Timestamp: 23 September 2023 @ 2050 Pacific
California's capital city saw two lawsuits filed Tuesday over its handling of the homelessness crisis.
Alan Riquelmy / September 19, 2023
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CN) -- Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho sued the city of Sacramento on Tuesday over the homelessness issue, accusing the city of failing to enforce its own laws.
The suit, in Sacramento County Superior Court, came in the wake of a letter he sent Mayor Darrell Steinberg in August about the homelessness crisis. Citing reports of hypodermic needles on a soccer field and kids walking through human waste to school, Ho demanded action from the city in 30 days.
That deadline passed earlier this month.
"You might be asking yourself, how did we get here?" Ho said during a Tuesday press conference. He added: "The community is at a breaking point."
Flanked by community members, Ho said the city must be held accountable to the same laws applied to its people. Residents face harassment from homeless encampments. People have been threatened, watched the unhoused deal and use drugs and witnessed sex acts. At 3 a.m. Tuesday, someone set some bushes outside the courthouse on fire.
"How did we get here?" Ho asked. "Enough is enough."
Sacramento has seen an erosion of everyday life, Ho said, claiming people no longer feel safe. The unhoused population has grown over 250% over the past seven years Steinberg has been mayor. Sacramento now has more homeless people than San Francisco.
"We need to get people off the streets," Ho said. "Living on the streets is not compassionate for the housed or the unhoused."
Stephen Walton, one of the people flanking Ho during the press conference, said his family has lived in the Del Paso Heights and Old North Sacramento area for almost 80 years. People in his community have compassion for the unhoused. However, that compassion must be balanced with public safety.
"We've watched open drug dealing, drug usage, human trafficking and prostitution," Walton said.
When someone contacts 311, a nonemergency phone number for the city, they're told nothing can be done, Walton said.
Emily Webb, who lives on the southern edge of the city core, said she's asked multiple times for the city to remove a homeless encampment near her house. At one point, someone's belongings blocked her driveway for weeks. People have used drugs in her front yard.
Over three dozen calls to the city resulted in canned responses and no action, Webb said.
"We've been threatened and yelled at," she added.
Attorney Ognian Gavrilov also stood with Ho during Tuesday's announcement and said he filed a lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of small business owners and residents.
"It's getting worse by the day and no solutions are being presented to any of us," Gavrilov said.
Gavrilov's clients claim a decree from Steinberg stops police and other authorities from clearing dangerous encampments that block sidewalks and pollute neighborhoods.
The two lawsuits, which have similar goals, could end up before the same judge, Ho said. It's also possible they would be consolidated at some point.
He also expects movement in his case much sooner than August 2024, the first hearing date listed in court records. That hearing date is a placeholder. Gathering evidence and depositions can begin around the end of the month.
Ultimately, Ho said his goal is for city officials to enforce existing law.
"This is a rare opportunity for us to effectuate meaningful, efficient means of getting the critically, chronically unhoused off the street," he said.
The district attorney outlined short-, mid- and long-term measures he wants implemented. To achieve a long-term goal of 10,000 more mental health beds and an expanded conservatorship law, and a mid-term goal of a citation-based method of getting unhoused people into treatment, the city must have compliance and enforcement of existing law.
The city currently has a sidewalk ordinance in place, as well as an ordinance focused on critical infrastructure.
The sidewalk ordinance allows for clearing space to provide an unobstructed path. The critical infrastructure ordinance prohibits camps on or near certain areas.
"What comes next is that this must end," Ho said. He added: "We are going to take this to trial."
Steinberg in a statement called Ho's actions a "performative distraction" from the work the city is doing on the homelessness issue. He said no other local government in this region has done more to address the crisis. Steinberg pointed to 1,200 new emergency beds, the sidewalk ordinance and critical infrastructure ordinances, a partnership with the county and thousands of new affordable housing units.
"The frustration that members of our community feel is absolutely justified," Steinberg said. "The Council has endorsed and is pressing for strong enforcement of our codes and the law. But the DA's lawsuit will not clear a single sidewalk nor get a single person off the streets."
In an interview with Courthouse News, Ho dismissed the claim that his suit is about politics. Instead, he said his focus is public safety. Ho said he has no power over raising taxes or building affordable housing. His responsibility is to ensure the public is safe.
"The fact of the matter is, nothing's changed," Ho said. "In fact, things have gotten worse."
According to Ho, nine out of 10 chronically homeless women are victims of sexual assault. Eight out of 10 chronically homeless people have mental health or drug addiction issues. Chronically homeless is defined as being unhoused for over a year.
It's those who struggle with mental health issues and drugs who are likely to be the most adverse to going to a shelter and don't want treatment, the district attorney said.
"It's not compassionate for people to live in the streets that way," Ho said. "Have I shaken things up? Have I upset certain people in certain institutions? Absolutely."
But when Ho talks to people, they vent their frustration over the unhoused situation. The city may point to Miller Park as a safe campground, but that's just one site. Camp Resolution, on Colfax Avenue, is city property leased to a nonprofit where unhoused people live. Ho said that's not a professionally run encampment, which is what he seeks.
The city needs a number of safe-ground sites in different locations, as the unhoused population is spread throughout the area, Ho said. It also needs real-time data about the number of open shelter beds. That data would play a key role in a citation-based method of getting people off the street and into treatment.
"We need more enforcement on the short-term level," Ho said. I'm really focusing in on the chronically homeless."
The city faces opposition to its take on the homelessness issue from both sides. The Sacramento Homeless Union sued the city and county for endangering houseless people by displacing them from shaded lodgings during a 2021 heat wave. In August, a federal judge stopped the city from clearing encampments after the union cited extreme heat. The city appealed an extension of that order in mid-August, which remains pending in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court-imposed prohibition against clearing encampments is no longer in effect.
Anthony Prince, an attorney for the homeless union, said in a Tuesday statement that it intends to file a motion to intervene in Ho's suit "As eviction moratoriums end and thousands more continue to lose their housing, the number of homeless persons will continue to grow, neither DA Ho's meritless lawsuit nor the city's policy of clearing encampments can or will solve the problem," Prince said.
Keywords: Fortuna Humboldt California US Ziosphere landlord property owner manager security deposit eviction unaffordable legal representation greed greed greed greed greed civil war
Source: https://www.courthousenews.com/sacramento-da-sues-city-over-homelessness/
Also: https://sfist.com/2023/09/20/sacramento-county-da-sues-city-of-sacramento-over-homeless-encampments/
Comment: Based on information and belief, many if not most owners of rental properties are lawyers.
And so the very first thing we would like to know is how many rental properties Thien Ho, Sacramento County DA, owns, himself - he, his wife, his parents and his children.
To determine this, however, we would need to examine the records of every tax assessor in every county in every state of the Union. There's no rule requiring property owners to only own rental properties in the county they reside in.
For reasons of discretion, many property owners do NOT buy rental properties in the county where they reside. It's much harder for an angry tenant who has just been evicted to seek the owner out if he lives a thousand miles away, in another state.
And so it is impossible to know for sure how many rental properties Thien Ho and his extended family actually own. When Thien Ho was employed by the State of California we believe he was required to fill out a form that lists the assets that he personally owns but because Thien Ho is a lawyer he surely knows how to transfer properties to other members of his family or conceal their existence with the aid of a family trust, etc.
Our government, in its wisdom, has kept this valuable information, that answers the question - who owns North America? - carefully separated in thousands of tiny little county-sized islands of information that are carefully insulated from one another and guarded by employees of each little county.
We think this is because these governments - whose legislatures are composed almost exclusively of lawyers - are helping to conceal the true state of affairs from the non-lawyer population of North America.
It would be trivial to establish state-centric databases of property ownership, and, in fact, they exist - but the databases are privately maintained by real estate vendors and legal firms, not the government, and their contents are inaccessible to you, the citizen.
Even if such a statewide registry were available by which interested parties could see how many rental and other properties specific lawyers, and other individual citizens, owned, it would still be useless when it came to identifying properties owned by real estate management corporations run by groups of lawyers.
People talk about Blackrock and Vanguard but what they don't realize is that there are thousands of corporations buying rental properties.
The owners of these rental property corporations are also, mostly, lawyers.
But if you were to look up the owner of the property, you would only see the name of a corporation. You would not see the owners of the corporation listed. This would require accessing another database.
This obfuscation is not an accident. It is deliberate. The goal is to conceal who owns, and therefore, controls, North America, from the peasants.
If we agree that most of the rental properties are owned by lawyers, then it follows that most of the evictions are due to lawyers - and other landlords - raising the rent.
Clearly these lawyers don't need more money - they already have so much money they are buying entire houses that they don't even need, each housing unit costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so the only explanation remaining is greed. These people have more than they need, but they want more ... more ... more ... no matter who else it hurts. They have destroyed our Commonwealth with their greed.
We think this is not a free market so much as it is premeditated treason by a group of people whom have aristocratic aspirations to rule over the rest of us. Something must be done. But what?
The California Legislature, in its wisdom, thinks it's cool to draft laws that actually refer to property owners as "land lords" - this, in a country that struggled to get rid of the aristocracy. See for yourself:
Voila! 241 distinct sections of our currently enforced California statutes refer to property owners as "landlords". That's an awful lot of coincidences.
From the above data, we infer that the California Legislature aspires to aristocracy - because they are the ones who write these statutes ... they all know what an "owner" and a "manager" are - but they seem to find these more neutral terms, distasteful.
The California Legislature are almost all lawyers.
And so we see, again and again, that the real source of this problem is lawyers. Lawyers, and greed.
It is entirely possible that Thien Ho is not greedy, does not own any houses directly or indirectly, and is just a loyal public servant doing his job - trying to make the city a safer place.
But he knows that everything we have said, above, is the stone cold truth.
If lawyers lowered their fees, tenants (and employees) would be able to afford legal representation. Lawyers are greedy. And most of them are dishonest, as well - crooked as a dog's hind leg, or worse.
If lawyers quit plowing all the extra cash they accumulate from unrelenting greed into the housing market, there would be more houses for sale and prices would go down.
If the lawyers employed by the California Legislature were to quit looking for properties for sale and focus upon removing bigoted language from our statutes as well as enforcing laws such as California's Ellis Act (we refer interested parties to CV2201861 for an example of just one such eviction, only months ago), we wouldn't be having these problems.
We think lawyers, and the government they have created that favors them, are the problem.
The drugs and the prostitution and the crime are only symptoms - people use drugs to cope with the pain of being homeless and the crimes occur as a result of our government having stripped people of their right to be secure in their own homes.
We think it is the government that is the problem.
We call for a California-centric Works Project Administration, or WPA, to employ the unemployed and put them to work repairing the infrastructure of our state and building emergency housing for the homeless.
Yes, you stupid mother fuckers, THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. Lead; follow; or get the fuck out of the way, you bungling assholes.
We did it a hundred years ago. Why can't we do it again?
We think the California and Federal governments have their heads shoved so far up their asses, that surgery may be required.
Food for thought.