Philadelphia has a homelessness problem, and it is affecting the passengers of the city’s public transit system.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, significantly fewer people used the subway. During this time, many of the city’s homeless started setting up encampments on the city’s subway concourses. It would not be uncommon for those who did use the subway to be harassed or to witness many of them injecting drugs into their bodies. In several instances, there were reports of homeless people defecating in public.
To remedy this situation, Philadelphia’s Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority started locking various stops to prevent the homeless from entering and loitering. Unfortunately, while this helped keep some homeless people out, it wound up temporarily trapping some subway users underground in multiple instances.
SEPTA is the regional public transportation authority for the Philadelphia metropolitan area and operates the area’s subways, bus routes, commuter rail, trolleys, and light rail systems.
Philadelphia’s City Hall subway stop is the main transportation hub in the city. It is an underground maze of intricate walkways that connects different public transportation stations in the heart of the city. As a lifelong resident, embarrassing as it is to admit, I have also experienced being trapped in one of the concourses. In addition to being a major inconvenience, it is also rather unsafe, as you are trapped underground with little to no police presence and many homeless people in the immediate vicinity. Yet it was still the course of action SEPTA decided to take.
“We had to harden the system. We had to close it down until people [started] coming back to work and we were able to address this public health crisis,” said Ken Divers, assistant director of transportation at SEPTA.
Also, these restrictions were not particularly effective, as the concourses were still filled with homeless people who were often seen abusing drugs or defecating in public. Moreover, homeless people would choose to sleep in some of these locked areas instead of in the concourse encampment. In many instances, the people that suffered the most were those whom this initiative was supposed to protect.
Much like the city’s surge in homicides, carjackings, and opioid epidemic, homelessness rates have soared in recent years. Since 2015, in Philadelphia’s Center City, where the City Hall subway labyrinth is located, the number of homeless has increased 57%. Additionally, Philadelphia has a poverty rate of 23.3%, the worst of the country’s largest cities. SEPTA’s decision to start locking entry points is the latest attempt to put a Band-Aid over a bad situation. And while this was an attempt to lessen homeless people living on subway concourses, it doesn’t solve the bigger problem at hand: the policies of the city’s Democratic politicians.
