What a mess the once-Golden state is in. I have friends and colleagues who live in California, and I admire their pluck in fighting to return their home state to some semblance of sanity, but boy, howdy, do they have a lot of work to do.

The latest problem? Homeless people bums setting houses on fire.

Francesca Padilla was awakened by the sound of screaming people and breaking glass. Soon she could hear the tortured howls of her neighbor’s dog Togo as the bungalow right next to her Venice home was engulfed in flames.

“It was yelping so loud–the sound isn’t the usual dog sound–it was suffering,” another neighbor told a local newspaper. “It was suffering.” The homeowner, Dr. Courtney Gillenwater, a pediatrician, was at work when the fire started around 3 a.m.  Her neighbors tried and failed to break into her bungalow to rescue Togo. But the Husky-mix ultimately died, and Gillenwater’s home in this Los Angeles neighborhood was destroyed.

Gillenwater suspected that drug addicts from the growing homeless encampment nearby started the April 2021 fire because she had asked city officials to remove a dumpster behind her house where they would congregate. 

This kind of thing, we are forced to note, happens because California allows it to happen.

Her neighbor, Padilla, also believes the homeless were the culprits. “Anyone can see the correlation between homeless encampments and the rise of fires,” she said. “We have people cooking drugs out in the open right across the street. Is that not a recipe for disaster?”

Initially, firefighters with the Los Angeles Fire Department also suspected arson, telling reporters candidly at the time that they believed someone threw something over Gillenwater’s fence to start the fire. But soon the department issued a statement declaring in euphemistic bureaucratese that “there is no evidence that indicates the involvement of a person experiencing homelessness.” Four years later, the cause of the blaze remains officially unsolved. 

Officially unsolved, my middle-aged ass.

These vagrants aren’t honest folks who are just down on their luck, nor are they stand-up working-class people tossed aside by the “evils of capitalism.”  Most of them are addicts to one substance or another, be it meth or heroin, or booze; many of them are on the streets by choice, especially in those jurisdictions that support them financially. And they are a “protected class,” meaning that the honest citizenry is too often expected to stop complaining and live with it.

The people who live in those cities and states, like California, are, justifiably, getting sick of it.  They are sick of being unable to go out at night.  They are sick of stepping over poop, discarded needles, and lakes of urine during the day.  They are sick of the thievery, the breaking and entering, the vandalism, and the smell.  Most of all, they are sick of the arson.

Vagrancy is a problem because it’s allowed. Once the various jurisdictions start removing these people from the streets and getting them the treatments they need – even if it’s involuntary – places like that house in Venice, mentioned above, will continue to burn.