Philadelphia Homeless Numbers at Ten Year Peak

this is how is always going to be ...the poor with the poors and the rich with the rich

Recently, development of a gated community has started right down the block from me. Everytime I look at it I think about the people I pass in Love Park everyday. I wonder if the people that are profiting from this development know that they could be using their skills and muscle to provide shelter for people who desperately need it. As for the folks that will purchase these properties at the low cost of 300,000 a unit I wonder if it has occured to them that just 2 blocks up and 2 blocks over there exist a whole community of poor people many of which are drug addicted, alcoholics and many homeless. This country is building Castles in Sand and eventually it will all crumble just like Rome who by the way also forgot about their most vunerable citizens while building the greatest empire in the world.

I urge you to not give in to "their" tactis. The people who are responsible for the DISPLACEMENT of people in our communities, (particularly the poor) are depending on us to just shake our heads and settle. We MUST make a stand and let them know that we are not going to let them take over our communities. They are destroying generations who know no other home, all for the mighty dollar. I suspect these people in hind sight wish they had done something, raised some voices, or just made some waves before it was too late. What we need to understand is that it is NEVER TOO LATE. If not for us then for the future. Building condos is ok, but taking our neighborhoods and displacing our city's residents will not be tolerated. We as a people can stand together and tell them to build something WE can afford, or build somewhere else. We love New Yorkers, but we are not going to let them take over our Philly. (this is only one challenge).There are may others with sites on our city. The sneaky little tactics "they" use are not even clever. How dare "they"! We MUST STAND NOW. NEVER SETTLE!

I think there are three major problems here that conspire to give us our homeless population:

1. The gutting of mental health services in the 80's. It's great that the system was reformed. It was clearly abusive but there's a big difference between reform and repeal.
I have schizophrenic brother who has been on the street at several points in his life, all when he's off his meds, and each time we have to literally drag him off the street and spend a week or two trying to convince him to get back on his meds.

2. Drug Addiction. It's a symptom of a much larger social problem but living on the street is usually the end result.

3. The disappearance of SRO (single-room occupancy) facilities. Watch old movies and you'll get the sense that, up until the last 30 years, there were rooming houses aplenty. The Graduate is a perfect example. There used to be a lot of places where single men could rent a room, long-term, in a building with a shared kitchen and sometimes with a shared bathrooms. These places now are all but illegal. The fact that men on the street far outnumber women demonstrates the grip that the Victorian era still has on us and our attitudes about men.

So, what do we do? Certainly the easiest thing to do is to bring back zoning that allows for SRO. People can't live in a shelter forever and (looking to Maslow's Hierarchy) will never feel whole relying on charity or city government.

We have to lobby for more/better mental health services. This is a state/fed obligation. There certainly need to be more and better in-patient services for those who need it.

We should be putting pressure on the city to include mod/low-income housing requirements for developers building more than 3 units. There's no reason that the housing insecure should be isolated from the rich and middle-class on reservations (projects) or confined to the lowest rung on the housing ladder via section 8 vouchers.

We should be putting pressure on the suburban counties to take care of their own homeless populations so Philadelphia doesn't bear the burden for a metro of 6 million people.
Bucks Co. may not have a methadone clinic but that doesn't mean they don't have heroin addicts.

In case you haven't been in Philadelphia long enough to notice - the homeless population in Center City was incredibly low back in 2000. Almost immediately after the tech-bubble burst the homeless population began to grow. The inference being that there's a direct link to employment. In a system that is still predicated on the theory of trickle-down economics the last thing you want to do is chase away tourists or more residents. In doing so you eliminate the jobs that people on the street desperately need to stay off the street. The rich aren't going to give up what they have without a fight. They'll pay poor people to fight other poor people to keep the status quo. There's no way they'll let meaningful change happen through the electoral process. So unless you've given up on non-violence as a means (no judgement here) you're given to working within the system.
In that case it's time to stop being paternalistic and start being pratical.

I wonder why there are still homeless in Philadelphia right now considering that the government are doing programs for this type of problems arising in a government. There is such an increased indeed but when it compared to my country I could say that it is just a pinch of salt .There are thousands of homeless people in my country.