Shall We Release the Kraken?

A Note on the Homeless

I found this little scene on Chestnut between Di Bruno Bros. and Target. The woman standing in the bus shelter is yelling at the woman lying on the bench, telling her to sit up so that she, the standing person, can sit down.

2023.

I'd like to say that scenes like this are rare in the place where I live, but they are not rare, and they are not new.

Somewhere near Rittenhouse Square, 1982.

Moravian street near the Union League, 1984.

Over the years, the people of Center City Philadelphia have pitched in and tried to help alleviate the suffering. For instance, the Bethesda Project, headquartered at 1630 South street, has been providing emergency shelter, housing, and supportive services to the homeless since 1979. It currently has 15 locations, including the Trinity Memorial Church at 2212 Spruce Street and the Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square. 

(Bethesda was a place of refuge and healing in Jerusalem. Jesus heals a man there in John 5; the priests don't like it because it's the Sabbath and Jesus told the man to pick up his bed, and the man picked up his bed. And things kinda go downhill from there.)

Since 2018, the Center City District has had an outreach program, called Ambassadors of Hope, that helps the unhoused seek shelter and treatment.

I hope we can all agree that these admirable efforts, and others like them, are not not fully meeting current needs. We do have a problem of the homeless on our streets. It is bad, it is getting worse, and local residents are beginning to lose patience. There is pervasive unhappiness with aggressive panhandlers and others whose bizarre behavior disrupts the normal life of the sidewalk and often frightens people who are just trying to walk down the street.

Let me add that the problem is not confined to the city's sidewalks. One recent evening a friend of mine was sitting in her living room when she heard small noises in the kitchen. As her husband had already gone to bed, she got up and investigated. A homeless man had gained entry into the house and was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, removing his shoes. She spoke to him, and he mumbled incoherently. My friend is a retired middle-school teacher, so she used her teacher voice and ordered him to put his shoes back on and leave the house. The man put his shoes back on and shambled out.

Waverly street, 2023.

There are undoubtedly further things that the City and other local organizations, both public and private, can do to help address the situation. However, I think we also need to recognize that homelessness and its related issues are basically a national problem we've been failing to address for a very long time.

For example, many of the unhoused are mentally ill. John F. Kennedy, in the last bill he signed before he was murdered in Texas, pointed the way forward for this group. The law centered on two ideas: closing the mental hospitals, which were widely seen as dumping grounds that did not serve the patients well but did permit the rest of us to ignore their existence; and, second, opening a large number of community mental health clinics that would provide treatment and support to patients while allowing them to live in their home communities. 

The first proposal was accepted with alacrity, and the mental hospitals were closed at a grand rate. However, the money saved by closing the hospitals was, by and large, not recommitted to the proposed community mental health clinics, the vast majority of which were never created.

The result was a large number of seriously ill people released into the public sphere, sometimes with housing, but rarely with adequate provision for their care. I had personal experience with this process in Asbury Park in the 1970s and 1980s. The town had lost much of its popularity as a beach resort, and it had a lot of empty rooms in hotels and boarding houses. The state sent along the mental patients, and their presence, with beds but without adequate support systems, was a powerful accelerant to the city's further decline, which only turned around after the year 2000. (See The Uncertain Eighties. For more on the national situation, click here and here.)

20th and Walnut, 1984.

Subway entrance, 123 South Broad, 1984. 

So I do think the current situation in Philadelphia amounts to playing with fire. And I do think local initiatives can do more to alleviate the situation. We just shouldn't kid ourselves about what we're up against, or expect work at the local level to fully resolve a national problem.

I'm hopeful that our new mayor, Cherelle Parker, may help make the situation better through local initiatives, but I would also encourage her to form an alliance with other mayors to try to get this issue before Congress once again. 

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 15, Mayor Parker spent time with President Biden and visited Philadundance with him. The Inquirer reported that the two discussed how the federal government could assist Philadelphia with issues of public safety and affordable housing, and also "the opioid crisis afflicting the city's Kensington neighborhood." So I am permitting myself some cautious optimism, with the hope that people will recognize that the problem of homelessness extends well beyond Kensington and involves issues other than opioid dependence.  Mental health, for instance.

Finally, a word of caution. I am concerned that Mayor Parker's initiative in Kensington may be over-reliant on the services of the police. As George Orwell noted in "Shooting an Elephant," the injection of a police presence into a volatile situation can lead to suboptimal outcomes.

Unfortunately, I feel this may well be the path that Mayor Parker chooses. Following Sidney Powell, we can call this Releasing the Kraken. It will certainly be popular. But it won't work, and the optics will be terrible. 

Lombard street, 2024.

Wikipedia has a lengthy and very detailed article on the history of the Kraken. I think we should offer a prize to anyone who actually reads it through to the end. To see the article, click here.

See also The Uncertain Eighties, A Moment in Time, Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Quo Vadis, Philadelphia?