A Boring Dystopia

It’s not as bad as the title makes it sound. California is aggressively putting people into assistance. Their leaders are actively saying to not arrest your way out of the problem. It’s a step in the right direction.

So there's a lot going on, California is a big place, and thanks to its separation from the rest of the country (by way of the Sierra Nevadas, kinda like Switzerland in Europe) California behaves like its own country far more than Texas ever did.

And transients like California cities, or did in the 20th century, mostly because you could live without shelter all year around. That said, the responses by cities to homeless are different. Los Angeles is glad to sweep them out of sight where (pre-gentrification) San Francisco was the gateway to getting re-established (provided you were weren't too crazy to function in employment), so train bums would go to SF when they were tired of riding the rails. SF is also where cults would go to recruit commune workers, which is how my once-transient friend ended up in Rajneeshpuram happily cleaning bungalows on his path to enlightenment.

California is desperate for public housing, and has several projects trying to build some. But NIMBY lobbies are strong. Private landowners fear their property will depreciate if public housing and corresponding community services pitch stakes in their area, which is what Gavin Newsom is contending with (or taking bribes from; we're not sure either.) Newsome is a Pelosi - Feinstein kind of Democrat, establishment and neoliberal, and pushes for humane causes in an effort to preserve capitalist systems, less so in recognition of the bottom rungs of our stratefied society as human beings and equal participants in the community.

(The last time we had a Republican governor, it was Arnold The Gubernator Schwarzenegger, about the least-Republican Republican there was, and he still took a wrecking ball to California right after the state was fleeced by Enron. So don't expect a party switch to improve matters)

So yeah, Newsom is okay with cleaning the streets of the riff-raff, if it will make his campaign contributors happy for a while, and won't be used to embarrass his presidential campaign. And given this is the age of the smartphone camera, we may well get to see how brutal California law enforcement gets when released from their slips.