City Councilmen Mike Bonin, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Paul Koretz and David Ryu have asked city staffers to come up with a plan for an “empty homes penalty” or vacancy tax.
"No bed in this city should be empty when people are being forced to sleep on pavement. ... Empty-home penalties encourage landlords to keep people housed, and they help raise needed funds to create more affordable housing. This is an important tool for addressing one of the root causes of homelessness in L.A., and it is a step we desperately need to take," Bonin said.
Bonin claims that there are over 100,000 vacant units in Los Angeles, and about 60,000 homeless people. So just give every homeless person a vacant place to live and voila! No homeless.
Wow, this Bonin is a real, certified dumb-f@#k! So, while landlords are paying property taxes, mortgage interest, utilities, and upkeep, you want to force them to hand over the keys to their properties to homeless people who will pay them no rent and who will absolutely, unequivocally TRASH their properties until they are uninhabitable. I mean ... you KNOW that is going to happen ... look at what they have already done to make the streets of Los Angeles uninhabitable, you dumb-f@#k! So, you know what will happen next, you dumb-f@#k? Crime, disease, devaluation, and disrepair will leach out from those properties to surrounding properties and you will experience what has happened in Detroit - huge numbers of properties will be abandoned by their owners and turned over to the city - and the city will get NO property tax revenues from the ever-expanding ghost town that once was Los Angeles. Where do these IDIOTS come from?! Hopefully, Bonin does not have any children. He needs to be sterilized, as quickly as possible, in order to help save the gene pool.
There is seriously more wisdom coming from O.J. Simpson's Twitter feed than from the City Council.
All of this foolishness is in response to the city being embarrassed by the fact that although the city and county spent nearly $600 million last year to combat homelessness, the number of transients shot up 16 percent to 60,000 people.
Of the city's homeless population, the annual point-in-time count found 75 percent of them living outdoors, primarily in encampments on the streets.
In fact, homeless camping has become so widespread in L.A. it's only a matter of time before there's a special section devoted to it at REI.
Things are so out of control there is now a movement in the works to recall feckless Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti over his inability to stop the bleeding.
Garcetti hasn't yet announced if he will sign on to Bonin's wacky idea of hammering homeowners yet again, but I have a better idea.
If Garcetti is serious about providing public housing for the homeless, let's start with his house.
The 6,000-square-foot Getty House is a three-story Tudor mansion with 14 rooms, seven bathrooms, tennis courts and a $25,000 chandelier.
I'd like to see the mayor's face when the first homeless person takes a sink-shower in one of his bathrooms. Besides, you'd think Garcetti could easily relate to homeless people; He lives in public housing, is always asking people for money and the City Council doesn't know what to do with him.
Yep, homeless bums to Garcetti's mansion and foreign invaders to Pelosi's mansion. That's where they ought to be.
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