Canada’s liberal capital city has been besieged by drugs and disorder
I got out of the taxi in front of my hotel in lower town Ottawa and was immediately accosted by a homeless junkie looking for a donation to the cause. It was a Sunday evening, well after sunset, and not quite the greeting I had hoped for upon arrival in Canada’s leafy capital. The smell of pot was in the air, a lot of it — there was a cannabis store across the street, and another around the corner.
Activists who defend violent homeless encampments claim they are driven by compassion, and that criticisms of encampments, or of homeless crime more generally, are callous. This is untrue. Those who call attention to homeless crime merely recognize that victims of street violence deserve empathy and protection — especially because, when said victims speak out about their experiences, they suffer shocking abuse by “compassionate” pro-encampment activists.
“It’s pure hell,” said Bambi Alvey, who has lived in the retirement community for 10 years. “I wake up every morning looking out my window at the homeless people looking through my window back at me.”…
“Every morning I go out, I look at my window to see what they have stolen out of my yard,” added Yvonne McKown who has been living there for eight years…
Disorder poses a danger to its future.
This past spring, activity in downtown San Francisco reached just 31 percent of its 2019 level, as measured by comparing visits to points of interests such as restaurants, retail shops, and grocery stores between the two years. No other North American city of the 62 reviewed in a University of California, Berkeley analysis fell that far. Is “the City,” as its residents like to call it, destined to hollow out and become synonymous with urban decay? Or can it reverse its decline?
A Portland, Oregon mother who found a homeless woman in her son’s bed was blindsided a second time when the city’s woke district attorney let the intruder go within 24 hours.
Kelsey Smith, from Northeast Portland, first knew something was amiss when she heard her dogs barking in a bedroom and went to investigate. She initially thought her husband was playing a prank on her, but within moments quickly realized someone had broken into her home to hide out.
After backing out of the room and calling for help, Smith was bum rushed by the intruder, who had picked up an ottoman and threw it at her before leaving the home.
A viral video making its rounds on social media offers a grim new snapshot of San Francisco’s surging homelessness crises as two men can be seen brawling amid squalid conditions on a city sidewalk.
The shocking scene was filmed and posted to Twitter by J. Terrell Allen, who said he stumbled upon the wild fight in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood on an evening walk.
On my evening walk. SOMA isn’t safe. Just happened. This is disgusting @MattHaneySF. I’ve written to your office and you and failed to take action. Why??? Is it worth your time? pic.twitter.com/cLwAtb4ZGU
— J. (@jterrell) September 9, 2022
Residents of Portland, Oregon with physical disabilities have filed a lawsuit accusing the city of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to clear homeless encampments from city sidewalks.
The federal class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday says that Portland has failed to keep the sidewalks accessible to people with mobility issues by allowing encampments to proliferate unchecked.
It has only been about 2 weeks since KGW 8 aired a report about people leaving the city of Portland because of crime and homelessness. A few days ago the site published another story along the same lines. People are just fed up with the city’s problems and are ready to abandon ship.
A man wakes up in San Francisco, has breakfast, showers, and gets ready for work. As he opens his front door, he discovers a fresh deuce on the stoop of his seven-million-dollar row home. In a previous time, he would have noticed it earlier in the morning when he went to fetch the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times or Wall Street Journal newspapers.
A flood of new images from the streets of San Francisco have brought into stark focus the extent of the city’s ongoing homelessness problem, which has driven some businesses to threaten to withhold tax payments.
Rows of tents were pictured lined up outside businesses with people’s belongings strewn across the sidewalk.
Homeless individuals, some of whom were struggling with clear physical ailments as well as drug and alcohol addiction, sat in the street right outside entrances to residential properties and small businesses struggling to bounce back after highly restrictive COVID laws forced them to close, destroying revenues.
Olivia Murray wrote about the fact that business owners in San Francisco’s Castro district are fed up that the city is doing nothing to stop the influx of homeless into the district, complete with bodies splayed on the sidewalk, litter and, of course, human waste. For those of us who remember the city in the 1970s, this is a familiar tale—and one rife with possibilities.
Beginning in the 1960s, San Francisco had the biggest and most vibrant gay meccas in the world, located right on Castro Street, with the hub where Castro intersected with Market. By the mid-1970s, we high school students often went there for the great old movies at the Castro Theater, to visit the cool boutiques, to eat at the trendy-but-still-affordable restaurants and, naturally, take in the street scene.
The government pays homeless addicts to stay on drugs and alcohol
Ira, an older, soft-spoken homeless man, recently went to the Downtown Austin Community Court to see if he was eligible for free housing. One of my friends, a fellow researcher, accompanied him. Ira answered questions about his background, including about whether he had had run-ins with the law or a history of drug abuse. After the interview, the social worker at the court told Ira that his problems were not severe enough to get housing. Dejected, Ira joked, “If only I would have been a drug addict.” The social worker shrugged and responded that the community court’s housing program “takes a lot of things into consideration, but yeah.”
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.
