My Opinion Reta Moser

LA Times reported about a report by the Policy Advocacy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law. The report was written for the Western Regional Advocacy Project, a San Francisco homeless advocacy group.

Western Regional Advocacy Project released the report to the public with this statement: “BIDs are a concerted and growing effort to erase from cities any sign of vast inequality while at the same time perpetuating it,” the group’s executive director, Paul Boden, said in a statement. “BIDs work to manufacture the appearance of prosperity in the city square but that farce comes at the expense of basic human rights for the unhoused poor.”

My personal observation of the Venice BID operation is to clean up the areas that are not cleaned up, look blighted, and are totally unsanitary. Many homeless are within the BID area. But area covered by BID is not a targeted homeless area.

Homeless people, in general, do not clean up after themselves. They create an unsanitary blight in the neighborhood where they reside. Both the safe and the clean teams for the BID have had positive comments from the homeless, not negative, and certainly reports of affecting homeless adversely have not been the case, quite the contrary.

See the Venice BID August report https://veniceupdate.com/2018/09/17/bid-august-report-of-save-and-clean-operations/ Read some of Rick Swinger’s reports of rats, alley defecation. The BID doesn’t even address those problems. They clean up graffiti, pickup trash. Once again see their report for August. LA Times article http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=029721af-5783-4edf-ba07-5ae28d11c634

This document looks like it was slanted for the people paying for it. Shameful.