Even for California government, where failing-up is a 72-font, doily-festooned entry dead-center on the office vision board, this epic fail was way over the line.
Los Angeles County’s homeless czar is out of a job at the end of December – Merry Christmas! – for basically being an utter failure at his job.
Peter Lynn’s ouster was announced this week after an audit showed that he spent too much money on homeless housing, among other things, while the homeless population increased by a third.
Lynn blamed it on a PR problem, telling the Los Angeles Daily News that, for some odd reason, the public wasn’t buying his line that homelessness is caused by structural racism and housing prices in liberal LA County:
“We tried to lift these issues up to people,” he said. “There is a tendency for people to focus on individual characteristics.”
By “individual characteristics” he meant being a crackhead and mentally ill. Take Hunter Biden, for example. Last summer’s New Yorker piece, designed to inoculate Joe Biden from “WTH’s with Hunter?” questions during his presidential run, revealed that the younger Biden routinely scored crack at an LA homeless tent city. Don’t worry, they were professional crack dealers. That’s because some of the people in those tent cities are prisoners who were released early in the name of criminal justice reform.
Tent cities have grown with such speed that, if you plotted them on a map, they’d resemble a moveable amoeba, which when held at arm’s length, would look uncannily like a giant buffalo chip. For reference, please see the San Francisco poop map.
A couple of years back I visited an Orange County tent city. A county employee, paid to help homeless people find services, told me that people camped because it was free and they could spend their government checks on drugs instead of rent. The ethos of LA County tent cities is probably much the same.
Peter Lynn isn’t looking for a job because he failed to communicate; he’s out of a job because people noticed that his soft-headed approach wasn’t working and resulted in people getting hurt, leaving their neighborhoods filthy, or their houses burned down.
The PR problem for LA County is not that Lynn failed at convincing the public that its collective racism forced people onto the streets. No, the real PR problem may be that the largest city in the county, Los Angeles, advertised a “ten-year plan to end homelessness” complete with freebies. Voters dangled the tantalizing specter of basically free housing by backing a $1.2 billion bond measure to build apartments, while LA vowed to spend $100 million on homeless issues, and the cops were told to stand down from enforcing petty drug and vagrancy laws. It is entirely conceivable that a third more smartphone-owning, drug-addicted people came in droves to score their crack and fentanyl close to the source and were free to enjoy it – without consequences – on the streets of LA County with their buddy, Hunter Biden.