LOS ANGELES â Surrounded by sprawling homeless encampments, drug use and trash-strewn sidewalks in the heart of Los Angeles’ Skid Row, Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton blasted California’s homelessness crisis as a “political scandal,” accusing Democratic leaders of spending billions in taxpayer dollars while allowing the streets to deteriorate.
“‘The homelessness crisis,’ as if it’s some kind of natural disaster that can’t be helped,” Hilton told Fox News Digital, referring to how politicians and others describe the conditions as he surveyed the sprawling encampments.
“No, it is not a crisis. It’s actually a scandal. It’s a political scandal because the people in charge, they’ve caused this with their policies.”
Skid Row, the epicenter of California’s homelessness crisis, is facing renewed scrutiny after a sweeping federal drug raid Thursday. The crackdown came as voting gets underway in the Nov. 3 governor’s race, with Hilton challenging Democrat Xavier Becerra in a contest where homelessness and billions in taxpayer spending have emerged, yet again, as key campaign issues.
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Fox News Digital observed sprawling homeless encampments, Narcan distribution points, human feces on sidewalks and piles of ash from what people in the neighborhood said were fires lit earlier that morning to keep warm.
Hilton accused years of Democratic leadership of failing to solve California’s homelessness problem despite billions in taxpayer spending, while taking aim at government-funded nonprofits and developers he claims have financially benefited from the crisis.
“The real estate developers, and it’s a real crony game now, which I’ve been told about many times,” he continued. “We’ve got a small number of real estate developers who are in on this, and they get all the contracts to build these apartment units for people that don’t help them at all, because the other part of it isn’t being done in terms of drug addiction or whatever.”
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“The point about these nonprofits is that they’re part of this philosophy, the ideology of harm reduction, all the things we’ve talked about, which means that they are not actually trying to solve the problem,” Hilton said. “Because if they solve the problem, they don’t get paid anymore. So they have an incentive to keep it going.”
In September, federal prosecutors charged the founder of a Los Angeles-area homelessness nonprofit with wire fraud, alleging he misused taxpayer funds, including nearly $50,000 for a trip to Tahiti, after receiving more than $118 million in public funding through government contracts.
Federal and local authorities, including the FBI, DEA and LAPD, arrested 23 of 28 defendants charged in a sweeping drug trafficking investigation Thursday, targeting alleged gang-affiliated dealers and independent operators accused of selling fentanyl, methamphetamine and other drugs in and around Skid Row.
Hilton argued that addressing homelessness begins with enforcing existing laws and removing encampments from California’s streets.
