Despite the camping ban repeal, sprawling camps of drug-addicted transients lured here by departed mayor Steve Adler and the hard left Austin City Council continue to dot the landscape in and around Austin.
Indeed, the problem remains so large that one Austinite has created a Google map to track homeless camps. If you live in or near Austin, click on that to see how big the problem is, and how many camps are near you.
Says the New York Post:
Liberal policies have led to a shocking explosion in homeless camps across the state capital, with around 168 different homeless camps across the city and 10,000 people living on the streets, sources tell The Post.
The sheer amount of people living on the street, 10,000 according to the City of Austin’s own count, now makes up 1% of the entire population in the greater Austin area.
His map reveals the clandestine encampments have spread to a far greater extent than many taxpaying residents had previously realized — dotting the entire city, including near popular tourist destinations like Zilker Metropolitan Park.
Often hidden from public view in wooded areas, the encampments, banned by voter mandate, have become hotbeds for illegal activity and been the site of two deaths since April.
[Jamie] Hammonds warns that an even bigger public safety threat could be looming as the sites remain largely unregulated by the Democratic city’s leadership.
“A big fire is going to take place, and it’s going to burn up a lot of people. It’s going to happen,” Hammonds predicted.
“I’ve been warning the city about this for over a year.”
In the year and a half that Hammonds has been documenting the camps, he claims to have regularly witnessed people with mental health and drug issues use unsupervised fires for warmth and cooking.
“We have fires in these camps every year, but thank the Lord the fire department has been able to put them out very quickly,” he added.
The homeless sites are often nestled in wooded areas, surrounded by oak trees.
“It gets really hot and really dry in the summer,” the filmmaker explained. “These folks build fires, and these greenbelts, when it gets dry, it’s like a match waiting to go off.
That story, in turn, was a follow-up to this one in which Hammonds documented Violet Crown Trail being trashed.
Hammonds has his own YouTube channel, as well as a domain (http://www.dashatx.org/) that currently seems to be suffering from a certificate problem.
The Homeless Industrial Complex obviously benefits from these sprawling homeless camps (and, indeed, tried to directly financially benefit from cleaning them up before they got caught). They exist because those on the hard left benefit from their existence, no matter how many camps they burn down, piles of trash they leave behind, or how many law-abiding citizens they victimize.
(Hat tip: Not the Bee.)
Tags: Austin, Crime, Democrats, homeless, Jamie Hammonds, Social Justice Warriors, Zilker Park
Weaponized compassion.
So long as they can get sympathy from the normies for the poor downtrodden homeless, they’ll be able to leverage that into big bucks, laundering it through their agencies and “charities”.
When the whole thing blows up? That’s going to happen when everyone else loses patience with the “homeless drug-addicted” class and begins mercilessly dealing with them with utter indifference.
That day is coming. It’s come for a lot of normies, up here in the Puget Sound area. Some of these folks I hear saying things of late that I’d have expected out of the mouth of some reactionary loony-toon types decades ago, and it’s becoming mainstream. As in, “Make Narcan illegal; pass out free Fentanyl…” sort of indifferent. “Hey, if they want to live like that, let ’em… Just don’t expect me to pay for picking up after ’em…”
I think a preference cascade against “compassion” ain’t all that far off, and the indigent “homeless” population is going to find it a hell of a lot harder to survive on the streets with every hand raised against them. There’s a narrow window where that could maybe be turned around, but… Man, I just don’t see anything like that happening. It is, instead, going to fester until people are just fine with shoveling dead bodies in bags and burying them somewhere out of the way. They just don’t care, any more…
Watched a local pastor get his ass reamed for suggesting the congregation ought to open a soup kitchen. They weren’t too happy about that idea, ‘cos they’ve seen what that sort of attractive nuisance begets…
I am appalled, APPALLED, that the homeless druggies aren’t more environmentally aware of how their littering contributes to climate change. Look at what they’re doing to Gaia!?! Messing up trails!? Why can’t they shoot up closer to city infrastructure so they can toss the needles in public playgrounds like decent civilized people? THOSE TARPS AREN’T EVEN FAIRTRADE SOURCES WTF! You’re pro-sweatshop hobos? Really?
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