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There is a lot of talk these days about high-growth cities and areas in the United States, especially in many of the cities/metropolitan areas of the South and West.
New restaurants, activities and festivals, job opportunities, constant new structures are being built and so on, however, one topic that sometimes gets ignored is homelessness and poverty.
In many more established areas of the Midwest and Northeast, rampant poverty and homelessness has long been a problem, but increasingly these issues have crept into the South and West.
This thread is not here to expose and degrade any one city's homeless and poverty issues, but rather how the city or metropolitan area you currently live is trying to correct these chronic problems.
Los Angeles City voters passed a measure on property taxes for X amount years called Prop H. Raise 1.2 billion to build housing for homeless like shelters throughout the vast city rather than concentrate everything in Downtown called Skid Row.
Los Angeles County passed recently Prop HHH which is a sales tax increase which would provide services like mental health, addiction help, other services for the county's including LA City's. It would create hundreds of millions in yearly revenue.
I dont know of the other cities in LA County other than LA has measures to build housing shelters or if they rely on LA City to house them. Also I dont know of other nearby counties. Recently Orange County has had issues to homeless near Anaheim/Disneyland area but opposition from other cities in Orange County to share the burden was met with protests and anger about not in my city.
The VA in LA is building housing for homeless vets on VA property. I think that is federal money spent on homeless, but not sure.
There are other sources of funding for homeless and non profits that build homes but not sure how much.
I live in the Dallas proper area and we have a massive homeless population. What Dallas seems to be doing is eliminating the tent cities that are popping up all over the place. I live near what used to be one of the largest tent cities in Dallas, and like 4 months ago, Dallas just started kicking out homeless people. I don't think that this is going to help, due to the fact that new tent cities just pop up once another one is destroyed.
Philadelphia has a massive heroin problem, and has one of the largest (if not the largest) open air drug markets in Kensington. Hence, there is a ton of homeless addicts zombie-ing around the city. The main encampment where they all used to live on the ConRail tracks was featured on an episode of Dr. Oz and embarrassed the city. So the city and ConRail reached an agreement to clear the encampment and clean up the massive heaps of garbage and needles littering the area. Nobody really thought of where all these addicts would go, and essentially just pushed them elsewhere. Then they mostly moved to living under an overpass, where the city is now planning on clearing out again with no real plan on where to put them. It's just a mess. Every day walking the streets I see multitudes of junkies walking around aimlessly or bent over into Exorcist-style pretzels that I didn't even know was humanly possible. As the city rapidly gentrifies and neighborhoods become better and better, people are less willing to put up with the problems they bring along, and they just keep getting pushed from area to area.
New York City's mayor has announced plans to open a string of shelters and apartments throughout the city. But while that's compassionate, opening some of these places in the most expensive real estate around is not a good way to make the voters happy -- especially when they're some of the richest people on the planet.
Residents of 'Billionaire's Row' wail against homeless shelter plan
Pittsburgh's mayor has set up a camp for the homeless in a untrendy part of the city. This hasn't thrilled people who live in the neighborhood next to the camp. It's ironic since most of the public housing and shelters are on that side of the river and far away from the mayor's rich hood.
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