A Marine Corps veteran and business owner has gone viral for speaking with the homeless in San Diego and learning their stories.
While dodging “used hypodermic needles, discarded food containers and human waste,” veteran Kate Monroe recently spoke to dozens of the city’s homeless, according to Fox News.
One of them, a homeless woman by the name of Mary, claimed being homeless in the city is “not that hard” thanks to all the welfare provided by the city.
“Usually we’re low income, and when you’re low income, you get free phones, free food, free clothing. There’s so many resources that are just give and give and give. I think we’re spoiled to be honest with you. My sister’s like, ‘Where do I sign up?’” she said.
She added that things might be different if the police were still ticketing and/or jailing the homeless like they used to back in the day.
“If we went to jail, it would motivate my butt to get off the street. We need to bring that back,” she said.
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But not everybody felt the same. One homeless man grew emotional as he described seeing a city councilor walking the streets but paying the homeless no mind.
“He was not talking to any of the homeless. He wasn’t coming to us. He can pop a tent up right next to mine, and he can stay out here for 24 hours with us. He can see what it’s like. This ain’t easy, being out here,” the man said.
Another man concurred.
“Politicians to me, they don’t even live down here, so they don’t really know. So they throw money at the problem, but they kinda gotta get their hands dirty to really find out what the people really need,” the man said.
Speaking of politicians, Monroe appeared positive that they’re most to blame for the homelessness epidemic in San Diego.
“If you don’t like the state of affairs, you gotta look at how we got there — the people who led us there — and just say do I want more of this? And if I don’t want more of that, then I have to vote differently,” she told Fox News.
Moving the homeless around the county doesn’t fix the problem, it hides it, says @KateMonroeCEO of https://t.co/xDF4qKypeY.
Dumping money at the issue is “the culture that we breed by the way that we vote,” she adds.
More info: https://t.co/WEJQu1kusq pic.twitter.com/UbLhj0vK3H
— KUSI News (@KUSINews) June 6, 2023
Monroe is the CEO of VetComm, a veteran disability organization. She’s lived in San Diego 20 years and has thus witnessed the rise of the city’s homelessness epidemic. According to her, the rise began with the building of PetCo Park.
“I actually moved here before PetCo Park was built. And before PetCo Park, the dynamics of downtown were very different. You’d find quite a lot of homelessness, but it was spread out throughout downtown,” she said.
Then everything changed.
“But as they started to gentrify everything … and they redeveloped the area, they just kept moving them from block to block. And now you find them in what they, unfortunately, named the Bottoms. And they shoved them into a two by four block radius and there’s 20,000 of them all camped out, and so that environment has bred a situation where that many people together with access to drugs. It’s like a feeding frenzy,” she continued.
“When we were down there, people were doing drugs in the middle of the day, live in front of the police. Forget that it’s in San Diego. It doesn’t look like it’s in America. There’s so much trash and human waste and garbage and just the stench of it. Also, you can sense when you’re walking down the street that there’s some hostility when you’re walking through. It doesn’t look safe,” Monroe added.
“They’ll come rob you when you sleep” @KateMonroeCEO and I met a homeless man in a wheelchair on the streets of San Diego that described what they endure everyday. He said thefts, sexual assaults and physical assaults are common place. After the last time he was robbed he now pic.twitter.com/xX9K5Qy3c4
— Kevin Dahlgren (@kevinvdahlgren) May 7, 2023
Part of the problem is that nobody seems aware of the crisis, as the city has carefully swept it under the rug.
“San Diego’s not on the news nationally. So we don’t get any exposure of our homeless problem. We’ve done a good job hiding it. And because we’ve done a good job hiding it and making our voter constituency believe that we’re actually working on it, they’ve gotten away with sweeping it under the rug,” she explained.
As a business owner who “solves problems every day,” she personally believes she knows how to resolve the crisis.
“Most people would go down to the Bottoms and would see this chaos and this many people and the state it’s in and would go, ‘omg, where do we even start?’ The magintude, the gravity of it when you’re faced with it is almost insurmountable, and I think it has a paralytic effect on people’s ability to help people,” she said.
“Whereas if we just parsed it down into just bite-sized chunks, and we can take them off little by little, I don’t think it’d take six to eight months before we could completely revolutionize downtown,” she added.
Writers and editors can be contacted at writers@bizpcreview.com with feedback, tips, or corrections.
V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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