On Skid Row, GOP candidate faults Democrats

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, one of the top Republican candidates running for California governor, met a woman sprawled on the sidewalk as he walked around Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

- BY SEEMA MEHTA

RIVERSIDE County Sheriff Chad Bianco, in a campaign T-shirt, talks with people on Los Angeles' Skid Row.

(JASON ARMOND Los Angeles Times)

“I'm waiting for the sun to come out from the clouds. I’m sunbathing,” the woman said Tuesday morning, lying on her jacket on the cold concrete, denying that any drug use was taking place in the roughly 50-block swath of downtown Los Angeles. “This is what we do here in California.”

Bianco shook his head and, as he walked away, said there was zero chance the woman was not high on methamphetamine or something else. He said it was immoral for the state’s leaders to allow people to live in such conditions, and pledged to clean up Skid Row within four years if he is elected governor in November.

“Why on God’s green earth, why would we allow this to happen?” Bianco later said. “And why would you have something that you call Skid Row, that you just accept, instead of doing something to fix ... these people’s lives.”

Bianco squarely blamed the problem on waste, fraud and mismanagement under Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and prior elected leaders, who he argued failed to effectively tackle the issue. He is among the critics who points to a 2024 state audit that found California had spent $24 billion to combat homelessness over the prior five years without tracking the results.

A spokesman for Newsom disputed such characterizations of the spending.