THE CM PRESS TALKS REALITY ABOUT GANGS IN COSTA MESA (AGAIN)
In Costa Mesa, most of the gangs and gang members are located in the following slums: Mission-Mendoza in Mesa del Mar; Coolidge-Fillmore in Mesa North and in various similar barracks style apartments on the Westside including Shalimar and some in the Wilson Street area near Rea School.
These slums are the equivalent of forts that keep the gangs and gang members safe.
From these forts they sally forth to commit crimes all around the city and then retreat to their forts to be safe.
So long as those gang safe slums--those forts--remain, the gangs and gang members will continue to thrive in our city.
Most of the PTA level, gushy, feel-good programs about diverting people from being in the gangs--such as the ones being pushed by Katrina Foley--are a waste of our money. They're voodoo sociology. They're garbage.
Mostly what they accomplish is to give an income stream to those who practice this voodoo sociology.
We've had such programs in Costa Mesa for more than a decade and we have more violent crime and more gangs than ever. And, things aren't going to change until we understand that the way we get rid of the gangs is to remove their habitats--their forts--their cozy, safe slums.
This means that we have to start thinning out the slums.
How do we do this? As we've said many times before, we need to have the City of Costa Mesa, itself, to start acting responsibly and get out into the real estate market and start buying up slum buildings as they come up for sale.
Then, the City can tear them down and start assembling open space parcels to put in more parks or whatever might be needed.
And, wouldn't Costa Mesa be nicer with more open space and parks?
Remember, there are proposals on the table right now to build thousands of new condos and apartments in the north part of Costa Mesa. So, with all the new building, isn't it time we started removing old slum buildings instead of just building more and more housing units without doing anything to balance out the scales and keep our City a manageable size?
How many people should we try to stuff into Costa Mesa? Isn't our present population of about 110,000 about the maximum we can have to still retain some of the character and ambiance of our city?
So, the CM PRESS is saying, let new buildings be built, but remove old buildings at the same time and create more open space and try to keep the population about what it is right now.
This will help renew Costa Mesa, bring in much needed open space, and will help rid our city of gangs all at the same time.
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Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.
