If The Shoe Fits
Stories about local politicos taking half-day walking tours of soup kitchens and emergency shelters always make me cringe. Claims that the experience is somehow supposed to give them a better appreciation for the challenges facing the homeless echo as either disingenuous or delusional.
In this case, it’s city and county leaders hiking along with Mecklenburg Ministries “In Their Shoes” program, ostensibly designed to give participants a sense of what the homeless and poor face on a daily basis.
Here we have Commissioners Chairperson Jennifer Roberts stepping through a homeless camp, not miles from the very site where the county, under her leadership, wants to spend tens of millions of dollars to build an uptown baseball stadium and tens of millions more to build an uptown urban park. Yet Roberts and her liberal cohorts continue to insist that there’s a paucity of funding for programs to help the homeless.
Here we have Superintendent Peter Gorman, flubbing a bus connection and arriving late to an emergency shelter, lamenting the plight of a struggling CMS worker and the school district’s purported 4,000 homeless children. Meanwhile, Gorman pockets an annual salary of more than $300,000 and has built multi-million-dollar temples of bureaucracy scattered across the county, stuffed with hordes of six-figure administrators. Yet CMS is so stone-broke, Gorman and his bureaucratic regime have been forced to layoff hundreds of frontline workers and teachers and scrap programs designed to help the most disadvantaged of students.
Here we have Mayor Anthony Foxx attempting to effect a visceral connection with families that have lost their homes. This would be the same mayor, of course, who pushed to raid $12 million from neighborhood development and use the money instead to help build a $37 million streetcar that will connect to the city’s half-billion-dollar light-rail line that glides past some of the city’s homeless camps on its way to uptown’s jungle of multi-million-dollar, taxpayer-funded museums.
Maybe the mayor’s $70,000-a-year spokesperson can explain how those spending priorities help the homeless that his boss spent six hours visiting, because I can’t.
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