In states like California, Colorado, Washington and Arizona, cities this summer are spending millions buying hotels and converting them to shelters for the homeless.
In Los Angeles, there is a ballot initiative in 2024 to require hotels to use vacant rooms to house homeless people besides paying customers. The American Hotel & Lodging Association has objected to the proposal.
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Nationwide 27.4 percent of homeowners are considered “house poor,” meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs.
However, in some U.S. cities, far more Americans are living beyond their means, according to research from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In Hialeah, Florida, 59.3 percent of homeowners are spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs. While Hialeah has the highest percentage of homeowners spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs, it was not alone.
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The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is gaining steam in recent years and has been pushing the Democratic Party to the left, particularly in deep blue cities, advocating for policies that even moderate Democrats disagree with.
Democratic Socialists make up the left flank of the Democratic Party, supporting abolishing prisons, aggressive climate policies, rent controls and radical racial equity policies, according to the Democratic Socialist website. They’ve been aggressively adding to their membership over the past few years, as well as gaining ground in key deep blue cities such as New York City, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, calling for radical policy changes and opposing mainstream Democrats.
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Multiple fireworks shows slated for July 4th along Los Angeles’ coastline have been canceled in the wake of a county mandate that was initially spurred by environmental activists, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The L.A. Regional Water Quality Control Board implemented a firework permit rule in an effort to clamp down on pollutants from firework displays, which reportedly affect nearby water sources, the LA Times reported. The Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation (CERF) brought a lawsuit against Long Beach’s Big Bang on the Bay, alleging that a firework show in 2022 violated the Clean Water Act.
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Since Texas’ border security mission Operation Lone Star (OLS) launched more than two years ago, the multi-agency effort has led to the apprehension of nearly 400,000 foreign nationals who entered the U.S. illegally.
Since last April, Texas has sent over 500 buses of foreign nationals to six so-called sanctuary cities.
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A bus of foreign nationals who illegally entered Texas and were apprehended and released by the Biden administration were taken to Los Angeles for the first time, Gov. Greg Abbott said. They were dropped off at the Los Angeles Union Station Wednesday evening.
“Texas’ small border towns remain overwhelmed and overrun by the thousands of people illegally crossing into Texas from Mexico because of President Biden’s refusal to secure the border,” Abbott said. “Los Angeles is a major city that migrants seek to go to, particularly now that its city leaders approved its self-declared sanctuary city status. Our border communities are on the frontlines of President Biden’s border crisis, and Texas will continue providing this much-needed relief until he steps up to do his job and secure the border.”
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Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson says the Chinese-American financial institution Cathay Bank has given Senate Republicans records showing millions of dollars going from Chinese companies to President Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
Republicans and others started raising concerns during President Biden’s successful 2020 White House campaign, if not earlier, that Hunter Biden used the family name and influence while his father was vice president to make millions in overseas business deals, which also could have compromised U.S. national security.
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Americans once again fled large cities for suburbs and Republican-led states in massive numbers from June 2021 to June 2022, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of U.S. Census data.
More than 800,000 people in total left the country’s large metropolitan areas, compared to 1.2 million the year before, in an ongoing trend sparked by the pandemic, according to the WSJ. Ten of the nation’s 25 largest metropolitan areas saw population loss, and most of the top cities that saw population gains were located in red states.
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Chicago recorded 697 total homicides in 2022, far more than any other city in the United States, but New Orleans had the highest murder rate per capita, according to a new report from a nonprofit research group.
Chicago had more total homicides in 2022 than Philadelphia (516), New York City (438), Houston (435) and Los Angeles (382), which rounded out the top five, according to a report from Wirepoints, an Illinois-based research and news organization that surveyed 2022 crime data from 75 of the largest U.S. cities.
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The suspected killer of Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop David O’Connell reportedly worked for the deceased prelate prior to allegedly killing him, police said this week.
Authorities arrested Carlos Medina reportedly after viewing surveillance footage indicating the suspect’s SUV in O’Connell’s driveway at the time of the killing.
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A Los Angeles Archdiocese auxiliary bishop known as a “peacemaker” was shot to death Saturday afternoon, officials said.
Bishop David O’Connell, a 69-year-old native of Ireland, was shot and killed Saturday just before 1 p.m. local time inside his home in the neighborhood of Hacienda Heights, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said.
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The nation’s largest school districts are implementing policies that require educators to keep students’ gender transitions a secret from their parents.
Los Angeles Unified School District, Chicago Public Schools and New York Public Schools are promoting practices and policies that hide a student’s transgender status from their parents. The policies have become a cultural flashpoint amid a battle over the role parents should play in their child’s education, and the extent to which gender ideology has infiltrated K-12 classrooms.
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Democrats’ virtual 180 on the issue of crime — a journey from supporting the “defund the police” movement to espousing tougher law enforcement — has been accentuated by a striking pattern in recent months: prominent liberals being mugged, sometimes quite literally, by the harsh reality of rising crime as victims themselves.
The latest liberal to embody this shift is Bill Walton, the 69-year-old basketball legend-turned-garrulous broadcaster, who has a history of stirring controversy and advocating a range of progressive causes over the years.
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The total number of homeless people in Los Angeles County has skyrocketed over the last few years, reaching a staggering new total of over 69,000.
Fox News reports that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which released its updated report on Thursday, found an increase of 4.1 percent since 2020. In the entirety of the county, approximately 69,144 people are now homeless; in just the city of Los Angeles alone, there are 41,980 homeless people.
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Following national coverage of the Minneapolis school district’s race-based employment policies, Liz Collin Reports hosted a retired Los Angeles teacher who saw the same thing happen in his district over 15 years ago.
Phil Pearson worked as a special-ed teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest district in California and second largest in the country, when a similar rule to move teachers based on race was put into place.
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In the latest train robbery in the city of Los Angeles, dozens of firearms, including handguns and shotguns, were stolen from a cargo train in a massive raid.
As reported by ABC News, three suspects arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) last summer were found to be in possession of some of the new .22-caliber handguns from the stolen cache. The guns were found to match the larger batch of 36 handguns stolen from the train that had been bound for Tennessee, according to police.
One of the suspects admitted that the guns were stolen while the train was in the Lincoln Heights rail yard, which has become a prime target for train robberies in recent months. Later, two more suspects were arrested with shotguns that were found to have come from a larger batch of 46 shotguns that had also been stolen from the train.
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Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the Union Pacific railroad in Los Angeles on Thursday to help clean up the site following a spate of railcar thefts, bemoaning the state of the area.
“I’m asking myself, what the hell is going on? We look like a third-world country,” Newsom said to reporters, according to Politico.
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Criminals have reportedly opened up a new lucrative front in the ongoing package-theft epidemic throughout the U.S., targeting shipping infrastructure to steal goods before they even get to consumers’ porches.
UPS Chief Executive Carol Tome told CNBC this week that one of the company’s 18-wheeler shipping trucks was robbed several weeks ago in December. “[The driver] was stopped at gunpoint,” she said. “He was zip-tied, thrown into the back of his feeder car, and they took the packages.”
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Homeless encampments have begun cropping up near schools throughout the city of Los Angeles, even despite a citywide ban on any such encampments near public areas, as reported by the Epoch Times.
The Los Angeles City Council had previously passed a new resolution, Ordinance 41.18, which was signed into law by Mayor Eric Garcetti (D-Calif.), forbidding any such homeless camps from being set up within 500 feet of “sensitive-use” areas, including schools, daycares, libraries, and parks. The ordinance also banned such camps from forming near freeway overpasses and underpasses, ramps, tunnels, and bridges.
But in order for the ordinance to be enforced, each individual district’s councilmember must introduce a motion to do so, which then must be approved by the council. As such, homeless encampments have begun sprouting up near schools in the Venice Beach neighborhood, which falls under District 11; that district is represented by Councilman Mike Bonin (D-Calif.), who has a history of refusing to enforce anti-homeless measures for other districts, and has not yet introduced any such measures to protect his own district.
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A California activist group calculated that students in Los Angeles County missed over 90,000 school days in the span of a month, Fox News reported.
In about a month a total of 92,455 in-person school days in Los Angeles County were lost, which Jonathan Zachreson, the founder of Reopen California Schools called “astounding,” Fox News reported Monday. Quarantine measures to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic kept kids home from school, which led to the learning loss that Zachreson said “could have been avoided” if school officials hadn’t intervened in public health matters.
Many students were able to stay in school because of “Test to Stay” programs, which allow unvaccinated students who are exposed to the virus to stay in school as long as they are asymptomatic, wear a mask and take two COVID-19 tests a week, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
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Larry Elder, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in California’s recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom, was attacked by people throwing eggs at him as he walked around Los Angeles on Wednesday.
Elder was with his campaign staff as he walked through the Venice neighborhood where the attack occurred.
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The transgender individual who exposed himself in front of women and children at a California luxury spa earlier this year, has been charged with indecent exposure, the New York Post reported Thursday. Darren Agee Merager, 52, is a registered sex offender with two prior convictions of indecent exposure, according to the Post’s law-enforcement sources. Merager is also facing “six felony counts of indecent exposure over a separate locker room incident in December 2018,” according to the Post.
As American Greatness previously reported, several women complained last June, when the biological male allegedly exposed his penis at the Wi Spa in Los Angeles.
Viral video footage of the incident showed a woman angrily confronting a staff member of the spa about a naked man who had apparently exposed himself in an area reserved for females.
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A Los Angeles luxury spa is facing intense criticism after a biological male was allegedly allowed to parade around in the nude in front of women and children. Video footage that went viral over the weekend, shows a woman angrily confronting a staff member of the Wi Spa about a naked man who had apparently exposed himself in an area reserved for females.
“It’s okay for a man to go into the women’s section [and] show his penis around other women—young little girls—underage?!” the incensed woman can be heard saying in the video. “Your spa—Wi Spa condones that?!”
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by Ailan Evans As rates of violent crime continue to rise across the country and once-safe neighborhoods face increased dangers, many liberal communities are having to confront their complicated relationship with the police. Following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, the defund the police movement attracted attention and support…
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The number of homicides in six major cities across the country has increased compared to last year, disproportionately affecting black people, according to crime data.
Black people have represented a massive share of murder victims in six major cities through the first six months of 2021 compared to last year, which itself saw a large crime surge, according to data analyzed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The DCNF analyzed both police department data and homicide reports compiled by local news outlets to determine how black people have been victimized in the wake of the 2020 crime spike.
“We are seeing an uptick in violent crime across the country, specifically gun violence,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told The New York Times earlier this month.
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The union for a Los Angeles trucking company, Teamsters Local 986, was forced out after nearly 80% of workers signed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to remove it.
The National Labor Relations Act governs private sector workers, unionization and how workers can remove a union from their workplace. In 27 right-to-work states, union payments are voluntary. In California and other non right-to-work states, union payments are mandatory for all unionized and non-union employees.
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United Teachers Los Angeles and Los Angeles city officials have come to a tentative agreement, creating a path for the nation’s second-largest school district to reopen.
Students in the Los Angeles Unified School District would return to in-person classes in mid-April under the tentative agreement struck Tuesday evening, according to city and union officials, The New York Times reported. The Los Angeles school board and United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) members still need to ratify the agreement.
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As of Wednesday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had made 235 arrests over this month in an effort to enforce coronavirus restrictions as the region continues to see a surge in COVID-19 cases, officials said Wednesday.
Sheriff Alex Villanueva said his agency has patrolled and targeted underground parties.
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A Northern California wildfire threatened thousands of homes Thursday after winds whipped it into a monster that incinerated houses in a small mountain community and killed at least three people.
Several other people have been critically burned and hundreds, if not thousands, of homes and other buildings are believed to have been damaged or destroyed by the fire in the foothills of the northern Sierra Nevada, authorities said.
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OAKLAND, California (AP) — A protest in Oakland, California, in support of racial justice and police reform turned violent when a small group of rioters wearing helmets and goggles and carrying large signs that doubled as shields set fire to a courthouse, vandalized a police station and shot fireworks…
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Planned Parenthood announced Wednesday a plan to open 50 health centers at Los Angeles high schools.
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Sen. Amy Klobuchar participated in an LGBTQ town hall hosted by CNN in Los Angeles Thursday night while President Donald Trump was rallying in her home state of Minnesota.
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by George Rasley Recently, Dr. Drew Pinsky spoke with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade about the horrific conditions on the streets of Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city, before making the frightening prediction, “There will be a major infectious disease epidemic this summer in Los Angeles.” Pinsky described to Kilmeade…
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The State of California settled a lawsuit with the Election Integrity Project California (EIPCa) Friday and has agreed to remove as many as 1.5 million inactive registrants from the Los Angeles County voter rolls. EIPCa filed suit against the state in August 2017 and alleged that California was not “following…
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by Elizabeth Lee Imagine being on the bridge of a ship navigating through space with your crew’s survival at risk, then stepping onto a river raft to battle aliens in a swamp, and finally flying through the air, all in one night. All this and more are possible at…
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by Dora Mekouar More Americans are moving to smaller cities in search of a better quality of life. They’re leaving places like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York for mid-sized cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, according to an analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau. A…
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