LOS ANGELES — President Donald Trump took another swipe at California on Monday night, slamming Los Angeles and San Francisco’s homelessness problems and stating, “We may intercede.
“We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up. It’s inappropriate,” he told Fox News in an interview.
Trump didn’t offer any specific proposals, but he did speak at length about how homelessness was hurting cities, blaming the “liberal establishment.”
Trump has used California as a punching bag on a variety of issues, including fire policy, environmental regulations and crime. His critique of the state during last year’s deadly brush fires got pushback from firefighters, and police have criticized his views on gangs and crime as inaccurate.
A recent survey found the number of people living on the streets, in vehicles and in shelters in Los Angeles County increased by about 12% over last year. The annual point-in-time count put the number of homeless people just shy of 59,000 countywide. Within the city of Los Angeles, the number soared to more than 36,000, a 16% increase.
L.A. County is spending billions to build more housing for homeless people, but rising rents and a shortage of affordable housing have made it more difficult to catch up.
San Francisco saw a 17% jump in the number of homeless residents over the last two years, according to preliminary results of the city’s count. Farther south in the Bay Area, the number of homeless people living in Santa Clara County increased 31% over the last two years, from 7,394 to 9,706, according to preliminary results released by the county. San Jose saw a surge of 1,822 people, for a total of 6,172 homeless residents living in the county’s largest city.
“It’s disgraceful. I’m going to maybe and I’m looking at it very seriously,” Trump told Fox News. “We’re doing some other things that you probably noticed, like some of the very important things that we’re doing now. But we’re looking at it very seriously because you can’t do that.
“You can’t have what’s happening — where police officers are getting sick just by walking the beat. I mean, they’re getting actually very sick, where people are getting sick, where the people living there (are) living in hell too.”
Fact check: LAPD officers were sickened at the Central Division station. But none was on patrol, and the illnesses do not appear to be related directly to the conditions of nearby homeless encampments.
Trump suggested that homelessness is a relatively new problem, claiming, “We’ve never had this in our lives before in our country.”
But cities have struggled with the problem for decades.
“Some of them have mental problems where they don’t even know they’re living that way,” he said. “In fact, perhaps they like living that way. They can’t do that. We cannot ruin our cities. And you have people that work in those cities. They work in office buildings and to get into the building, they have to walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago.”
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