Tag Archives: #Homeless

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Democrats talk a good game, but when they have had the power, their policies have not worked! 3½ years of President Biden have produced record homelessness

Philadelphia’s last Republican Mayor, Bernard Samuel, left office on January 7, 1952, when Harry Truman was still President of the United States, and George VI was still King of England. In the 21½ years since January 3, 2003, Republicans have been Governors of Pennsylvania for just four years, with Tom Corbett leaving office on January 20, 2015. And since January 20, 2009, a Republican has held the White House for only four years. So, if homelessness is rising in the City of Brotherly Love, it isn’t exactly the GOP’s fault.

Homelessness in Philadelphia increases for third consecutive year

The number of homeless Philadelphians exceeded 5,000 for the first time since 2020.

by Layla A. Jones | Monday, September 23, 2024 | 3:09 PM EDT

The number of homeless Philadelphians increased for the third consecutive year, according to the annual point-in-time homelessness count conducted by the Office of Homeless Services.

The count was conducted in January and includes unsheltered people and those living in emergency shelters, safe haven and transitional housing. In 2024, the total number of homeless people reached 5,191, up from 4,725 the previous year — a 10% increase.

Mandated by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the annual point-in-time count is a snapshot of homelessness on one day in January.

Philadelphia’s count calls on volunteers, armed with clipboards, socks, and gloves, to spread across the city interviewing and cataloging people who are homeless.

How is it, if Democratic Party policies work, that homelessness is increasing in Philly? The Keystone State has had Democrats as Governors, and the city is a one-party, Democratic town. Mr Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes in 2020, 3,458,229 (50.01%) to 3,377674 (48.84%), but only because he carried Philadelphia 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%), a margin of 471,050 votes. That’s how Democratic Philadelphia is![1]Without Philly, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%). Whatever the Democrats wanted to do in Philadelphia, they had the votes and the officeholders to do.

High – but declining – poverty, the opioid epidemic and a lack of affordable housing are to blame for the rising numbers of unsheltered people, according to a summary of the city’s winter count.

“Poverty remains a factor, irrespective of poverty trends/trajectories,” said Sherylle Linton Jones, spokesperson for the Office of Homeless Services.

More than 20% of homeless people had either been evicted or displaced for another reason in the preceding 90 days, showing how impactful an issue affordable housing is in Philadelphia.

If poverty is declining, why would homelessness increase?

The drug crisis is certainly a factor, as former Mayor Jim Kenney concentrated on hugely important things, like an additional tax on Big Gulps from Seven/Eleven, but, other than that, had pretty much checked out of doing his job, and the Kensington section of the city had become not just a local laughing stock, but a nationally and even internationally known drug wasteland.

Let’s tell the truth here: Democrats talk a good game, but when they have power, their policies have not worked!

Philadelphia’s rising homelessness comes after the office overspent its budget by almost $15 million, pressured by a mandate to keep people sheltered.

The Democrats tell you that they are going to do something, but even with having overspent their budgets, they don’t get the job done!

Philadelphia’s numbers are in lockstep with a nationwide trend of rising homelessness. In 2023, homelessness grew 12% to the highest level ever recorded. More than an estimated 650,000 people are homeless in the United States, the largest number since the country started tracking the annual point-in-time survey in 2007. The rising homelessness crisis led the conservative-leaning Supreme Court to rule that municipalities could ban sleeping in public places, effectively outlawing unsheltered homelessness.

It hasn’t been just Philly. Under President Joe Biden, and the Administration’s oh-so-sympathetic attitude, homelessness nationwide has still soared to record levels. Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff has been telling us that she’s going to solve the problem by building 3,000,000 new, ‘affordable’ homes, but whatever her ideas to do that are, she never presented it or persuaded President Biden to do it. Once again, the Democrats are talking a big game, but they’ll fail miserably.

Mrs Emhoff is, as the Democrats always say they are, big on labor unions, but if her ‘plan’ includes pushing union labor on building those three million new homes, then she will have automatically made them more expensive, and less ‘affordable.’

Millions of people will vote Democratic this November, but those people will be voting for promises that cannot and will not be kept.

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↑1 Without Philly, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%).
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Homeless People Are Dangerous

I’m adapting the title of this article from Robert Stacy McCain’s series “Crazy People Are Dangerous,” because the ‘suspect’ in this case almost certainly is crazy. Really, don’t you have to be a bit nuts to pull out a knife and start stabbing someone else?

Philly DA charges man with assault for stabbing in SEPTA’s 15th Street Station

Jason Howard, 33, was charged with aggravated assault and related crimes for allegedly stabbing another man around 4 a.m. Thursday.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Friday, January 19, 2024 | 2:58 PM EST

A 33-year-old man who authorities say stabbed a man in the back multiple times in the 15th Street SEPTA subway station on Thursday morning has been charged with aggravated assault and related crimes.

Jason Howard attacked the 28-year-old victim after a confrontation around 4 a.m., a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office said Friday.

Both men were experiencing homelessness and likely taking shelter in the subway station when they apparently got into an argument and Howard pulled out a knife, authorities said.

I do so love the newspaper’s stylebook, which tells us that both the victim and (alleged) perpetrator were “experiencing homelessness,” rather than just saying that they are homeless. CBS News tells us that they were “unhoused.”

The following video report is from Fox 29 News, because The Philadelphia Inquirer would never, ever publish photos or other material which would show the image of the suspect!

Police reviewed surveillance footage and a SEPTA police officer later spotted Howard at the station, wearing the same clothing as the assailant in the video, as he stepped off a train on the Market-Frankford Line, said SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch. Philadelphia police arrested Howard on the 1500 block of Walnut Street shortly after, he said.

The Market-Frankford Line, huh? I’ve suggested before that it should be called the MF Line, because nothing good happens on it!

The Transit Police recovered a knife from the suspect, though it has not been reported whether that knife was the one which was used to stab the victim. Mr Howard is currently being held in lieu of $275,000 bail, something which a homeless man is unlikely to have or be able to raise.

We have previously noted that the city is far behind on its payments to privately-run homeless shelters, and it’s January, so yeah, the “unhoused” will seek shelter from the bitterly cold wind chills.

Former District Attorney Seth Williams tweeted, “Why drive when @SEPTA is so easy today! @SEPTAPHILLY“, and a lot of people replied with comments about how unsafe the system is. It wasn’t just this stabbing; Tyshaun Welles, an apparently good kid, was killed at the very same SEPTA station, allegedly by Quadir Humphrey, who just started shooting, apparently not aiming specifically at young Mr Welles, but just because he’s a thug with a criminal history who decided to be stupid.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a federal government agency that, with a name like that, shows how serious the problems are just by its existence, reported that, in 2022, 21% of “individuals experiencing homelessness” reported having a serious mental illness, and 16% reported having a substance use disorder. They also reported a 16% increase in “individuals experiencing chronic homelessness between 2020 and 2022,” which tells us just how much President Biden’s claims that the economy is doing just great are lies.

Let’s be honest here: homeless people are dangerous! With a (probably underestimated) 21% being seriously mentally ill and others besides that 21% — though there is certainly some overlap in these percentages — being alcoholics and junkies, that’s a lot of people you do not want to be around.

This is serious stuff. New Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins has promised to clean up the blatantly public drug market and the homeless encampments in Kensington, but that leads to the obvious question: if she kicks the homeless out of their camps, where will they go? One of the obvious answers is that they’ll go into the SEPTA train and subway stations!

Mrs Mullins is absolutely right: Kensington has to be cleaned up, but it’s not just that neighborhood. Kensington’s Allegheny Station is right along the MF Line, and the junkies will go where they know.

SEPTA needs increased ridership, and a $1.00 fare increase, to pay its bills and a city concerned about ‘climate change’ wants more Philadelphians to use public transportation, but Philly can’t get there if SEPTA stations become nothing but shelters for homeless junkies and crazy people. Over seventy years of unbroken Democratic Party and trade union rule has turned the City of Brotherly Love into what it is today. Mrs Mullins should be given a chance to do what she promised, but the problems in Philly are far greater than anyone is willing to admit.

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After 72 uninterrupted years in power, Democrats have kept Philly our nation’s poorest big city

The city of Philadelphia has been governed by Democrats for decades: the last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was President of the United States. The Democrats of today, in complete charge of the City of Brotherly Love, have talked a great, great game of taking care of the poor and downtrodden, yet it has to be asked: having talked the talk, have they walked the walk?

Some Philadelphia homeless shelters have gone months or years without being paid by the city

The Office of Homeless Services spent $15 million more than it was budgeted over the last four years, but some nonprofit leaders say during that time, they experienced severe delays in payment.

by Anna Orso | Wednesday, January 17, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

It was the Monday after Thanksgiving when officials at Gloria’s Place, a West Philadelphia homeless shelter that’s operated for five decades, learned their contract with the city wouldn’t be renewed due to a lack of funding, and the seven families in its care would need to find shelter somewhere else.

That came after Gloria’s Place had for ten months housed dozens of children and adults referred to them by the city — but were not paid the more than $400,000 the city owed them.

Yup, it’s another one of those Philadelphia Inquirer articles limited to subscribers only. I subscribe so that you don’t have to. Continue reading →

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Couldn’t we build something like this in Kensington?

In the two-part episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine entitled Past Tense, Part 1 and Part 2, a transporter accident lands Commander Benjamin Sisko, Dr Julian Bashir, and Lt Commander Jadzia Dax in San Francisco, in the year 2024. From Wikipedia:

Sisko and Bashir are found by a pair of police officers, who believe them to be vagrants and warn them to get off the streets. They are escorted to a “Sanctuary District”, a walled-off ghetto that is used to contain the poor, the sick, the mentally disabled, and anyone else who cannot support themselves.

Well, who would have thought that it would be so prescient!

Liberal City Builds Walls To Protect Elite, Clears Out Homeless

by Andrew Sanders | Tuesday, November 14, 2023 Continue reading →

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Was Deep Space Nine prescient?

It was a single paragraph in The New York Times which caught my attention:

About 171,000 people living in California are homeless, a total that, stunningly, accounts for nearly one-third of all the homeless people in the United States.

According to the Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 guesstimates of population, California had 39,029,342 residents, out of a total of 333,287,557 people in the United States. 39,029,342 ÷ 333,287,557 = 0.11710410779, or the Pyrite State having 11.71% of our total population. Why, then, does California have “nearly one-third of all the homeless people in the United States”? Continue reading →

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What happens to liberal voters when the consequences of liberal policies start to interfere with their own lives?

We recently noted uber-liberal Austin — Joe Biden carried Travis County, where Austin is located, 435,860 (71.62%) to 161,337 (26.51%) — and how it cut the city’s police department budget by a third. Of course, the city has seen a 73.68% increase in homicides from January through May over the same period in 2020, but the lovely Amanda Marcotte, a former Austinite, claims that’s because guns are so easy to get, not that they were any harder to obtain in 2020.

But, with few exceptions, it’s just the riff-raff killing other riff-raff, so the liberal elites in the city government and around the University of Texas don’t really care. It seems that they only care when problems encroach on their neighborhoods. From The Wall Street Journal:

As Austin Booms, Homelessness Faces Crackdown

Bans on public camping in Texas are breaking up encampments downtown

By Elizabeth Findell | June 24, 2021 | 8:15 AM EDT

AUSTIN, Texas—A freeway overpass shaded Elizabeth Contreras’s tent from the hot Texas sun, five years into a stretch of on-and-off homelessness that began when her husband left her, she said. Austin Police Officer Rosie Perez stopped by the tent last week with a written warning for Ms. Contreras: Within weeks, she would need to be gone.

Police officers are beginning to enforce new city and statewide bans on public camping, after a two-year battle over Austin homeless policies. Amid a growth boom that accelerated the city’s affordability crisis, homelessness has increased and local shelters are mostly full.

“You guys are asking ‘Where do I go?’ and I don’t have an answer for you,” Ms. Perez told Ms. Contreras. “But I know the process is going to continue.”

Cities nationwide are grappling with how to respond to homelessness after the coronavirus pandemic. This rapidly growing city of nearly 1 million has an estimated 3,160 people experiencing homelessness, according to an estimate by the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, a nonprofit that serves as the lead agency for homeless services in the Austin area. While that is a small number compared with many West Coast cities, the issue gained visibility after a change to city policies led homeless encampments to spread across downtown Austin and popular walking and biking paths.

Austin City Council members voted in 2019 to rescind a longtime city ban on sitting or sleeping in public, following testimony, mostly from homeless people and advocates, on its impact. One man spoke of a friend who had been killed when, sleeping in a tunnel to keep from being cited, she was swept away in a flood. Others said citations made it more difficult to work out of homelessness.

The majority of city council members agreed, saying camping rules criminalized homelessness and were inhumane and ineffective.

Backlash against the move was swift from Republican state officials, who often tangle with Austin’s liberal leaders. Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to override the decision days after the vote. Matt Mackowiak, head of the local GOP, spearheaded a petition effort to force the camping ban onto an election ballot. That effort gained steam, drawing support from police and some Democrats frustrated by the city’s limited action.

After initially saying they would carve out specific areas for camping, city leaders made no further adjustments to their policies. Efforts to purchase and operate hotels as transitional housing stalled. The Covid-19 pandemic complicated anti-homelessness efforts and reduced shelter capacity.

In May, critics of City Hall notched two victories. Austin voters approved Mr. Mackowiak’s ballot proposition, 57%-43%, forcing the city to reinstate the ban. State lawmakers also approved a ban on camping, with some recreation exceptions, on all public land in Texas. Neither ban made provisions for where to send people evicted from public spaces.

“Their social experiment on the camping ordinance failed so spectacularly that it can never be attempted in the state of Texas anywhere,” Mr. Mackowiak said.

There’s more at the original.

Remember: the voters who forced the reinstatement of the camping ban are the same ones who elected all of those Democrats and socialists to the city council, and the same ones who gave Joe Biden such an overwhelming victory in Travis County.

The Mayor stated that it’s easy to find political support to create more housing for the homeless, but a major political battle to figure out where to locate it. Translation: NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard.

This is what happens when liberal policies are enacted and start to actually affect mostly white, well-to-do liberal voters. They wouldn’t mind all of those tents if they were in the lower-class areas, but when they encroach on downtown high-rise condos or posh office buildings, that’s a different story altogether.