DRAIN THE SWAMP!Re: "Intervention crucial to interrupt gang recruitment," by Katrina Foley, The Current, 1/19/07
Katrina Foley has an out of touch column in today's The Current in which Foley continues to push her voodoo sociology group hug, spend your money with her liberal pals, approach to eradicating gangs in Costa Mesa.
Foley's column is full of the same vague and unsupported generalities as the original report to the City Council asking for funding for Foley's programs.
For example, in the original report presented to the City Council on January 2, we read:
"There is a substantial body of evidence that suggests that diverting youth from gang involvement after the youth is in a gang is extremely problematic."
There is? Where is that substantial body of evidence? There were no citations, no footnotes, no support for that or other similar assertions in the report. It was just liberal doublespeak. Too conclusionary as they say in law school.
Foley's approach has been tried for at least the last two decades in Costa Mesa, and it has failed miserably. We have more gangs and more gang violence than ever.
Now Foley and her pals are using the results of the failed programs to ask for more tax payer money to fund even more group hug programs that won't work. It also appears that some of the people involved with Foley's plans are the same people who joined with Foley in trying to defeat the mayor in the just past election.
To understand why the group hug approach has failed and why it will continue to fail requires that one understand a little about the specific dynamics of Costa Mesa and it also requires that we speak to the problems very directly and with a minimum of PCitis:
1. Most of the gang members in Costa Mesa have a connection with the city having been turned into an ersatz illegal alien sanctuary. If there were no illegal aliens in the city, there would be very few gang members.
2. Today, most of the gang members live in just a few slums in Costa Mesa: Shalimar; a neighborhood near Wilson and Placentia; a few other areas on the Westside; Fillmore-Coolidge; and Mission-Mendoza.
3. Most of these slum areas are characterized by having long rows of military barracks style tri-plexes and four-plexes that are functionally obsolete.
Even though most upwardly-mobile citizens won't live in these "barracks" that lack modern amenities and design features, and which lack safe surroundings, the landlords can get top rents by letting suspected illegal aliens cram themselves into tiny units and garages.
One illegal alien who murdered an employee of a local daily newspaper was discovered to have been living with twelve other illegal aliens in a one bedroom apartment in one of the aforementioned slums.
With the above in mind, let me ask two questions that, if you think about them, get to the heart of the matter and which suggest a solution to the gang problems in Costa Mesa: Do you see alligators living where there are no swamps? Do you see gang members living in Newport Beach?
Why are those questions relevant? Because all living things gravitate to places--habitats--where they are comfortable.
Alligators need swamps and gang members need slums. Drain the swamps and the alligators will leave. Remove the slums and gang members will leave.
Unlike some older inner cities, Costa Mesa is in a unique position as a coastal city right next to tony Newport Beach. This gives us the ability to improve things.
In fact, Costa Mesa is not yet full of slum habitats, and it doesn't have to have any of them. It has just a few such habitats as indicated in number 2, above. Costa Mesa has failed to update and improve our multi-tenant housing over the past two decades, while Newport Beach did so. This has caused an ever widening divide between these two sister cities. Newporters in one neighborhood in Corona del Mar even went out on the street and applauded as the last old apartment building in that neighborhood was torn down. This was reported in the Daily Pilot a couple of years ago.
What the City of Costa Mesa must do is thin out the slums. Because we only have a few such slum habitats, the City doesn't have to raze hundreds of blocks of slums, as would be the case in some other cities, and Costa Mesa doesn't have to use eminent domain to rid our city of slum habitats.
The City of Costa Mesa can simply buy up slum buildings--one here and one there--as they come up for sale on the open market. Then, the City should tear them down and put in pocket parks where the footprint is small or much needed sports fields and open space if the footprint is large.
Will this drain the swamp approach be fought by a small group of slum profiteers? You bet. As a friend of mine, who made his fortune in slums, once said, "There's money in slums." And, in Costa Mesa, a symbiotic relationship has grown up and become the "establishment" that depends on this symbiotic relationship.
Here, in brief, is how this symbiotic relationship works in Costa Mesa.
Some out of town industrialists who have their factories on 60 acres of the best coastal land in the city--the Westside bluffs--need cheap labor.
Illegal aliens supply that labor. Because the illegal aliens can't make a First World living off the labor that they sell on the cheap, the charities make up the difference and, in effect, offer the benefits packages that the out of town industrialists don't offer.
Thus, if you're an illegal alien in Costa Mesa you get your medical and dental care paid by a local charity. You get free bags of groceries. You get cash to help pay your rent and utility bills. You get free day care for your kids. You get cheap rent by doubling up in the barracks style apartments. And, that's just for starters.
Who benefits and how? The out of town industrialists who have low labor costs. The charity bosses who get to fill their rolls with "needy" people and who can then ask for more tax money. The slumlords who get to charge rents that are about as high as those in Newport Beach by looking the other way and letting people live like sardines in their apartments. The illegal aliens who get to live on the cheap in a coastal city. The liberal establishment types who get to feel fuzzy, compassionate and needed.
Who is hurt by this symbiosis? The good, decent middle class citizens of Costa Mesa who live in fear of crime and whose schools are now on a Third World level and whose quality of life is being driven down.
To repeat. If the City of Costa Mesa is serious about getting rid of gangs, then it needs to drain the swamp. That's the only way to do it. Chicago learned this lesson with Cabrini Green.
Would this draining the swamp create a hardship for illegal aliens? Probably not. Costa Mesa isn't an island. There is an inland city to our north that has cheap rents and which prides itself on being illegal alien friendly. People are free to move there if that works better for their personal circumstances. It's a free country. When possible, people should live where they can afford to live and where they don't have to be subsidized by others. Isn't that a traditional American value?
Note that this is not a call to remove all low income housing, but it is a call to do what is necessary to bring in modern low income housing and to thin out the functionally obsolete breeding grounds for gangs and criminals.
If you're a pre-mugged liberal (and I know a lot of you will read this) and your knee is starting to jerk over what I've written above, then let me tell you that I'd like to live on Balboa Island, but I can't afford it. Should I just move there and then expect people to subsidize me?
If you don't think I should do that, then tell me why we should be subsidizing people to live in Costa Mesa.
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CORRECTION TO ISSUE # 64
The old Planning Commission will be seated at the 1/22/07 Planning Commission meeting, not the new one as reported. The new Planning Commission will take over on 2/12/02.
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Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.
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