Poverty & Homelessness Are Fueling Rampant Theft And Violence In Major US Cities
By Michael Snyder/End of the American Dream May 17, 2024
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The tremendous chaos that is gripping communities all over this country did not emerge out of a vacuum. For years, poverty and homelessness have been on the rise. According to a recent report from Harvard University, the number of homeless Americans has increased by almost 50 percent in less than a decade.
Meanwhile, the ranks of the poor have been growing as the middle class has been eroding. Today, approximately 40 percent of the entire U.S. population is considered to be either living in poverty or among the "working poor".
According to Wikipedia, the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population only has 2.6 percent of the wealth. And that number is from 2021, and so things are almost certainly even worse today. All of this economic suffering is helping to fuel a deeply alarming explosion of theft and violence in our major cities, and our leaders don't seem to have any solutions.
Everyone knows that homelessness is out of control in large coastal cities such as Los Angeles and New York, but we are seeing the same thing happen in the middle of the country too...
Nashville residents say they are increasingly struggling to afford a home as an influx of out-of-state buyers drive real estate prices up, leaving many with no where to go.
Rates of chronic homelessness in the Tennessee capital have soared 77 percent this year, according to the city's official stats.
77 percent in one year.
Take a moment and let that number sink in.
Many of these homeless people are actually working, but affording a place to live is out of reach.
Today, the average one bedroom apartment in Nashville will set you back more than $1,400 a month...
Rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Nashville area soared $200 in the past year to $1,442 a month, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Young said without more affordable housing, the issue will worsen: 'I guarantee you it's going to double from where we are now.'
And home prices in Nashville have soared to absurd heights...
The median home sale price in Nashville at the end of February was $414,012, compared to $290,983 five years prior.
Home prices are at the heart of the cost of living crisis that is causing so much pain all over the nation right now.
As I discussed yesterday, home prices in the U.S. have risen by 47 percent since the start of the decade.
So this helps to explain why tent cities are popping up from coast to coast.
In my entire lifetime, I have never seen so many people sleeping in the streets of America.
Many of them are addicts, and San Francisco has decided to "help" them by giving them free beer and vodka shots...
The City of San Francisco is providing free beer and vodka shots to homeless alcoholics at taxpayer expense under a little-known pilot program.
The "Managed Alcohol Program" operated by San Francisco's Department of Public Health serves regimented doses of alcohol to voluntary participants with alcohol addiction in an effort to keep the homeless off the streets and relieve the city's emergency services. Experts say the program can save or extend lives, but critics wonder if the government would be better off funding treatment and sobriety programs instead.
"Established in countries such as Canada and Australia, a managed alcohol program is usually administered by a nurse and trained support staff in a facility such as a homeless shelter or a transitional or permanent home, and is one method to minimize harm for those with alcohol use disorder," the California Health Care Foundation explains in an 2020 article describing the pilot program.
Are you kidding me?
Of course San Francisco has been giving free syringes to drug addicts for a long time too.
Needless to say, the problems that San Francisco is facing have only gotten worse, and we have seen countless businesses leave the city as a result.
The latest one to leave downtown San Francisco is American Eagle...
Yet another retailer is leaving Downtown San Francisco amid the city's spiraling crime and homeless crises - at the especially embattled San Francisco Centre mall.
American Eagle announced it is closing its doors at the former Westfield San Francisco Centre over the summer, citing more 100 significant security incidents that allegedly occurred between May 2020 and May 2023.
Drug addicts constantly have to steal stuff in order to fund their addictions.
Right now, we are in the midst of the worst addiction crisis in the entire history of the United States, and this is one of the primary reasons we are facing the worst retail theft crisis in the entire history of the United States.
Retail shrinkage has more than doubled during the past five years and is now costing retailers more than 100 billion dollars a year...
If you've paid attention to recent retailer earnings reports, you have undoubtedly heard the phrase retail shrink cited as a key factor contributing to margin erosion and poor earnings performance. Shrink is the industry term for inventory loss often attributed to theft and shoplifting, damage or errors. Once simply considered a cost of doing business, retail shrinkage resulted in profit losses exceeding a staggering $100 billion in 2022.
What's more problematic, the trend of shrink appears to be far from reversing course, with losses more than doubling over the past five years.
These are the facts.
I am sorry if some people out there do not like them.
In addition to rampant theft, our streets are also filled with rampant violence.
Earlier today, I was shocked to learn that police officers in the United States were attacked more than 79,000 times last year...
The rate of assaults on American law enforcement reached a 10-year high in 2023, with more than 79,000 officer attacks reported, according to a new FBI report released Tuesday.
The report analyzes data from state, local, federal and other agencies across the U.S. to determine trends in violence against law enforcement. It shows that the number of officers assaulted and injured by guns is also climbing.
I would not want to work as a police officer in any of our major cities at this stage.
It is way too dangerous.
Sadly, our ongoing national crime wave is being made worse by "organized crime groups" that are coming in from other countries...
A Michigan sheriff is sounding the alarm on "burglary tourism" - a recent trend where international organized crime groups enter the U.S. to skillfully rob wealthy suburban homes.
"We believe that there has to be some kind of training camp because they come so well-trained, so equipped, and so knowledgeable about how to move and how to attack a home," Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard told "Fox & Friends" Wednesday.
"They do a lot of pre-op surveillance. They determine as best they can when someone won't be in a home. They go very quickly to the home, they break a window. They go through it, not opening a door or window. They have an electronic jammer."
Bouchard says that the gangs that are causing so much chaos in his area of Michigan are mostly coming in from Chile...
Bouchard said the gangs, mostly from Chile, are then able to quickly target home safes and small high-end items.
"They're very focused on high-end jewelry, like watches, cash, high-end purses... things that are highly, valuable and disposable. And out they go and they move on. They usually hit a number of homes in our area, and then they move on to another part of the country, and then another crew will come in. And it's been a cycle."
In other parts of the nation, groups from other areas are responsible for enormous spikes in crime.
The federal government keeps trying to tell us that things aren't that bad, but a Gallup survey discovered that a whopping 63 percent of all Americans believe that crime is either an "extremely serious" or "very serious" problem in this country...
Sixty-three percent of Americans describe the crime problem in the U.S. as either extremely or very serious, up from 54% when last measured in 2021 and the highest in Gallup's trend.
Our society is literally coming apart at the seams all around us, and this is precisely what I have been warning would happen.
Decades of very bad decisions have brought us to this point, and our politicians continue to take us in the wrong direction.
But if you think that things are bad now, just wait until you see what conditions are like a year or two from now...
Originally published at End Of The American Dream
