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San Jose is launching a new program to clean up the streets while also helping get people off them. The initiative will employ 25 homeless residents to pick up trash at 40 "litter hotspots" around the city. The employees will be paid $15 per hour and work four to five hours per day. announced by Mayor Sam Liccardo Thursday in partnership with Goodwill and Downtown Streets Team. Participants will start picking up trash in November. While the pay is better than San Jose's minimum wage (currently at $13.50 per hour as it scales toward $15 by 2019), it's probably still...

Seattle businesses leaders attended a meeting with city officials this week where they vented about the problems they are facing because of rampant homelessness. KIRO 7 reports that some businesses say they can’t continue unless something changes for the better: Some businesses owners say they may not be able to stay open much longer if something doesn’t change…Imiun Liu owns several businesses in Seattle such as the Eastern Café in the International District, where he says crimes involving the homeless are so common that he and other business owners can’t help but feel defeated by the RVs and tents...

Wholesale fish distributors, produce warehouses and homeless encampments line Ceres Avenue downtown, creating perfect conditions for rats. Uneaten food is dumped on the street — a salad platter was recently splattered on the asphalt — and discarded clothing piles up only to be swirled into rats' nests. Those rats, experts say, are likely contributing to the growing number of typhus infections cropping up on skid row and other parts of the region. The disease is spread by fleas, which are carried by rats, opossums and pets.

When I wrote about the Arizona Senate race earlier today and the nearly even polling we’ve seen thus far, I asked if there was anything that might help Martha McSally break through and establish a solid lead over Kyrsten Sinema. I wonder if this might be just the ticket. Some news about Sinema’s early history – something she’s campaigned on heavily and been questioned about before – has emerged in the past 24 hours. One big part of Sinema’s narrative is the three years she spent homeless as a child. It’s a heartwarming tale of a family grappling with adversity...

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was seen serving food to the homeless while volunteering for Catholic Charities in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, causing left-wing critics to allege the scene was a staged public relations stunt aimed at “humanizing” him. What are the details? Entertainment publication TMZ reported on Judge Kavanaugh keeping up his volunteer work in spite of it being his first week on the Supreme Court. The jurist was seen working alongside his former pastor — Monsignor John Enzler, who is now the CEO of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington — feeding homeless residents while his security detail...

A flea-borne typhus outbreak in the Los Angeles area has also rocked Long Beach – the third city to be struck down in the region. Officials have this year recorded 12 cases of the bug in the city, home to 470,000 people and around 20 miles (32km) south of downtown LA. A further 20 cases have been recorded in Pasadena since the start of 2018 - and 59 in the whole of LA County in total. Pasadena and Long Beach are both technically in LA County, however they have their own health departments which record their own figures.

San Francisco might be the one of the most expensive place to live in the world but it has recently acquired a new, slightly less esteemed honor - the feces capital of America. A new study by the real estate listing website RealtyHop declares the California tech-hub to be the worst place in the US for 'poop sightings', with ten times as many as New York and 20 times more than Chicago in 2017. According to the study compiled from publicly available 311 data, there were 21,000 incidents of feces complaints last year, which is an average of 456 per...

A flea-borne typhus outbreak among homeless in downtown Los Angeles triggered an investigation by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health after several cases were reported, the agency said Thursday. NBC sources say the number may be upwards of at least a dozen. Typhus can cause fever, chills, body aches, nausea and vomiting, cough, and rash, but can be treated with antibiotics. If not treated however, it can be fatal. Flea-borne typhus is a bacteria that spreads to humans when they come in contact with infected fleas or rat feces. Animals such as cats, rodents and opossums all attract...

Working on a complex issue often takes creativity. When it’s an issue like homelessness, every angle is worth exploring. So when the nonprofit Oroville Southside Community Improvement Association Inc. asked to partner with the city on its Haven of Hope on Wheels project, which includes a trailer outfitted with showers, toilets and laundry facilities, the Oroville City Council obliged. The council sensibly saw the project for what it is — another way to help the disenfranchised while keeping them from disrupting businesses or taking baths, doing laundry and going to the bathroom along rivers and in parks. The council voted...

City budget boosts spending for homelessness services The new city manager and City Council agree: The city needs more money to address the homelessness situation. The proposed Fiscal Year 2018-19 budget submitted by City Manager Spencer Cronk includes $3.1 million in new spending on homelessness-related services. That’s on top of the roughly $25 million of spending on such services that will continue from last year. Part of that proposed increase comes from the Watershed Protection Department, which has proposed hiring a contractor for an estimated $1 million over four years to clean up litter in creeks or drainage facilities that...

Federal data released Wednesday show that California has the highest poverty rate in the nation. The Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) for 2017 estimates that California's poverty rate is at 19 percent. That figure is a slight 1.4 percent drop from last year, but still the highest of any state. The bureau's methodology takes into account the cost of living in a given area. Caroline Danielson, the policy director at the Public Policy Institute of California, said a high cost of living, in particular for housing, had weighed the state down. "The state's high housing costs have weighed heavily...

A judge on Wednesday ordered a Burlington County, N.J., couple to testify under oath next week about what happened to the $400,000 they raised in a GoFundMe campaign to help a homeless man, Johnny Bobbitt Jr. — money their lawyer says is gone and that Mr. Bobbitt says they squandered. Superior Court Judge Paula T. Dow directed Mr. Bobbitt's team of pro bono lawyers to request financial statements from the pair before the court closed on Wednesday. At the hearing, the couple's lawyer told the judge they wanted to invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. At issue is whether...

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Cities can't prosecute people for sleeping on the streets if they have nowhere else to go because it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, which is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court said Tuesday.

Johnny Bobbitt, famously rescued from the streets of Philadelphia last October after word of his kindness to a stranger went viral and led to a $400,000 GoFundMe campaign, is once again homeless, drug-addicted — and panhandling for money. The couple who started the fund-raiser say that in helping Bobbitt, they've spent or given him more than half of the money donated by thousands of people around the world and they are withholding the roughly $200,000 balance. Bobbitt says he fears that the couple, Kate McClure and her boyfriend, Mark D'Amico, squandered much of the money. He worries there may be...

Johnny Bobbitt is back under a bridge just months after a couple raised $400,000 for him — and then reportedly kept it. It seemed like an American Cinderella story: when New Jersey resident Kate McClure ran out of gas in a “sketchy” neighborhood in Philadelphia, 35-year-old homeless veteran Johnny Bobbitt offered her his last $20 dollars for gas, which he went and fetched for her himself. McClure and her boyfriend Mark D’Amico respondedraised more than $400,000 in Bobbitt’s name. This, however, is where the story gets ugly. (snip) ...The couple claims to have already spent half the money on him...

Lunacy on the Left Coast: As you’ve likely heard, the city of San Francisco has a bit of a homeless problem, and as such, city taxpayers are spending a king’s ransom every year to deal with it. Two of the newest ‘additions’ to San Fran’s Public Works staff are personnel dedicated to cleaning up after the homeless. That includes picking up their used drug needles and their human feces — the latter for a whopping $184,000-plus dollars per year per “Poop Patrol” employee.

he day the fence arrived, Gabe was sitting next to his tent, right at the heart of Los Angeles’ Skid Row. It was a chain link fence – about six feet tall – placed at the edge of the sidewalk, where it neatly enclosed Gabe, his neighbors, and the tented homes they have made for themselves on the streets of what is sometimes called the homeless capital of the country. “They put the whole sidewalk inside the fence,” said Gabe, an older black man with kind eyes and a disarming demeanor who has lived on the streets of Skid Row...

A 24-year-old homeless woman wrestled to free herself from an alligator after the animal attacked and tried to drag her underwater as she swam in Florida’s Lake Hernando early on Wednesday, PEOPLE confirms. Felicitie Gillette was swimming in the Citrus County lake around 1 a.m. when a 5- to 6-foot alligator grabbed her by her left arm and attempted to drag her underwater, according to a statement from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. She was able to fight off the alligator and called 911. “It came up out of nowhere and attacked,” Gillette said in a frantic 911...

In another triumph of progressive politics, the City of San Francisco has announced the formation of an official “Poop Patrol” to scour the streets and remove the mounting piles of human excrement deposited by the homeless inhabitants of the community. The Patrol will start with a staff of six—one supervisor and five workers. Public works department spokeswoman Rachel Gordon said “we’re not denying the right of the homeless to carry out necessary bodily functions as they see fit. After all, the streets and sidewalks are public spaces open to all. We want the homeless to understand that this is not...

The Billion Dollar Homeless Scam The more we spend, the worse it gets. August 16, 2018 Daniel Greenfield New York City will be spending $2.06 billion on its Department of Homeless Services. There are 61,421 homeless people in the city which is spending $33,539 per homeless person. That’s only a little short of the starting salary of an FDNY firefighter at $39,000. More money will be spent on the homeless than on the firefighters who save New Yorkers from burning buildings. The FDNY will have to make do with $2.04 billion, and the health department with $1.6 billion. That’s impressive...