A business owner in Sacramento, California, who says the growing homelessness crisis has forced her to relocate after 15 years shows how the problem has expanded beyond the major West Coast cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.
DailyMail.com reported hair salon owner Elizabeth Novak posted a video Friday on Twitter describing the people camping in tents across her front door.
Her shop has been broken into, she's been attacked and other long-standing business owners have had a similar experience, Novak said.
She tweeted that she often must clean up urine, feces and used needles left on her doorstep.
Novak issued a plea to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
"I want to know what are you going to do for us Californians? I've had a business in downtown Sacramento for 15 years - a successful business," she said via Twitter.
"I now have to leave my place of business, I have to close my shop," Novak wrote.
"I just want to tell you what happens when I get to work. I have to clean up the poop and the pee off of my doorstep. I have to clean-up the syringes.
"I have to politely ask the people who I care for, I care for these people that are homeless, to move their tents of of the way of the door to my business."
Fox News conducted an investigation this summer "to chronicle the toll progressive policies have had on the homeless crisis in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland.
"In each city, we saw a lack of safety, sanitation and civility," Fox News said. "Residents, the homeless and advocates say they've lost faith in their elected officials' ability to solve the issue. Most of the cities have thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem only to watch it get worse."
In San Francisco, which has more billionaires per capita than anywhere else in the world, has a homeless problem "so severe that it rivals some third-world nations."
"On any given day you can see souped-up Lamborghinis and blinged-out trophy wives in one part of the city, then walk over a few blocks and see piles of human feces, puddles of urine and vomit caked on the sidewalks," Fox News said. "The misery of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction hits deep in San Francisco and has turned parts of a beautiful city into a public toilet."
'Seattle is Dying'
Further north up the coast, a news special on the homelessness problem titled "Seattle is Dying" by local KOMO TV has prompted a national conversation.
Seattle radio host John Carlson, who is on the board of a number of non-profits that help the homeless, said that in his more than half a century in the city, he doesn't "recall a television news special provoking such an ongoing, sustained conversation as this one."
Far more people have seen it online than saw it on television.
Carlson said the reason "Seattle is Dying" angers "critics anchored to the status quo is that it confirms what many people who live and work here see and believe."
"It swats down silly talking points about homeless encampments being the result of greedy landlords, Amazon employees or" in the words of one critic, "our regressive tax system, generations of racial discrimination and long-term cuts in public housing."
"Please," Carlson wrote. "The problem is that Seattle's political establishment and a constellation of activists and service providers have created a system that incubates drug abuse, refuses to enforce relevant laws against it or the quality of life crimes associated with it, and then are somehow surprised when the problem of drug-related homelessness swells instead of shrinks."
Carlson noted that "Seattle is Dying," by KOMO reporter Eric Johnson, finds one solution in Rhode Island's Medication Assisted Treatment program for the incarcerated. The state screens every individual who enters the correctional system for opioid use disorder. It then offers, along with drug counseling, all three types of FDA-approved drugs to treat addiction.
See the KOMO-TV special "Seattle is Dying":
Los Angeles is trying to mitigate its problem with a program that appears to be unsustainable financially if not ill-advised from the standpoint of social consequences.
USA Today reported some people living on the city's streets will receive keys to one of 72 new apartments, complete with a fitness center, in the heart of trendy Koreatown.
Each unit is built at a projected cost of $690,692, with two additional projects in the pre-approval phase expected to top $700,000 per unit in total costs.
"This kind of cost is utterly unacceptable," Controller Ron Galperin said, according to USA Today. "I believe we need a fundamental course correction."