New York City homeless man sleeps on sidewalk with toaster oven, crisis worst 'since Great Depression' https://t.co/VMMPhLKpLs
— Fox News Lifestyle (@FoxNewsLife) September 14, 2022
Posted on 09/14/2022 9:44:04 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
“Homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s,” the Coalition for the Homeless reports.
After decades of failure, New York City homelessness keeps getting worse. The only people who appear to be benefiting are the ones who make a pretty penny “serving” the homeless. The homeless–an ever expanding group in our major cities–are still sleeping rough and dying of overdoses.
This despite the fact that NYC spends about $43,750 per year per homeless person — 50% more than it spends on each schoolchild. That adds up to billions of dollars in spending with nothing but disastrous results to show for it. At least that is less than San Francisco, which spends an astonishing $106,500 per homeless person.
Fox News has a must watch/must read feature on how bad the homeless problem has gotten in New York City, and needless to say it is eye opening.
It is one part outrage-inducing and one part depressing. The human cost for both the homeless and the average citizen is mind boggling.
New York City homeless man sleeps on sidewalk with toaster oven, crisis worst 'since Great Depression' https://t.co/VMMPhLKpLs
— Fox News Lifestyle (@FoxNewsLife) September 14, 2022
Fox reporter Kerry Byrne spent time talking with and listening to actual homeless folks, and the people who are forced to deal with them and the filth and depravity that excessive homelessness brings along with it.
Sal “Sinatra” Salomon, a New York City singer, actor and advocate for the homeless (he was once homeless himself) shared his observations.
“It just keeps getting worse,” Sal “Sinatra” Salomon, a New York City singer, actor and advocate for the homeless, told Fox News Digital this week.
“This is the greatest city in the world and this is unacceptable,” said Salomon.
The theater of the absurd proliferates even as the city’s Dem leaders dump billions of taxpayer dollars into failed programs and shelters that are run by private contractors.
Salomon says he spent years living on the streets and also time behind bars in state custody.
The city shelters, in his opinion, “are worse than prison” — that’s one reason why so many people prefer a hard life on the streets, he suggested.
“Prison workers have supervisors and are trained to respect the privacy of the men in prison,” he said. “Shelters are run by some loudmouth from the neighborhood who knows the mayor and hires their friends with city money.”
Ah, there’s the key: “Shelters are run by some loudmouth from the neighborhood who knows the mayor and hires their friends with city money.” It all makes sense now.
With the kind of money that cities like New York and San Francisco spend on “eradicating homelessness” you would think that they would make some progress. They have been spending billions, year in year out. Yet the problem only gets worse.
“Helping” the homeless is an industry for the people who make a living and make a killing off of it. Bureaucrats, nonprofits, and developers are essentially farming homeless people to make a nice living and profit off of the problem. The cost to build each “unit” of affordable housing in San Francisco, for instance, is $1 million. $1 million to house a single person or perhaps 3, if it is a family. That is a tidy sum, providing a nice profit for the builders but a seriously bad deal for taxpayers.
It’s a scam. A grift. From the Hoover Institution:
During the pandemic, San Francisco distributed 262 tents across six locations. These tents are sheltering just over 300 people. I don’t know how much the city paid for these tents, but one can purchase a perfectly fine, very large tent from REI for about $400. The annual budget for these tents is $16.1 million, which comes out to about $61,000 per tent per year. This includes meals, bathroom facilities, and security.
City supervisors were taken aback when the interim head of San Francisco’s homelessness department handed them the bill and reported that the cost wasn’t eligible for FEMA repayment. If they had been housed in a hotel, FEMA would have covered the expenses, but apparently not for tents that flap in the wind. Whoops. As in a double whammy, $16.1 million whoops. And as if it were OK for supervisors to waste taxpayer money from the rest of the country had it been FEMA eligible. You know the old saying about playing with other people’s money.
Back to Fox News’ report:
Yet heartbreaking images of the homeless living in deplorable conditions on the streets shock visitors who have flooded back to New York City this year — especially in high-visibility marquee locations in and around Times Square.
In recent weeks, “The Crossroads of the World” has welcomed more than 350,000 pedestrians each day, according to the Times Square Alliance. That matches and even exceeds the pre-pandemic numbers of 2019.
And what did they find there?
A person slept outside an empty storefront at the corner of Eighth Avenue and West 45th Street on Monday, wearing socks and sweatpants.
The person’s face was covered by a cardboard sign from New York City Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) touting “prime pay!” for workers.
One man, also without shoes, sat bleary-eyed outside an entrance to the 42nd Street/Port Authority subway station at the corner of Eighth and 44th Street.
His right hand rested on the filthy sidewalk, while his left arm was wrapped up inside his jersey.
Steps away, a pile of debris spilled out of a trash bin at the corner of West 43rd Street, one of the busiest pedestrian intersections in Manhattan.
I have to smirk at the irony of a homeless man covering his face with a sign from the SEIU, one of the most radical unions in the country. They claim to care and advocate for the downtrodden in our country, but providing a sign for a homeless man to sleep under is probably the most good they have done in decades.
Republican activist, former city council candidate, and lifelong Manhattan resident Jackie Toboroff hit the nail on the head: “City leaders created this problem. It’s a manmade problem.”
She cited a long list of reasons for the city’s homeless explosion.
“They emptied the jails, they shut down Broadway and business for two years, they ruined education for children, they made drug use aspirational, their mandates forced people to lose their jobs, they flooded the city with illegal immigrants — and now we have the cost of the Biden economy,” said Toboroff.
I admit that I have no clear idea of how to finally address the homeless problem. There are so many reasons people find themselves on the streets. But I am quite certain that the very first step has to be to fire the grifters who have been living off the misery of the homeless and start over. Until we do we are just going to get more and more of the same.
More homeless. More grifting bureaucrats. More $60,000 tents. And richer developers who make a nice living off of building “affordable” housing.
Stop. Just stop. Right now.
Where have all the homeless came from?
There were always few bums on the streets, but there has been an explosion of them lately!
Anybody knows?
The current administration is helping provide “affordable housing” to many folks!
What passes for a flop house in New York City now costs $60 per night, up from 25¢ per night back in the day. Additionally crime in homeless shelters keep potential "customers" away. Many say they feel safer sleeping on the street than in homeless shelters.
Government money for green energy gets more green energy.
Government money for homeless folks gets more homeless folks.
My wife and I do support Christian ministries for homeless men and youth. They need to stay sober and clean. They need to take classes and/or work. They provide on the job training (paid) for those without experience.
Stop calling them homeless, they’re druggies.
1. Round them up, put them in a camp, dry them out and try to rehab those you can and keep the rest who can’t be rehabbed in the camp.
2. To keep this from happening again do what Singapore does - come down really hard on both users and pushers, especially pushers.
3. Close the border, or at a minimum know who and what the hell you’re letting in.
4. Replace destructive, pathological compassion with tough love.
Problem solved.
Round them up, put them in a camp, dry them out and try to rehab those you can and keep the rest who can’t be rehabbed in the camp.
Well, there's druggies, alkies and whackjobs. They indeed need to be "rounded up" and evaluated. The mentally ill need to be institutionalized, leaving them loose on the streets is inhumane.
Up here in Maine, you'll often see a street sign in many towns..."Town Farm Road". It was about what you described. They worked on the farm and raised their own food.
They had it figured out long ago, back when normal people ran governments.
Bingo. You nailed it.
I worked in NYC in the ‘80’s and homelessness was bad then.
Absolutely
Drug addict campers and some crazies
I deal with this daily
It’s an epidemic is addicts who camp illegally we treat like folks who can’t pay rent
Predators
You’re uninformed
It’s drug addicts
Uncomplicated
Deport every illegal found.
Then you’re Enabling drug addicts
Who prey on me
Thanks a lot
Me the old fart
Maggie is a peach she has tried to help us
Some good media exists
13
Drugs. Booze. Mental illness. And the end of flop houses and rooming houses
___________________
Drugs, Booze and Mental Illness were around for a long while.
Some homeless were around for a while too.
They showed up in media during Republican administrations (Reagan was especially chastised as heartless.)
They reliably disappeared during Democratic administrations.
But there is an explosion of homeless right now!
The are everywhere!
I am puzzled. Maybe the flop houses?
“They had it figured out long ago, back when normal people ran governments.”
All it is is common sense - something that it’s in very short supply.
The cause of all this dysfunction is a depraved, pathological pervasive sense of compassion that leads to tolerating very bad behavior, destructive to both the individual and society. All in the name of “compassion”.
It’s the old, “spare the rod, spoil the child”. - One of the gods of the copybook headings.
I read the stories about men who were in a rest room when a “homeless” man in shabby and dirty clothes came in, took out a bag and got out nice clothes and put them on, put the old ones in the bag and left.
Some have told they made hundreds in one day from kind people giving cash to them in their scam.
While I was at work all day and fighting traffic to go home at night.
“Deport every illegal found.”
The illegals are the least of the problem, they’re just a symptom. The actual disease are the disgusting politicians, bureaucrats and the people who put them in power - the voters.
If YOU were one of those miserable, downtrodden illegal, and you knew the door to the land of milk and honey was wide open with a red carpet waiting for you, would you walk in?
Or put another way, if you leave your front door whire open with a sign that says “you’re welcome to come in and help yourself to what we have” and people walking by accepted the “invitation”, whom do you then blame. when your place gets trashed?
I don’t blame then at all for wanting to live here.
It is the fault of the politicians who created this mess.
Nevertheless, they still all need to be deported as they are found out. They KNOW they are entering illegally.
Out immigration policies rot. I know of cases of good, well educated, law abiding, tax paying, hard working foreign nationals whose green cards were revoked for no good reason while criminals and terrorists are given a pass on everything and handed all kinds of free stuff.
That needs to change.
Illegals need to be sent back to where they came from and apply for LEGAL immigration and meet criteria like my grandparents had to. Must have a sponsor, a job, and a place to stay, all lined up. Must be healthy and not a criminal. And I would add, these days, no terror connections at all allowed.
IOW, help be a productive member of society instead of a drag on it.
The ministries we give to have dorms where they need to stay clean and follow the rules.
Agreed though - even the people that now stay there say that 100% of the homeless on the streets are addicts. But I’m glad there is a place that will help those that want help to get (and stay) clean and to get some job skills and get on a productive path.
This is in the Seattle area - it is just crazy how they have allowed the drugged-out homeless to take over the sidewalks, city parks, streets, etc.
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