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Philadelphia
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Trading: ticker tape
Posts: 2,894 since Apr 2012
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Complex issue to say the least. I've driven through Camden many times to get to or from new jersey and if you pull down any side street off the main road you'll usually hear people howling you to pull up to buy heroin. They'll often scream from their stoops "dope, dope, dope" to get any passerby interested to stop. Much of the ghettos don't have electricity or running water and just become places for the homeless to squat and do drugs. Much of the homeless either have drug addictions or mental illnesses and usually the former turns into the ladder.
The reason Philadelphia and surrounding cities have gone to the wayside is because most of the industry in previous decades was built around textiles, ship building, and other heavy industrialized products. After the factories shut down and become abandoned you have whole communities shut out of jobs pretty much permanently. You'll see this in satellite towns all over PA that were heavy in the steel industry like Allentown or even other cities like Detroit in other states.
Hiring more police officers to reduce drugs and homeless is like hiring more ambulances to fight cancer. As prescription drugs become increasingly more expensive and harder to get you see suburbia flocking to these areas to get drugs creating a huge demand supplying money to the ghetto when it otherwise wouldn't have dime. You also have to understand the criminal network in these areas are extremely sophisticated where they'll have look outs on every corner for blocks and blocks notifying all the dealers when and where the police are. The profit margin on hard drugs here is up a few hundred percent so even if someone gets locked up there are 10 other people willing to take their place because they have no other hope. And not only that but after someone gets convicted of a felony drug charge for trying to feed their family they won't be able to get a job that pays anything more than minimum wage so why would they want to do anything different.
If nothing is done about the homeless they accelerate the decline in property values, are a burden to the health care system, and simply put a damper on the consciousness of the society seeing them struggle from day to day. Yes giving money to them usually results in them buying drugs but it's a disease. Having them on the street makes the problem get worse long term. These areas need to be rebuilt with new industry and jobs otherwise the problems won't go away. You have miles of ghetto with little to no jobs built for a once prospering industry that simply has disappeared and now they've become conduits for cheap drugs to get into the pockets of the entire city, it's almost like a virus that feeds on the host because it has no other source of subsistence. Homeless people are the main byproducts who've become inflicted and they'll just resort to violence and crime if you don't give them some spare change, rehabilitation, or most importantly a way to earn an honest buck.
The Badlands: Death of an American Neighborhood | Video - ABC News
R.I.P. Joseph Bach (Itchymoku), 1987-2018.
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