I don’t understand why the good folk at the Sun are surprised that the residents of Mount Vernon are giving this project a thumbs up.
Homeless Shelter planned for 620 Fallsway
Opposition to this should be expected from some business owners and political types that are well connected to the real estate community. The proximity of homeless folk inevitably effects property values, true. But property value is just a number in a ledger, so who cares?
I guess it matters if you’re a real estate developer or investor. And guilt by association might attach to a politician beholdin’ to such as them. It might matter to a fat-cat banker whose Cheshire grin fades at the thought of collateral losing its liquidity. But for those of us who live here because it is culturally, economically, and sexually diverse it matters little. We plan to stay.
The Sun’s label of Mount Vernon as “one of the city’s most prestigious neighborhoods,” is lost on us. The only true and telling word in that phrase is “neighborhood.” Most of us live here for that sense of neighborhood that would be lost if it became all white bread, gentrified, bourgeois.
Unbridled capitalism, and the greed that it engenders, has brought our nation down to near collapse. The drug trade, at the urban level, is nothing more than laissez-faire Capitalism without the boardrooms; and that is the scourge of our city.
The homeless are not our enemy. Our enemy is the culture we have built that makes homelessness possible. The “not in my neighborhood” mentality towards the homeless is doubly offensive when it is mouthed by folk who paint themselves as liberal or progressive.
