Start by looking at the government policies that have made it worse.
California is home to nearly one-third of the nation’s homeless population and the problem—by almost everyone’s account—continues to worsen. The statistics tell part of the story: More than 170,000 people sleep in tents in public parks, under freeway bridges and on sidewalks in our cities and suburbs. The state has spent $20 billion to address the problem in five years.
Billions in spending have failed to solve California’s massive—and worsening—homelessness crisis.
Ask the average Californian his take on homelessness, and he’ll say that it’s gotten much worse. Back in the early 2000s, a visitor to Los Angeles’s Skid Row or San Francisco’s Tenderloin would have witnessed scenes of misery that seemed scarcely capable of further deterioration. Intense reaction against street conditions back then gave rise, in many California cities, to campaigns to end homelessness, prompting billions in new spending. But no California city ended homelessness; the average Californian’s impression is correct. According to the best data available, homelessness in California grew during the 2010s and is still growing.
Los Angeles officials are trying to stop the spread of the flesh-eating drug xylazine that has taken over the city.
The ‘zombie drug’, a veterinary tranquilizer approved in the US for cows and horses, is now flooding the illicit US drug market, with dealers often cutting it with cocaine and heroin.
After plunging due to interest rate hikes throughout last year, the average price of a Canadian resale home has now increased for four months in a row, new numbers showed Monday.
The Canadian Real Estate Association said Monday that the average selling price of a home that sold on its MLS system in April went for $716,000. That’s the fourth monthly increase in a row, and it marks a collective increase of more than $100,000 since the start of the year.
Canada sees 60% increase in homeless support workers over 5 years
As homelessness in Canada grows, the number of workers in the homelessness support sector has also been increasing.
According to Statistics Canada, the sector saw a 60.7 per cent increase in workers between 2016 and 2021, when there were 10,130 people employed in the field. StatCan says that this outpaced the growth in all other sectors by 3.4 per cent.
Toronto council on Friday declared a symbolic homelessness emergency in the city, which is what cities do in the face of intractable problems they will never solve.
Symbolic because it doesn’t compel the federal and provincial governments, to which the city is appealing for more funding, to do anything.
Daniel Penny, the Marine facing a manslaughter charge in the subway chokehold killing of Jordan Neely, is being “railroaded,” outraged friends and family told The Post Saturday.
Loved ones are angry at the rush to judgment over Neely’s death and those who have branded Penny a “murderer” for the May 1 incident on a Manhattan subway train.
On Saturday mornings, Maggie Herdman, 31, leaves her home near Jane and Eglinton at 6 a.m. to commute nearly an hour to the Fort York Food Bank. Once there, it can take up to four hours before it’s her turn to shop inside the small College Street storefront.
Before the pandemic, Herdman used to be able to relax, sit down and read as she waited inside. Now, through rain and snow, she stands by as the line snakes behind her towards Kensington Market. “I’ve gotten sick before,” said Herdman, a recipient of Ontario Works. “But I still do it.”
All of this misery lies at the feet of our ruling class. Mass immigration, supported by the Uniparty has driven shelter costs beyond the reach of many, young, old it doesn’t discriminate.
Anybody seen any trickle down from the public service strike? Didn’t they claim they were “fighting” so everyone could enjoy gold plated benefits like they have?
Who thought that Canada would become a Banana Republic governed by greed.
Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who choked and killed Jordan Neely, a homeless man, on the subway last week, surrendered on Friday to face a charge of second-degree manslaughter.
Mr. Penny, 24, dressed in a dark gray suit, his blonde hair curly and his upper lip covered in a trim mustache, walked through the front doors of the Police Department’s Fifth Precinct at around 8 a.m.
Like San Francisco and many other US cities, Washington DC has experienced sharp increases in crime and homelessness
When thinking of Washington DC, grand monuments and museums might come to mind, however, in recent years, America’s capital has become more renowned for its growing homeless population and rising crime.
“Crime here has exploded, people do not feel safe,” Isaac Smith, an Emergency Medical Technician in DC, told The Telegraph for a documentary film about the capital.
“I have a bullet hole through my living room,” Mr Smith continued.
Get ready Toronto. This is your future.
John Sherry saved all his life, owned his home outright, and ran a business with 15 workers. Then his wife got cancer.
Now the couple live in a trailer and take grocery handouts from shelter volunteers. Their prospects of ever getting back into a home in tony Marin County, California, are swiftly dwindling.
‘I’m not the guy that’s down there and has zero. I saved real well. I owned my home outright. But circumstances happen,’ Sherry, 69, told DailyMail.com.
The city of Phoenix is slated to begin work this week clearing out and cleaning up “the Zone,” a massive downtown homeless camp that a state judge recently deemed a public nuisance.
City workers on Wednesday are slated to begin removing tents, block by block, from a portion of the unstructured homeless camp, one of the nation’s largest, according to media reports.
Legislators in the Peach State have joined a growing movement rejecting the failed approaches that have fostered urban anarchy elsewhere.
The United States has a homelessness problem, but we have an even bigger homelessness-policy problem. It is an issue at the federal level—HUD spends nearly $10 billion annually to create bad incentives that reward destitution—and at the state and local level. This week, two widely divergent state approaches to homelessness were on display.
…. In San Francisco, “permanent supportive housing” is one such failed program. In one instance, the city found that a quarter of those given a free apartment were dead in just a few years, many from overdoses. The federal government and states like California embrace this boondoggle, but other states should make other choices. They can dedicate funding to treatment and emergency shelter, for example.
We can hope Toronto takes note … but I fear city hall is in love with all the worst policy.
Hundreds of locals in one of San Francisco’s wealthiest counties have been forced to pack up their lives into RVs and trailers after being pushed out of the housing market.
Shocking photos show the ever-growing line of trucks and other vehicles along 101 Highway – which now stretches over two miles in one of the largest encampments in the country.
Cities in Marin County, where on average homes cost $1.4million, are pushing for the line along the highway to end after the number of residents living in their cars ballooned during the pandemic.
State dubbed America’s wokest says people should be allowed to stay in tent city without ‘time limitations’
Homeless people in Oregon could be given the right to sue anybody who tries to move them for $1,000 (£796) under legislation being considered in the state.
Democrats, who hold the majority in the state’s House of Representatives, have drawn up a bill which would decriminalise the tent cities which have been pitched on public spaces.
The bill would allow unhoused people to stay “without discrimination and time limitations”.
