Category Archives: Politics

Homelessness on the rise in the wake of COVID

By: Aliyah Rodriguez

Members of New York City’s homeless population continue to face uncertainties as the pandemic wages on.

A major concern for New York City at the center of the COVID outbreak over the past few months has been the city’s homeless population. Early in the pandemic, when health professionals were relaying information about the best practices for containing the virus, many looked towards homeless shelters and how it may be harder for the homeless to social distance in such close proximity to each other. While temporary solutions were provided by the city during the outbreak, the city is now looking toward the future for more permanent solutions to this issue. 

The Bowery Mission – an organization that has been aiding the homeless in NYC since the 1870s – state on their website that nearly one in every 106 New Yorkers is homeless, adding up to nearly 80,000 men, women, and children. These numbers could potentially rise due to so many of the city’s residents being laid off due to the pandemic and not being able to pay their rent. 

During the early months of the pandemic, the city’s Department of Homeless Services moved nearly 10,000 people out of shelters into 63 hotels across the city due to concerns over the quality of life and unsanitary conditions in the overcrowded shelters. 

As a temporary solution in August, 282 homeless men were moved to the Lucerne – a luxury hotel that would charge $200 a night prior to the pandemic – in the Upper West Side. This was not the first homeless relocation conducted by the city, in May shelter residents were moved into the Park West, the Belleclaire, and the Belnord hotels in the Upper West Side, the neighborhood houses about 730 homeless people by the end of the summer. Many in the community complained about the presence of the homeless, however, and a battle was sparked over where to relocate these individuals. 

The Lucerene became a home for the homeless in the midst of the pandemic| Carlos Allegri for Reuters

According to the Department of Homeless Services, the homeless rates in March were down seven percent for families with children, three percent for adult families, and rose four percent for homeless individuals in comparison to the figures from March 2019. State mandated shutdowns began mid-march, however, and the effects were felt by the homeless in the months afterwards. The DHS has not yet updated their website to include statistics from April to now.

The Coalition for the Homeless presents more up-to-date and exact numbers of the homeless rates in the city, since the information from the DHS’s website stops in March, just as the state began its shutdowns. According to their website, in August 2020, there were 57,660 homeless people, including 12,866 homeless families with 19,006 homeless children, sleeping each night in the New York City shelters. These numbers don’t account for the city’s homeless that sleep elsewhere like on the streets, in the subways, and in parks.

On June 23rd, about 100 people set up camp outside of the City Hall to influence the city council to cut the New York Police Department’s funding in the wake of George Flloyd’s murder. Within a week, the small patch of grass that held the protestors became a makeshift community where over 100 people – consisting mostly of the homeless – slept in tents. The community offered food services, help-yourself clothing bins, hand-sanitizing stations, and other forms of community support such as a makeshift mental health check-in tent where licensed professionals advised those suffering from trauma, addictions, and mental illness. Organizers of the camp criticized the city by saying that their efforts to help the homeless was doing what the city had not: addressing the needs of its most vulnerable residents. 

Members of the community complained that the camp looked like a “shantytown”| New York Times

On July 22nd, police officers in riot gear cleared out the encampment, displacing the homeless once more, after many complaints from community members about it becoming a “shantytown”.

New York’s City council website provides a roadmap to the city’s solution of the homeless crisis, but in the age of COVID-19, many are wondering how effective these plans will be as the homeless population grows.

With COVID cases on the rise again, we’ll have to wait and see what the future holds for the city’s homeless population.

The Airbnb effect

San Francisco Chronicle July, 2015

Both Airbnb and its San Francisco critics are correct. Most of the booming vacation-rental company’s local listings are only occasionally rented to travelers, as Airbnb says. However, at least 350 entire properties listed on Airbnb — and hundreds more listed on competing sites HomeAway/VRBO and FlipKey — appear to be full-time vacation rentals, bolstering claims by activists that the services remove scarce housing from the city’s limited inventory.

The terrible numbers that grow with each mass shooting

Washington Post August 2019

The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.

RELATED

The number of U.S. mass shootings depends on how you count

Public mass shootings account for a tiny fraction of the country’s gun deaths, but they are uniquely terrifying because they occur without warning in the most mundane places. Most of the victims are chosen not for what they have done but simply for where they happen to be.

There is no universally accepted definition of a public mass shooting, and this piece defines it narrowly. It looks at the 167 shootings in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (two shooters in a few cases). It does not include shootings tied to gang disputes or robberies that went awry, and it does not include domestic shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers.

Active Shootings in the U.S.

The Wall Street Journal, April, 2019

Active-shooter incidents around the U.S. fell slightly last year, but they remained at the second highest level since 2000, according to new data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Deadly incidents in 2018 included the shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school, the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Borderline Bar and Grill shooting in Thousand Oaks, Calif. In total, there were 27 incidents around the country last year, leaving 85 people dead and 128 wounded. That compares with 30 shootings in 2017, the deadliest year in the FBI’s records.

Between 2000 and 2018, there have been 277 active-shooter events, which have killed 884 and injured 1,544, according to the FBI. These shootings have taken place in 44 states and Washington, D.C., in churches, workplaces and neighborhoods, and at all hours of the day.

Maps of the Donors Powering the 2020 Democratic Campaigns

From The New York Times August 2, 2019

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has a huge lead over other Democratic presidential candidates in the number of individual donors they have each accumulated so far.

This is the first time since the primary race began in earnest that we can estimate how many individual donors each candidate has attracted — a key indicator of how much they are catching on with voters.

Mr. Sanders is relying heavily on small donors to power his campaign, and he entered the 2020 race with a huge network of online donors who supported his 2016 presidential bid. The map above shows the breadth of Mr. Sanders’s roster of donors across the United States.

A map that includes the rest of the Democratic field without Mr. Sanders offers a picture of where the other major candidates are picking up donors. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the other leading progressive in the race, is outpacing the rest of the field across much of the country — a sign that her strategy of relying on grass-roots donors, and refraining from holding high-dollar fund-raisers, is working.