The most honest testimony about homelessness and addiction on the West Coast this year did not come from a politician, a nonprofit director, or a paid consultant. It came from a man who stood up at a city council meeting and introduced himself with a sentence most officials would never dare say out loud.
“My name’s Corey Ratlif. I am a drug addict and homeless,” he began. Then he explained what finally turned his life around: “It took me forty-five days in jail to finally get my mind right and hold myself accountable.”
Before that, he told the council, he drifted through the streets for years, and the city made it easy. “I was being enabled from the city — with free pipes, free foil, free housing, places that police can’t really come in and do anything about. So now we’re encouraging and enabling a drug addict and a homeless person to be comfortable in that situation. That does not help the situation.”
What helped, he said, was the opposite of comfort.
“Hold me accountable, arrest me. Don’t give me a slap on the wrist, don’t let me go.”
That time in jail, he said, gave him room “to think, take accountability for what I did, understand that I need to change things, get out,” and into sober-living and recovery. His verdict on those programs was plain: “These sober-living programs are the answer. It was, for me.”
Then came the line that should stop every Southern California official cold. He has an older brother, he said, “still actively in addiction, who has no thought whatsoever of getting out of that situation — because tiny-home villages, housing projects, everything there is comfortable to be homeless and a drug addict… These days it’s so easy to be a drug addict, and you’re accepted in the city because it’s okay.”
One brother went to jail, got sober, and went back to work. The other was handed a tiny home and a tolerant city, and he is still using. That is not an accident. That is policy.
Los Angeles County is already running this experiment — and taxing us to pay for it
We do not have to guess how this ends, because Los Angeles County is already doing it. Voters were promised that if they simply approved enough money, the crisis would ease. In the City of Los Angeles, Proposition HHH borrowed more than one billion dollars to build supportive housing — units that ended up costing well over half a million dollars each and arrived years behind schedule. Countywide, Measure H layered on a sales-tax stream of hundreds of millions of dollars every year for homeless services.
And the county is still reaching deeper into our pockets. Its newest half-cent sales-tax increase, Measure ER, pushes Burbank’s sales tax to eleven percent this October. One tax after another, billions of dollars in all — and the encampments only grew. That is not a funding shortfall. That is proof that you cannot spend your way out of a policy that rewards the very behavior it claims to fix. We wrote about that appetite for higher taxes and government handouts in “Time for Tax Cuts, Not Handouts.” This is the same failure, seen from the street.
“Free” beds are an advertisement to the whole country
The money does not just fail — it advertises. “Free” sober-living beds, low-barrier housing, and no-questions-asked services do not only serve the people already here; they draw people in from everywhere else. California’s loosely regulated rehabilitation and sober-living industry has been the subject of investigation after investigation into “patient brokering” — operators recruiting addicts from across the country, billing insurers and taxpayers, and then dumping those people back onto the street when the checks stop.
Build the destination and they will come — by the busload and by the thousands, from states that were smart enough not to build it themselves. Every “free” bed a city offers is an advertisement to the entire country that this is the place to come and use. Burbank did not create Los Angeles County’s crisis, and Burbank will not fix it by volunteering to absorb it and pay for it.
It is already happening on a Burbank street
This is not a hypothetical. Right now, at 1134 North Lima Street, in the middle of a Burbank neighborhood of single-family homes, a company called Regain Hope Detox and Recovery Center runs a live-in medical detox and residential drug-treatment operation. In its own words, it provides “24/7 physician-supervised” detox and “live-in care in a comfortable home setting” — a round-the-clock medical business operating out of a house on a residential street.
Public records filed with the California Secretary of State list the operator as Regain Hope Detox and Recovery Center, Inc. (entity number 6252607) and name Mileidys Gomez Gonzalez and Carlos Yoo as the corporation’s officers and directors.
And it is built to draw people in from far away. On its own website, the facility tells prospective clients: “Out-of-state? We help arrange travel.” It advertises that it bills a long list of health plans, including taxpayer-funded ones such as the military’s TRICARE. This is exactly the pipeline the man in the video described from the street — addiction treatment marketed across the country, paid for with insurance and public money, setting up shop on a quiet Burbank block.
Here is the part that should alarm every homeowner in this city: a facility like this needs no permit hearing, no public notice, and no vote to open. Under California law, a state-licensed alcohol- and drug-recovery facility serving six or fewer people must be treated exactly like an ordinary single-family home — allowed in any residential zone, with no special-use permit and no zoning hearing beyond what a normal house needs (California Health and Safety Code section 11834.23). Federal fair-housing law and the Americans with Disabilities Act pile on still more protection, and courts have used them to overturn cities that tried to say no.
The result is simple, and it is happening one house at a time: a facility like this can open next door to you, and the city cannot require a hearing, cannot notify the neighbors, and in most cases cannot stop it. By the time neighbors notice the strangers, the round-the-clock traffic, and the medical comings and goings, it is already there — and there is almost nothing they can do about it. No notice. No hearing. No say. That is not a loophole. That is the policy, and it is quietly taking over single-family neighborhoods across California.
Not in Burbank
That is the model now being pushed toward Burbank: homeless shelters, tiny-home villages, “navigation centers,” and drug services that hand out supplies while asking nothing in return. We should say no — clearly and without apology.
Concentrate free housing and drug supplies in one place and you concentrate the need that follows them. A city that opens low-barrier, drug-tolerant housing does not simply help its own residents in trouble — it becomes the regional magnet, the address every county agency and every out-of-state operator quietly points people toward.
None of this is about cruelty. It is about what actually works, and the man in that video, who lived it, told us plainly. Real compassion is measured by how many people get clean, get housed for good, and go back to work — not by how many beds we hand out with no expectations attached. Burbank should back treatment-first, sobriety-based recovery, enforce the law, and help the people who genuinely want out. What Burbank must never do is build comfortable permanence for addiction — the exact thing a recovering addict says kept his own brother sick, and the exact thing bankrupting the county next door.
Corey Ratlif asked one thing of his city: hold me accountable. Burbank should have the courage to do for our community what Los Angeles would not.
Respectfully,
The Burbank Republican Party