I won’t pretend that my homeless situation and the difficulties that I encountered in getting off of the streets in 1986 (or any other time) was anywhere near as dire as Jordan Neely’s. I wasn’t drinking at the time (that would come in a couple of months). I had no mental illnesses that were diagnosed. I could even have gone back home to Detroit if I wanted to (which I did…briefly). What ran me out onto the streets and into homelessness was, for the most part, anti-LGBTQ bigotry. Simply put, I began to feel mentally and emotionally safer out on the streets of NYC than I did at home or at college. So that’s where I remained for a time.
One of the topics of the APR links below concerns the reasons why public transit is bearing part of the brunt of occasionally being the preferred place to sleep and, occasionally, to hangout for the homeless.
The reasons for that haven’t changed in almost 40 years. At least.
I knew Tyrone Prindle, not very well (I hadn’t even been in New York two weeks!) but well enough to know that he was a pretty big sports fanatic. There’s a very good chance that football was the topic a group of us were discussing as I was standing maybe a foot away from him when he was shot dead.
The homeless shelters weren’t safe then and nothing has changed. I knew people that preferred to sleep on the subway 40 years ago for that very reason.
OK, y’all came here early in the morning to read pundits and not to hear me pundit so I’ll end it there for now…but one last thing.
Shame on New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York Governor Kathy Hochul for their comments about the killing of Jordan Neely.
We begin today with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times reminding us that the stigmatizing of the homeless has consequences for all of us.
Why is it, in one of the wealthiest places in the history of the world, did Neely lack for a proper place to sleep and adequate mental health care? Why was he thirsty and hungry in a land of unimaginable plenty? Why, in the throes of crisis, was a subway car the only place he had to go?
There should have been something to catch Jordan Neely before he fell this far. Instead, a stranger choked him to death.
We are living through a vicious campaign of demonization and hostility toward the homeless. Networks like Fox News show endless videos of attacks by homeless people that present them as inherently unstable, violent and dangerous. Prominent voices speak of sweeping homeless people from the streets like trash, and cities have tasked the police with using force to solve the problem.
Yes, homeless people have committed acts of violence. But the facts are clear: The homeless, including people with mental illnesses, are far more likely to be victims of violence and abuse than perpetrators. For all the talk of fear and anxiety over being confronted by homeless people, imagine the fear and anxiety of knowing that, to many, you don’t exist as a human at all. And the truth of the matter is that it takes only a bad accident or a job loss or some other traumatic incident for many of us to go from housed to unhoused. We aren’t as distant from homeless people — and homeless people aren’t as distant from us — as we’d like to think.
Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker reminds us of the prevalence of crimes against the homeless.
Last July, one assailant stabbed three homeless men he found sleeping in New York City. Just a few months before those incidents, a thirty-year-old man named Gerald Brevard III, shot five homeless people in Washington, D.C., and New York City, killing two. These acts of violence did not inspire the same response from activists, who, this past Wednesday, protested at the Broadway-Lafayette subway station where Neely died, or from politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, on Wednesday, tweeted, “Jordan Neely was murdered,” and the city comptroller, Brad Lander, who called Neely’s assailant “a vigilante.” “Black men seem to always be choked to death,” the congressman Jamaal Bowman tweeted, perhaps tying Neely’s killing to those of George Floyd and Eric Garner. “Jordan Neely did not have to die. It’s as simple as that. Yet we have another Black man publicly executed.”
The difference between last year’s attacks and Neely’s death was the video. We can see the panic on Neely’s face, the life slowly extinguished from his eyes. We can see others who do not intervene. We can see the face of his killer, which remains calm and largely expressionless throughout the struggle. We cannot see what precipitated the event; bystanders have told reporters that Neely had not attacked anyone and seemed like he was in distress. According to reports, he ranted that he was “fed up and hungry,” and, so, we are faced with the senselessness of what we are watching, and try to fill in some motive, however imagined it may be. In this case, many people outraged by Neely’s death seem to agree with Lander’s speculation—the blond ex-marine had acted out of a lawless impulse to punish Neely for the crime of being homeless and in distress. Homelessness and erratic, nonviolent behavior, in this case, received a death sentence. The longevity of such viral moments depends, in large part, on the outrage being reproduced over and over—on whether they confirm a pattern that people actually care enough about to notice.
Aaron Gordon of VICE looks at how public transit became a “safety net” for the homeless and what the city of Philadelphia and their SEPTA transit system is doing about it.
In some cities, the homelessness crisis on transit systems is truly life and death. On May 2, a New York subway rider choked a man who had been seen panhandling and acting erratically, killing him. Between January and March, 22 people died on LA Metro, most from overdoses and in areas commonly known as homeless hangouts, according to the Los Angeles Times. Last year, a man who had been drifting in and out of hospitals, mental health facilities, and living on the streets for decades pushed Michelle Go in front of an oncoming train, killing her. Later that year, New York City mayor Eric Adams authorized the involuntary hospitalization of some people during homeless encampment sweeps and mulled a policy of increasing ticketing and summonses for homeless people—an obvious precursor to jailing them since they do not have the money to pay any fines. Many centrist and right-leaning commentators, such as Josh Barro, paint this issue as one that “exposes a key contradiction that leftists need to resolve. Do they care about the provision of high-quality public services? Or is their primary objective to ensure that the coercive force of the state is never used to enforce rules?” The creation and enforcement of stricter rules are increasingly popular policies nationwide, and fail to address the causes of homelessness.
Nevertheless, conservative activists and think-tankers have launched coordinated campaigns to make being homeless a felony, ensuring the homelessness-to-prison pipeline becomes even more streamlined. In April of last year, Tennessee state senator Frank Niceley, in discussing one such bill, made the argument that homeless people should find inspiration in a young man who, for a brief period early in life, “lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with the masses and then went on to lead a life that’s got him into the history books”—evidence that life on the streets is not “a dead end.” He was referring, of course, to Adolf Hitler. Tennessee passed the bill, implicitly recognizing that, generally speaking, the U.S.’s answer to homelessness, inasmuch as it has one, is prison beds or shipping them out of town for someone else to deal with.
[…]
But just because it is a known problem doesn’t mean there is an intelligent, evidence-based public discourse on what to do about it. The fact is that transit agencies have, to varying degrees, been dealing with this question for decades. Paradoxically, many members of the public, politicians, and the political commentariat clamor that transit agencies do something, even though the root cause of homelessness is quite obviously a housing problem and not a transit problem. And that something usually involves the same short-term non-solution that hasn’t worked for decades—ramping up police presence and enforcement at great cost—while ignoring the cheaper and more effective long-term solution of investing in outreach workers, drop-in centers with food and facilities, shelter beds, and supportive housing.
Kristi Eaton of The Daily Yonder points out that rates of rural homelessness are increasing at higher rate than urban/suburban homelessness.
The number of people overall experiencing homelessness in the U.S. rose by less than 1% from 2020 to 2022, but those in rural Continuums of Care, local planning bodies responsible for coordinating the full range of homelessness services in a geographic area, which may cover a city, county, metropolitan area, or an entire state, saw an increase of nearly 6%, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Homelessness decreased for some groups, including veterans, families with children, and unaccompanied youth, according to the annual Point-in-Time count. Black and Indigenous people continue to be overrepresented among those experiencing homelessness.
[…]Steve Berg, chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said rural homelessness is distinct from homelessness in other regions, and it’s imperative to have systems in place to respond to those unique needs.
“For example, outreach providers often have to canvas much larger geographic territories, and people will sometimes live in more remote areas where it is more difficult to identify and serve them,” he told the Daily Yonder. “It’s also important to know that wages tend to be lower in rural areas and the total inventory of housing also tends to be limited. Even in a region with lower rental prices, this creates enormous strain on people’s abilities to stay in their homes.”
The brinksmanship over the debt ceiling continues as Jeffrey Diamond of CNN reports that 43 Senate Republicans want spending cuts to be accompanied with any debt ceiling increase.
The group of 43 Republican senators, led by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, said they are “united behind the House Republican conference in support of spending cuts and structural budget reform as a starting point for negotiations on the debt ceiling” in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat.
The letter underscores the deep rift in Washington over how to avoid a debt default. Republicans have repeatedly advocated spending cuts tied to the debt ceiling while the White House has maintained it will not negotiate on the matter.
[…]A breach of the US debt ceiling risks sparking a 2008-style economic catastrophe that wipes out millions of jobs and sets America back for generations, Moody’s Analytics has warned. The impact could include delayed Social Security payments, late paychecks for federal employees and veterans and a direct hit to Americans’ investments.
Sanja Kljajic reports for Deutsche Welle that two mass shootings days apart is enough for Serbia to want to reduce the number of guns.
Serbia has now announced it will drastically reduce the number of guns in the country. “All people who own weapons — I’m not talking about the roughly 400,000 people with hunting weapons — will be subject to an audit, and then no more than 30,000 to 40,000 guns will be left,” Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said after the recent shootings. “We will almost completely disarm Serbia.”
The Serbian government also announced that over the next six months, checks will be conducted to ensure gun owners are storing their arms safely and keeping weapons and ammunition in a place inaccessible to minors and other unauthorized persons.
The procedure for issuing new firearms licenses will be tightened as well. Serbia’s Interior Ministry will impose a two-year moratorium on new permits. “We know this will not happen without causing friction — but the fewer rifles there are, the less danger there is for our children and citizens,” Vucic said at a press conference after the shooting.
Finally today, Raphael Tsavkko Garcia writes for AlJazeera, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is no different from Brazil’s ex-president Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula’s far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, for example, spent his entire tenure accusing his critics of spreading “fake news” while disseminating misinformation on a wide range of subjects, from COVID-19 and vaccine science to corruption and feminism.
And Lula is hardly any better. Just like Bolsonaro, the leftist president also has a habit of giving passionate speeches against “fake news” and spouting misinformation to further the interests of his government almost in the same breath.
[…]Lula’s relationship with “fake news” and misinformation is not limited to a one-off remark aimed at hurting an old adversary either. The president has an established history of using public money to support media outlets publishing misinformation that is beneficial to him and his Worker’s Party (PT).
Today there are still countless websites and TV channels in Brazil that exist only to spread pro-government “fake news”. There is, of course, no expectation that the output from these Lula-friendly outlets will be scrutinised by the government’s new “fact-checking” website any time soon.
Try to have the best possible day, everyone!
