Nothing good can come up with imitating SanFran, but this is the worst.
Homeless people living on the streets and sidewalks of downtown Miami are also relieving themselves on the streets and sidewalks of downtown Miami, turning the city’s core into an outdoor toilet, merchants and residents say.
“The situation is the worst I’ve seen in my 25 years here,” said business owner Jose Goyanes. “The stench is really bad, even after you hose it down. We see people urinating against buildings or pulling their pants down and squatting because they have nowhere else to go.”
Deposits of human waste can be seen in planters, doorways, gutters — or right in the middle of the block. The pavement behind the old Macy’s department store is soaked with urine. Feces ferment in front of vacant storefronts for days when there’s no landlord to clean up. People who work and live downtown are calling in a Code Brown.
Human waste from homeless people makes downtown Miami streets unpleasant, unsanitary
Miami has always had a envy issue . It wanted to be like other “cooler” cities like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, but rather to be itself and develop a local color, it always tried to imitate those places they envied. A quarter of a century later, downtown “Magic City” and adjacent areas look like a Dollar Store version of a Big City.
When we moved to Miami some 20-25 years ago, there was a fierce political fight for the soul of downtown. Back then it was a busy commercial location catering to the visitors from South America that came to do shopping for either their pleasure or for resale back in their countries. Homeless people stated to concentrate in bigger numbers and be nasty about begging and business got pissed about it. They demanded the city/county to do something about it, but all the cool kids in other cities were siding with the homeless and supporting the “Urban Hobos” (Not kidding. I was told by cops in one department that they were required to refer to them like that.) The business owners were targeted by government and Media a heartless Capitalists who did not care for the plight of poor families living in the streets and that they should be ashamed. Well, the campaign worked, business shut their moths, packed their shit and moved away. The problem was that the people that came to buy stuff also migrated and the business space was never refilled. Who is going to open a business there when the unofficial street enticement was homelessness?
Last time I went downtown was 7 years ago and it was already a mess. The plaza in front of Government Center was a collection of bureaucrats going from building to building and homeless doing their thing. And the further away from the corner of 1st Avenue and 1st Street you walked, the worst it got. Fecal issues were not yet as bad as they are supposed to be now, but if the temperature and winds were right, you would get a nice strong whiff of Eau du Piss.
I feel bad for those having to work and do business down there. A lot of things you needed to do at government offices now can be done online and same for shopping including for export-only and that has made the place irrelevant to most of Miamians. Other cities in the county were less “woke” and created regulations against aggressive panhandling and enforced public health laws. What? You don’t think you see homeless people taking a daily dump in front of Gloria Estefan’s restaurants in Miami Beach, do you? Take a crap in Calle Ocho and you will be chased with machetes by a horde of angry Cubans and same in Little Haiti.
One of the stories that’s going around is that San Francisco insiders say the reason they poop and leave syringes in the street is the city banning plastic bags from stores. When plastic bags were around, the homeless addicts had the decency to poop in plastic bags and throw them out. When the do-gooders banned plastic bags there was no way to be even halfway conscientious about it.
I haven’t been in downtown Miami since August of ’87, so 32 years. I pray I don’t have to.
What’s the problem? Doesn’t the high tide wash the streets clean twice a day?
The Global Warming Fanatics keep telling me Miami is being overrun by the rising ocean and soon to disappear in Twelve Years. Isn’t Al Gore claiming that same ocean is regularly flooding Miami right now? We are all dead in twelve years anyway! What’s a little poop in the mean time?
/s
Not to.sound like Ebeneezer Scrooge, but what happened to the homeless shelters?
(Actually, I know. The drug addicts don’t like them because they can’t take their drugs there, and the insane don’t like the other rules. Most of them prefer being on the streets.)
Back in the 70s when I was in college, the states started closing the mental hospitals, saying that mental patients could be better served “in the community.”
I said then that was bullshit, since after the first time they forget to take their meds, they’d never take them again. Some of my dorm-mates, who were working toward Master’s degrees in Social Work, told me I was a reactionary asshole who just wanted to keep people locked up. (I was a Criminal Justice major.)
I guess they showed me.
Oddly enough, this oollddd street medic/ER RN, aggrees with you.
May the Almighty save us from any more of these liberal “success stories”.