To the Honorable Mayor Garcetti, and the Honorable Councilman Mike Bonin,
During our COVID-19 health crisis, you recently proposed bussing homeless people into the Pacific Palisades Recreation Center. While we applaud your commitment to serving the public, our family, friends and fellow homeowners strongly object to your current plan. Please house elsewhere.
Our Recreation Center includes a park, and a children’s playground. Adjacent are medical offices, grocery stores, and an elementary school. The cleanliness and safety of this family-friendly area must be preserved. Thanks to efforts by our local PPTFH, the homeless population in the Palisades has remained virtually zero. We therefore assume you are planning to import new homeless from elsewhere in Council District 11.
Starting in 2016, taxpayers began sacrificing $1.2 Billion to address the city’s homeless. Yet four years later, we still lack adequate infrastructure. Neither the Jones nor Boise decisions prevent LAPD from dismantling illegal homeless encampments during the daytime. Yet for years, LAPD has stood down on enforcement, perhaps at your direction. By coddling the homeless, the Councilman has allowed accumulation in his district, growing the same health hazards and filth we see in Skid Row. Via recent legal settlements, homeless appear unmovable, and would not likely be returned to their pre-COVID origins after their residence at our Rec Center.
Through Proposition 47, minor crimes are effectively no longer enforced and/or prosecuted. If permitted into the Palisades, the new homeless will likely roam, often intoxicated, committing crime and theft in an area sparsely covered by the LAPD. As disastrously seen elsewhere in CD11, and all over Los Angeles, criminal blight would continue, but now in our neighborhood as well.
We in Pacific Palisades should not be asked to integrate your new homeless as if they are safe neighbors. We already know they are not.
Thank you for your understanding, and for your continued service to the City.
Very respectfully,
Matthew Reiser
Father, Husband, Homeowner, Business owner, CD11 constituent, and Los Angeles native
