Saint Paul resident, sick of being ignored after repeated complaints about a homeless encampment outside his house, gets…
…well, a little heated:
A St. Paul man declared “all-out war” against a policy adviser in the mayor’s office when the city failed to remove a homeless encampment near his home, authorities say.
Jeffrey Karl Weissbach, 62, called City Hall on July 10 about an encampment that had taken shape in front of a bridge near his home in the 300 block of Colborne Street, according to a Ramsey County criminal complaint charging him with making threats of violence, a felony.
It doesn’t end well for him (so far).
But I have to admit, as someone who’s lived in Saint Paul for a long time, that I get it. The City of Saint Paul, being a one-party company town (the company is “government”) where “Urban Progressive Privilege” gives the public class a sense of entitlement that puts the whole “serving the tax-paying public” thing pretty much at the bottom of list of public priorities.
Move the homeless camp to Crocus Hill.
Dude, you live by the railroad tracks on West 7th Street. That’s the West End and everybody knows it’s the White Trash part of town. Why would the city spend a nickel on the likes of you?
Take the advice of Democrat Governor Dayton: if you don’t like it, move.
I luv reading when people comment on the neighborhoods or areas of St Paul and then I go out to a map to see and think “Huh?”.
Narrator: let it go, jdm, it’s St Paul.
JDM: You have to understand that St. Paul was original established at Pig’s Eye lagoon (because that’s where boats could get off the river, no steep bluff), then grew to Lowertown (convenient warehouses to store cargo unloaded from steamboats parked at the levee at Pig’s Eye) and marched up the hill, biggest money always seeking the highest ground. Also being a river town, the streets were laid out perpendicular to the river, not true North-South. When people in St. Paul say “North” we mean “perpendicular to and heading away from from the river on the American side (not the Indian side, which was owned by Chief Kaposia’s tribe).”
From the point of view of a person standing in downtown, where the river flows Southwest to Northeast but we call it West to East, riding your horse down Old Fort Road (West 7th Street) takes you West. Naturally, that end of town is the West End. And it’s lower ground than Cathedral Hill, or Crocus Hill, or Highland Park, so it was populated by people with less money who built lower quality houses that remain today. There’s a railroad line running parallel to the river, then diverting toward Minneapolis.
It’s all perfectly obvious when you’re standing on the ground. It’s only the map that causes confusion. Throw away the map. The map is not the terrain.
But Joe…
There are (some) delightful grid pattern sections of Saint Paul.
These were created by the trolley, (ahem, light rail) companies, who followed the old real estate adage of “buy low, sell high”.
Before the advent of the affordable automobile, developers would buy large tracts of farmland, build a light rail line to it, sell the lots – and abandon the rail bed to the “government”.
In that, light rail was once and will always continue to be solely about development rather than moving people around.
Back then people loved it, because the “clean” trolley replaced streets full of horse poop and rather than a coal smoke belching steam locomotive, the trolley ran on “clean” electricity…….whose generators belched coal smoke in the same neighborhood that these days gets to host the homeless.
Folks that don’t like street shitting tent dwellers, trash heaps, typhus, rats, needle gardens & etc. are well advised to make arrangements to decamp for a more favorable venue, because all of the above is sweeping Democrat cities like wildfire.
Threatening reprobates is just not the way to approach the problem.