The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
Therefore, the city of Los Angeles has launched an initiative to pay homeless people fifteen taxpayer-dollars per hour to perform street cleaning tasks.
Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti — to whom some critics refer as “Garsh***y” — announced the plan Monday.
A crew’s been formed — christened the Skid Row Clean Team — and it’s presiding over a 54-block area known for its typhus outbreak, rat-filled garbage piles, and vagabond tents.
I’m assuming, given the above, it’s also acclaimed for its generous piles of feces. But I offer no proof.
According to Eric, the team’s comprised of “about two dozen” homeless and formerly-homeless Californians.
And it’s poised to “[lift] up” the participants:
Our new Skid Row Clean Team is empowering homeless and formerly homeless Angelenos through a program that’s just as much about cleaning the streets as it is about lifting up the people who live on them. pic.twitter.com/q2m3pONyIM
— MayorOfLA (@MayorOfLA) August 26, 2019
As reported by KFI, the unit’s in fact made a dent in the disgusting debris of downtown:
So far, crews in Los Angeles have cleared more than three thousand pounds of hazardous waste from homeless encampments. Garcetti says there were about five hundred cleanups last month and nearly 3000 needles were removed from the public spaces. However, the mayor did not blame the homeless entirely for this issue.
“As we’ve seen time and time again, the vast majority of trash that our crews picked up last month came from illegal dumping not from homeless Angelenos.”
He says crews also cleared 15 hundred tons of trash that was blocking sidewalks.
“Everytime we walk around to pick up the trash, people will be like, ‘Oh thank you for keeping the community better,'” one woman told KFI’s Andrew Mollenbeck.
“We made an additional 376 visits to encampments to ensure sidewalks were passable removing 1,500 tons of solid waste,” Garcetti stated.
As for the pay, to be fair, California’s current minimum hourly wage is $12 for companies with 25+ employees and $11 for those with fewer. Still, KFI states the homeless workers are being given “$15 an hour or more.”
To get an idea of what the city’s dealing with, here are some stats, courtesy of The Daily Wire:
L.A. directed $20 million in state funds to improve the Skid Row area last year. A recent count estimates 4,757 homeless individuals currently reside there. This fall, the city plans to upgrade the neighborhood’s hygiene infrastructure, increasing the size of a personal care center that offers showers, toilets, and laundry machines for residents. The facility currently provides more than 500 services per day.
And here are some ol’ audacious antics:
A recent NBC4 investigation documented homeless people, often in the Skid Row area, “hijacking” fire hydrants throughout L.A. The probe found that vagrants “are illegally using fire hydrants as a source of water to bathe, shave, even fill water balloons, leaving the hydrants damaged and often useless to firefighters during the critical fire season.”
Nice.
Eric’s excited for the sidewalk-livin’ sanitizers to move on up to mainstream living:
“Every un-housed Angeleno deserves the help that they need to get off the streets.”
Well, two dozen down…4,745 to go.
-ALEX
See 3 more pieces from me:
And Up We Go: LA’s Homeless Sue The City For Its Property-Destroying Street Sweeps
Find all my RedState work here.
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