Los Angeles’s incompetent leadership turned the city into a ticking time bomb for massive fire damage.
For the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the Los Angeles Fire Department had a budget of around $837 million. Los Angeles spent more money on homelessness — around $961 million. LAFD is also forced to spend its own resources and money from its own budget to deal with homelessness.
According to a memo from interim LAFD Chief Ronnie Villanueva, a third of the fires the department has responded to in the last six years were homeless fires. In the last 10 years, rubbish fires have surged 475%. Half of those fires involved homeless people, and Los Angeles in 2023 saw homeless fires double from 2020 to a total of 13,909. The cost of homelessness is dipping into LAFD’s resources on top of the $961 million the city directly allocates to the issue.
On top of this, LAFD actually has fewer fire stations now than it did in 1960, despite having 1.4 million more people now, along with a massive homeless population. Los Angeles has allowed its homeless crisis to spiral out of control, with the city not even bothering to verify that the billions it has spent on homelessness over the years are going toward anything that it is supposed to be paying for.
Karen Bass’s turn in the mayor’s seat has been no different. When Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered cities to begin clearing homeless encampments, Bass objected, as did then-Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Lindsey Horvath. Both were more worried about the “criminalization” of homelessness than about homeless encampments themselves being bastions of crime or threats to the public health and safety of residents, including the surge in homeless fires.
LA DA WON’T RESENTENCE MENENDEZ BROTHERS UNTIL THEY GIVE UP ‘LIE’ ABOUT PARENTS’ MURDER
Bass and like-minded progressives think housing should be the focus of homelessness policy, but Los Angeles can’t even do that properly. As of the end of March, two months after the fires, Los Angeles has only approved rebuilding permits for four properties. As of last week, Altadena has more than 1,500 properties waiting to be rebuilt and zero permits approved. Los Angeles won’t clear dangerous homeless encampments without having housing for the homeless to go to. But it won’t make sure the billions in spending actually go toward building housing or even letting people whose homes burned down begin the rebuilding process.
This is the level of incompetence that created the circumstances that caused Los Angeles to burn out of control. City leaders have created a homelessness crisis and burned through Los Angeles taxpayers’ money and the fire department’s resources while allowing fires to burn throughout the city in the process.