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| 10th Avenue & W40th Street @ 10:22pm, Sunday, August 29th, 2010. |
I used to get angry when I saw homeless people sleeping on the street. Angry at them. But after nearly a quarter century of working and playing here beginning in the early 80's, as well as living here for nearly a decade, I no longer do. I just can't blame them.
My philosophy is this; if you aren't bothering, harassing or hurting anyone, and you have nowhere safe to go (sorry, many of the shelters are NOT safe), well, you don't really have much of a choice, do you? Is it bothersome and sometimes disturbing to see them as we walk to our air-conditioned apartments? Yes. Is it sometimes frightening when someone is lying sprawled out on a sidewalk on a desolate street at night? Yes. Is it disgusting and infuriating to see someone openly urinating in the middle of the sidewalk on a busy street (I have seen this twice in the last month on 10th Avenue) as women and children walk past? Yes.
So, whose fault is it? Well, I don't know if "fault" is the right word, but the burden of this problem lies squarely with the City of New York, and pardon my French, they are doing a really shitty job of dealing with it.
If you want to know what the problem looks like, walk down 9th Avenue on the Westside of the street between 40th & 41st Street (though you should be careful and not do this at night) any day of the week and you will see them congregating, sitting, and sleeping on the sidewalk near the homeless shelter and the soup kitchen. These are the faces of homelessness. Funny, I never see our Mayor over there.
For the record, while the homeless population is down 29% from 2005, its up 34% in 2010 over 2009 (See it HERE). And according to the NYC Dept. of Homeless Services daily homeless census, there are currently 35,337 homeless individuals (adults and children) in New York City (Read it HERE). I have no idea why the city references a drop from 2005 in its statistics. Its almost as if they think that's going to fool people instead of being more concerned with the enormous percentage increase from the preceding year (34% is a BIG one year increase), 2009, which is what is relevant and what they need to be concerned about.
Well, here's a newsflash people...things are getting worse, not better. I saw a squeegie guy on two separate occasions this past May at the corner of 42nd Street and 9th Avenue, something I have not seen since the early to mid 90's right before Giuliani became mayor, and as everyone who lives here knows all too well, crime is up double digits from last year in the two worst categories, Rape and Murder, according to the most recent NYPD statistics (Read it HERE).
And as most of us who live in reality know, it isn't just a problem in Hell's Kitchen. This past week on two different nights I walked down a heavily congested West 13th Street near Lower 9th Avenue in the Meat Packing District, within a one block stretch I was on one occasion solicited twice (openly) and asked if I wanted to buy cocaine, and on the other occasion I was asked once, though I specifically try to avoid and ignore them (I can tell who they are and I see them often), so its likely I was asked a few other times that I didn't hear, and I spotted at least four drug dealers on the block. This is going on every day, and it isn't at 4am in some back alley, this happened before midnight in one of the most heavily trafficked (and expensive) neighborhoods in the city.
If our Mayor would spend less time worrying about whether or not I eat trans fats or salt and pay more attention to the social and crime problems that are plaguing our city perhaps we would be in slightly better shape around here.
Our mayor grew up in an Upper Middle Class home outside of Boston, went to Johns Hopkins University, and in 1981 at age 39, he became a multi-millionaire from his first career at Solomon Brothers (a $10 million dollar severance package), before Bloomberg the company existed. He has never lived a day of his life in New York City as a Middle Class person (starting banking and trading jobs at Solomon Brothers, even in the 60's & 70's made at least Upper Middle Class money, and usually you weren't Upper Middle Class very long). Taking the subway to work everyday with four large heavily armed NYPD Detectives does not make you a regular guy anymore than living in an eight figure townhouse on the Upper East Side does.
I don't know about you, but I often feel like the Mayor is telling us what to do and also telling us that if we don't like it, tough, which seems to come in the form of his often arrogant and dismissive tone. I don't think thats my imagination, and I am not interested in being "told" what to do. But therein lies the problem; a man who is that wealthy (According to the 2010, Forbes 400, he is the 8th wealthiest man in America, and 23rd wealthiest man in the world) is beholden to no one, which can apparently be a bad thing. An example of that would be that you can afford to spend $90 million dollars for a mayoral election and outshout and virtually drown out any other opposing voice. Once elected, it apparently also gives you enough muscle to instill a sufficient amount of fear in the City Council to get them to go along with you and change the term limits law in 2008, which by the way was put in place in 1993 with a public vote, and again in 1996 a public vote kept it in place. I cannot for the life of me figure out how we all let this happen, and without a without a public vote. Well, we didn't let it happen, our Mayor decided that we didn't need Term limits anymore (can you say illegal?), and that it didn't matter what the citizens of New York City thought, or that they had voted on the issue and decided that they were needed, twice, so he and the New York City Council passed it through, giving himself a 3rd term. Following his victory he actually tried to change the law back to make sure nobody else could be a mayor for 3 terms after him, and he is still trying to do it. Is anybody else outraged by any of this?
And before you start typing up angry emails about how much our dear Mayor gives to charity (and he does) AND specifically how much he gives to support homeless causes, read this very recent article from the New York Times (Read it HERE) about the Doe Fund, a large homeless charity here in NYC, and the money they apparently received (millions) from the mayor in exchange for supporting and apparently being dumb enough to actually testify (The head of the charity as well as 20 other staffers testified) in support of the Mayors bid to overturn term limits without disclosing the slight multi-million dollar conflict of interest not just from his personal donations, but from the tens of millions of dollars in city contracts they receive that the mayor ultimately controls. Ooops.
Its simple, we want cops and fireman on our streets, we want teachers in our schools, we want hospitals that aren't sitting empty, and we want these people to be paid a living wage so they afford to live in the damn city they serve and in many cases protect day in and day out, most of them doing so for between 20-30 years of their lives, and frequently giving up their lives in the process. We want housing for the poor and the homeless, and services to help make them self sufficient. We don't want to hear whining and bitching about salt in the food or any other unimportant nonsense until this city pulls out of its current decline and is cleaned up.
And yes, you are going to have to do it yourself Mr. Mayor, as our loggerheaded unelected Governor is as useless as tits on a bull, and has more problems than you will ever have, so you ain't getting any help from him, as he's too busy bankrupting our state government and trying to avoid being indicted over Yankees tickets - sorry, what a moron.
So much for not being political. Oops.
