Tent cities are everywhere. Yalonda M. James / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty
It’s a toy store called Treasure Trove, but the first thing you see when you enter is no child’s play. Boxes of Narcan, a medication used to treat emergency drug overdoses, sit on the front counter near the cash register, accompanied by a handwritten sign that says “Free”.
Treasure Trove opened a year ago in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as a satellite store of their toy and second-hand goods shop in nearby Newberrytown. But this second location, within spitting distance of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, has evolved into something like a mission for the chronically homeless that also sells Funko Pops figurines. The owners, a pleasantly nerdy couple named Jason Crocenzi and Jennifer Draisey-Crocenzi, say it was impossible to operate a standard retail business in a downtown where hundreds of deprived homeless people wander the streets and often outnumber regular pedestrians.
In July, the Crocenzis were featured in a feel-good story for the local newspaper about turning their business into “a hub for helping the homeless”. One of Treasure Trove’s employees is Daniel, a gravel-voiced 75-year-old veteran who had been sleeping in a tent since 2011 until the Crocenzis were kind enough to let him live in the store building.
The problem is that the homeless don’t always love them back. Less than a month after the article appeared in The Burg, someone named Toby walked into the store and angrily demanded $3,000 for a new e-bike. He’s a bespectacled 26-year-old homeless person already infamous among some local merchants and residents because, for years, he’s been aggressively demanding no-strings-attached financial assistance. The Crocenzis offered Toby free clothes, beverages and leads on affordable housing, but wouldn’t hand over thousands in cash to him.
Jennifer’s account of what happened next is harrowing: “He then threatened to sue me, then kill himself, and then charged at my huge husband, ripping part of his beard off, hitting him with a mop, throwing his phone, and breaking inventory. He ripped Jason’s shirt, kicked and hit him, and refused to let him go for several minutes as we kept yelling: ‘Let him go, stop this!’
“Jason was on the ground, unable to breathe, until the police arrived and immediately pulled him off. It’s not many who would even try to attack a 600-pound store owner who does nothing but give free items to the homeless all day long.”
The Crocenzis pressed charges, and Toby eventually pleaded guilty to assault but was not in police custody for long. Meanwhile, Toby told a completely different story about the encounter. According to an account on a neighbourhood Facebook group, he was the blameless one being discriminated against. “They started yelling, cussing, and harassing me,” he wrote. “If anyone supports this business, they are not human.” The moderators sided with Toby and banned the Crocenzis from the group. When Jason Crocenzi protested, he said he was told they didn’t want to infringe on a homeless person’s First Amendment rights.
Today, Toby continues to use the group to beg for PayPal or Venmo donations and bullies people individually through direct messages. Everyone in this liberal-leaning city seems too uncomfortable to put an end to it; anyway, what can truly be done?
It’s not an uncommon story: nearly every American city now has a version of Toby. Often, it’s a handful of individuals — mentally ill or drug-addled chronically homeless people — who terrorise entire blocks, neighbourhoods, or public transit for weeks, sometimes years.
In San Francisco, one such repeat offender is Lacey, a woman who, since 2020, has chased people and their children around city parks while screaming bloody murder. In Austin, Texas, a homeless man named Rami Zawaideh smashes city property with a sledgehammer and cuts down trees with a chainsaw and machete while shrieking all through the night. Due to a confrontation with Daniel Penny in a New York subway car, the entire nation is aware of the sad story of Jordan Neely, a homeless person with 42 prior arrests — including three subway assaults. Neely remained on New York City’s “Top 50 List” of homeless people in need of assistance and treatment from 2019 until he was killed in 2023.
In Harrisburg, a small city in south-central Pennsylvania, the problem isn’t just Toby. There’s another unhoused man who — for seven years — has created havoc wherever he goes in a stretch of downtown. “He just comes in, and he’s ranting and raving, torturing customers, yelling in their face for money, doing drugs,” said Angel Fox, the owner of a local laundromat. “It was so sad to see that he’s not just tortured the other small businesses on the street but the community. In a four-block radius, one person is terrorising the community, and nothing is being done.
“Why is he still on the streets? Is law enforcement… waiting for him to hurt someone or someone’s kid, or do we have to be traumatised because we have to self-defend ourselves?” Fox continued.
The local police say they’re doing what they can under the system as it exists — they’ve arrested this particular perpetrator nine times in 2024 and 45 times since 2017, but the charges aren’t violent enough to warrant longer-term jail. There’s little in the way of other recourse. The Harrisburg State Hospital, which once took care of thousands of mentally ill patients for a century and a half, was shut down in the early 2000s and sat decrepit and abandoned until it finally burned to the ground late last year.
The fiery destruction of the state hospital is an appropriate metaphor of America’s under-institutionalisation problem. Since John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, most of the country’s mental hospitals were closed over the second half of the 20th century. And it was a bipartisan project: liberal reformers catalysed by exposes of abuses found common ground with fiscal conservatives who opposed the costliness of the asylum system. Without these institutions, the tens of thousands once housed in them are instead cycled in and out of jail, emergency rooms, and living on the streets. The shelters that offer to put a temporary roof over them run on government funding, grants, and donations and are all voluntary. No one is forced to get treatment or stay in a shelter, and so many of the homeless inevitably pick up where they left off after they leave jail, for better or worse.
What we get instead, in a time of ever-increasing economic inequality and hyper-individualism, is the rise of the anti-institution — large informal homeless encampments that have become a standard feature of the American city. Harrisburg’s own ragged tent city grows in a forested acre on the south edge of town, a no-man’s-land patch of wilderness between the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation building, a trainyard, and the Susquehanna River. It’s a series of tents, lean-tos, and makeshift camps walled in with found objects, surrounded by litter and discarded items.
This isn’t the first iteration of Tent City. The previous version, under the Mulberry Street Bridge, was cleared out in 2023 after police said the area was full of trash, rats leaping out of garbage, and “a spike in violent crime, drug usage, overdoses, sex workers, rapes, stabbings, and shootings”. Without institutionalisation and a short-term housing plan beyond the shelters, the homeless simply recreated the bridge encampment in a new location.
It isn’t safe to live there. Two men were stabbed in the camp in 2024, and dangerous blazes break out as people try to stay warm by building haphazard campfires. On 16 January, after a man named Alfred Colon burned to death in a tent there, his family said they hadn’t had contact with him in four years, and didn’t even know he was homeless. Drug overdoses are also common, hence the emergency doses of Narcan at Treasure Trove. According to Daniel, the former homeless employee at Treasure Trove, a portion of tent city’s residents are addicted to $5 fentanyl pills, often called “blues”.
The dysfunction of the tent cities inevitably spills out into the downtown area which, like many cities, is already suffering from a post-Covid malaise. A lack of footfall in a struggling local economy reliant on state government jobs that have stayed remote, boarded-up businesses, and the chronically homeless population have given much of downtown Harrisburg a tragic post-apocalyptic quality.
The political vacuum creates a doom-loop effect: businesses are often wary of investing in neighbourhoods like these, and when they don’t, residents lack access to essential services, including groceries and healthy food options. Commercial and property values drop, reducing funding for public schools and other municipal services. Middle-class people in these neighbourhoods tend to move out, exacerbating the concentration and clustering of disadvantage. Without policy changes, cities like these threaten to produce more homeless people and quietly slide into oblivion.
The lack of a legitimate response to this issue, or liberals’ defence of the status quo, may help explain some of the urban working class’s revolt in November’s election of Donald Trump. The media scratched their heads and tried to puzzle out why working-class people, especially those of colour in cities, turned towards MAGA.
At least some of that anger was directed at the Democrats for prioritising the chronically homeless and illegal immigrants for free housing and services. Liberal cities continue a delusional Housing First policy that’s next to impossible to succeed over the next decade when there’s hardly any affordable housing for the non-college-educated working class, much less the destitute. In 2024, the Biden-Harris administration awarded $3.16 billion to over 7,000 homeless-related projects, including $2 million to Harrisburg. That amounts to about $7,500 per homeless person included in the city’s Continuum of Care. Meanwhile, those who hide their homelessness or who scrape by working multiple jobs receive little help.
Those who object to these priorities or the anarchic state of encampments are considered bigots. Thanks to progressives’ culture of weaponised “empathy”, there’s little expectation of accountability or pro-social behaviour from the homeless because it’s considered inherently cruel to a class of people to be pitied as symbolic victims of capitalism and contemporary society. But treating the homeless like they’re Peter Pan’s Lost Boys helps no one, especially not the mentally ill or drug-addicted people themselves, who are often victims of crimes at the hands of each other in tent cities.
Thankfully, the tide may be slowly turning towards involuntary treatments. California and New York have recently adopted and expanded involuntary treatment policies and so have Canadian provinces such as British Columbia and Alberta. Trump has said that he will work with states to ban urban camping and push people into treatment for drug addiction and mental health, but it’s unclear whether his administration will invest in the kind of resources needed. Thus far in his second term, he’s appeared to be much more interested in wrecking existing institutions than creating new ones.
But without serious reform, we will just see more tragedies such as Daniel Penny’s vigilante confrontation with Jordan Neely in a New York subway or the attack on Jason Crocenzi in Harrisburg. More tragedies by inertia.
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SubscribeThe Daniel Penny incident shows that the mentally ill and criminal element effectively have a monopoly on violence. Any person who has a violent confrontation with a homeless person will almost certainly be attacked by activists – and probably charged by the police. Any white male who engages with any person with a protected status (which for straight white men is everyone else) will suffer the same fate. There is a famous video from Vancouver BC of Billboard Chris being assaulted by trans activists while a Vancouver Police Office is literally laughing the background watching. When someone calls her out on it she immediately starts lying about what happened. Even the VPD were embarrassed enough by the video to claim they were searching for the individuals. But that is what you can expect here. I am not a shrinking violet – but unless I truly have to protect my family I will not engage to address these people’s bad public behaviour. The potential legal and reputational risks to me are far too high. This is of course the outcome that both the woke police and their activist friends really want.
And the author needs to be called out on referring to Daniel Penny as a vigilante. He didn’t seek out this incident, it was thrown into his lap. Deciding to protect women and children on a subway car from a psycho threatening to kill someone is not vigilantism.
Words matter. They matter very much.
You can see who’s side the author is on. Daniel Penny is a real hero and the story had a happy ending. Daniel Penny is free and Jordan Neely is dead.
Daniel Penny got away with murdering a man.
What the writer describes is indeed a major failure of liberal policy-making, as instantiated by the Democratic Party. We (I mostly vote left myself) are so concerned with gaining status with other professionals, by identifying and championing ever more kinds of marginalized identity, that we ignore the realities of human destructive self-delusion.
You’re on to something with your observation about destructive self-delusion. Some people will use their agency to harm themselves (and others along the way). The tough question is how will the self-destructive agency of those who harm themselves and others be curbed? At the moment it seems the progressive view is that these people should be allowed free rein as though they were the rational agents that they have shown themselves not to be.
Well lets see what Elon Musk does with his chain saw.
This is really complex, difficult problem for governments to solve. The Pollyanna Left thought by renaming The Homeless “The Unhomed” and marking them as a sacred, marginalized group that could collectively fight for their dignity, it would “transform” the community. The problem with the phrase “Unhomed” is that it implies society did this to you and it’s not your fault.
I’m certain many of these people got bad breaks but they’ve quite clearly made an immense number of unproductive personal decisions in their lives to be where they are. Creating an entitlement victim complex in an unproductive person takes away agency and enables more unproductive behavior.
You do need social workers but those workers can’t be trained to reinforce victimology. Likewise you need homes and treatment programs but they have to be no-nonsense. No “safe injection sites” or coddling.
The ban on public “urban camping” is just common sense. If some benevolent landowner wants to do something good with their philanthropy, how about dedicating a large plot of isolated, private land to the public for the treatment housing and facilities. Then again that would require philanthropy to be selfless act with no return on investment so there may not be any takers.
It’s a really, really difficult problem to solve for the public or private sector. But some of these left wing solutions and policies just exacerbate the problem.
Difficult in the sense that no one in authority has the balls to implement the required policies to deal with the problem-the solutions are not difficult-the political will is.
There are layers though. Who pays for it? What do you do with non-compliant addicts? Are they just thrown in jail/prison or left to roam?
There’s a significant financial cost to the public to pay for each inmate.
I’m just saying it’s easier to talk about it than implement.
Which is cheaper, paying for institutionalization or paying for prison after they’ve committed crimes, and also losing the tax revenue and economic efficiency that comes from middle-class people being safe in cities?
Difficult because there is powerful opposition to solving it. Not because of anything inherent.
We did not have this problem 60 years ago, and its scale was very small and in just a few places 30 years ago.
This is a choice.
No it’s not.
Many of the homeless are Vietnam vets with PTSD. There are also those who are one paycheck away from being homeless and lost that paycheck. Yes, it’s obviously a complex problem because no one has the solution.
Easy answer, bring back the asylums, albeit in not such a cruel guise as the previous incarnations.
Will never happen though, the left will say it punishes the drug addicts and mentally ill while the right will moan about the cost and babble on some nonsense about personal responsibility.
So the richest country in the world will continue to have tent slums and shanty towns reminiscent of Soweto
I saw something similar in cities across Europe. Homeless people in cities and around railway stations doing what is entirely rational, which is to seek out shelter, warmth and opportunities for food, and hustling for money in a variety of different ways, and often as a result of mental illness or addiction.
However, the crime of vagrancy has a long history and is not easily solved. The Victorians had enforced poor houses, more recent were mental health orders. Consequently, dealing with adults who are both ill and a nuisance, in a humane way, is not easy. But abandonment seems the worst solution.
My guess is that enforced help should be used, which means some form of institutional facility and treatment both to help the individual and to protect wider society from the problems they cause, which may include crime and health problems.
Obviously prison is not appropriate, but I would have thought some aspect of work or occupational therapy will need to be part of the process to rehabilitate individuals for the discipline of work, and behaviour that fits within expected public norms.
Perhaps then it should be agricultural in nature, with income for work (otherwise it will be labelled as a form of slavery) – more probably horticulture than bulk crop growing. It could be tied to meditative practices to improve mental health. Which then sounds very like a monastery, or kibbutz, or commune, with the observation that perhaps learning ‘belief’ and ‘purpose’ is a necessary part of such an intervention.
Which, strangely to me as an atheist, suggests an element of pastoral religion may have more of a place in saving the homeless, than secular psychology and science-y institutions.
You have not provided answers, yet. But you are asking the right questions.
i’d say the answer is work houses (modern version) but nobody wants to here that the Victorians were right.
This is nothing new at all. This article could have been written in the 1990’s, or any time over the last 30 years and it would have been perfectly relevant. The failure of our institutions for so long is why Trump was elected again. This is just one more example of why people with common sense are so frustrated by the general acceptance of the status quo by our previously elected leaders.
It’s a basic fact of life that most people who are significantly mentality ill simply can’t hold down jobs or manage a household on their own. Why do we keep thinking otherwise? Perhaps if we stop pouring billions into BS projects, eliminate patronage jobs and reduce the massive fraud, there will be funds available to bring back mental institutions.
My first reaction was also, “okay, now tell me something new.” Because there is nothing new in this article – same problem, same obstacles, blame because “we” are not doing anything to right the ship, and no suggestion of what to do. For every “solution,” there is always someone who sees a problem, and progress stops. Here’s a thought: there are some problems that government cannot solve, because solving the problem requires treating some people differently from others, which is untenable in a democratic society. So the solution likely is to be a private solution, with churches and charities taking the lead, and without taking government money (which will only make them beholden to government). But can that work, especially on the large scale required?
Thankfully, the tide may be slowly turning towards involuntary treatments.
He was suggesting a solution which is to go back to what worked in the past. A past, where the homeless people were simply referred to as “bums” even on TV series episodes.
There would be enough money if billionaires paid their fair share of taxes.
“The Crocenzis pressed charges, and Toby eventually pleaded guilty to assault but was not in police custody for long.”
And that, right there, is why this problem metastasizes.
‘Middle-class people in these neighbourhoods tend to move out, exacerbating the concentration and clustering of disadvantage’
Tend to?
Why on earth would anyone stay in these neighbourhoods unless they had no choice?
It’s a revisionist myth that closing asylums was a joint liberal/conservative project. No doubt there were conservatives who objected to the increasing costs of the usual “helping industry” bureaucracy through the 60s and 70s, but the primary impetus long predating that was the Left’s “reform” movement insisting that the mentally ill (as well as criminals) were often the victims of capitalism and the existing social structure and should be set free. Ken Kesey and Jack Nicholson from the book and novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest were not conservative skinflints.
It’s said that JFK passed that God-awful legislation out of guilt for the terrible treatment (lobotomy) that his family had performed on his sister Rose….
Once a month, on the fourth Monday a group of us Unitarian Universalists are scheduled to prepare and serve meals at a local sheltering center called RCS. Several times we have served more than a hundred people . We UUs have been supporting this outreach service for more than ten years.
If you were to Google RCS in New Bern NC you would see a wide selection of ways that community has developed to support the poor in Eastern North Carolina. RCS is not remotely a large enough umbrella to provide all assistance needed.
This said, our fellowship’s skin in the game is not nearly that of the Crocenzis, however I enjoy being with these people, and they appreciate our effort. How many of you in this dialog can say the same? Or are all of you sitting in your offices and homes far from these retched tent cities having no desire to be more than a critic?
I hope you didn’t sprain anything patting your own back. The rest of us get the pleasure of watching out tax money wasted on things rhat result in more homelessness.
I don’t live to serve losers, especially adults. If it gives you a huge dopamine hit to play Jesus Christ to these hungry and homeless people, so be it. That is your project, not mine. Remember what happened to Elizabeth Smart when her father brought that drifter into his house to “help him out.” These people are dangerous and I don’t want to be around them. I’d rather go visit upper-middle class and middle class elderly in nursing homes if I want to be generous with my time. Much safer.
Exactly.
We’ve all read or seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the idea being that incarceration in an “institution” may not be ideal. It features its tradeoffs. But, not institutionalizing these people may not be ideal, either. More tradeoffs. Society has to pick its poison.
A big question is: Who gets to decide who gets institutionalized? In the Soviet Union, institutionalization was one way of dealing with politically inconvenient people. But, when it comes to certain people on the streets … “we know when we see it.”
Don’t be a Pu***
Who could have possibly predicted that all the compassion in the world would blow up in people’s faces? Every city with a homeless problem has made the problem worse by throwing money at it and pretending the issue is one of insufficient housing. That’s only true in a minuscule number of examples. Mostly it’s addicts, the mentally ill, some criminals, and lot of grifters.
It’s possible to lose one’s rental home and end up homeless without having any of the labels you list.
The point is, that is easily fixable. There is so much help out there if your problem is just homelessness.
This is what “woke” is about. It was never about “inclusion” or “equality.” It is about inversion. The more pathetic, mentally ill, violent, impoverished, stupid and dangerous you are, the higher on the “woke” hierarchy you move. The pinnacle of woke privilege is what we see here: An insane, violent homeless lunatic has more rights than a local shop owner. Meanwhile, the actual productive members of society are expected to “take a knee for justice” and be robbed blind. Hopefully this crazy fad will end before our society burns to the ground.
the more love you owe them—the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love—the more unfastidious your love, the greater the virtue. -John Galt
They love losers and they worship failure.
Maybe cities like that should slide into oblivion. The automobile changed cities, the internet is changing them further. Maybe the time of the city as a focal point of life is, well, maybe it’s over. Like the wooly mammoth, perhaps it’s been superseded.
We need to liquidate antisocial elements because they just ruin life for everyone else.
Just take a walk on the NY subway- seems like a crazy is in every car. The other day a guy was banging his head on a pole, people talk to themselves and talk to others belligerently. Supposedly, 27 people got shoved onto the tracks last year by nuts. Last year, leaving the Philharmonic I got hit so hard on the shoulder by a nut and I didn’t even see it coming- my shoulder ached for days.
They should have plexiglass barriers to prevent people from being pushed or falling onto the tracks. It seems an obvious solution to that problem.
That includes liberals who are liquidating themselves in utero and by transing(sterilizing) their children.
It’s a lousy situation for all involved. I wouldn’t know where to begin to address the situation.
No one does.
moderators sided with Toby and banned the Crocenzis from the group. When Jason Crocenzi protested, he said he was told they didn’t want to infringe on a homeless person’s First Amendment rights.
So they decided to infringe on Mr. Crocenzi’s First Amendment right instead!
Ah, Harrisburg. The small city was wonderful once. I had an apartment facing the River. Every Saturday the Amish had a farmers’ market where I could get bushels of lovely flowers, home made scrapple, fresh fruit and vegetables. The man I was to marry visited me from NYC where he was stationed. We would picnic on the wide green lawns under the bridge. a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou beside me singing in Harrisburg.
Wonder where this writer is from. He implies 2nd and 3rd tier cities in USA just recently started the slide to oblivion, exacerbated by covid. Cities like Harrisburg have been in decline since deindustrialization started in the 1970s. Rust belt from Worcester, MA to St Louis, MO has hundreds of towns whose downbeat ambiance is so similar, it’s hard to tell them apart. Blame post industrial economy. Corrupt pols and naive dogooders try to save these beautiful places. But permisive attitudes described in the article towards troubled people suck the potential out of these places.
“… it’s unclear whether his [Trump’s] administration will invest in the kind of resources needed.”
This is a Federal, rather than State and local responsibility because… why?
I’m becoming more & more convinced that it’s largely down to the feminisation of society, specifically by those who wield real power, that is the problem.
It’s the maternal instinct to protect small, vulnerable things, exacerbated by the fact that many of the women in power have no children of their own, so are (unconsciously) on the look out for proxies. Now I would say this is mostly a good thing, softening the brute masculinity of old systems of governance, but, as always happens when any narrow sort of perspective on how human beings work takes hold, the results are counterproductive & everybody ends up worse off. Maybe time for some common sense after all?
Been thinking along these lines also. Women didn’t have much of a voice in the public square until the 1970s, but it has grown increasingly dominant since then, and we now have a culture where feelings are prioritized over facts, and where the preferred method of disarming opponents is some form of ostracism or cancel-culture –exactly the sort of thing I remember seeing from girls on the middle-school playground, now amplified on the internet. Virtues like bravery, loyalty or patriotism have steadily lost ground to “kindness” and “empathy”, which seem predestined for abuse by crass virtue-signalers, and someone “being offended” is now considered sufficient grounds to censor speech.
Am I advocating a return to the “good old days” of female exclusion from the public square? No, but a sense of balance needs to be restored or else we risk not being able to address the article’s concerns at all.