Paul Hogan wants out of Los Angeles due to the homeless problem.
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I guess Paul and the homeless aren't mates? Damn.
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MovieChat Forums > General Discussion > Paul Hogan wants out of Los Angeles due...
It's a shocking thing when the rabble make living in your own home a difficult thing to do.
Maybe he should go back to Australia and relieve LA of the Paul Hogan problem.
shareMy guess is that he can't stand dropping a bundle of money on his Venice Beach house by selling at a big loss so he's staying put. Otherwise like you say just move somewhere where there are no crowds of homeless people.
How bad could the homeless situation even be where he lives?
shareITS REAL FUCKING BAD...THE HOMELESS SET UP TENT CITIES THAT LINE THE STREETS AND FILL PARKS UP LIKE WOODSTOCK.
shareIt's very bad, it's considered a scandal even in the US, where the authorities seem to expect that a certain number of people will have no place to live.
So while I have sympathy for homeless people who'd rather sleep on the beach in Venice than on the hard concrete of Skid Row, I also have sympathy for residents like Hogan, who's an old man who thought he'd set up a comfortable retirement home. How he's got a choice between selling at a huge loss or living in fear, because apparently the local authorities have no plans to make the situation better for anyone.
Apparently he said he would love to move back to Australia but not until he doesn’t have to do 14 days quarantine upon his return. Seriously, he’d prefer to be a prisoner in his American home indefinitely than spend 2 weeks quarantined... I guess that makes some sort of sense to him 🤔
Love Paul but he does seem to be getting a case of grumpy old man syndrome.
It's not like homeless people break into houses, so I don't know why he's so bothered with them near his house. If people sleeping on the street is the worst you have to put up with, I think you got it pretty good.
shareThey're not just "sleeping on the street." They're crapping and pissing on the street. They're menacing passersby with aggressive panhandling. They're shooting drugs out on public. If they're hoarders, they leave huge, unsightly piles of garbage in shopping carts and bags everywhere. I'm so sick and tired of people acting as if America's homeless are like the plebs straight out of pre-Revolutionary France paintings. They're not.
shareI blame the government for not addressing the issue. There's no way to avoid people being in that situation, but there are ways to help it.
shareHere's the thing about that: When bureaucrats (ie. not the ones living around the homeless) do things to "help the homeless situation" they do things to make sure the homeless are fed and taken care of. This has the effect of attracting more homeless to that area which increases the "homeless problem" which makes the bureaucrats' hearts publicly grow in size and legislate even more things for the homeless.
Meanwhile the residents of that area are dealing with the increasing squalor, danger, odor, hazards, and decreased property value. The "homeless problem" in the perspective of the citizens is the presence of the homeless themselves, not their comfort. Cities that offer nothing to the saintly homeless don't have homeless problems.
You always get more of what you incentivize.
You're right, but the rabbit hole is so much worse than you could've imagined.
A dirty little secret about CA's homeless population explosion is that other states, when they saw how 'generous" it was being in taking care of the homeless, started encouraging their indigent population to move out there in droves. For example, NYC Mayors have been handing out one way tickets to the homeless throughout for well over a decade: https://gothamist.com/news/de-blasio-continues-tactic-of-shipping-homeless-out-of-nyc.
IMO, the US has to bring back institutionalization and "skid rows", but skid rows that are more humane than they were in the past, that offer everything from mental health facilities to drug rehab. It's not fair or right to force the general public to have to deal with the chronically mentally ill or vagrant, especially if they're either being a nuisance or dangerous.
shareI agree.
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I don't get that either. With his money his quarantine would be very comfortable it's not like they throw people in concentration camps.
shareI would move, too. It's the most disgusting place I've ever seen. No wonder liberals love it there!
shareI wish the news media would stop calling it a "homeless problem."
It's not a "homeless problem" but an "indigent" problem. A large majority of these people are either people who need to be rehabilitated for whatever reason or are vagrants who've dropped out of society and chosen to live life on the skids. No amount of affordable or free housing will get them off the streets, because they're not "homeless" in the sense that the Orwellian media would have you believe.
A long time ago, people like this used to live in areas known as "skid rows" or were simply institutionalized. Then a coalition of ****wits ranging from bleeding heart liberals and civil libertarians to Rightwing anti-New Deal/anti-Great Society Reagan Conservatives decided that we didn't need either anymore. If we dumped them in middle class and rich neighborhoods, they'd magically become productive members of society by way of osmosis.
Agree about the term "homeless" which has morphed into a euphemism. When I was a kid, one almost never heard this word, and if you did, it was in the context of people being dislocated due to a fire or natural disaster.
I've lived in cities long enough to recognize a bum when I see one. If the person is mentally ill, well that's another issue and we should not let them just languish on the street in the name of civil rights.
I also remember those days as a kid when there was no such thing as "homeless" other than "lost home in fire". I remember when, back in the day, the people who are being called homeless today were called bums, drifters, winos, druggies, squatters, panhandlers and vagrants. The euphemism was started in the 1980s to cover up the fact that deinstitutionalization and all of these misguided civil libertarian/bleeding heart programs to "free" or "save" the mentally ill turned into a complete and unmitigated disaster. It was just so much easier to just say, "They lost their homes after missing a mortgage payment," as opposed to, "Maybe closing mental facilities, slashing welfare programs and ending SROs was a bad idea."
"A long time ago, people like this used to live in areas known as "skid rows" or were simply institutionalized. "
Well, a long time ago, when I was young, the dysfunctional people who didn't qualify for institutionalization used to live in cheap hotels, flophouses, horrible tenement apartments, and other forms of low-income housing that have largely vanished from American cities. A big part of the problem is simply a lack of low-income housing, people like this used to have cheap and horrible places to live, back before cities became overcrowded and so expensive the poor were forced away or onto the streets.
Places like Downtown LA used to have cheap housing where a drifter could stay for a while before moving on or getting thrown out, but gentrification is converting the places where flophouses used to be into condos. How long before Skid Row itself gets gentrified and renamed "Renewal Row" or something? And when that happens, where do all the people who lived there for nothing go?
How long before Skid Row itself gets gentrified and renamed "Renewal Row" or something?
What you're talking about has already happened here in NYC, unfortunately. Our skid row was called "The Bowery," and yes, we had the same kind of housing for the really down and out--so-called, "SROs." This area is getting gentrified to hell and back.
How long before Skid Row itself gets gentrified and renamed "Renewal Row" or something? And when that happens, where do all the people who lived there for nothing go?
Well, here are my theories, based on certain trends:
1. In NYC, people are being increasingly forced to rent out rooms instead of apartments. So, SRO-style living arrangements are happening in spite of bans.
2. More aggressive tenant laws that basically legally sanction squatting or engineer it so that tenants will never have to pay landlords more than half the time and earn "squatters rights" or "canceled rent". Case in point: I just had tenants steal 11 months rent from my parents because of cancel rent (even though they were working the entire time), and there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it in NY State.
3. Aggressive anti-landlord laws that force small landlords out of business, allowing the government to seize property and convert to affordable housing for the destitute (which has started happening here in NYC). share
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'white middle class scum' lol
Troll harder, you are shitting the bed so far...too obvious👎
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So should I call out of work on Monday to avoid getting murdered by the riffraff?
You are a silly person and in a very amusing way lol
That "riffraff" are your fellow human beings who were not born into privilege as you were. You should call out of work and go to your community center and help your fellow human beings, but you won't because you're middle class and gladly use products that people commit suicide over the working conditions they're subjected to in making them... all because it's cheaper if a few humans die in the process than to give people a decent living wage, ALL people, regardless of where they live.
share“poor people who starved to death so the wealthy could have a place to live.”
Really?
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If your speaking of gentrification, as in modern day LA, where middle class people move into poor areas and start fixing places up then you should know there is an obesity epidemic among the poor in the US and most have IPhones.
shareJust like a typical filthy rich leech, you insist the poor have better lives than you do. Of course you would never join them because you know that is all a lie, but you have no problem exterminating them despite the fact that you're the one who displaced them and created the problems to begin with.
shareWhen I was a young adult around 1987 I was reading a news article about how the courts ruled that a city cannot force homeless people who live on the sidewalk to be institutionalized. The title of the article was something like “Apparently beggars can be choosers”.
shareThat's funny. Reminds me of how clever headlines used to be back in the day before clickbait and Top 10 listicles (remember the infamous "Headless Body Found in Topless Bar" headline from the NY Post?).
It doesn't surprise me that the article came out in 1987. That was peak civil libertarianism when it came to the homeless problem. Around this time, there was this huge story in NYC involving a crazy homeless woman who became obsessed with a local TV personality called Bill Boggs. She started calling herself Billie Boggs and stalking him. Anyway, the city tried to shelter her and other homeless people during the winter, and in came some douchebag from the ACLU (OH, HOW I HATE THE ACLU) "protecting" her right to be out on the streets in sub-zero weather.
For anyone who's curious, this article does a great job breaking down the role that civil libertarianism had to do in helping fuel the "homeless" crisis. We have "homeless" people because civil libertarians helped close or demonize facilities designed to help the mentally incompetent, drug-addicted and vagrant: https://www.city-journal.org/html/assault-public-order-how-civil-liberties-union-goes-astray-12717.html.
This reminds me of a movie I watched recently where the protagonist was suddenly forced to move from his apartment. The exact details of the reason are vague to me but the point is, he was given a check for $15,000 as relocation compensation. It was like a type of severance pay that I thought was pretty generous. In the following scene, he was driving, complaining to a friend on his phone that he was about to become one of the homeless. I thought, "What? Seriously?" At that point, he had $15000 cash on his person and two part-time jobs.
shareI saw something like this happen in real life.
I had a friend who was being pressured into leaving her apartment by the landlord, but...get this...was offered $30,000 to sweeten the deal. 30...thousand...freaking...dollars.
When she told me this, she didn't act as if she'd been given a great deal to find a new place. She acted as if the landlord was throwing her out into the street and forcing her to become homeless. I said, "What are you crazy??? Take... the money," and her response was to look at me with these big, saucer eyes and say, "But...where will I go...?"
She actually said that! "Where will I go?" What do you mean, where will you go? Find ANY apartment, pay off the rent with that money, and then spend a year, maybe two years tops to find an apartment as cheap or cheaper than the one you left behind.
Needless to say, the landlord got pissed off when she refused his offer (assumed she was playing hardball, maybe?), knocked the money down to next to nothing and then threatened to evict her. So, she went from 30K to something like 8K in less than two years and a possible eviction.
... Then a coalition of ****wits ranging from bleeding heart liberals and civil libertarians to Rightwing anti-New Deal/anti-Great Society Reagan Conservatives decided that we didn't need either anymore.
No ... not at all in the least.
This was the purely 100% what you call here the "Rightwing anti-New Deal/anti-Great Society Reagan Conservatives" that hate social programs, hate government and tried for 40 years to destroy it, and through corporatizing media, Fox News, Right-wing AM talk radio and Trump have finally pushed society to the point where a not insignificant number of numbskulls think this idea that the destruction of our country and its government would be a step forwards, even a benefit to the white people, and those minorities who bow and scrape dependently to them.
These right-wing morons just will not understand that what will take over from our democratic government will not give a wit about 99% of them, and is having a big laugh at their gullibility.
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This was the purely 100% what you call here the "Rightwing anti-New Deal/anti-Great Society Reagan Conservatives" that hate social programs, hate government and tried for 40 years to destroy it...
You're not getting it...
The bleeding hearts/civil libertarians formed an "unholy alliance" with those Rightwingers that made it possible for them to carry out deinstitutionalization.
To put it another way, you're right--Rightwingers were hell-bent on destroying social programs, welfare, etc. But to be able to do that without losing votes or turning the public on them, they had to somehow frame this destruction as a positive thing (as in benefiting society, benefiting mental patients, etc.).
The people who did that weren't from the Right. They were 1960s counterculture hipsters (like Ken Kesey), so-called "bleeding hearts" from the Far Left and the ACLU. They put out a spate of material designed to demonize mental hospitals and romanticize mentally ill people as just "free spirits" living to a beat of a different drummer in a conformist society and being punished for it.
Two of the most famous (or infamous) pieces to demonize mental hospitals was "Willowbrook" by Geraldo Rivera and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." So, by the time Ronald Reagan and Reagan era conservatives had their meat hooks on the national budget, the public was 100% on board with their defunding and closing of anything remotely to do with mental hospitals or mental health. Images of Nurse Ratched and filthy patients shuffling the halls of Willowbrook were still fresh in everyone's minds, so they shrugged their shoulders and went, "Okay, do what you gotta do. Close the hospitals. It'll all work out somehow." share
The one half-assed data point you have is the One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and that is totally apolitical. No one took that seriously as a call for political action. Besides it was in the mid-70's.
1967 Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California. At this point, the number of patients in state hospitals had fallen to 22,000, and the Reagan administration uses the decline as a reason to make cuts to the Department of Mental Hygiene. They cut 2,600 jobs and 10 percent of the budget despite reports showing that hospitals were already below recommended staffing levels.
1967 Reagan signs the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act and ends the practice of institutionalizing patients against their will, or for indefinite amounts of time. This law is regarded by some as a “patient’s bill of rights”. Sadly, the care outside state hospitals was inadequate. The year after the law goes into effect, a study shows the number of mentally ill people entering San Mateo's criminal justice system doubles.
Geraldo Rivera is a right-wing nutjob.
What you are trying so hard to imply just did not happen, at least not in any significant or meaningful way the way you want to make it sounds .... like a typical BS Republican false equivalency ... mistakes were made on both sides .... No ... mistakes were made by the Right-wing, and for what ... to cut taxes so we could have the tyrannical global oligarchy we now have today?
You made a HUGE MISTAKE making that comment about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. You don't seem to be aware that the movie was based on a cult classic written in 1962, which laid the foundation of the 1960s counterculture. It was an anthem for the generation that later jumpstarted the "do what you feel" ethos of the day and later demonized all institutions (prisons and mental hospitals) as violating it. Ken Kesey, who wrote the book, was anything but apolitical.
So, the book's popularity and message preceded Reagan years before the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act was signed. Not only that, it's not a coincidence that the act was signed 1967. 1967 was the peak of the counterculture movement (Summer of Love), when the college kids who'd lovingly clutched a copy of Kesey's book from years before were living out its message that institutions only existed to lock free spirits and nonconformists up. On top of that, the counterculture was pushing all of these out of touch, utopian ideas that merely "love", "freedom" and "compassion" was going to cure everything. ("All You Need is Love", "What the World Needs Now"). In other words, the mentally ill don't need rehabilitation, rules, etc. Just free them, they'll find love and compassion, and be healed.
People like Reagan were able to exploit the countercultural fervor at the time for cynical purpose in spite--ironically--being a member of The Establishment that the counterculture hated so much. When he became president, Reagan was able to do on a national scale what he had done in the 1960s, precisely because the movie resurrected the spirit of the book, which Boomers--now pushing middle age--treated as sacrosanct.
BTW, Geraldo Rivera definitely wasn't a Rightwing hack starting out. His claim to fame was doing exposes that today would've labeled him an "SJW." If you think he was acting or was seen as a Rightwing in the 1970s, you really don't know him.
You made the mistake thinking that a popular book, especially one by Ken Kesey are far-left loon influenced policy. To be honest, your narrative is purely idiotic, but it would have to be to appeal to right-wing minds. It is part of this whole wacko blame the left-wing for everything - to obscure the fact that it is the right-wing, the wing that owns all the money and has all the right-wing oligarch lunatics with delusions of nobility that began taking over the government with all their money ... in response to the call from the Powell memorandum.
We are living through America’s third struggle with oligarchy. It began in 1971, when Lewis Powell, himself a proud agent of the tobacco oligarchs, laid out in a famous memo to the US Chamber of Commerce a plan for the various oligarchs of America to stop competing and organize to take over the US government. By 1980, the plan was in full flower, and by the late 1990s, the oligarchs directly or indirectly controlled a majority of the states, the entire Republican Party, and, at the federal level, well over half of the Democratic Party. By 2005, oligarchic control over the executive branch of our federal government was largely in place, and it was cemented with the Trump administration. When Donald Trump—himself an oligarch—came to power in January 2017, he and his agents embarked on a campaign to destroy the institutions of America that had been so carefully built up over more than 240 years. They succeeded in damaging and corrupting every single federal regulatory agency and turned the foundational departments within the executive branch into full-fledged agents of the Trump oligarchy.
Hartmann, Thom. The Hidden History of American Oligarchy (p. 3). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition. share
One last thing:
Every country has its problems. Every country, more or less, does the best thing it can to solve them. The United States is now 50 plus years into multiple problems--mass shootings, drug crisis, homeless crisis. And still, after all the yelling and screaming, nothing has been resolved. If anything, things are worse than ever.
The reason is that Americans subscribe to this childish mentality that everything is a zero sum game--including ideas--because everything is a competition.
For example, sociologists and media critics and psychologists and other factions are all right when they say that the reason why we have gun violence is: 1) movies glamorizing violence 2) gun fetish culture, by way of NRA 3) video games 4) lack of regulations 5) lack of mental health.
These are not "competing" ideas from "competing" groups. They're all contributing factors. But each "group" that subscribes to one of these points always likes to shoot other ideas down as being wrong because THEY see ideas as a competition.
It's the same with this homeless crisis. You're not interested in seeing the entire picture. Your insistence that this is 100% a Rightwing issue is typical of this "competition of ideas" mindset. You can't entertain the idea that multiple factions contributed to this problem and that the solution is for those multiple factions to see which part they played, so that they can have a "meeting of the minds" and fix it together--as a coalition of forces.
I know you're going to come back with a snide comment ranting I'm a "Republican." That's okay. You keep doing that. Hopefully, moderates like myself will finally gain enough traction in this country to finally come together and fix these problems that continue to fester precisely because of this "competition of ideas" issue I talked about.
One last thing ... you tell a disjointed, absurd narrative that gets you from your point A to your point with as little regard for the facts as a little kid driving a Matchbox car over a map disregarding the roads and terrain without a thought.
If you are not part of the solution, you are the problem; so you are not whatever you call yourself to cover your lack of integrity.