Sad Los Angeles

AP reports:

Many voters in heavily Democratic Los Angeles are seething over rising crime and homelessness and that could prompt the city to take a turn to the political right for the first time in decades.

Sounds a bit like Auckland!

One of the leading candidates for mayor is Rick Caruso, a pro-business billionaire Republican-turned-Democrat who sits on the board of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and is promising to expand spending on police, not defund them.

He is a Democrat, but one of the few moderate or sane ones.

But these are fraught times in Los Angeles, with more than 40,000 people living in trash-strewn homeless encampments and rusty RVs, distress over brazen smash-and-grab robberies and home invasions while inflation and taxes are gouging wallets — gas in a region built on car travel has cracked $6 a gallon. Rents and home prices have soared.

Again sounds like Auckland!