And what happened to the “homeless” that were inhabiting these camps? Did they just move somewhere else and create new encampments?
And what happened to the “homeless” that were inhabiting these camps? Did they just move somewhere else and create new encampments?
If they go to other overloaded camps they are not welcome. lot of fights and territories in a homeless camp. It is not a peacefull place.
I suspect most in dc are paid protesters. They will go home.
https://www.shelterlist.com/city/dc-washington
maybe some will go to a shelter?
The point being that homeless are not all the same.
California is Supercool to the Homeless
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lsrBlKpbBS8&pp=ygUgQ2FsaWZvcm5pYSBpcyBzdXBlcmNvb2wgaG9tZWxlc3M%3D
“You don’t have to go anywhere in paricualr but you can’t stay here”!
“And what happened to the “homeless” that were inhabiting these camps?”
They went elsewhere.
They were homeless on some of the most expensive public property in the nation’s capital; now they are homeless on less expensive, less visible property - maybe somewhere in Maryland or Virginia.
At least it returns park areas in crowded Washington D.C. back to residents and visitors to use without having to confront squatters who don’t like taxpayers in their “living space.”
There are countless homeless shelters the taxpayers have been fleeced for over the past few decades. I sure they could be distributed among all of them in the greater DC area.
Every city is different, so I begin by noting that DC specific remarks don't necessarily translate into broader policy prescriptions. Some do, but take them on a case by case basis.
The first complication in DC is the very small size of the District, which is set by the constitution. In most other places, the city would long since have annexed the heavily urbanized suburbs. That can't happen in DC. If one looks at the metro area as a whole, most of the really extreme DC stats normalize to look a lot more like the rest of the country. If you look at the tiny core that is DC proper, we have the monumental core, the government complex, the historic downtown and a remarkably bipolar income distribution when one looks at the residential areas.
Remember that Washington, DC proper now contains less than ten percent of the CMSA's population. It is smaller in population than several of the big suburban counties. And here's a local twist: the inner ring suburban counties expanded significantly in the 1960's and 70's, especially in Northern Virginia after the new Potomac River bridges enabled commuting into DC. I sometimes refer to these as the "beltway suburbs" -- and many of them were in part the product of white flight and were explicitly planned as completely automobile dependent, with residential areas quite separate from work and major shopping areas, which made everyone jump into a car to do anything more than visit the next door neighbor. Many of them were also planned deliberately for exclusionary zoning, the general idea being that DC could be used as the regional dumping ground. In DC itself, the very affluent, professionally accomplished and politically connected elites in upper northwest wanted no part of low income housing, shelters, or social services, so they systematically forced all such things to the east side, especially Anacostia. LBJ and the Great Society amplified this by prioritizing big public housing projects, and these naturally got shunted into the politically unprotected areas because the gentry liberals practiced NIMBY before NIMBY was invented.
What we see in DC now is not the product of the natural organic growth of a major metro area. It is the product of more than half a century of disastrously bad social engineering. That has to be dismantled. The DC-Baltimore-et.al. CMSA now has a population of over 10 million and has the country's worst traffic congestion. Largely as a result of hellish suburban commutes, we now have gentrification on steroids in the older core neighborhoods, many of which had been quite battered by the long decades of bad policy. A big part of our crime problem is gentrifiers pioneering into now rapidly shrinking pockets of dysfunction, aka our "affordable housing" areas. I came to town in '79 and lived through this on Capitol Hill, which was one of the first great turnaround success stories. Once we got rid of the crackhead crook of a major and Anthony Williams started to straighten out DC government services, this has taken off across the city. We are reclaiming the city block by block. But where we hit immovable barriers are with the big public housing projects, the now aging LBJ thug ranches. In some parts of the city, Capitol Hill being a good example, these have been thinned out as they aged and weren't replaced. This makes an immediate difference and the surrounding areas come back to life pretty quickly. This is what now needs to happen in Anacostia.
Now back to the original question. Where are the displaced homeless supposed to go? I'm willing to have long, constructive conversations about this, but the short answer (as a longtime Capitol Hill resident) is that first and foremost, they just need to go. Period. Anywhere else. If DC police kept them on the run, they would drift naturally to the suburbs. (And it's not just the homeless; MS-13 is now a suburban gang.) There is some justice in this, as DC's suburbs have been free riders for far too long, Silver Spring being the honorable exception. Take DC's homeless and dump them in Rockville, Potomac, and the better parts of Arlington and Alexandria. I don't care.
Separate that question from the very important parallel question of HOW to handle this population: more shelters, more in-patient treatment centers, a return of the asylums for the severely mentally ill, work camps, whatever. But whatever we do, we need to look at the metro area as a whole and spread the burden.
And that means getting them out of DC, which should no longer serve as the regional human waste dump. We're gentrifying them out of the city very quickly, and if we keep closing housing projects, we'll finish the job in another generation. Maybe the truly hopeless cases will find their way to Baltimore or Philly, where they will fit right in. Maybe they'll show up in your backyard. I don't care. DC can take its proportional share, but we are still far above that mark. Until we reduce the overload, ship 'em out.
With any luck, they moved to Maryland.
We ship them to Illinois.
I think Martha’s Vineyard will take them all. (/S)
I don’t care!
The old “You made your bed (tent-whatever) now sleep in it.” no longer applies.
They were not homeless. The removed people were campers illegally tenting on Federal property
“And what happened to the “homeless” that were inhabiting these camps? Did they just move somewhere else and create new encampments?”
There’s plenty of room on Martha’s Vineyard.
L