Andrea Morrison has a 10-year-old son in Little League, but he can’t play ball because he gets threatened by a homeless man who lives in the dugout.
The man has allegedly harassed the preteen player at Seattle’s Ballard Community Center fields and has gone so far as to threaten to kill him.
As a mother, Morrison has had enough. She said the homeless people camped out at the park suffer from mental illness and that their actions are unpredictable.
“They are taking it out on our neighbors, our kids,” she told Q13 FOX.
At nearby Gilman Park, parents have also started to question how safe their children are at practice. The girls on the softball teams are encouraged to use the bathroom before they get to the park because of the number of homeless people loitering around the area.
OREGON LAWMAKERS LOOK TO PROTECT HOTELS FOR THE HOMELESS FROM LAWSUITS
One time, there was a naked man outside his tent by the bathroom whom authorities brought out on a stretcher in front of the players. Neither the Little Leaguers nor their parents or coaches knew if the man had overdosed or died.
In all, during the first three weeks of practice, there were four troubling incidents.
Unfortunately, the scenes playing out in Seattle are being repeated across the country.
As COVID-19 restrictions are lifted and more people head outdoors, they are finding huge homeless encampments that have spread across public parks, pavilions, and sidewalks.
Little League coach Eamon Reilly told KOMO that he wanted to play ball with his team this season but had grown frustrated by the issues that have resulted from the homeless encampments.
A lot of the resentment is aimed at city leaders, who, some say, have let the problem grow.
“If you are prioritizing people sleeping in the dugout versus my son playing T-ball, I have no words to describe how upset that makes me,” Reilly said.
The homelessness crises in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle didn’t happen overnight. Little by little, the cities succumbed to skyrocketing housing prices, rampant drug use, and liberal policies that have made it easy for people to feed their addictions and commit crimes, making it hard for the mentally ill to get treatment.
For decades, the liberals in charge, the self-proclaimed champions of compassion, opened up their cities. It didn’t matter if the public complained, crime rose, or that nearby businesses boarded up and left.
Elected officials did everything to make sure it looked like they cared. They threw billions of dollars at the problem and argued about how homelessness could be curbed. They held forums and studies and talked until they were blue in the face. They promised compassion and change but fell short on both.
Now, residents are paying the price for years of inept policy decisions. They have had to sit back and watch hundreds of homeless people set up tents in public parks, around lakes, on sidewalks, and on school property.
People have said they don’t feel safe or protected in places they once did and have lost confidence in their elected leaders’ ability to turn the situation around.
“A lot of my friends who grew up in Seattle have left,” Nikhil Joshi told the Washington Examiner. “The homeless problem here is getting worse by the day.”
In Denny Park, Seattle city officials recently swept a homeless camp after concerns of widespread violence. Since November, there have been more than 60 calls to 911 involving incidents at the park, the city’s oldest and most historic located in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle. They included 10 arsons or illegal burns, five domestic violence incidents, four assaults, and three sex offenses. There has also been at least one overdose and numerous other medical emergencies.
In Echo Park Lake in California, the number of tents and their tenants have skyrocketed to more than 170. In March, police in riot gear stood by as the city cleared the homeless encampment and shut down the park for repairs. The move to clear the tent community created a bitter divide among residents, city officials, and authorities.
Homeless advocates also railed against the move. The group Echo Park Tent Community said in a statement that the growing encampment had provided a safe place for homeless people during the COVID-19 crisis.
The removal of the tent community has become a flashpoint in the debate over homelessness in Los Angeles and the city’s policies to address the growing problem.
“There were both sides of the coin,” Nichole Fiore, a senior associate for Abt Associates, told Bloomberg CityLab. “People who wanted the encampment closed and also people who were saying, ‘Leave the encampment open, these encampment residents have formed a community, they’ve lived here for a year or so. Let it stay open because they’re not going to permanent housing.'”
California accounts for most of the country’s homeless population. The number of pre-pandemic homeless as of January 2020 stood at 161,548, a 7% increase from the year before. In Los Angeles County, the number jumped 13% from 2019 to 66,436, according to a federal report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, whose district covers Echo Park, supported the sweep and told the Washington Examiner that beds were reserved for every single person experiencing homelessness at Echo Park Lake. He added that there had been more than half a million dollars in damage to the park and that, at one point, more than 100 people were living at the lake.
“For over a year, my office has diligently worked to respond to the myriad challenges at Echo Lake Park – the lack of adequate shelter or services for the unhoused population; the dangers to public safety found throughout the park; and the growing list of repairs necessitated by the park’s deteriorating conditions,” O’Farrell said. “From the outset, I made a commitment to find transitional housing for everyone at Echo Park Lake who wanted it, no matter how they got there or where they came from.”
But these congratulatory pats on the back politicians give themselves for the clearing and closing of encampments come with mixed results and at a high cost.
According to a first-of-its-kind report on tent cities commissioned by the federal government and conducted by Abt Associates, the homeless sweeps cost millions of dollars.
The city of Chicago forked over $3.6 million in 2019. In San Jose, which had a higher population of people sleeping outdoors, the tab came to $8.6 million. In Tacoma, Washington, taxpayers footed $3.9 million to manage encampments. Overall, the cities in the study spent between $1,672 and $6,208 per unsheltered person, managing the camps with little success.
The news doesn’t come as a huge surprise to Seattle resident Tim Gaydos, who told the Washington Examiner that things aren’t likely to get better until cities start addressing the root causes of homelessness.
What they are doing now, some believe, is akin to putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.
Gaydos, a former pastor and founder of the Friends of Denny Park, said elected officials often try to “fix” the homeless crisis by providing shelter but that it doesn’t get to the root of the problem.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Giving someone a home isn’t going to solve the main issue, and the main issue is we have a significant mental health and drug addiction pandemic,” he said. “We’re just kind of off track when it comes to some of the bigger issues. It’s not just a homelessness issue. We’re talking about severe mental health and drug addiction, and unless we’re willing to kind of take a holistic approach and realize there are different issues, we’re going to be in a tough spot.”
