New Yorkers Continue to Ignore Homelessness at Their Own Peril

‘My day job at the Chief-Leader, a weekly newspaper that covers New York City’s municipal workforce, requires that I be out and about reporting on what public workers like the police, EMTs and transit workers are doing to keep the world’s greatest city safe and running smoothly. As a consequence, I encounter the city’s social conditions on the street, in the subways and in the shadows where public spaces meet private property.
As the city’s equality gap persists, these encounters increasingly include dozens of homeless and clearly indigent people. Several times a day in the subway I am asked for money. On the street and in the underground passageways I have had to avert my eyes from a mother sitting on the floor with a drowsy toddler in her lap, begging for food or money. At the evening rush hour, half-naked men, clearly intoxicated, who appear mentally ill, shuffle through the crowds at Penn Station. Others just lay on the floor, presumably asleep, as my fellow commuters and I just step over their bodies like they were road kill.’
Read more: New Yorkers Continue to Ignore Homelessness at Their Own Peril