feel powerful, and when you can have the mayor talking about you every single day, and hundreds of police officers show up to fight you every day, you feel more powerful than when you’re sitting at home.”

The protests have led to vicious finger-pointing over who was to blame for the serial destruction that has left so many downtown storefronts shattered and covered with plywood.

 

Covid Shrinks the Labor Market, Pushing Out Women and Baby Boomers

At WSJ, "Nearly four million Americans have stopped working or looking for jobs":

Unlike previous recessions, this one is making it especially difficult for parents, women in particular, to work because of school closures and the loss of child care. https://t.co/tMz82YGdnX

— Catherine Lucey (@catherine_lucey) December 3, 2020

Since spring lockdowns were lifted, the demand for workers has snapped back faster than many economists expected. Between April and October the unemployment rate fell by more than half, to 6.9%, undoing more than two-thirds of its initial rise.

But unemployment data overstates the health of the labor market because the supply of people either working or looking for a job has declined. The U.S. labor force is 2.2% smaller than in February, a loss of 3.7 million workers.

The labor-force participation rate, or the share of Americans 16 years and over working or seeking work, was 61.7% in October, down from 63.4% in February. Though up from April’s trough, that is near its lowest since the 1970s, when far fewer women were in the workforce.

The supply of workers and their productivity are the building blocks of economic growth. A smaller labor force leaves fewer workers to build machines and clean tables, restraining the economy’s long-term prospects.

“If we don’t get all the workers back, we can never have a V-shaped recovery,” said Betsey Stevenson, economics professor at the University of Michigan, referring to a quick and sustained bounce-back after a sharp decline. “Everybody should be worried about making sure that we don’t leave workers behind,” she said.

>Many economists say it’s too soon to conclude this year’s decline in participation is permanent. They note labor-force participation usually falls in recessions. The lack of good-paying job opportunities prompt many of the unemployed to give up the job search, return to school or simply retire earlier than they had planned. When labor markets tighten, rising wages and better hours pull people back into the workforce. Heading into the pandemic, labor force participation rates had improved; unemployment fell to 50-year lows and wages rose during the last economic expansion.

Many who have left the labor force had worked in low-wage sectors like retail, hospitality and personal care services disproportionately hit by the pandemic. Once the virus is contained, many of those jobs and workers may return, boosting participation.

Just a third of the increase in the number of people sidelined from the labor force since February 2020 say they still want a job but are not now looking, according to the Labor Department.

>Older workers who leave the labor force for good might mean employers turn to hiring more younger workers at lower wages when the economy recovers more broadly. But that’s not the same thing as the creation of new jobs, which is the engine of economic growth.

Some economists say the extent to which participation revives depends on how swiftly demand rebounds. Joel Prakken, chief U.S. economist at IHS Markit, believes that the combination of falling unemployment and the reversal of virus-related economic effects will gradually restore participation to pre-pandemic levels.

The economy has already recovered faster than many predicted in the spring, and advances in vaccine development suggest the potential for a strong recovery as the health threat ebbs.

New applications for unemployment benefits declined last week, a sign layoffs are easing but remain high. U.S. services businesses, a key driver of economic growth, gained ground for the sixth straight month in November, adding to signs of a continued recovery.

Nonetheless, some economists see three reasons the pandemic’s depressing effect on the labor force could linger. First, it appears to have sped up some baby boomers’ decision to retire, shrinking the number of productive workers in the economy prematurely. Second, it is forcing some parents of young children, in particular women, to reduce their hours or stop working altogether, which could make a comeback harder. Third, it is falling particularly heavily on workers with less education and skills. These workers often struggle to find well-paying work and many drop out of the workforce.

Participation fell sharply after the 2007-09 recession and never fully recovered. This partly reflected demographics as the first baby boomers qualified for Social Security in 2008. The recession damped participation of “prime-age” workers, those 25 to 54, which didn’t return to 2007 levels until 2019, when the labor market was strong. Lower participation reduced average annual economic growth by 0.6 percentage point from 2009 to 2017, according to S&P Global.

This recession appears to be speeding up retirements. In the third quarter of this year, about 3.2 million more baby boomers said they were out of the labor force due to retirement than in the same period a year earlier, according to Pew Research. From 2011 through 2019, the number of retired baby boomers rose at a rate of about two million annually.

Labor-force participation among workers aged 55 and over logged in at 38.7% in October, down from 40.3% in February.

“It’s always harder for older workers to find jobs when they’re pushed out,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, labor economist at the New School in New York City.

That’s especially true for older workers who entered the pandemic already in a vulnerable position. At the start of the year, Karen Naranjo, age 65, was unemployed, networking at charity events while preparing to look for a job at a nonprofit serving homeless or at-risk youth that used her project-management skills. But then the pandemic upended her plans.

Blue Exodus: California Is a Failed State

It's Jon "Ex-Jon" Gabriel, at the Arizona Republic, "California is a failed state. How do we know? They're moving to Arizona in droves":

Driving across Arizona, it’s hard not to notice a surge in California license plates. The reason for this is becoming more apparent every day. California is a failed state.

After nearly a decade of one-party rule, the once-Golden State is tarnished, possibly beyond repair. Listing all the problems facing our neighbors across the Colorado River would require several books, so I’ll only highlight a few.

The fifth-largest economy in the world and home to many of the greatest technology companies on Earth can’t keep the lights on. The state’s three largest utilities turned off power to more than 410,000 homes and businesses on Friday, Aug. 21, then again to half as many Saturday, Aug. 22.

Gov. Gavin Newsom sprung to action on Monday by announcing more blackouts. "We failed to predict and plan these shortages,” the governor said. “And that's simply unacceptable."

But accept it he did, noting that the state’s near-religious promotion of solar and wind power left a gap in the reliability of its power grid. You don’t say.

Wildly unpredictable events, like August being hot, never occurred to Newsom last October when he signed six more bills to kill off his state’s fossil fuel industry. Shutting down one of California’s two nuclear plants certainly didn’t help. Perhaps their plan to close the second one in 2024 will have different results.

So have those to stop homelessness

Documentary filmmaker Christopher Rufo’s latest work reveals the tragic failure of the city’s homeless policies. In “Chaos by the Bay,” he shows the results of well-meaning progressive efforts, from decriminalizing homelessness to plying addicts with free drug paraphernalia, alcohol and cannabis. For the most part, rampant mental illness has been left untreated...

Still more.

L.A. County Removes Homeless From Freeway Underpasses

Some of these folks lived under freeways for years. Mind-boggling.

At LAT, "They made a home under L.A.’s freeways. But soon they could be forced to move":

Hope you give the story a read, and take a moment to marvel at the amazing photography of @GenaroMolina47. He always knocks it out of the park.

Also drop me a line with your thoughts, compliments or complaints about this sweeping change coming to LA. https://t.co/i6CD5jRWqT pic.twitter.com/9uyIaUsbIq

— Benjamin Oreskes🦅 (@boreskes) July 26, 2020

The 105 Freeway roared overhead as homeless outreach worker Daniel Ornelas knelt to speak with Genia Hope.

Hope’s home has been, for years, a sprawling complex of tents beside a tangle of freeways in southeast Los Angeles County. Like many homeless people, she has chosen to live under or near a freeway because it affords some measure of safety compared with other spots where homeless people bed down.

A rusted elephant trinket stood guard outside her tarps and tent, and inside she lounged on a black leather couch, smoking a cigarette alongside a rack of clothing.

Hope raised her now-grown children in Apple Valley and later followed a man to Bellflower. She lost her job at a rehab facility and then, after her partner died, grief, anxiety and struggles with addiction led her to the street.

Now, it looked as if Ornelas might just be able to help her. The COVID-19 pandemic has opened up a wealth of resources to help get people off the streets, and a recent order from a federal judge will unlock even more. But efforts to aid people like Hope are going to be complicated by a shortage of available shelter and fighting among government entities about how best to carry out the judge’s wishes.

Hope told Ornelas that living beside this freeway underpass, just off a bike bath that snakes along the Los Angeles River, was optimal. Police rarely hassled her here, and she had plenty of space to be alone. An on-again, off-again love interest lived nearby, and her homeless neighbors formed a supportive community.

One neighbor brought her some lunch and a strawberry slushie as she spoke with the outreach worker.

She jumped at the offer, excited at the prospect of getting to take a bath and sleep in a bed. Her matted blond hair needed washing, she said. It would be ideal if her boyfriend could join her — at arm’s length.

“If we could be at the same hotel and in separate rooms, that would be great,” she said. “Sometimes we just need a break from each other.”

A government program known as Project Roomkey, which aims to rent motel and hotel rooms for homeless people, has fallen short of its goals locally but still has vastly expanded the number of rooms available to homeless people vulnerable to COVID-19. As a result, Ornelas was able to quickly whisk Hope off the street. Like many outreach workers who serve the county’s swelling homeless population, he pays special attention to the underpasses and embankments near freeways.

Those areas became a subject of great interest and conflict after U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered city and county officials to provide space in shelters or alternative housing for residents living near freeway overpasses, underpasses and ramps. Once there is enough shelter, the agreement could pave the way for law enforcement to enforce anti-camping ordinances.

The order came during proceedings for a lawsuit Carter has been presiding over since March, when the advocacy group L.A. Alliance for Human Rights sued public agencies across the county, accusing them of allowing unsafe and inhumane conditions in homeless camps. Carter’s focus on the areas around freeways took many homeless advocates and government officials by surprise.

Many who could be forced to move said they were leery of going into temporary shelters, tiny prefab houses or sanctioned camping sites, because they felt confined by rules that prevented them from leaving after certain hours and put them in shared spaces that they would otherwise avoid.

And those coordinating where people living near freeways go next — the homeless service providers and outreach workers— say that the order will lead to needless confrontation between law enforcement and people living on the streets. They also say politicians’ attempts to comply with the judge’s desires focus far too much on interim housing options and will come at the expense of more permanent solutions...

More, and don't miss the great photos.

California Braces for Hard Times

And we were doing so well too!

At NYT, "California, After Riding a Boom, Braces for Hard Times":

Delayed by the virus, tax day is almost here. This is what you need to know. And be prepared to wait if you're owed a refund. The I.R.S. has a huge backlog. https://t.co/lSEgYrBE7M

— NYT Business (@nytimesbusiness) July 10, 2020

OAKLAND, Calif. — When California shut down its economy in March, it became a model for painful but aggressive action to counter the new coronavirus. The implicit trade-off was that a lot of upfront pain would help slow the spread, allowing the state to reopen sooner and more triumphantly than places that failed to act as decisively.

But the virus had other plans, and now the state’s economy is in retrenchment mode again. For the nation, this means that an important center of its output — a magnet of summer tourism and home to the technology and entertainment industries along with the world’s busiest port operation — is unlikely to regain momentum soon when growth is needed most

For the state, it means a progressive agenda predicated on the continuation of good times will be hampered as governments move from expansion to cuts. Voters had mostly been open to paying for expanding services and priorities like affordable housing, but they seem to be turning wary of new taxes.

California has always been a boom-and-bust economy, so while nobody was predicting a global pandemic that would tear through the service sector, the prospect of struggle was not unforeseen. Jerry Brown, the four-term governor, left office in 2018 with a multibillion-dollar state surplus and unemployment headed to a record low. But instead of departing on a triumphant high note, he said after his final budget presentation, “What’s out there is darkness, uncertainty, decline and recession.”

His more upbeat successor, Gov. Gavin Newsom, came in promising to expand health care and tackle the state’s homeless problem. Yet in his inaugural speech, Mr. Newsom warned, “Even in a booming economy, there is a sense that things are not as predictable as they once were.”

Indeed. Unemployment, which was 3.9 percent in February, the lowest on record, shot up to 16.3 percent by May, compared with 13.3 percent nationwide. Container traffic at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach is down about a third from a year ago, while many beaches and attractions like Disneyland were closed on July Fourth and are delaying their reopening plans. Most dispiriting is the sense that even after politicians made tough calls that Californians largely supported, the economy seems no better off.

Andrew Snow was supposed to be ramping up by now. Mr. Snow, who owns the Golden Squirrel, a restaurant and bar in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood, cut his staff of 28 people to two after the pandemic hit. But thanks to takeout orders, a new line of business selling groceries and the resumption of outdoor service, he recently brought two back, and was set to bump that figure to six or eight by the July Fourth weekend.

A few weeks ago, those plans seemed sound. Back then, on the sunny Friday afternoon when outdoor dining in Alameda County was allowed to resume, the Golden Squirrel’s patio tables, about eight feet apart, were full of patrons enjoying their first trip out for a drink since shelter-in-place orders took effect. That weekend the surrounding College Avenue retail strip was busy with masked, distanced, Purell-doused dining that to many felt borderline decadent after months of being cooped up.

Now business is slowing again, as California is averaging about 8,000 new cases a day, about triple the level a month ago. Mr. Snow’s plans to bring back workers over the holiday weekend didn’t come to pass, and he has put further hiring on hold.

“People are scared,” he said in an interview. “The math for having more people doesn’t work out anymore.”

Exactly how and how quickly the state should have reopened, and who is to blame for the backslide, are unlikely to ever be resolved. What the result means for the economy is more time in the dark, more need among the poorest citizens and more drain on the taxes required to support them.

The U.C.L.A. Anderson Forecast, which has been prognosticating California’s economic trajectory since 1952, expects that the state and national economies won’t fully recover until “well past 2022.” In the state as in the nation, the worst declines will be in the leisure and hospitality industries, while higher-wage areas like technology will be better off, a dynamic that will make financial inequality worse.

Even if the country avoids a second wave of infections in the fall, and a vaccine is made and distributed relatively quickly, that won’t keep many businesses from failing. Others will shift from investing in new equipment and employees to paying debt and shoring reserves. State and local budgets could take years to recover their pre-coronavirus levels of spending, even with federal help.

“The impacts will disproportionately affect lower-income Californians, while the more rapid growth will be happening in technology and construction, which are higher income,” said Jerry Nickelsburg, director of the U.C.L.A. Anderson Forecast.

The longer the pandemic’s disruption, the more likely it is that some jobs will never come back. For instance, a number of restaurants had already switched to counter service, even for fairly high-end meals, to avoid the need for servers who have a hard time affording housing in big cities. Now virtually every restaurant in California is operating around counter service or delivery, and some may not change back...

Still more.

After Young Women Dies of Drug Overdose, Whittier Votes to Shut Down Homeless Encampment, Impose Curfew (VIDEO)

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Armed Congregants Kill Gunman at Texas Church (VIDEO)

At the Other McCain, "UPDATE: Texas Church Shooter Identified as Homeless Criminal Keith Kinnunen."

ABC's report, with video, is here.

Solution to mass shootings- Good guys with gunshttps://t.co/TqoeYcPsED

— GrrrGraphics Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) December 29, 2019

Homeless People Are Honored Guests at Orange County Home

Something on the bright side.

At LAT:

I recently got invited to a five-course dinner at a private home. The honored guests were homeless people, living in a shelter six miles and a world away. I hope you‘ll read my latest City Beat column, online and in print this morning. https://t.co/Hq4bKTilv2 #mydayinla

— Nita Lelyveld (@LATimescitybeat) November 16, 2019