'Homeless by Choice' in New York
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Mohamed Rasul is homeless in New York City. But don’t
feel too sorry for
him, he’s “homeless by choice.” He’s got a free
laptop and free Wi-Fi in Bryant Park.
According
to Mohamed, he’s “never been as comfortable as under
de Blasio” because no one forces him to leave the
park where a miniature carousel spins children
around on painted horses and a yoga lesson takes
place on the main lawn. These things, the carousel,
the yoga lesson and the free Wi-Fi, only exist
because the park was restored from its old days as
Needle Park.
Back then the stretch of park behind the New York
Public Library had more crimes than some towns.
Cleaning it up took a lot of hard work.
Now that hard work is being undone by a pro-crime
mayor.
When you have enough Mohameds in the park then the
kids, the coffee, the Wi-Fi, the yoga mats and the
lunch break crowd goes away to be replaced by
junkies, needles, drug dealers, muggers and rapists.
As Mohamed can tell you, being homeless in the city
under Bill de Blasio isn’t too bad for the bums.
To be homeless in New York City today means
three meals a day,
a microwave oven, TV, free laundry, free
Internet,
free health care and a prepaid cell phone with 300
minutes a month.
That was a few years ago. Maybe they have free
laptops now.
If that sounds like a better deal than most New
Yorkers or tourists get, you’re right. It’s why bums
from across the country and even the world have been
flocking to the privileged life of a Big Apple bum.
One in four homeless in New York list addresses
outside the city. There are
tourists who come to
hang out in the city. Instead of forking out a small
fortune for a hotel, they stay in a homeless
shelter. And then there are the “Oogles.” Most New
Yorkers have seen them even if they don’t know what
they are.
Oogles are homeless hipsters who panhandle with
ironic signs. Usually white and young, they made up
a sizable section of the Occupy Wall Street
encampments. Also known as travelers, crusties and
voluntary homeless, they travel to music festivals
around the country. Many are heroin addicts. They
usually come from prosperous homes, but are great at
gaming the social welfare system.
Homelessness is so hip that the Oogles have
displaced the classic city panhandler with hordes of
pierced flannel-wearing white kids in their twenties
toting signs about how they need to get to Seattle
or Portland. That is when their witty signs aren’t
openly boasting about how they need drugs.
Oogles dramatically inflate the homeless population
not only in New York City, but around the country.
As they pass through different cities, the social
welfare infrastructure of each area counts them as
part of its “homeless crisis.” The same Oogle can
add to the “crisis” of a dozen cities. But the Oogle
isn’t homeless. He’s just a bum.
The media says that the homeless crisis is a
disgrace. It’s half-right. The real disgrace is that
we are once again allowing a breed of entitled
leftists to destroy our cities.
It’s no wonder that New York City’s homeless problem
keeps growing the more resources are thrown at it.
It already increased 10 percent under Bill de
Blasio. There are now more “homeless” in the city
than there are people living in the entire city of
Manhattan, Kansas. And their numbers will keep on
growing.
By focusing on homeless families, we can eliminate
most of the Oogles. And the homeless data shows that
the issue is a broken culture, not gentrification,
rising rents or any of the other excuses.
Even though black people are less than a quarter of
the population, they account for up to 61
percent of
homeless families. While the Hispanic population
rose 10 percent, Hispanic homeless fell from 38
percent to 31 percent. Even while the black
population was declining, its homeless share was
rising.
White families in the city, who were hardest hit by
the Obama Depression, went from 2 to 5 percent of
the homeless population. White people make up a
third of the city population and their numbers have
been rising. Even though there are a million Asians
in the city and 1 in 5 of them live below the
poverty line, there appears to be no statistically
significant number of them in the homeless
population.
So the issue clearly isn’t racism.
What is the Asian secret? Even poor Asian families
have a mother and a father. Meanwhile 93 percent of
homeless families are single parent. More than half
of them went into the system complaining of
overcrowding or domestic violence. Another 8 to 12
percent complained of “discord.”
This isn’t a homeless problem. It’s a broken family
problem.
The homeless families held up by the media as proof
of how uncaring New Yorkers are are not suffering
from gentrification. If that were the case, the
majority of them would be coming from Brooklyn and
Manhattan, not the Bronx. Their situation has its
roots in the same pathology that causes crime.
No amount of homeless shelters or social services
spending will fix it. It will only make it worse.
New York City doesn’t have a homeless problem. It
has a drug problem. It has a broken family problem.
And it has a hipster problem. It has an activist
problem and a bloated social services sector
problem.
Homelessness remains a political term that
manufactured a condition for which society is
responsible.
We can see by looking at the hard numbers that
society did not cause this. Individual behaviors
did. New York’s welfare spending has created a
massive magnet that attracts freeloaders and
encourages bad behavior. And Bill de Blasio has
taken those bad policies and turned them into a way
of life.
The decline of the quality of life in the city has
hurt blacks more than it has hurt whites. There has
been a sharp population drop in the black middle
class as their neighborhoods began turning bad.
Their departure lowers black net worth and turns the
city back into a political poverty plantation. The
homeless crisis is a weapon that the left uses to
destroy the quality of life in cities. Especially in
working class and middle class neighborhoods.
Bill de Blasio rammed homeless shelters into
formerly nice neighborhoods, including an Asian
neighborhood in Queens,
bringing along panhandling, public urination and
crime. One local resident asked. “Why does the
government want to support this group? Why do they
want to give them free money? We have to work from
11 a.m. to 11 p.m.”
The left is not fond of those who work twelve hours
a day. They’re filthy “bootstrappers” who interfere
with their political program of destroying
communities and replacing them with broken families.
The homeless crisis is the kind of self-perpetuating
crisis that the left loves. The more money is thrown
at it, the worse it gets. The money will mostly go
into its own bureaucracy and its networks of allied
non-profits who double as the political
infrastructure for the left.
And how else is Bill de Blasio, who has won the
opposition of a majority of city voters with his
disastrous policies, supposed to win reelection?