Crime-ridden Seattle has lost its downtown Nike flagship store and multiplex movie theater as crime runs rampant and the number of homeless people dying soars.
The Rain City’s downtown area suffered its latest blow on Friday when the popular Nike store, located at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Pike Street, shut its doors for good.
Nike’s exit came right after Regal Cinemas announced it would reject the lease of the Meridian 16 multiplex located on Seventh Avenue and Pike Street.
The City of Portland, Oregon, has released an online dashboard that documents more than 30,000 homeless campsites reported in the past year as officials vow to clean them up.
The Homelessness and Urban Camping Incident Response Program (HUCIRP) launched the dashboard on Wednesday to give the public more clarity on how they are handling the dire homeless situation in the City of Roses.
The interactive map shows the thousands of camps in the Oregon city, their risk level, and before and after photos after crews have cleaned up.
A San Francisco art gallery owner who sprayed a homeless woman with a hose has been arrested, police have said.
Collier Gwin, 71, has been charged with misdemeanour battery, after a video of him spraying the woman outside his gallery on 9 January caused outrage.
He faces up to six months in prison and a $2,000 (£1,600) fine, the city’s district attorney said.
Mr Gwin has since apologised for his actions, describing them as indefensible.
Only in San Francisco. Business owner #reelsinstagram #shorts #briochesf @sfgov @SFGate @SupervisorTang @AaronPeskin @Telemundo48 No respect ✊🏼 pic.twitter.com/Gn2mmPpLtb
— #briochesf (@briochesf) January 9, 2023
Like many cities on the West Coast, Redding, California, is experiencing a homelessness crisis. And, like too many cities around the country—as I detail in my book and have highlighted in many columns over the years—officials appear to have determined the problem can be best dealt with by making it difficult or impossible to share food with people in need.
Homelessness in Redding is a challenge city residents have recognized and organized to address. Last summer, for example, a group of “regular guys” in Redding partnered with a local taco truck to offer free lunches to those in need. More recently, an obituary for a charitable local resident highlighted her compassionate history of sharing homemade coffee and sandwiches with hungry residents.
The owner of an art gallery in San Francisco who was caught on camera spraying a homeless woman with a hosepipe has defended his actions.
In footage shared on social media, Collier Gwin, who runs Foster Gwin Gallery in the Financial District, leans against the gate of a restaurant and continues to spray the woman, despite her yelping with discomfort.
Local businesses were quick to condemn his actions, while scores of enraged social media users left dreadful reviews online – causing the gallery’s rating on Google to plunge to just one star.
San Francisco pic.twitter.com/n6XU5CMvQa
— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) January 10, 2023
What do people expect to happen when authorities abandon responsibility?
A homeless woman in Portland revealed how easy the Oregon city makes it to subsist in that lifestyle.
A woman identified only as Wendy told an interviewer from the nonprofit We Heart Seattle, “It’s a piece of cake, really; that’s probably why you’ve got so many out here.”
She mentioned that certain organizations will provide free food to the city’s homeless residents, letting the homeless do what they want in between those meals.
The true scale of homelessness is being grossly undercounted in the official estimates, experts say, leading to a chronic underfunding of programs designed to help unhoused people.
The most recent statistics of unhoused people nationwide are from 2016 in a Canadian Observatory on Homelessness report, which states more than 250,000 people in Canada experience homelessness in any given year.
Homeless encampments are “visibly rising” in Canada, according to the Canadian Human Rights Commission — and to address this, a “Housing First” approach is needed from all levels of government, be it federal, provincial or municipal, experts say.
The “Housing First” approach identifies the right to housing as the first and foremost need of people experiencing homelessness. Needs such as childcare, drug addiction or medical requirements come after an individual has been housed, Leilani Farha, the global director of The Shift, an international initiative that advocates for the right to housing, told Global News.
Acting to address “a crisis we see all around us” toward the end of a year that has seen a string of high-profile crimes involving homeless people, Mayor Eric Adams announced a major push on Tuesday to remove people with severe, untreated mental illness from the city’s streets and subways.
Mr. Adams, who has made clearing homeless encampments a priority since taking office in January, said the effort would require involuntarily hospitalizing people who were a danger to themselves, even if they posed no risk of harm to others, arguing the city had a “moral obligation” to help them.
I don’t disagree. The homeless problem is often a mental illness or addiction problem.
“What stands out for visitors?” I asked our guide during a tour of Honolulu’s Chinatown with my out-of-town guests. “Always the same,” he replied, “the homeless.”
An auditor general’s report found that multibillion-dollar federal housing programs were not being tracked to see whether they actually reduced homelessness.
While other Canadian cities are firmly in the throes of winter, Toronto, after months of balmy weather, finally surrendered to its first snowfall on Tuesday, with more on the way. Winters are a habitual stress test on Toronto’s infrastructure, especially public transit, but also on its constellation of social services for the homeless.
Most nights in Toronto, the shelter system is full and has to turn people away.
“I’ve written a lot of posts about the problem of homelessness in Portland over the years. Just this year there have been multiple reports about people planning to leave the area for good because of crime and homelessness. There have been specific reports about dangerous homeless people and persistent homeless thieves who never seem to get taken off the streets no matter what they do.”
Portland is a “progressive paradise” anything they do will make things worse and this plan is typically insane.
Feds want to reduce chronic homelessness by 50% — but there’s scant data on progress
The federal departments tasked with curbing chronic homelessness in Canada don’t know if the billions of dollars in public money they’ve spent have helped to get people into homes, Canada’s auditor general reported Tuesday.
Auditor General Karen Hogan found that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and Infrastructure Canada have failed to collect sufficient data about their programs, which are designed to connect the most vulnerable people with homes.
These two agencies are largely responsible for delivering the federal government’s National Housing Strategy, which has a target of reducing chronic homelessness by 50 per cent by the 2027-28 fiscal year.
After less than two years as a homeless shelter, opened with the aim of moving people out of park encampments, the Novotel on the Esplanade is pivoting back to life as a tourist hub.
The shelter will shut its operations by year’s end, the city recently announced, as part of a gradual closure of 27 temporary shelter sites by the end of 2023. The hotel aims to resume life as a tourism destination in 2023, city hall says — as a development application has also been made with hopes of building two towers on the site with a hotel, retail and condos.
