(Natural News)—Downtown Los Angeles has been likened to a “third world” area following the release of disturbing footage showcasing a homeless encampment, complete with open fires in the streets and sidewalks strewn with trash.
The alarming video, shared by Fox News reporter Bill Melugin on X, reveals numerous homeless individuals gathered on filthy sidewalks at the intersection of San Pedro Street and 6th Street in LA’s Skid Row neighborhood. Some are shown near open fires on the street, mere steps away from the Midnight Mission, a $17 million facility catering to the homeless.
Billionaire Elon Musk, known for his commentary on California’s homelessness crisis, simply reacted with “wow” upon viewing the footage.
Commenters on X expressed astonishment, with one stating, “Gavin Newsom’s California may be the wealthiest state, but its cities resemble those of Third World nations,” while another remarked, “If you didn’t tell us this was LA, we would think this was a city in a third-world country!”
The homeless population in LA currently exceeds 46,000 individuals, marking a 10 percent increase from the previous year, as reported by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
LA, in particular, has witnessed a surge in homelessness since the onset of the pandemic, with over 10,000 more individuals living on the streets compared to 2019. Since 2015, homelessness in the city has risen by 70 percent. (Related: HOMELESSNESS in the U.S. reaches RECORD HIGH amid worsening economic downturn post-pandemic.)
The Midnight Mission, located just meters from the distressing scene captured in the online video, is facing severe strain on its resources.
The Mission provides three daily meals, temporary accommodation, a barbershop, and a women’s crisis center. However, despite their efforts, female homelessness in LA has spiked by 55 percent in three years, with over 90 percent of these women reporting experiences of physical or sexual assault.
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To address the opioid crisis gripping Skid Row, the city has deployed mobile teams equipped with oxygen cylinders to prevent overdoses.
Meanwhile, workers from the non-profit organization Homeless Health Care Los Angeles traverse the streets, attending to individuals living among makeshift dwellings and witnessing dire health conditions, including substance abuse.
Los Angeles County has allocated a budget of $609.7 million to combat homelessness in 2023-2024, a $61.8 million increase from the previous year. Despite these efforts, Governor Gavin Newsom admitted last summer that the state’s homeless crisis was a “disgrace” and pledged additional resources.
During his tenure, homelessness in California has surged by 13 percent, prompting Newsom to acknowledge the challenges related to high housing costs, regulatory hurdles, and local opposition to new housing construction.
LA mayor faces big challenge
Following her election as mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass made a bold declaration that would serve as a defining measure of her tenure: “We are going to solve homelessness.”
The Democratic congresswoman, who was previously considered for vice president by Joe Biden, envisioned a transformed city with over 40,000 homeless individuals provided with housing and vital services to mend their fractured lives. “We are going to build a new Los Angeles,” she proclaimed.
Now, one year into her mayoral term, Bass reported that over 21,000 unhoused individuals were transitioned into leased hotels or temporary shelters in 2023, marking a 28 percent increase from the previous year.
Numerous drug-ridden street encampments were dismantled, and housing initiatives are underway. Yet, behind these promising statistics lies a harsh reality: this is merely the beginning.
Billions of dollars had been invested to address homelessness in the region, and new programs had been implemented. However, the mayor acknowledged the possibility of continued increases in homelessness, partly due to evictions and the cessation of Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) aid for low-income households.
While Bass has made progress, tackling LA’s homelessness crisis presents a formidable challenge. The city grapples with managing a potentially expanding homeless population, equivalent to the size of Palm Springs, without an efficient computer system capable of tracking individuals within it.
Visit CaliforniaCollapse.news for more stories like this. Watch this report about homelessness in California.
This video is from the Right Edition channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
- Homeless camp pops up on a Beverly Hills sidewalk as homelessness spills into the wealthier areas of California.
- NBC News: Inflation and illegals to blame for HOMELESSNESS among LA students.
- Poll shows 86% of Americans believe homelessness is a major problem in the U.S.
Sources include:
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.