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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (1417951)9/6/2023 5:02:54 PM
From: Doren  Read Replies (1) of 1583150
 
> a SURGE in homelessness

San Diego history & homelessness. Wall St Journal called SD "the most corrupt city in America" - we've had multiple mayors indicted and convicted, and there should have been more... mostly when we were a red city.

Here's the short story of former Mayor Maureen O'Conner. She married Jack in the Box millionaire Robert O. Peterson. He was 61, she was 31... it was TRUE WUV... He financed her run for Mayor. She modeled herself after SF mayor Dianne Feinstein.

When I lived in San Diego, as a young man, it was a charming port city with a colorful quaint but crumbling downtown area full of strip joints, karate movie theaters, and diamond ring peddlers catering to naive navy boy. Early Tom Waits songs are often loving tomes to its quaint charms, he lived down here. It was also full of SRO hotels (Single Room Occupancy) that catered to the poor and to old people, many of them living on a shoestring but paying rent. There were also artists living and working in unused commercial space as they often do in big cities.

Mayor Maureen and Robert and a consortium of Mexican investors bought up much of the cheap downtown and SRO property for dimes. Then she and our corrupt city council decided to spend millions of TAXPAYER MONEY to "clean up" downtown. They kicked out all the SRO people into the streets. Rents doubled or tripled or quadrupled.

Those are the people who SURGED into the streets mostly, and into neighborhoods of people who thought "cleaning it up" with their money was a good idea. Under freeway bridges, on the sides of freeways, on sidewalks. Cops kicked them out of downtown. Maureen and her billionaire friends made them homeless. Maureen and her consortium took home an estimated 2 billion reselling formerly cheap property according to our local newspaper.

Downtown SD is now a hidious sterile party area for drunk techie yuppies.

Diane and her developer husband pulled the same scam on SF prior to the scam in San Diego... but tech money made rents there far worse. Out of the reach of even medium middle class families.

I was living in Los Angeles downtown in the 90s. It was a quaint crumbling but charming place in its own way. The homeless shelter is located there. It was the LOWEST CRIME neighborhood in Los Angeles. (Tony East Hollywood near Griffith park had the worst crime problem.) Downtown was also full of artists who cleaned up unwanted commercial buildings to live and work in. Then Magic Johnson bought a building downtown. I had a nice loft with a great landlord, but I could see the "fix was in"... it was obvious. I could see it coming. And it was. The city council decided to spend TAXPAYER money to "clean up downtown." Rents started to rise. My landlord retired and sold my building. The new lord doubled my rent (he wanted to keep me as manager) and tripled the rest.

The homeless spilled out of downtown into Santa Monica, and other unfortunate neighborhoods etc where residents complained like hell about poor people with the temerity to be in their neighborhood. Cops kicked them from one area to another to another and back to Santa Monica.

All the artists left downtown spread into various cheaper communities.

I left.

I don't think you've ever been around homeless people. I have. I rode my bike past the shelter almost nightly on my way to the downtown library. Never had a problem. Never was worried about crime. I also rode up to Hollywood twice a week... that was harrowing. Dangerous... mostly from asshole drivers.
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