Welcome to the Wino Arms
by Jeff Davis
Black welfare mothers and illegal aliens with food stamps have unfortunately become as American as apple pie. Added to this is a Babylon of Third World invaders from nations like Somalia, Kenya, Cambodia, Jamaica and Guyana, most of whom seem to wind up getting benefits, perks and privileges. Now we have a new privileged minority we have to pamper and cater to —drunks.
Yahoo News reports from Seattle that “Social-service agencies are conducting an experiment: Offering dozens of homeless drinkers subsidized apartments where they can keep boozing at a fraction of the cost. ‘The average citizen who hears about this project probably is appalled,’ said Bill Hobson, executive director of the city’s Downtown Emergency Services Center, which constructed the apartments. Their concern runs something along these lines: ‘Why do I want to spend my tax money on people who are not doing anything to help themselves?’ The answer to that is: You’re already spending it.”
So the solution is simply to give up any attempt at all to compel these people to exercise personal responsibility, accept the fact that they will henceforth be a permanent, parasitic charge on society and give them their own pads in which to lay around drunk all the time.
Yahoo goes on: “The four-story $11.2 million building is one of few such facilities in the nation. Minneapolis has a similar program. The Seattle apartments were built with taxpayer and privately donated dollars.”(You mean someone is privately donating dollars to build crash pads for drunks?) “The center expects to spend about $11,000 per resident to operate the building each year, less than 10 percent of the money chronic drunks would cost if left on the streets. Preliminary figures suggest the building will pay for itself in less than five years. Before moving into an apartment, the 40-year-old Steik [a sample drunk in the article] was a frequent visitor to the Seattle Sobering Center, a nonprofit agency where police bring homeless alcoholics to dry out. He spent 700 nights there in 2 1/2 years.’I had a place to live every night as long as I was intoxicated enough,’ Steik said.”
Well, that’s one way to solve the homeless problem. “Hey, man, let me in, I wanna crash!’ Response: “No, you’re not drunk enough. Knock back one more bottle of T-bird and you’re in.”
Back to Yahoo: “At the apartment building, residents pay less than $200 a month in rent and must buy their own alcohol. Seventy-five people live there, with more waiting to get in. ‘We need more places like this,’ said Steik, who lives on disability payments. ‘I can afford living here, but I can’t afford an actual apartment someplace else.’” Residents are selected by social-service providers who agree on a list of the worst alcoholics. Once in, they can stay for the rest of their lives as long as they follow a few rules focusing mostly on avoiding violence.”
So, basically, this is how Seattle solves its homeless drunk problem. Give them their own apartment complex with more or less free room and board so long as they just quietly lie there on the floor, their livers and their brains rotting away, and they don’t make waves or rock the boat and remind the rich people of their existence. Seattle claims it’s working. The same article notes “The Metropolitan Improvement District reports alcohol activity on the downtown streets has been cut in half. Human-service agencies report their contact with downtown drunks has been reduced by 56 percent.” Well, true, that can happen if you just sweep the mess to one side with a broom instead of solving it, transferring the problem to somewhere else. But the trouble is that when you move a problem elsewhere, it’s still a problem. Yahoo goes on: “At least one neighbor, a business called Northwest Trophy, is unhappy about the project, Gracy said. The owners sued unsuccessfully to block its construction and have complained nonstop about noise, litter and trespassing. In April, they announced they were giving up and selling their building.”
Yahoo does make one interesting comment, though. “Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, D.C., was not surprised at the success of the Seattle project. But she says the issue is more about housing than alcoholism. In the 1970s, chronic alcoholics could find cheap places to live, but affordable housing has all but disappeared in cities like Seattle. ‘Now you need probably $3,000 and a clean credit history and a job just to get in the door,’ Roman said.”
This is true enough. While yuppies are going mad selling one another ridiculously overpriced houses, the masses of illegal Third World immigrants in the cities have pushed rental housing costs through the roof and made it almost impossible for lower paid White workers to find a place to live anywhere less than fifty miles from where they work.
Maybe if White working people get drunk enough, they can move into their local Wino Arms apartment.