Lessons from a previous American tumble
American cities are littered with street camps, drugs, and a motley crew of addicts, alcoholics, dropouts, vagrants, criminals, and the mentally ill. From Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood to San Francisco’s Tenderloin, from Portland to New York, from downtown Los Angeles to Seattle’s Highland Park, thousands of American urban districts are sites of danger and disorder.
The tragedy unfolding on our streets may seem unprecedented. But drug-fueled urban squalor is nothing new in the United States, and we could learn something from how our forebears handled it.
