Fightinville Journal

There's an alley across the street from me, between a tall fence and the side of an old bar.  It's a popular spot for people who want to get high, or as I saw a couple of days ago, people who want to conduct a little prostitution. When I see people go into the alley or hear them talking, I go over and tell them they're on private property. The property piece I really don't care about so much as I care about defining the boundaries of what I will and won't put up with on my block. The alley is a little offset from my front door, so I have to cross the street at an angle to get to it. This time, I rounded the corner to be confronted by a large white ass attached to a mid-thirties woman, with a tall guy standing behind it.  "You have to go," I said. Normally I try to be calmer and just let people know they don't own the property and they leave. This time I was a little more incensed because, hey: you're right by my front door and there are families wi...

 I've learned that when I see a homeless person without shoes, it means they got so high they lost track of them. I think they take them off because they get overheated, and by the time they come down, they're too far from where they left them to remember. Yesterday while out walking our dog, we turned a corner and walked through the middle of a scene. My wife doesn't interact with or make eye contact with the homeless if at all possible, so she missed it.  I also tend to follow that rule, but being a guy am more subject to interactions wanted or not. In this case, one guy was being pursued at a walk by another, younger guy, who seemed to be preparing to beat him up. The victim had been around for some months, and was a muttering, laughing, muscular young man who appeared to be coping with some intellectual disability and drug use. I walked up to the pair, and the victim looked over at me and then groggily, hesitantly, began to move in short arcs as though to enter orbit ar...

I saw an old friend at a coffee shop.  We started talking about the neighborhood, and he said Housing First was a failure.  Housing First is the dominant idea behind current thinking in homelessness. Get a roof over someone's head first, then connect them with services.  The saying is there's nothing about being mentally ill or addicted to drugs that is going to be improved by living on the street.  I left the cafe and saw police cars down the road. By the time I got to the scene the police were gone and a lone man stood on the corner talking to nobody.  Did you see what the cops were here for, I asked.  "They were here because I bought the jail and they won't let me run it," he said.  He had no shoes.  You bought the jail, I asked "I paid four billion dollars for it, and they won't let me run it. It's just racism," he said.