What People in One of America’s Richest Neighborhoods Say About the Homeless When They Think No One’s Watching

The photo shows a tiny blonde woman sitting on the sidewalk in front of a newsstand, wearing combat boots and striped blue-and-white socks pulled over her ankles. A dog is sleeping beside her, partly obscuring a sign that reads, “Anything helps.”

Normally, petite blondes and slumbering dogs don’t shake people to their very core, but on this Facebook page, the pair portends the breakdown of law and order, maybe even the end of civilization. “I think this war is lost now. Destruction by design,” a member of a Facebook group called Third and 33rd (and Beyond!) commented in response to the photo. “Those who should represent the taxpayers and law abiding have another agenda. That’s obvious. They are actively using the rule of ‘law’ to reduce the power of the police to halt this. This is not incompetence. It’s being engineered. See how fast it’s happened? It will take years now even if a clean up started today.”