From an LA Times story on the rise of homeless people gravitating to beautiful, sunny Malibu:
Being homeless in Malibu is different.
Chris Smith watches ducks land on the lagoon at sunset from his beach encampment, known to locals as Margaritaville.
Nancy Rosenquist told the City Council of huddling behind a dumpster and listening to Lady Gaga record a song in an adjacent building.
Residents have long been generous to those who live in the city’s 21 miles of canyons, beaches and glittering shopping centers.
For 17 years, religious groups fed homeless people, and the city and private donors put up hundreds of thousands of dollars for social workers to find them housing and services.
But Malibu United Methodist Church — facing pressure from the city — in recent weeks took a U-turn, deciding twice-weekly dinners for homeless people would stop after Thanksgiving. The cutoff came after city officials summoned organizers and suggested they were attracting more homeless people and making the problem worse.
This paragraph is perhaps the best:
The issue boiled over on conservative and Christian online forums, where Malibu residents were castigated as liberal hypocrites. Lurid death threats poured in to City Hall.
Liberal hypocrites, of course. But death threats? That tells me it’s another instantiation of liberal cannibalization.
Malibu, population 13,000, has roughly 180 homeless residents but no shelter or housing for poor people.
That’s right: the fascists in Malibu don’t have a single unit of subsidized housing.
What, pray tell, has caused this influx of undesirables?
After the Metro’s Expo Line opened to Santa Monica last year, neighbors began complaining of mentally ill and rough-looking characters camping at the beach and hanging out near schools.
“A homeless person was taking a shower in the girls locker room in middle school — that wasn’t real good,” said Gary Peterson, a retired developer and hotelier who quit the church’s board of trustees over the meal issue…
Some homeless people believed residents were reacting against an influx of African Americans from Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles. Malibu is 90% white.
In that last instance, there should be [1](echo) quotes around the word ‘white’.
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