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Things are so bad in so many American cities that our mainstream media outlets do not have the space or the time to cover it all. Even if they wanted to cover it all, which they clearly don’t want to do.
After all, the decline and fall of America’s great cities does not make Donald Trump look bad. And the only news that is fit to print these days is news that makes Trump look bad. As Democrat run cities collapse before our eyes, the media assure us that there’s nothing worth watching there. New York, Chicago, Portland, Seattle… down the drink, as they say. And the news media are trying to cover up the story, or, at the least, blame it on white Trump supporters.
Anyway, today’s story of decline and fall concerns Los Angeles. One has not heard very much about LA, but the Daily Mail-- what would we do without the Daily Mail, as Lizzie Crocker once opined-- has the story, in some considerable detail.
It opens with a vision of God’s Gym. You remember Gold’s Gym-- or maybe not. It’s the place where a young Austrian immigrant, by name of Arnold Schwarznegger got his start in body building and muscle bulking.
How does the Venice Beach Gold’s Gym look today?
Yet today Gold's sits amid post-apocalyptic scenes which have consumed much of LA, turning the City of Dreams into an urban nightmare from which people are fleeing in droves.
A makeshift tent city made up of flapping tarpaulins and cardboard boxes surrounds the gym on all sides.
Junkies and the homeless, many of whom are clearly mentally ill, walk the palm-lined streets like zombies – all just three blocks from multi-million-dollar homes overlooking the Pacific.
Stolen bicycles are piled high on pavements littered with broken syringes.
It’s not just Venice Beach.
TV bulletins are filled with horror stories from across the city; of women being attacked during their morning jog or residents returning home to find strangers defecating in their front gardens.
Today, Los Angeles is a city on the brink. 'For Sale' signs are seemingly dotted on every suburban street as the middle classes, particularly those with families, flee for the safer suburbs, with many choosing to leave LA altogether.
British-born Danny O'Brien runs Watford Moving & Storage. 'There is a mass exodus from Hollywood,' he says.
As is happening in New York City, people are moving out. Again, reporters have wisely checked with moving companies to get the true measure of the exodus.
And a lot of it is to do with politics.' His business is booming. 'August has already set records and we are only halfway through the month,' he tells me.
'People are getting out in droves. Last week I moved a prominent person in the music industry from a $6.5 million [£5 million] mansion above Sunset Boulevard to Nashville.'
Note well, the man who runs the moving company is planning to move out of Los Angeles, to Tennessee:
O'Brien, 58, who moved to LA from London 34 years ago, is also planning to move to Tennessee.
He understands clearly that leftist politics have destroyed the city.
'Liberal politics has destroyed this city,' he says. 'The homeless encampments are legal and there's nothing the police can do. White, affluent middle-class folk are getting out. People don't feel safe any more.'
With movie studios still shuttered because of the coronavirus pandemic and businesses only just starting to remove the wooden boards put up after city-wide rioting following the death of George Floyd while being arrested by three white officers in Minneapolis, LA is now in the grip of white flight.
Even Lou Ferrigno, actor and bodybuilder, picked up and moved out of Los Angeles:
But Ferrigno, for all his impeccable connections, has become fed up with what he describes as the 'dramatic decline' in LA. He and wife Carla recently sold their £3 million home in Santa Monica and moved into a 7,146 sq ft mansion two hours north of LA.
Carla says: 'One morning around 7am I opened the curtains in our beautiful Santa Monica home and looking up at me from our driveway were three gang members with tattoos on their faces sitting on our retaining wall. They were cat-calling me and being vulgar. I motioned I was going to call the police and they just laughed, flicking their tongues at me and showing me their guns.'
Her husband added: 'We put the house up for sale after 40 wonderful years and moved north. We feel lucky to have made it out. Now we are in a wonderful place and very happy.'
He feels lucky to have made it out? Seriously, that is not a good omen.
But, it had been going on before the pandemic hit.
The virus only made matters worse. There are homeless encampments in some of the most instantly recognisable tourist traps.
Stretches of Hollywood Boulevard – embedded with glittering stars representing those who achieved their dream of fame and fortune – resemble a Third World shanty town rather than the heart of America's second-largest city.
Outside the Chinese Theatre where Marilyn Monroe and other screen icons are immortalised by their handprints in concrete, the Michael Jackson and Superman lookalikes who usually pose with tourists have been replaced by vagrants begging for change.
The city is fast becoming unlivable. But, at least it’s totally woke and is opposed to racism:
Meanwhile, the visitors snap photos of a large Black Lives Matter logo painted down the middle of the street.
Car parks beside the beach in Santa Monica – a popular tourist destination for Britons – are filled with bashed-up motorhomes, each housing several people.
The authorities have even put portable toilets on the streets to try to stop the homeless relieving themselves on private property.
And also:
The Westwood area of LA, home to some of the most upmarket blocks of flats in the city, has been renamed 'West Hood' by locals appalled by rising crime.
Veteran publicist Ed Lozzi says: 'The city was changing before coronavirus brought us to our knees. The homeless problem has been escalating for years, exacerbated by weak politicians making bad decisions.
'Hollywood has always been the wokest of the woke, so politicians have done nothing to stop people sleeping on the streets. It's not illegal and the weather's nice, so they keep coming.
'There is insufficient housing, inadequate mental health care. Add in Covid and it's a perfect storm.
'When I first arrived in LA 40 years ago, the town smelled of orange blossoms. Now the streets stink of urine. There is a beautiful park in Westwood but you can't go there because there are people slumped on the ground and you step on a carpet of needles.
'White flight is real. The elites and middle classes are leaving. People are taking losses on the sales of their homes to get out.'
Even Elon Musk has left town.
The most recent high-profile name to quit Hollywood is Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, a darling of the showbusiness crowd. Actor Robert Downey Jr has said it was Musk who inspired his portrayal of Tony Stark, the eccentric billionaire inventor in the Iron Man movies.
Musk has recently sold his compound of four homes in Bel Air for a combined total of $62 million (£47 million) and is said to be considering a move to Texas, where he is building Tesla's $1 billion new factory.
'When the real-life Iron Man moves out of Hollywood, you know it's all over,' says a source at one of the major studios.
If you want to look to the bright side, you can measure the fact that Jeff Bezos just bought some more property in Beverly Hills. Then again, he has private security.
5 comments:
Jeff Bezos moves to this mess. Does he plan to clean it up by free shipping all of the problems somplace, on his dime? Or however much it costs; he can afford it. Or should we start looking for Amazon to fail, as Bezos has lost his mind?
Then again, as you mention in the Seattle post, he has properties in Washington, D. C. and NYC, so while his business sense may be excellent, his vision of living in a tropical paradise is far off the mark.
The hollowing out of leftist shithole cities is a good thing in itself. But the cancer now moves freely through the nation to carry the contagion and alter demographics of conservative states like Texas. Red states must do everything to red pill blue state refugees. They must be converted or they will tip the balance irrevocably.
Those Beverly Hills mansions were not for Jeff, they were for his new Mistress. She expresses wish to be closer to her football player friends in LA. She says they are family, and they help her heal during this crisis. Jeff was eager to make alive girl happy. She dresses him now.
I left LA many years ago for all the reasons listed. Never understood why people failed to perceive the chaos coming and demographic problems (but liberals lack the imagination to understand demographics as a problem, and leftists understand the problem and use it to further their goals). If you left little Hermosa enclave, it became very clear. But they are all hypnotized by weather. Venice was bum city then, with nothing to offer. Considered taking over Bell and building a secure fortress city in middle of South LA, but venal local city officials ruined the plan over peanuts.
The double-cross of a Dem gov and a Dem mayor is killing cities and states.
But, they're still in California.
I expect a cycle to occur, wherein those who have sucked the cities dry using their connections to the .gov, will buy up properties on the cheap, and then call for law and order to be re-established, probably at federal expense. They will be best able to afford the properties and will know when the turnaround will come. Real estate value is all "location..." these properties will be very valuable again someday.
The wealthy, organized and connected (in fascist ways to the ruling leftists) are usually very effective at getting exactly the policies they want. That the cities are turning to shitholes is like the life cycle of a virus - the cell dies, then viral particles are spread throughout the host (metastasis)
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