“Homelessness & Affordability Crisis”

A homeless encampment in west-end Toronto became the scene of a physical clash between Toronto police officers and protesters on Wednesday, as a crowd attempted to block dozens of police and security from clearing some 15 remaining people from a Lamport Stadium camp.

A physical altercation erupted after advocates attempted to block machinery from taking away a small, wooden structure. Two people were arrested for trespassing, and one for alleged assault of a police officer. Before the clash, protesters had decried enforcement and officers pressed into the crowd with bikes to form a perimeter around an occupant told to pack their bags.

VIOLENT CONTENT. Clashes broke out at Lamport Stadium as City of Toronto staff cleared out a homeless camp. A mini-riot between activists and Toronto Police happened out on King St. when officials tried to move out a shelter box right through the dense crowd. @680NEWS pic.twitter.com/s2qYFvDAtS

— Mark Douglas (@Douglas680NEWS) May 19, 2021

I am a little surprised this has received such subdued media coverage. But then the media in Toronto has paid scant attention to the weekly “Freedom Marches” which grow with each outing. It almost seems they pick and choose the news they report on to suit someone’s agenda.

Residents of Venice Beach in Los Angeles say soaring crime rates and the exploding homeless population have made life in the elite beachside community unbearable.

A ‘catastrophic’ increase in homelessness in Los Angeles has seen hundreds of tents line the beach’s famous boardwalk.

Business owners say they are being forced to close their doors and longterm residents are afraid to leave their homes after dark after being subjected to violent attacks and intimidation.

Democrat cities have allowed hundreds of homeless encampments to pop up along the West Coast.

Homelessness isn’t new to places like San Francisco, L.A., Seattle, Sacramento, and so on. I was in Portland 12 years ago for a comedy gig. The park in front of the club looked like a scene from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. Today it looks like the Walking Dead.

The Invisible Asylum

The story of American deinstitutionalization has become familiar. In a long arc—from President Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963 to the present—federal and state governments dismantled mental asylums and released the psychiatrically disturbed into the world. Though there were sometimes brutal abuses in the state mental hospitals of the early twentieth century, the closure of the asylums did not put an end to mental illness. If anything, with the proliferation on the streets of psychosis-inducing drugs such as methamphetamine, the United States has more cases of serious mental illness than ever before—and less capacity to treat and manage them.