These people are not innocent victims of misfortune: according to the city's Department of Homeless Services, 70% of homeless people are drug users and 50% have criminal records. New York provides more municipal services to the homeless than any other city, but all this does is attract far more than our share of this burden.
Compassion is a two-way street: if people are fed at public expense, and bums are, they owe it to the rest of us to refrain from menacing our streets. Traditional vagrancy laws should be enforced. There have been several incidents of crime against local residents by the homeless over the last few years.
It only takes a small number of people to give an otherwise pleasant neighborhood the atmosphere of Calcutta, and naturally this is not what potential students or faculty at Columbia should be seeing when they visit.
We urge the Columbia administration to do four things:
1. Talk honestly with students about how they should not encourage the homeless by giving them money.
2. Be more vigilant in throwing homeless people off of Columbia property - they love to build encampments over hot-air vents on the edge of campus.
3. Ask the NYPD to be more strict about driving the homeless out of the neighborhood, as they do in midtown.
4. Pressure local institutions that attract bums by feeding them, like the Broadway Presbyterian Church, to conduct such activities outside the neighborhood.
