I want to talk about homelessness and the difference between immediate causes versus long term causes. And there's a Fresno Bee story about homelessness in the valley. Homeless population in Fresno in Madera up three percent, why that number will likely grow.
It's written by Thaddeus Miller.
Now the main thrust of the story, so that the title is up three percent. You get into the story, it says the number of people living unsheltered in the region has grown by ten percent over the last count. The Fresno Madera Continuum of Care said this week the entire homeless population, which includes those in shelters, rose by three percent. Okay, so our unsheltered numbers grow by ten percent.
But the entire homeless population, so that includes people who are in fact have some shelter at least for the moment, but they're living in they're living in homeless shelters, rose by three percent from the last count in twenty twenty three. Officially, there were four hundred ninety three homeless people as of January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, in the last count
in the Fresno and Madera tally. A full report on this year's tally will be released after the numbers are reported to the US Department of Housing in Urban Development in June. So, no matter how you slice it, it seems as though the number of homeless people is increasing in Fresno and Madera. And yet the story Now, there's a part of me that's a little skeptical about this. I'm not sure how reliable these stats are, like.
That they give.
You know, the number they give is four four hundred and ninety three, not four four hundred and ninety two. We're counting skinny Pete, but we're not counting you know, Bob who's uh, you know, living on his sister's.
Couch or something. You know.
I I feel like it's really hard to actually survey the area and actually find out exactly how many homeless people there are.
It's a moving target.
The whole nature of homelessness is that you're a little bit off the grid. You're you're not residing somewhere, you don't have a mailbox to respond to a survey of are you homeless? So it seems like this is a moving target. However, to whatever extent they have metrics, the metrics are not looking good, they're all pointing in the direction of more homelessness. Well, then the story takes a turn.
It takes a turn towards criticizing the Trump administration. So the news of a growing homeless population Thttius Miller writes in Fresno in Madera Counties comes as the Fresno Housing Authority raised concerns about proposed federal cuts that could affect housing security for many families. Then it goes on to sort of have the normal Fresno be complaint about the no camping ordinance. Fresno b hates the no camping ordinance.
On top of that, the city of Fresno has taken a more aggressive stance on dealing with homelessness, including making arrests of the unhouse if they decline.
To accept help. Blah blah, blah blah blah.
Officials said the growing number is difficult to pin down anyone factor, with the lack of affordable housing, low incomes, mental health challenges, and substance abuse disorders all contributing to the rise of the same old story. All right, So here's the turn. The federal budget proposed earlier this month
showed significant cuts to programs related to homelessness. After twenty twenty five, the Fresno Housing Authority will no longer receive funding to support two hundred and sixty Fresno families with Federal Emergency housing vouchers, a program that started in twenty twenty one. Officials from the Fresno Housing ASTHA already said that said that the program was originally intended to continue through twenty thirty and was funded by the American Rescue
Plan Act of twenty twenty one. Slashing those five years would amount to a fifteen million dollar cut, according to the authority. All right, now, this is purely the Fresno Bee relaying what the Fresno Housing Authority is complaining about about the Trump budget. That the Trump budget is cutting this. Now, this would be a little bit of surprise to me. The Trump budget, the Reconciliation Bill, the one big Beautiful Bill, as they call it, is.
A spending nightmare.
I mean it's it's yet another example of Republicans talking a big game about fiscal responsibility and spending when they are out of power, and then as soon as they get into power, they don't do anything to control spending. However, so I guess I'm a little surprised that there's going to be these massive cut in homelessness. Now, this is where I get into the differences between immediate problems versus root problems. The Fresno Bee wants to take a little
potshot at Donald Trump, the Trump administration, Trump's budget. So they see, oh, this federal program is getting cut. This federal program provides funding for this reresne housing authority. It's going to endanger the ability of the PRESNOE Housing Authority to provide housing to some of these they say, families.
Not sure what that means. Does that mean households?
Does that meaning seemingly I don't know, does that mean single people at homeless people like you don't see too many homeless families out on the street.
I don't know.
That strikes me as a little odd that that way of expressing it. And therefore it's Trump's fault because we're cutting funding for homelessness. Let's ignore the fact that the state of California has spent billions and billions of dollars on homelessness to seemingly no effect. In fact, it's a massive scandal that the Newsom administration has spent billions of dollars didn't really track outcomes very well and seemingly has had no improvement on homelessness. Here's a CBS News story
from a year ago. Audit finds California spent twenty four billion dollars on homelessness in five years, didn't consistently track outcomes. California spent twenty four billion dollars to tackle homelessness over the past five years, but didn't consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money actually improved the situation. According
to the state audit released again. This was back in April of twenty twenty four, and estimated one hundred and seventy one thousand people are homeless in California, which amounts to roughly thirty percent of all the homeless people in
the US. Despite the roughly billions of dollars spent on more than thirty homeless in housing programs during the twenty eighteen to twenty twenty three fiscal years, California doesn't have reliable data needed to fully understand why the problem didn't improve in many cities, according to the state auditor's report.
This report concludes that the state must do more to assess the cost effectiveness of its homelessness program, state auditor Grant Parks wrote in a letter to Governor Gavin Newsman lawmakers. The audit analyzed five programs that received a combine thirteen point seven billion dollars in funding. It determined that only two of them are likely cost effective, including one that converts hotel and motel rooms into housing and another that
provides housing assistance to prevent families from becoming homeless. Under the three point six billion dollar program to convert hotels and motel rooms, which is a lynchpin in Newsome's almostness planed, the average cost of a room is at least two point five times cheaper than building a new home, the audit found. Blah blah, blah blah. Anyway, the remaining three programs, which received a total of nine point four billion dollars since twenty twenty, couldn't be evaluated due to a lack
of data. So this is the problem with California has spent a lot of money on band Aids. I think that's the conclusion we should we can maybe draw here. California is spending a lot of money on band aids, you know, because even I mean, even this idea of converting hotel rooms into housing. That's not necessarily a long term solution. It's not really addressing the root causes. It's getting people off the street, which is good, that's great, But I then wonder.
Well, are you really addressing the root causes? And again I have my sort of limited window for dealing with this. A home was housing into the setup shop right across the street from my office at Blackstone. And you know I'm at Blackstone and Griffith. That's where the Right to Life office is.
And it's the old Motel six at Blackstone in Ashland, and the back of its parking lot is right across the street from me. And they turned that back fence of the parking lot for some reason, they turned it into a security checkpoint that allows people to come on and off the campus to walk on Griffith Avenue. And what happened a ton of drug dealers just set up shop on Griffith to sell to anybody and everybody from
the homeless shelter. So what I was realizing looking at it was okay, well if this is allowed to continue, And I mean I made such a huge stink on in the city, calling the cops et cetera, that it seemingly is not continuing. If this is just allowed to continue, these people have a drug problem, which majorly contributes to their homelessness to begin with. They're allowed to maintain their drug problem the whole time that they're living in this shelter.
And this is not a permanent shelter. I think it was like it's like a twenty eight day kind of temporary housing deal. As soon as they leave the shelter, they're still going to have a drug addiction problem. So what is that accomplishing.
Nothing? Here?
We are we're spending all this money for this particular housing project. I don't know exactly what it's funded by. I don't know if maybe they're trying to take more measures to cut down on people using drugs. They were responsive to me when I said, hey, you gotta I'm not gonna allow this. I'm not gonna allow your residents just to sit on my stoop and litter and all that.
But if that's how a lot of these homeless shelters are maintained, where like drug dealers just kind of roam around the perimeter of them to sell drugs to residents, I mean, I don't know how much money was spent to convert that motel six into homeless housing. It's got to be a lot. It's got to be a lot to buy it. It's got to be a lot to retrofit it. It's gotta be a lot of construction costs. I'm I don't know who funded it. I know it's not a city funded thing. I talked with some city
council members. Nope, Nope, that's not a city thing. So I presume it's some kind of state grant. Millions of dollars were probably spent on that shelter. And if that shelter is not able to do anything to deter any of their residents from maintaining a drug problem the whole time, that's just going to be money flushed down the drain.
And that's why I'm a little skeptical of these stories about oh, Trump Administration's cutting a homelessness program and that's going to lead to people being homeless?
Is it?
Is?
It? Really? Is? I sort of wonder.
I sort of wonder if we're so focused on the after the fact band aid that we're not getting the root of the problem. We're not really addressing the root of the problem. The root problems.
Are drug use.
The root problems are the unaffordability of housing in the first place. And it feels like that this is a constant, this is a constant California thing. We subsidize the demand rather than increase the supply. We can't afford to build housing for lower income people.
So what do we do.
Well, you give a bunch of government subsidies for building low income housing. We don't do anything to address the supply, Like if you had more supply, the cost would go down. No, we don't do any kind of supply side response. Everything is subsidizing the demand. That's the case with housing and with so many other problems housing or lower income people
can't afford mortgages. Oh, we have the Rench, We have mortgage assistance programs with more federal subsidies for it, more spending, more spending, more spending, more subsidies, more subsidies, more subsidies. And I think it's nuts. I think it's an after the fact way of addressing problems. It's not getting to the root. So I guess I'm I'm a little leery to say, and especially.
Because I don't know all the details and and blah blah.
Blah, I'm a little leery to say, oh, yes, the Trump administration, what a bunch of evil jerks for cutting this homeless this housing program.
Maybe it was wise, maybe it wasn't. I don't know, but I'm.
A little loath to say, oh, this cut of money, that's the problem. I don't think money is the problem. We were spending Jack, we were spending zilch on homelessness, you know, thirty years ago, and we had way less homelessness in California. Why because it was more affordable to live here. So I'm you know, drug proliferation of drugs wasn't quite as bad. Maybe I don't know. Maybe it was just as bad thirty years ago as far as drug problems, but we weren't spending that much thirty years ago,
and we didn't have the same problem with homelessness. Clearly, there is something wrong with our state, and it's with our state, with our state and Oregon and Washington and New York and Illinois.
Hmm. Maybe the problem is purely just.
Electing Democrats all the time. That's the one connective thread between everything. So in short, I think this is another kind of classic example of making liberal lawmakers feel better about themselves by saying we spent fifteen billion dollars to address homelessness without actually looking at one, Does that actually fix the problem in two?
Is this not really a.
Root problems solution. This is just a band aid to cover up what's going on when we return how this is yet another feather in the cap of good old Gavin Newsome. That's next on the John Girardi Show. Homelessness is one of the many reasons I just don't see Gavin Newsome credibly winning, credibly winning the presidency, credibly even winning the Democratic nomination to be president. The state has
spent under his watch tens of billions of dollars. In twenty twenty four, they had this audit come out and say, hey, you know how we spent like twenty four billion dollars over five years on homelessness, and it seems like we have no.
Data to ensure that this was effective at all.
We didn't even have metrics for ensuring it was effective. And by the way, it doesn't seem like it was effective. It's it's one of like five or six huge issues that I don't see how he recovers from. And my mind always goes to the same place the hypothetical CNN or MSNBC Democrat primary debate that presumably will be held in probably the first one will happen in December of
twenty twenty seven, November December of twenty twenty seven. And he's gonna be up there with maybe Kamala maybe maybe not, we'll see, but certainly with Pete Boodagig. He'll be up there, maybe JB. Pritzker, Newsom's overweight Illinois twin, maybe Josh Shapiro, maybe John Fetterman. Uh, you know, there'll be a smattering of god knows, maybe even AOC. The AOC wild card is really something to think about, because I think she's
got some options right now. There are a lot of people thinking she could challenge Chuck Chuck Schumer for his Senate seat.
Or she could run for president. So that's the wild card.
Anyway, you'll have all these other ambitious Democrats up there. AOC is ambitious as hell, Josh Shapiros seemingly he is ambitious as hell. And I don't know how Newsome is able to stand up there and say, oh, I was a governor and someone's like, what are you doing here? You've been saying you're gonna fight homelessness and address the problem of homelessness. You've only been saying it for the
last eight eight seven, so that's twenty three years. You've had twenty three years as a major public official to combat homelessness, where you had seven years as mayor of San Francisco, eight years as lieutenant governor, eight years as governor, and by every metric, homelessness got worse. You spent tens of billions of dollars, much of it was spent improvidently because you didn't have metrics for ensuring its success or ensuring that that it was or wasn't effective even and
by every metric, homelessness got worse under your watch. And now, you know, six and a half years into his governorship, Newsom's in this sort of bitter spot where he's sort of like now trying to shift the blame to local governments because he knows he spent all these billions of
dollars and it didn't do jack. So he's now trying to blame local governments for improvidently administering the money that he had the state sent because a lot of these programs got administered by you know, counties and cities and stuff like that. So he's trying to do all these like tough, getting tough, like I'm not going to increase public union employee salaries for like county and city governments unless they demonstrate, you know, that they're using state money well,
and that's ticking off. That's something that's in his current may revision to the budget, and the boy that's really ticking off the public sector unions right now.
They are not happy with that.
So Newsom has to do this like blame shifting game, and there's no way the problem is going to get better at some point in the next year and a half. So I don't know how he's again do I feel like I do this every show. I don't know how Newsome stands up there during a Democrat primary debate and looks over at.
Josh Shapiro and have Josh Shapiro or.
AOC to say to him, you know, you've allegedly been the governor of California for eight years and you said you were going to tackle homelessness and every metric homelessness got worse, and you spent tens of billions of dollars to no effect. How how do you come up here and lecture the rest of us about what it means to be a good leader. How can you dare to say that you should take your track record of governing one state and expand it to the whole country.
You are a fraud. I mean, I.
Don't And by the way, homelessness is not even the worst of these issues. Homelessness is one of like five issues that are like that for Newsome where I don't know what his response will be other than some kind of slick used car salesman kind of dodge that he's going to try to pull on everybody. But he can't do that that long. Eventually he's gonna get nailed to the wall by somebody. Someone is going to roast him. And that's why I kind of wonder if his I
wonder if he knows it. I wonder if he realizes that he's not really in a good position to run for president, but news stories keep coming out that he's interested. When we return another episode in people flying enormous flags on the side of El Capitan somehow and federal employees pretending to have no idea about it, That is next on The John Girardi Show. Some of you may remember this
story from February. It was San Francisco Chronicle reported on and a bunch of people reported on it that a group of Yosemite National Park staffers hung a big American flag upside down on the face of El Capitan in Yosemite as a protest to the Trump administration laying off a bunch of National Park employees. And at the time I remembered feeling that, wow, what a great illustration of
why these people should be fired. And there was like the story came and went and all these questions were left lingering.
So questions such.
As did federal employees do that on their work time? Like, we're paying you to be forest rangers and you're up here protesting the Trump administration.
Did you do that on work time?
You certainly did it on work land, I mean in the National Park where you're supposed to be working. How did you get a big old flag to the top of El Capitan? That's another thing I wanted to know. How logistically was that supposed to work? Also, like, did you, as a Yosemite Park employee have special access that allowed you to get to the top of El Capitan to
fly an American flag upside down? Not to mention the whole idiocy of remember how the New York Times for because Missus Alito flew a American flag upside down because her neighbors started yelling at her after January sixth, then basically tried to act as though it was Sam Alito's fault that January sixth happened for some reason.
And her neighbors were being mean to her.
So Missus Alito flew an American flag upside down, and this led to all these problems for Justice Alito.
People saying, oh, the.
Upside down flag was a symbol of for the stop the Steel movement. Now all of a sudden, when it's people protesting trumpets, Oh well, it's just kind of a generic American symbol for distress.
Anyway, that whole story came and went.
I had all these questions that led me to think, well, maybe, yeah, if this is what the staff at the National Park is and does and has time to do apparently, then yeah, maybe they probably should have been fired. Well we've got another one, folks, We've got another large flag being flown on the side of El Capitan. It's written by Abigail Anthony and National Review find it odd. I didn't see
this anywhere in local media. On May twentieth, activists raised a massive transgender pride flag on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park on Tuesday to protest the Trump administration's LGBTQ related policies. I will note it's only the T. The Trump administration seems totally the hunky dory with the L and the G and the B, possibly the Q.
They just don't like the T.
By the way, the greatest marketing UH coup of all time was how transgender activists whatever managed to stick the T in with the L and the G and the B. Because, look, I think maybe there are some philosophical reasons why it
kind of makes sense for them to be together. But frankly, just at the level of American public opinion, Americans are probably at this point for the most part, don't really care that much about the L and the G. Wait a minute, the L the B. Yeah, the L, the G and the B. Americans don't care too much about it. They are mostly accepting of it. The T is like a whole different ballgame. Though the T sort of inherently
involves beyond like social stuff. It involves hormonal treatments, and surgeries and all kinds of things like that that I think a lot fewer people are okay with, and the idea of that the left treats them all as of a piece when the American people have very different views about the leg, the G and the B versus the T. It's really one of the great sort of marketing coups of all time to act as.
Well you're opposed to LGBT people.
When someone's like, hey, I don't think that we should give a permanent life altering surgery to a twelve year old who.
Is kind of confused.
Yeah, it's an amazing coup that they had, although it doesn't seem to be working as the Trump administration is.
Basically, I think what this is in response to is the One Big Beautiful Bill, the OBBB as I call it, which my wife hates that name.
She thinks it's ridiculous.
It is kind of ridiculous, but I think it's a little catchy.
The Reconciliation Bill that the Trump administration just passed includes cutting off various forms of federal funding, I think chiefly Medicaid and possibly Medicare funding.
For transgender interventions.
So that's not going to be covered by Medicare Medicaid at least Medicaid, And that was kind of a point that was a little bit up in the air with the OBBB, was would it cut those things? Would it only cut it cut those kinds of interventions for miners, but still cover it for adults.
No.
Actually, the final version that was passed by the House includes cuts for everyone, for adults, children, et cetera. It's not The federal government is not going to be in the business of funding transgender interventions, which I think is great.
I don't think they are healthcare.
I don't think they have much evidence behind them that they actually help improve any outcomes for people. In fact, that's why the United Kingdom has stopped doing those interventions for miners, because the data was not there that it was helpful. This is my sort of insight. This is like the one advantage of a socialized medicine setup that the UK has in America doesn't well. With the socialized
medicine setup. You're not as driven by the almighty dollar, You're not as driven by the direct profit motive for a given service. Individual doctors are not so incentivized, so, as a result, the urge to do a procedure that will make you a ton of money but doesn't actually have any long term benefit. That urge isn't as much
there in the UK as it is in America. In America, those kinds of surgeries, those kinds of interventions, make bank, and so the docs who do them, I think, are more willing to overlook the evidence, spin the evidence to say that it's good and useful, when really the evidence
is indicating it it's not doing anything. I mean, you're doing these interventions seemingly for someone's mental health, which is already a bit dicey to do a surgery for somebody's mental health, and to do a surgery on a healthy body for someone's alleged mental health problems, and it's not even really helping those mental health problems. The outcomes are
just not there as a positive. But of course, the way that the pro transgender left acts is if you don't provide children with these kinds of hormonal interventions.
Or surgeries, this child will kill him or herself. That's the kind of fear mongering they do.
In the UK, they stop doing it because the profit motive isn't quite as much there for doctors or professional Associations of doctors and they just looked at the data and said, Nope, we're not doing it. So in the UK they don't do intervention. They don't do trans interventions on kids in the UK.
Anyway.
So in this case with the flag, this is the again the pro transgender pride flag, which if you're not up to speed on your L and G and B and T flags, this is the one that's blue and pink. It's a blue horizontal stripe, pink horizontal stripe, white horizontal stripe, pink horizontal stripe.
Blue horizontal stripe.
You know, because there's boys and there's girls, and you can switch and then maybe there's white that's sort of in the middle. Who knows, which, by the way, is a classic symbol for the transgender movement, which is basically boiled down what it means to be man, what it means to be a woman, to stereotypes like if you've got a boy who plays with a Barbie doll a little bit too much, they'll start thinking that this boy
is transgender. If you've got a girl who's like, you know, a tomboy, they might start thinking that that girl is transgender, even though it's like This is a very surface level concept of what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman, which you know, thirty years ago people would have said was horribly outdated and sexist, that yes, you can be a girl and be rough and tumble and a tomboy and like sports and getting in the mud and playing with frogs and stuff,
and you know, still be a girl, still be a woman. You can be a boy and enjoy you know, I don't know, things like ballet or the fine arts or poetry or whatever.
And yes you can still you are still a boy. That doesn't mean you're not a boy.
Now we've got this Pride flag raised on the side of El Capitan. This time it doesn't seem like it was done by Yosemite National Park staff, which at the very least seems like an improvement. It was a protest done by let's see the demonstrators raise the flag claim it is fifty five feet by thirty five feet. It was hung fifteen hundred feet up El Capitan on the Heart ledges between eight am and ten am Pacific time.
It remained on display until about noon. Images shared by some of the activists show that statements like free Palestine, b gay do crime, trans people Save lives, and trans is beautiful were written on the flag in black marker Ah. Yes, the Palestinians notably accepting of transgenderism. With this historic unfurling, climbers reclaim space in the heart. Literally, the flag hangs on the recognizable heart ledges on l Capitan Wall in Yosemite,
said the activists in a press release. The nonprofit organization called the Outdoorist Oath, which promotes an action based commitment
for planet inclusion and adventure. The organization says asks members to take an oath which includes acknowledging climate change, committing to advocacy for environmental justice, and recognizing the systemic oppression in real that that systemic oppression is real, and that hatred, discrimination and biases marginalized people the hatred and discrimination biases of those evil Christian right wingers whom were allowed to hate with all of our fury.
Marginalized people.
Don't think that your marginalize is a Christian By acting like that, the Outdoorist Oath organization raises awareness about conduct like microaggressions in the outdoors. What is an outdoor microaggression? If I pee behind a tree? Is that a microaggression anyway? It hosts activism workshops those sound like a real blast called Stretch sessions, including sessions on white supremacy.
Boy, I'd love to sign up for one of those.
One of their members is a drag queen named Patty Gonia, who was named by National Geographic as one of it's nine Travelers of the Year in twenty twenty four. So I continue to wonder, though, Okay, you got this humongous flag on the side of El Capatan?
Was there?
Did did Yosemite Park staff help at all? Did they get more access to it as a result of maybe being friendly with the Yosemiti Park staff? The park staff said they took it down as soon as they could. It was up there for four hours, so was it as soon as they could. They don't have anyone on the top of El Capitan who could, like maybe tell people, hey, don't do this, stop it.
Maybe not, I don't know.
Yet again, flying your flag from the side of El Capitan influencing basically nobody? All right, when we return, something interesting happening at Buchanan High School next weekend high school Track and Field Championships in which a boy is going to win a bunch of the girl events.
Next on the John Girardi Show.
So next weekend at Buchanan High School is going to be the CIF the California Interschalactic Federation statewide Track and Field Championships, and so you'll have kids doing all kinds
of track and field events. There are a couple of these events, the high jump, the long jump, and the triple jump, in which a male athlete who identifies as a female has dominated the Southern California sort of run up events to these championships, and there will be this biological male competing in the female events, a biological boy who goes by a b Hernandez. He is in some
of these events completely dominantating the girls. And it again, it's this ridiculous situation that that's going to be on display right here in Buchanan. And again this is just to reinforce to maybe Clovis Unified parents, A lot of close Unified parents seem to think that Clovis Unified is immune to the liberal absurdities that we see in California
public education all up and down the street. And I guess they think that the ghost of Doc Buchanan, Saint Doc hovers over close Unified to protect it from all liberalism.
And he doesn't cloves. Unified is.
Every bit as required to comply with state laws about transgenderism and transgender participation in sports and blah blah blah blah blah as any other school district in the country.
And it'll be on display at Buchanan High.
School next week where there's going to be a who's gonna kick everyone's butt in long jump high jump events?
That'll do it. John Girardi Show, see y'all next time on Power Talk