I heart New York

The face of discrimination

(Photo credit: Stephen Yang, NY Post)

The NY Post reports on a homeless camp down on 8th Street that’s being ignored by that City’s modern-day version of John Lindsay, Bill,” Big Bird” de Blasio. Not surprisingly, the merchants still trying to make a living down there are distraught, but it’s not just them who wish the Mayor would retake the city:

“It makes me feel uncomfortable. It makes our city dirty and noisy,” said neighborhood resident Olga, 78, who’s lived in the East Village for 33 years.

“There was one woman who was making pee-pee and caca by the bus stop. It was very dirty and disgusting. Nobody wanted to use the bus stop.”

Poor Olga: at 78-years-old, she shouldn’t have to endure this. But my favorite part of the story is its interview with “Solaura’, a tattooed transvestite prostitute, explaining how its work takes place on the streets, and thus cannot use the services of homeless shelters with their 10:00 curfews:

“I am a highly marginalized individual and I just don’t have the same opportunity as a lot of cisgender people as far as employment goes, so the work I do is at night or I would have no income,” she said.

Hard to believe that this sex worker has trouble finding regular employment; it’s certainly because of discrimination against people of his persuasion, but I think we’d be remiss not to bring in Trump to take his share of the blame.

On a related note, I had coffee with a friend yesterday at Old Greenwich’s Joe Studio Cafe (“best coffee in town” my friend says, and it is indeed excellent). My friend, who formerly served in an elite military branch of an ally of ours in the Middle East and has dropped into some of the worst cities around the world, told me of a trip he recently took to San Francisco with his family: the conditions in downtown — not on the fringes, not on a side street — were as bad as any third world country he’s seen. The trash, the human waste, the needle-users and screamers terrified his young son, “and even I was extremely worried.” If a guy like this, with his training and experience, feels he can’t walk in the most expensive part of San Francisco without fear, it gives new meaning to its once-affectionate nickname of “Baghdad by the Bay”.