North Portland’s rampant homeless problem has residents fleeing the city, according to a report.
Real-estate broker Lauren Iaquinta told KGW8 that she’s seen an uptick in residents packing up and heading to the suburbs because of a homeless camp in the neighborhood’s Peninsula Crossing Trail.
In French, a “bidonville” is a shantytown. A “bidon” is a large container, like the giant yellow vegetable oil bottles used to carry drinking water in developing countries.
I’ve seen plenty of shantytowns in cities from India to Togo; they are an unfortunate consequence of rapid urbanization.
What surprised me when I came home to Washington, D.C., a few months ago was seeing shantytowns both outside the State Department, where my old office was, and Union Station, near my new office.
There is no shortage of evidence that residents of homeless encampments often harm surrounding neighbours through harassment, assault and vandalism. Despite this, many politicians and bureaucrats continue to whitewash homeless crime. This needs to stop, because although it’s important to support vulnerable Canadians, communities cannot simply be abandoned to lawlessness.
Illegal immigrants who mow the lawns and paint the mansions of wealthy Hamptons residents are being forced to live in hovels hidden in the woods due to the sky-high cost of residing in the summer playground of celebrities such as Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Joel and Jay-Z and Beyoncé, The Post has learned.
Squalid encampments exist around the tony town of Southampton, including just off the main highway and in the waterfront village of Westhampton Beach.
“I work for very rich people in the Hamptons but I can’t afford somewhere to live,” lamented Juan Antonio Morales, 40.
Residents of one Portland neighborhood say as many as 16 people have broken into two vacant houses on their street and are coming in and out at all hours, piling up trash and leaving used needles in the grass.
Understanding LA’s out-of-control homeless issue
A Democrat city in a Democrat state sporting the wealthiest concentration of virtue signalers in the world is an out of control slum. They want this to happen. Nothing else explains it.
The US needs a domestic Marshall Plan.
What’s the matter with California? “It’s suffering from San Fransickness,” which is “pathological altruism,” answers Michael Shellenberger, author of the book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.
Too many homeless people. Too little common sense. Too much magical thinking.
Shellenberger is running for governor, with a platform to undo the damage done by Gov. Gavin Newsom and the overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature with an approach to homelessness that can best be described as enabling.
Stuffing people who need drug or mental-health treatment into free or low-cost housing has proved disastrous.
To residents of San Francisco’s Sixth District, the deplorable conditions of single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels are no longer a great shock. In the Tenderloin, Civic Center, and South of Market neighborhoods, where most of the approximately 70 SROs are located, these city-run buildings have been terrible for as long as most can remember. And they’re getting worse.
TORONTO – The City of Toronto spent months laying out plans to clear about two dozen people from a homeless encampment in a popular park last summer, building dossiers on those living there and involving hundreds of municipal workers in the process, internal documents reveal.
The details are contained in thousands of pages obtained by activists through freedom-of-information laws.
The city documents, shared with The Canadian Press, reveal the scale of the clearing effort for Trinity Bellwoods Park – an operation that took place last June and eventually turned violent.
I have little praise for Tory but he did the right thing about the encampments.
The remedies we need to try.
I was in the midst of another cancer scare. Imaging tests were ordered, and then blood tests. No cancer – Yay! – but the blood tests revealed that I needed to increase the dosage of a medication for an unrelated chronic illness. Wednesday, March 23, 2022, was gray and drizzly. I don’t like to leave the apartment anywhere near sunset, but this medicine was important. I said the prayer I always say before opening my door. “God be with me as I walk. Saint Joseph protect my home. Saint Christopher protect my steps.” I set out for the CVS, three miles and two towns distant. Thanks to Google maps, I know I walk up 430 feet to arrive at the CVS in Wayne. There are pharmacies five minutes’ walk from my apartment, and, like my apartment, these nearby pharmacies are more or less at sea level. I walk so far and so high because I live in Paterson, NJ. It’s not just that a good part of the population speaks Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, or what is now called African American Vernacular English, and used to be called Ebonics. It’s not just because I am white and my first language is English, so I am a target for hostility and petty sabotage. I don’t want my prescriptions to meet the same fate as my vandalized, spat upon, and disappearing postal mail. I walk two towns away because even simple things that should work easily often don’t work in Paterson at all. More on that, later.
When California shut down in March 2020, advocates for unhoused people thought the state might finally be forced to solve its homelessness crisis. To slow the spread of Covid, they hoped, officials would have to provide people living outside with stable and private shelter and housing.
But in the two years since, California’s humanitarian catastrophe has worsened: deaths of people on the streets are rising; college students are living in their cars; more elderly residents are becoming unhoused; encampment communities are growing at beaches, parks, highway underpasses, lots and sidewalks.
California has the fifth largest economy in the world, a budget surplus, the most billionaires in the US and some of the nation’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Yet the riches of the Golden State have not yielded solutions that match the scale of the crisis that’s been raging for decades. Pandemic-era programs have had some success for a slice of the unhoused population, but many measures have fallen short.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Makeshift shelters abut busy roadways, tent cities line sidewalks, tarps cover broken-down cars, and sleeping bags are tucked in storefront doorways. The reality of the homelessness crisis in Oregon’s largest city can’t be denied.
“I would be an idiot to sit here and tell you that things are better today than they were five years ago with regard to homelessness,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said recently. “People in this city aren’t stupid. They can open their eyes.”
Referring to feral street people as “our unhoused neighbors” or “a person experiencing homelessness” is an attack on reality. In fact, they are mentally ill—schizophrenics, drug addicts, and alcoholics, usually in combination.
Because I don’t need to teach my kids about the Faces of Meth yet, we call the ghouls standing next to every freeway exit “hobos.” As in, “Don’t look over there, kids! That hobo forgot to put on pants today.”
Instead, Newsom makes the typical progressive move: throwing more money at the problem.
“We can end homelessness in the State of California,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared Monday. It’s a goal Newsom shares with President Joe Biden, despite Democrats’ inability to curb homelessness by throwing money at it.
Their solution? Throw more money at it.
“I don’t think that homelessness can be solved; I know homelessness can be solved,” Newsom also offered as he boasted that California would spend $5.8 billion to add 42,000 new housing units.
Councillors call on Mayor to end ‘extreme show of force’ in encampment clearings
TORONTO — Five Toronto councillors urged the city’s mayor on Friday to end what they called an “extreme show of force” during the clearing of homeless encampments.
Tory seldom does much right, let’s hope he stays the course.
