So much at Stake, including our Homeless

Coming off of a week where Republicans gathered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the Republican National Convention and witnessing them nominate Donald Trump as their nominee for President, my head, as a journalist, as a broadcaster, as a columnist, my cup of breaking news stories is running over, and my head is spinning.
Just two days prior to the RNC, Donald Trump was shot at by a 20-year-old man who lives near Butler, PA, where Trump was on hand July 13, 2024, for a Trump MEGA rally. The shooter narrowly missed, causing major harm to number 45. Ultimately, Trump was grazed by one of the bullets in his ear, and he will survive.
President Joe Biden caught Covid again, and Democrats on his side say this couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Some polls are showing Biden trailing convicted felon Donald Trump by 3 or 4 points. News stories have been published for weeks, expressing concern about Biden’s age (81) and his health. His poor performance at the first debate between Trump and himself this political cycle did not go well for Biden, further stoking the cry by some to replace Biden as the Democratic nominee for President.
And then, as if this past week weren’t crazy enough, there was a worldwide IT nightmare–that took computer systems down from hospitals to airports, to city governments to police stations. The overnight IT outage started late Thursday evening, July 18, 2024, and impacted potentially millions of people worldwide, including many in the Philadelphia region. In the early morning hours of July 19, 2024, the Philadelphia Office of Emergency Management realized something was wrong with its computers.
“Every server and computer that was powered up on our network during the update was affected. The City of Philadelphia employee systems were completely inoperable,” said Melissa Scott, the city’s chief information officer.
Critical services provided by the city remained up and running. Police and fire say they were able to answer every 911 call as they continued to work to make sure all of their computers were running.
Much of the world faced online disarray Friday as this widespread technology outage affected companies and services across industries – grounding flights, knocking banks and hospital systems offline, and media outlets off the air.
At the heart of the massive disruption is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that provides software to scores of companies worldwide. The company says the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, noting that the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.
For all these trending news stories I just shared, that’s not what this column is really about today.
The column is about all the homeless people I see every day as I drive into WURD to host a radio program between the hours of 5 am and 7 am, Mondays through Fridays these last couple weeks. I’m simply a seat warmer in that time slot. However, to travel through the city between 3:45 am-4:30 to get to WURD on N. Delaware Avenue in the Fishtown area of the city, down by the waterfront, OMG the people I see and the things they are doing. Some of them, for sure, are some of the people who were forced to get out of the tent city that had risen up out of nowhere in the Kensington area of Philadelphia, just minutes away from Fishtown. The last Mayor allowed that tent city to exist and grow and fester with open-air drug use and drug dealing running rampant in that community.
Some of the homeless people living in the tents that our current Mayor, Cherelle Parker, had removed a few months ago now refused the assistance the city was offering them. They would rather stay on the streets, even without a tent for shelter, than go into a program where they can get cleaned up, get help, and get back on their feet.
It’s hard to say how many of the people I see daily who were some of the crew from Kensington. Every time I see official reports on homeless people in Philly and how many homeless people are living on the streets of Philadelphia, I always think to myself, “These numbers are not right.” How can you truly do a count on the numbers?
All I know is that I live in America. I live in the birthplace of the U.S. Constitution, even with its flaws. In America (I think), as the greatest, most powerful nation in the free world, we should not have people living on the streets, sleeping on sidewalks, and living under the expressway overpasses. This is crazy.
On June 28, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court came out with a decision about homeless people living on the streets.
Get this: In its biggest decision on homelessness in decades, the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public places. The Justices, in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, overturned lower court rulings that deemed it cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment to punish people for sleeping outside if they had nowhere else to go.
Writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch said, “Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many.” But he said federal judges do not have any “special competence” to decide how cities should deal with this. “The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people and in their place dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy,” he wrote.
Advocates for the unhoused say the decision won’t solve the bigger problem and could make life much harder for the quarter of a million people living on streets, in parks, and in their cars. The ruling only changes current law in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes California and eight other Western states where the bulk of America’s unhoused population lives. But, it will also determine whether similar policies elsewhere are permissible, and it will almost certainly influence homelessness policy in cities around the country.
As of January 2023, the Point-In-Time (PIT) count in Philadelphia found 4,725 people experiencing homelessness, which was an increase of 236 from the previous year. However, there are homeless activists who say the real numbers are significantly higher, and I agree with the advocates for homeless people. Other data about homelessness in Philadelphia includes Racial disparities. 63% of those counted in 2023 were Black. 25% were white and 11% were Latino. Almost a third of the people surveyed in 2023 reported a serious mental illness. Mind you, these were the supposed numbers in 2023. My best guess is that we probably have upwards of 10,000 homeless men and women living on the streets and underbelly of Philadelphia.
What about the homeless? What are we supposed to do with the homeless?