Hello and welcome to this episode of Kennedy Saves the World.

Maybe where you live.

Your city used to be incredible, livable, vibrant, fun, cool, great stores, interesting restaurants, a magnet for

creative, hardworking people, and now the once cool parts of the city have been taken over

by the homeless. I mean, that's certainly what has happened in Los Angeles. In fact,

there was a while in the early aughts when downtown L.A.

was the mecca for artists and gay couples and designers and restaurateurs.

And they were going to make downtown L.A.

Incredible, extraordinary, filled with loft spaces and gyms and all sorts stuff.

And then homelessness just encroached on that part of the city.

It spread from Skid Row to essentially all of downtown L.A., making it really uninhabitable.

A good friend of mine who was an artist in downtown L.A. and had a production

facility and a showroom had to close both of those because people couldn't get to her showroom

because they would literally have to step over parts of homeless encampments. And every time they

would call LAPD, they wouldn't do anything.

It got incredibly frustrating.

So she had to leave and relocate to a totally different part of California where people kind of

fight to keep their city safe and livable, which is really sort of the baseline.

I mean, that's how most cities should operate.

But somehow, Los Angeles, L.A. County, and really all of California, it's become okay to let homelessness just fester.

And it's not cruel to want to move people off the streets. It's cruel to let people just malinger there for years and years and not force them into treatment, not force them off the streets, just let them slowly wither and die in massive encampments where women are sexually assaulted

and no one is really free to come and go as they should be able to in any part of any great

...