“Urban Dystopia”

“Unlivable”: Minneapolis slips into hellhole status — by default

Alpha News’ Liz Collins calls this a “shocking” video, and it would be — from anywhere else other than Minneapolis or perhaps San Francisco. South Minneapolis had been known as a relatively serene urban area, at least until a few years ago. When the extreme-progressive leadership began capitulating on homelessness, things began to change for residents like Dave Marquardt.

A good video at the link above.

Wall Street denizens fleeing NYC

This news probably wouldn’t be particularly newsworthy were it not for the fact that few in the media have been talking about it. For the past several years, there has been what the New York Post describes as a “giant, sucking sound” coming from the financial sector in New York City. That “whooshing” sound you hear has been caused by more than 150 major financial firms on Wall Street calling it quits and moving to more friendly climes around the country, particularly in the South.

Toronto is among the hardest hit “downtowns” in North Amercia. We too are heading for Hell hole status.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", "Urban Dystopia", USA

San Francisco: An iconic retailer pens a scathing letter to the city and state government on public safety.

San Francisco’s “Tyranny of the Minority”

San Francisco has its share of untouchable landmarks. Cable cars, the Golden Gate Bridge—and Gump’s. This iconic retailer has been through multiple transformations since its inception in 1861. It’s currently located in a smallish space on Post Street in Union Square, but its presence in the city looms much larger in terms of civic pride. The store epitomizes a uniquely San Franciscan version of elegance and style.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Progressive Paradise", "Urban Dystopia"

Harm City

Crime-ridden, dysfunctional Baltimore desperately needs new leadership—and more cops.

On July 2, a huge crowd gathered at Baltimore’s Brooklyn Homes public housing project for a block party. The “Brooklyn Day” celebration culminated in the worst mass shooting in Baltimore’s history, with 30 victims, including two fatalities; police recovered shell casings from as many as 16 guns. Before a single arrest had been made or weapon recovered, local officials were blaming guns for the incident, with Baltimore’s young Democratic mayor, Brandon Scott, condemning Congress for not banning “ghost guns.” But the Brooklyn Homes shooting was the inevitable result of policies that have engendered crime in Charm City for decades.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Depolicing", "Progressive Paradise", "Urban Dystopia"

A return to order: Canada is crumbling—And our leaders’ solutions are delusionally wrong

Allowing chaos and criminality is not compassion, no matter what the governing class pretends

Even the dwindling number of partisans who still bristle at the claim that Canada is broken must admit that it sure looks and feels that way. Life in Canadian cities is noticeably coarser, uglier, and more violent than it was just a few years ago. Places once known for their civic beauty like Victoria, where I grew up, are now defaced by parks and city blocks that would be considered embarrassing in the third world. It doesn’t help that this street-level squalor has spread incongruously in the shadow of gleaming new glass and steel apartment towers, which contribute in their own way to a growing feel of social division and alienation in what was, until very recently, still mostly a city of wood, stone, and brick built on a human scale.

h/t CK

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", "Progressive Paradise", "Urban Dystopia"

Phoenix’s Effort To Clear Out Sprawling Homeless Camp Known as ‘The Zone’ Stumbles as Neighbors Fret About Drugs and Violence

With a court deadline looming on July 10 for the City of Phoenix to clean up a squalid homeless encampment known as “The Zone,” more homeless people than ever are flooding the area despite the city’s aggressive efforts to address the disorder.

The failure to clean up “The Zone” is leaving business owners and other neighbors more distraught than ever about destruction of property, violence, drugs and filth, and even dead bodies.

Portland, Ore., Is Losing Residents Weary of Crime and High Housing Prices

PORTLAND, Ore.—Mark Rogers has made a list of things he misses about Portland—its vegan restaurants, Powell’s bookstore, public transit—and the things he doesn’t—having his things stolen, stepping in human excrement, extreme politics.

The 44-year-old artist moved across the country to Fort Wayne, Ind., last year.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", "Toronto - Canada's version of a Democrat run city", "Urban Dystopia"

America’s cities have descended into anarchy – and Britain’s could be next

From crime to climate protesters, the predictable result of not upholding the law is more lawlessness

It is always interesting to see how far things can run if the authorities let them. If you tour around American cities these days – especially Democrat-run cities – you can see the results everywhere.

Legalise or effectively legalise drugs – as in New York and other places – and you will soon see and smell them everywhere. In the middle of the day, you will witness people lighting or shooting up. All other judgments aside, it can be said with a fair degree of certainty that the person before you is not going to contribute to the economy that day. Nor perhaps for the remainder of their life.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Progressive Paradise", "Urban Dystopia", USA

What happened to the American city?

This is the only country where I have actually wondered: will these cities ever recover?

They’re calling it “revenge travel”: the desire to make up for the touring opportunities we all lost when we were locked down in our pandemical homes. As a keen professional traveler, I confess I’ve got a fearsome case of this bug: I’ve spent the past twenty months going just about anywhere I can, playing catch up.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Urban Dystopia", USA

On the Edge of Civilization

 

Cities that allow the most destructive of human behavior to take over the public space are cities where civilized life as we know it is being marginalized and forced to give way to social fragmentation. Dignity yields to savagery.

Europe has a long tradition of fighting narcotic drugs, with varying results. In 1992, the city of Zürich, Switzerland, closed the infamous ‘Needle Park’ area, just behind the national museum and the central railway station. For a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s,

hundreds of dealers and addicts packed into the park, [with] many people desperately needing urgent medical care on a daily basis.

As a curious tourist, I visited the place about a year before it was closed. I was shocked at the complete and utter lack of dignity among those who basically spent their entire lives there. Human beings had turned into empty shells, consumed and hollowed out by their addiction to something that was certain to kill them.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", "Urban Dystopia"

The ghost of Ancient Rome haunts America

Its great cities are on the path to decay

The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. Since then, 15 centuries have passed and thousands of cities have been built. And yet, as Rome’s greatest chronicler Edward Gibbon warned in 1776, a similar fate awaits our modern metropolises. This time, however, their decline will radically alter our perception of what “urbanism” really means.

Worth a read. This is what we are seeing in Toronto. Our cities have become ungovernable, virtually unfixable wastelands.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Urban Dystopia"

U.S. Scrambles to Stop Iran From Providing Drones for Russia

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has launched a broad effort to halt Iran’s ability to produce and deliver drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine, an endeavor that has echoes of its yearslong program to cut off Tehran’s access to nuclear technology.

In interviews in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, a range of intelligence, military and national security officials have described an expanding U.S. program that aims to choke off Iran’s ability to manufacture the drones, make it harder for the Russians to launch the unmanned “kamikaze” aircraft and — if all else fails — to provide the Ukrainians with the defenses necessary to shoot them out of the sky.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Urban Dystopia"