Katie Porter says its a lack of housing, not addiction or mental illness that leads to homelessness

I'm Adam Devine, Chief Fundraiser for Children's Miracle Network. We'll fund it up. It'd better be fun! Have you ever wondered how our network actually works? Well, wonder, no more! With the support of partnering businesses and individual donors, we help raise crucial funds for 170 children's hospitals across the United States and Canada. Hospitals that provide life-changing care for all kids. Visit us online at cmm.org And very happy Wednesday to you at 12.07 in the west, eats the John Philip show. Mr. Randy Wiggs and Culver City. John Gobernatorial candidate former congresswoman Katie Porter is trying to find a new approach for her campaign. The cooking videos didn't pan out, so how about some stand-up comedy? Some people said to me, what's your slogan for this campaign? It's something like, I don't want my kid to live on my couch. I want... Oh my. You know, she uses her kids as props more than she uses the whiteboard these days. Oh! Who knew she was going to try to portray herself as a modern-day domestic goddess? Some people said to me, what's your slogan for this campaign? It's something like, I don't want my kid to live on my couch. That was of course the intro to the video put out on our YouTube page today why the answer to homelessness is not treating addiction, it's housing. Oh, you've got to be kidding me. You want to hear it? Let's hear it. Some people said to me, what's your slogan for this campaign? It's something like, I don't want my kid to live on my couch. I want to make sure that every Californian can have their own home, can have their own apartment, can start a family. That is how we're going to grow ultimately also the tax base for the state and the revenue base for the state. Oh, come on! You're driving the billionaires out of the state and you think you're going to make up for it with the Wait, please! The state, so that's incredibly important. The last piece on housing is about homelessness. Homelessness is not primarily about addiction or about mental health. Sure about that? Oh my goodness. This woman is so far out to lunch, well, maybe that wasn't the right analogy to use, but this woman is not in touch with reality. No! The last piece on housing is about homelessness. Homelessness is not primarily about addiction or about mental health. Have you been to Skid Row? Okay. So if the high cost of housing is causing people to live on the streets, then what's the deal with the Lincoln Douglass-style debate with the lamp post? Sorry for the noise I'm kind of curious. The last piece on housing is about homelessness. Homelessness is not primarily about addiction or about mental health. We don't have more people with mental health problems here than we do in other states, but we do have- No, we do. We definitely do. In fact, the drug addicted know to come to California because this is where all the drugs are and we don't put people in prison for them. And I have a little secret for Katie. She doesn't think we have any more crazy people in the rest of the states in the union. We'll get this Katie. The people here are so crazy. They elected you. Then we do in other states. What we do have here is much more expensive housing. That's all it is. Everyone is in defense and all, but really in California, the apartments are so expensive that a meth head can't afford them. In West Virginia, they can afford a trailer. This is about the most defensive thing that's ever come out of this woman's mouth. That is- And I say that because she doesn't even pay for her house. We do. We're winner-witter chicken dinner. She is in subsidized teacher housing because she's a professor at UC Irvine. Even though she was not a professor at UC Irvine for the six years she was in Congress when she was still living in that housing. Okay. Speaking as one of the owners of her home, what do we have to do to a victor? I want to know because if I am the Mr. Furley to her jack tripper, at some point the bill comes due and I don't know what we have to do. I don't know if we got to go to the county. I don't know if we have to put a notice on her door. I don't know if we have to put a boot on her shopping cart. But it's time for her to go. Is she even teaching at that school anymore? I don't think so. She's currently running for governor. Well, she was in Congress for a while and then she ran for US Senate and now she's running for governor all while living in a house that we own. And the chronic street homelessness, the people you see who are unsheltered are the tip of a much larger iceberg of people who are doubling up, who are housing insecure, who are living in motels, or are getting evicted every couple months. We are not going to be able to solve our homelessness challenges until we stop people from becoming homeless in the first place. That doesn't work. You know what this is? This is projection because wasn't it just last week that she was bragging about all the bad checks she writes? Yes, in her cooking video. Sorry for the noise. I'm kind of carrots. Okay, so she's squatting in a house that we own. She's writing bad checks right and left. And now she's looking for the governor's mansion, which I might add is more public housing. You know, an auto was done of LA County's measure age. And one of the things that they could not find any tangible results for was what she's advocating for right now. Emergency rental assistance, rapid rehousing, the quote unquote, preventing people from falling into homelessness. It has no results. No, here's what happens when people can't afford to live where they live. They downsize. You go from a single family home to a condo. You go from a condo to an apartment. You go from an apartment that you have to yourself to sharing it with other people. And if you can't afford that, that's when you move to a place that's cheaper. You move to a different part of the state. You move to a different state. Maybe you take on a second job. That's how people who aren't schizophrenic handle things. If you're schizophrenic or you're you've fried your brains on drugs, then the deductive reasoning takes a hit. And some of the choices they make are let's just say poor. But for her to act like that doesn't happen, and it's just you go from having a single family home in a suburb to living on the street and shooting up with math is just not accurate. That is a fantasy in her head. And I really don't want to get involved in what kind of fantasy's exist in that head. But this one is definitely perverse. Little D. Because once you spend time on the street, if you didn't have a mental health issue or a substance use problem, when you wound up being in shelter, the chances through trauma, through assault, through not getting medical care that you develop one are very, very high. See, this is the same nonsense that Karen Bass tries to sell in Los Angeles. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They weren't mentally ill or addicted to drugs before they became homeless. They got on drugs because they were homeless because you need meth to stay on the streets. Otherwise, and I don't want to be this crass, but this is what they say. You need to stay, you need to take meth when you're on the streets. Otherwise, you're going to get raped at night. What she's saying is factually untrue. And we all know it. Here's how it works. And you've seen this with people who live in your neighborhood. You've seen this with people who you might be related to, who you may have gone to school with, who have ended up living on the streets. What happens is they have bad habits, whether it's drugs, whether it's alcohol, whether it's mental illness. I guess that's not a bad habit, but that's a problem certainly that presents itself from time to time. The more severe the case, the worse the problem is. And what happens is, they become unemployable. You cannot hire someone who's addicted to the math. You can't hire someone who is severely schizophrenic. They're unemployable. If you can manage your mental illness or manage your drug addiction, you're marginally employable. But if it's so bad that it touches everything that you do, you are entirely unemployable. So, okay, you have no job. You may have a spouse. You may have children. You may have parents. You may have aunts and uncles, siblings. Whatever, all of us have a social network. All of us have one. Even people who are anti-social, even people with no children, no siblings, there are people in our social network that we have access to. All of us. Unless you're living on a deserted island or a different planet, we all have access to other people. What happens is, your demons, your problems not only make you unemployable, but they make it so that you have alienated everyone in your social network. No one will allow you to sleep in a spare bedroom. No one will allow you to sleep on the couch. No one will let you sleep or live in their second home. Everyone in your social network has been alienated by you due to your behavior. And ultimately, these people get to a point to where no one will help them. And people choose not to help them. Even though Americans are very generous, Americans are willing to write checks, to worthy causes. They're willing to roll up their sleeves to borrow a phrase from Rob Bonta, and help people move if you need help moving somewhere or you need help fixing something. Whatever, people are very charitable when it comes to those sorts of things. People will let you sleep on their couch, live in their guest rooms, whatever. Unless they think that you're a threat to them. If they think that you're a threat to them, they're not going to bring crazy into their house. If you have little kids in your house, do you want them living under the same roof as a schizophrenic? If you have an elderly parent living with you, do you want that elderly parent living under the same roof as someone who's doing math? And the answer is no. You can't bring crazy into your life because crazy brings in more crazy. And at some point, you're going to go crazy if that's how you have to live. So even though you may want to help someone, you know you just can't do it. You can't do it. Despite everything that we've been taught from our religious leaders and our parents and our teachers about how it's wonderful to help people when they're in need, you at some point have to say no because it's just not safe for you physically. It's not safe for your mentally. It's not safe for you financially, whatever. And then when the problem children have exhausted everyone in their social network, that's when they go live in the encampments. That's when they decide, okay, it's ice cream for breakfast. I'm just going to live where all the drugs are. I don't have a house. I don't have anyone who's willing to allow me to live with them. I don't have any obligations living in an encampment. I'm not required to make my bed every day. I'm not required to brush my teeth. I'm not required to go to the bathroom in the toilet. I don't have to do anything that society usually requires me to do. And they go feral. And at a certain point, if drugs are your problem, especially if you're dabbling in fentanyl, you fry your brains and there's no bringing you back. To take a person like that and to say they're there because of the high cost of housing or the high cost of living or because times are tough, the plant closes down. You are purposely lying to yourself. And it's one thing if you're just a badgie college professor at UC Irvine to lie to yourself and lie to your students. Who cares? People lie to themselves all the time. I lie to myself on a regular basis. That's how we get through life. But to be governor and to buy into the lie and to have public policy reflected by this lie that you bought into, that I have a problem with because that's what we've been doing. And that's why this just gets worse and that's why our state looks like a toilet and that's why we're going bankrupt and that's why these people who are in charge have failed us every step of the way. And this woman likes to pretend like she's the smart one. I'm just a nerdy mom who's a college professor at UC Irvine and I'm just trying to do what's best by my kid. I don't want my kid sleeping on my couch. No, you're part of the problem, lady. So we are spending a lot on homelessness and I know people feel like we're spending are we making progress? We are not. Nope, not even close. We are helping people get off the street into housing, but somebody else is showing up the very next day. This is the other BS they tell you. No, no, no, we have housed so many people, but so many new people are falling into homelessness every single day. Yet every time you see a story about one of these people that's finally getting into a shelter, they've been on the streets for 15, 20 years. Here is what I would like to know. If she really truly believes that the problem is housing, I want to find someone on the streets who skits a friend I can addicted to meth and I want them to move into her house. I want them to sleep under her roof and I want her to invite that person into her house with her children there a sleep at night and her there without a husband asleep at night. If she really buys into that, then that should be no problem. John says they're dangerous and that would be a really bad idea. She think time wrong. Well, prove me wrong. So we have got to focus on homelessness prevention. This means things like rapid rehousing, it means interim housing. So if someone loses their house, they are never ever going to spend the night on the street. They're going to go to an interim housing community that moves them back into stable housing as quickly as possible. So we have to focus more on that prevention piece, but the big cure to homelessness is absolutely making housing cost less and having more different kinds of housing available. No, it's not. Sometimes it takes a lot of education to be that dumb. That was Katie Porter's little campaign video she put out today on the real drivers of homelessness. If you went away in on this, give us a call at 800-222-5222, 1-800-222-5222. All of us know someone, somewhere in our circle. Someone we've worked with, someone we have gone to school with, someone we used to live next to, someone we're related to, someone in your network is homeless. Are they homeless because of the high cost of living in California? Or are they homeless because they're crazy or addicted to something? I say they're crazy or addicted to something. She thinks they're on the streets because of the high cost of housing. You live here, you know these people. What say you at 800-222-5222? What 800- Hi, I'm Adam Devine, Chief Fundraiser for Children's Miracle Network. No, no, no, no, I said more fun! When I was a kid at Children's Miracle Network Hospital helped me get back on my feet, literally. So trust me when I say that these places are just hospitals. They are hoop factories. Children's Miracle Network is hospitals, programs, partners, and donors like you. Join us in making big change for all kids. Visit us online at cmn.org. 2-222 is the telephone number 1-800-222-5222. If you'd like to email the show, you can do so. Johnny, don't like show at gmail.com. That's Johnny, don't like show at gmail.com. And Randy, you're monitoring the mail bag. Tom writes in it. Johnny, don't like show at gmail.com on how to get Katie Porter evicted from her state housing at UC Irvine. Move a bunch of crazy homeless drug addicts into our residents. Well, they're there because of the high cost of living. So I'm sure everything should work out perfectly. All right, 800-222-5222 is telephone number. Are people living on the streets in California because of the high cost of living? Or do they have issues with addiction and mental illness? I say it's addiction and mental illness. Katie Porter thinks I'm wrong. What say you? 800-222-5222-800-222-5222 is the telephone number 1-800-222-5222. They fixed California hour coming up after the news at one. Right now, we're taking your calls on some sound that we just played you from Google editorial candidate Katie Porter who says that people are homeless, not because they're addicted to something or crazy, but because of the high cost of living in California. I think she's dead wrong. What say you at 800-222-5222? Let's begin with Pete in Fountain Valley. And Pete, I went to Ethan Allen Elementary School in Fountain Valley way back when. Hey, John. Hey, John. Hi there. Yeah, I knew it might very close to me. Two beautiful women who had beautiful homes, wonderful careers, wonderful families, everyone around them loved them, and they lost everything eventually to their addictions, and they lost their children, they lost their careers. No one could live with them. They lived on the street, and they died 20 or 30 years before their time due to their addictions. Yeah, I think that that is a common story. I mean, in my own personal life, I know of at least one person who became homeless, and this is going back to the 1980s, and it's actually a very tragic story. I was growing up in Garden Grove, town very close to where you are right now. And one of my peers at the time had leukemia. It was childhood leukemia, and it was a very severe case of it, and the kid ended up going into chalk, children's hospital, Orange County, and never came out. And that kid was this guy's life, and after the kid died, the drinking started, and the drinking got worse and worse and worse, and the guy just lost the will to live. And he ended up losing his marriage, he ended up losing his job, he ended up losing his house, and he ended up living on the streets as what we call back then, and why no? Someone who was just always having his nose in the bottle of a bottle of booze. And you couldn't help him, because his brain just broke when that kid died. And that was the end of him. And it wasn't because his house cost too much, and Orange County, even back then, was a very expensive place to live. It wasn't because his situation at work was bad. Mentally, he fell apart, and then when he fell apart mentally, the addiction to the alcohol got worse and worse, and then you end up with a broken person that you can't fix. Yeah, and the Katie Porter's point, that if, let's say you cut Southern California housing in half, then she thinks someone who lives in a box or under a lean two could afford even half of what it cost to live here? Well, if you could only afford half of what it cost to live at Irvine, it's called Barstow. It's called needles. There are places in California, you can't afford it. Very affordable. Yeah, how are you supposed to make things more affordable for someone who can't afford to make a payment or doesn't really care? Yeah, you can't do everything for them. Thank you for the call, sir. Let's go to Jim in my hometown of Garden Grove. Jim, hello. How you doing there, guy? Good. Yeah, I've been living in Garden Grove most of my life, half my life, I grew in Orange County. I mean, in LA County and Belflower and Downey for most of my time. But anyways, my brother is as homeless and apparently he cures to have that kind of life. He makes his way through life doing jobs and stuff, but at least he's not in jail. He's not in any trouble, but I've seen these other people. I work for a company that does travels all over the United States and stuff. And whenever time I go down to LA, it's like a giant toilet. I mean, I go down there where all these homeless people at LA County will not do a damn thing about this problem. They already wrote the finger, but Garden, Orange County, they'll take care of it. That's the big difference. And then on top of that, these politicians are never going to be accounted for because they're not reliable for what they say and do. And that's the major problem right now. These politicians, they can't hold a candle to some of the good ones that mean something. What you just described is accurate. When I go work out of the office, I see trash everywhere. I see homeless encampments on the street. I see people who are living on the streets all over the place. I see graffiti. I see blight. I was in Huntington Beach this weekend. And I didn't see any trash on the ground at all. I didn't see any homeless people living on the beach or in the parking lots next to the beach. They were raking the sand in the morning for heaven sakes to make it look perfect. It is so different the moment you cross that county line in Orange County from Los Angeles, where it's just apparent to you everywhere you turn. Okay, people care here. And it just seems like when you're in Los Angeles, it's a dead place where people have just given up and just accepted that this is just the way it is. The politicians in LA are not accountable for what they do. They are so corrupt. It's beyond. They're like a bunch of gangsters back in Chicago. They don't give a damn about nobody but their own self and lying in their own pockets. My wife's chicken here from Russia. And let me tell you something. Russia is very strict on what they do. And they don't tolerate this kind of stuff. Now, if you start talking against the military and this and the other, they'll pull your benefits away from you. No question about that. But LA County is a separate state in itself. And you cannot blame Orange County for being what it is because the people here in Orange County want to live a decent life. All right. Thank you for the call, sir. Let's go to James and El Segundo. James, hello. Hello. Thanks for taking my call. Appreciate it. Back to what the guy just said. The nicest place in Los Angeles is the South Bay. There is no flight here. And if it is, they will drag you out of here. That said, are you there, sir? I'm here. Okay. I want to get back to what we're talking about about the KD Porter issue. I grew up in El Segundo and the richest family in town, they own multiple houses here. And their son, which is one of the greatest surfers in the South Bay, is now living in a tent outside the Patega resort down in wherever it is. And that meth got to him. He has no teeth anymore. His father offered to buy him new teeth. And he said no because he's still messed up. And the father will not give him any significant amount of money because he will kill him with that money. He will kill himself with that money. Are you still there, sir? I'm here. And what you just described is exactly what I see with my own eyes, where you have a person who had every advantage on planet earth and the addiction and the demons that come with it just got the best of them. But his problem wasn't the cost of living. His problem was the addiction. The father gave him everything. Every one of us, Elves had the, every one of us had to have a part-time job in high school. And after the father gave him everything on the silver platter, tarves, money, everything, surfboards. So he never had to work. And the addiction overcame him. All right. Thank you for. Go ahead. There is no, there's no chance that he's going to get, if you give him free housing, it ain't going to work. Yeah. That's not his problem. The housing is not the problem. His problem is the addiction. Thank you for the call. Let's go to Tom and Campbell. Tom, hello. Hello. Thank you for taking my call. Well, two points. First of all, if you don't have a mental problem, you can work. And if you can work, even though if you live with a few of of roommates, it's not a perfect condition, but you can be housed. Now, on the other hand, she is describing there is that guess who and we all know who is responsible for high cost of living. So that answers her question. But before I think I have a client, I'm in financial world. I have a client who had a very rough divorce. And due to that, she's mentally very stressed. She's under continuous operation in her mind that somebody's following her that this and that, and nobody wants to take her as an aunt in any of the rental units. She has over half a million dollars, but she lives in her car. So it's definitely the mental condition. It's not the financial one. All right. Thank you for the call, Sarah. Let's go to Jerry in Sonoma. Jerry, welcome. Hey, good afternoon. So I don't know. Maybe it's different and I will see that it is up here in Sonoma County. But we have, there's a lot more than either or it's not either, either you're, you know, you can't afford to house or you keep your, your on drugs. We have the working homeless. We have people that do not want a home. They do not want a, hey, rent. They don't want to have any of that. So it doesn't matter what you give them. They don't want it. They want to live in their tent, on the street for whatever reasons so they can do what they want. We get people that go into homeless shelters and get kicked out because they refuse to follow the rules. Because they don't want to live with anybody else's rules. And part of that is paying a mortgage or paying rent. I spent a lot of time in Hawaii. And now they just, they, they, they will, I'm not saying, encourage homelessness, but they sure don't discourage it. And the more we build to house the homeless, the more homeless we will have to house. And there's also people that are literally just, they need help. And I'm not talking, you know, mental health. They need physical help to get back on their feet. And then they're, they're set and they're on their way. So there's a lot more than just, you know, too much or, you know, too much drugs or too much rent. It's a lot more, a lot more involved with that. And K. Porter does know what the hell she's talking about. She hasn't been part of that environment to know what's going on. So she's not going to know what it's going to take to fix it. So I mean, I think there's a lot of truth in my, and I'll tell you, if you're going to be a normal productive tax paying part of society, there's a lot of administrative aspects to life. You have to pay your taxes. You have to get your real ID. You have to make sure that you get permits for certain things that you want to do. You have to get licenses if you want to be employed in a certain profession. There's a lot of paperwork to life. And I went to school for political science. I understand I went to school with a lot of people who turned out to be bureaucrats. And my mind just kind of works that way. But there are people who, as you said correctly, they just don't want to participate in any of that. The old days, I guess you'd call them a free spirit or a hippie or whatever. But these people are some new spin on that where they just don't want to follow any of those rules. They want to opt out all of that. And if you live in the encampments, if you live on the streets, you don't need a real ID. You're never going to the airport. You don't need to fill out a ballot and vote. The Democratic Party will do that for you. You don't need to do any of that stuff. And I think that that certainly does represent a portion of them. Now, what you also said about them being a chunk of them that you can help, I also think that that's true. And in any sane world, that's where your dollars would be directed. Forget about the people whose brains are fried. Forget about the people who want to be homeless. Forget about the people who are so severely schizophrenic that we just don't have the medical treatment to make them functioning human beings again. If someone gets sick and they're living on the streets because they got sick or something along those lines, the story I told earlier, the kid that gets leukemia and the parent just has a lot of psychological problems because of it, you could help those people. There's something that you can do for them. But if you put the people who have fried their brains at the head of the line, and then you lie to yourself as to why they're living on the streets, you're never going to solve the problem and you're never going to put a dead in it. And it's going to cost you a fortune. Thank you for the call, sir. 800-222-5222 is telephone number 1-800-222-5222. I'm Adam Devine, Chief Fundraiser for Children's Miracle Network. We'll fund it up. It'd better be fun! Have you ever wondered how our network actually works? Oh, wonder, no more! With the support of partnering businesses and individual donors, we help raise crucial funds for 170 children's hospitals across the United States and Canada. Hospitals that provide life-changing care for all kids. Visit us online at cmm.org. Let's go to Helen in Napa. Helen, hello. Hello. Hi. I want to weigh in on this. When observation I've seen is you rarely have ever seen homeless Latinos. And I think part of that is because they have a very firm family structure and their work ethic for the most part is very high. They're not given the opportunity to buy drugs, smoke drugs, or leave the family to do these kind of activities. So that's just a minor. Otherwise, I do believe it's a mostly drug-related problem, multi-layered, but people who get stoned a lot, they kind of check out a society. And I think that's not always available to some people to buy the drugs and just hang out and do nothing. All right, thank you for the call. Let's go to Joe in Santa Monica. Joe, welcome. Hi, John. Thank you. That's three things really quick. I remember when Dr. Drew was on the radio, he described getting somebody off the street that was totally gone with drugs. And they cleaned the guy up. And the guy, I think I said this before, the guy said, why did he take so long? I mean, I was so overjoyed to have his mind back and to be able to be, you know, live in a structured society and have some structure in his life. So that's you're darn right about the drug problem. Two, there must be a statistic out there. I get the feeling that at least half of the people are more are from out-of-state. If I was a, if I had a problem with drugs or you kind of beautiful California, the weather's great. And you get needles, you get out, you could, if you want to be an addict and live off the street, the government provides all this great stuff for you. So it's like a magnet for bringing in people that want to be homeless. I'll leave it there. Thanks, John. Well, thank you. And the county in Los Angeles is passing out all the drug paraphernalia that you need to do the drugs. We know that the city and the state have a very permissive attitude about drug use. So the cops know that they're supposed to look the other way. You're right. We have become a tourist destination for drug addicts. All right. Let's go to Frank and Ontario. Frank, hello. Yes, I do. And I got an observation or actually an idea that all the money they spend for homeless, want to build a, like a campsite or a location that they can actually do a rehab and ship all the sounds terrible, but take out the homeless over there and have them go through the cycles and spend the money there. And then that way the city can rebuild itself and then add taxes and funds for the city to gain the self back. Well, part of the problem is that money that's allocated for the homeless or allocated for affordable housing, those sorts of things, goes to developers. Developers are very politically connected and they like the fact that the money comes from the government to them to build housing for these people. If suddenly you put them all out in tents in the desert, then the money doesn't find its way to the developers and the developers have a serious problem with that. So I don't see that happening anytime soon.