"We've had a lot of problems with homeless people, but they're not really fighting over turf issues. They're just fighting among themselves. My biggest problem is they leave their garbage behind and they're urinating all over the place."~ Andy Amoroso,
Commissioner Lake Worth--View the article
With the 2nd highest number of homeless in Palm Beach County, the Homeless coalition says that housing represents the fundamental base-solution to the problem of homelessness, with the lack of affordable housing and the limited scale of housing assistance programs contributing to the current housing crisis and to homelessness.
Addressing hunger is a moral imperative. Here in Lake Worth we have some churches that help as well as the Burrito Project where volunteers gather every Saturday morning to prepare burritos and sort clothes to share with the homeless at Bryant Park. There are some citizens who volunteer their services to give haircuts and shaves. And proudly, many of these volunteers attend Common Ground Church.
However, the commission just passed an Ordinance (4/1 with Maier dissenting) to give tax free mortgages to qualified poor people but we can't provide even a port-o-let for the homeless. That might stop them from "urinating all over the place."
Drive down Dixie in West palm Beach after dark. It looks like a refugee camp with the homeless sleeping in every available bus stop and business door way. And yet the priority of the Palm Beach County Commission is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a baseball stadium. Helping corporate billionaires rather then the homeless.
ReplyDeleteif I read andy right he is telling us for $18m for sheriff we are not getting any patrol at night and these people know it.cant imagine they are doing all these dirty deeds during the day
ReplyDeleteI would love to know how many of our homeless are actually imported here from throughout the country for sober home fraud to milk their urine. Then once they go back to using they are unceremoniously dumped on our streets. And another poor schmuck looking to stay clean is taken in. This is not against the ones that are well run and certified. But we have one down the street that is owned by a pedophile who's wife is a druggie with I think 2 drug deaths there so far. And a concomitant rise in break-ins. We usually have none. We cannot afford to take in the rest of the nation's drug problems and house them on our streets.
ReplyDeleteCity if LW is too poor to be responsible for housing all the homeless. We can't afford to pave our roads or provide basic services. We can't improve our tax base bc off all the crime, much of it by homeless.
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