In the year since city police and public-works crews cleared out a growing encampment of homeless people and drug users on Atkinson Street, Mass and Cass has seen a significant decrease in crime and quality-of-life problems, officials from Boston's police and public-health departments told city councilors at a hearing by the council's committee on public safety and criminal justice. Read more.
OK.
I’m not sure leaving a ghetto in place indefinitely is necessarily the right way either.
Hopefully, no one is advocating for doing nothing and leaving it in place. To some degree I think tearing it down was a start, but not a well thought out solution. I personally think that ignoring these sort of encampments only allow the problem to get worse. I think they definitely need to be broken up, but simultaneously services need to be put in place to address these people’s issues. Drug addiction, poverty, homelessness from being kicked out of other protective services. The list could go on forever, but these are huge and difficult problems that we need to address.
No I’m with you here.
This is one of those “nobody wants to touch it because they own it” kind of problems, we either leave it forever, or half-ass tear it down with no plan to follow up.
I don’t like people who insist leaving them in place forever as a hole of infinite misery is the best option, as if they’re defending some great moral principle of allowing people to wallow in hell for their own good.