Paul: …if we get back to the war on drugs, what is the war on drugs? What is it?
Moses: A war on poor people. To me, that’s what it is. It’s a war on poor people. Because think about it, when a person that’s affluent is using drugs, Charlie Sheen for instance, did they put Charlie Sheen in jail? So our poor people that are literally using drugs, their drugs that they bought with their money in their homes or wherever, why are they getting pushed into prison? They’re demonized.
I remember thinking back in the Clinton years, I’m not that old, but I’m 38, but back in the Clinton years I was a teenager, and I remember Hillary Clinton talking about superpredators and how they needed to make them heal. That’s when the war on drugs got really extreme, and a lot of people started going to jail for petty reasons. They . . . you had three strikes, it’s a war, but mainly a war on people of color that are poor. I’d like to fight against that too.
Media Misconception of the “Badlands”
Crew 2: I would add to that too, there’s a zoning narrative that people surround about it, “Oh, it’s just the Badlands, the bad people, bad land, bad everything.” And how does that count …
Moses: In my reality, the Badlands, first off, people say Badlands, but they don’t really know what Badlands means. Badlands is the name of the area, because the land was bad and the houses were sinking.
The Badlands, if you go to the Boulevard, that’s actually where the Badlands is. There’s a whole set of billboards, but there’s no houses, because all the houses started sinking into the ground because of water, and they called it the Badlands and it just caught.
The media did it, so number one, the prices in the neighborhood for the houses dropped. The resources for all the schools dropped. The people stopped putting money into North Philadelphia, and once they started taking those resources, more people used drugs. You started having more people kill each other.
Screenshot taken by @Rittsqu and featured by an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It shows the area Google Maps labeled as “Philadelphia Badlands” in 2019.
Encampments
Paul: You can get lots of people, but they’re just like from Christian Street. People are like, “They’re not from the neighborhood.” It’s like, “They’re just from two miles away.”
Moses: The thing too, because it’s so close to the L, people come and get drugs and they jump right back on the L and they go home. So the numbers that we’re seeing aren’t the real numbers. We’re seeing a small percentage of the people that are actually addicted. I’ve seen everything.
Paul: … I saw an interaction out on the street here with somebody who was talking about how he went and did some video projects up there when they were moving out the encampment. Somebody came by, she was like a restaurant owner from Frankford Avenue, and she was just like, “Why would you do that? Those people are just trouble.” She honestly had no idea why anybody would support that idea. I’m just wondering what your thoughts and reaction is about all of that.
Moses: About people …
Paul: Like the encampment, the moving of the encampment, all of that.
Beside the Kensington Avenue underpass.
(Jeffrey Stockbridge for The New York Times)
Moses: Me personally, I believe if the city’s going to move people out of the encampments, they have to have somewhere to take them. If you don’t have a shelter to put them in, if you don’t a warm bed for them, leave them alone. They’re not bothering anybody, they’re doing their little thing, they’re in a neighborhood. They’re not bothering anybody in the neighborhood. I know some people in the neighborhoods were complaining about people using the bathroom out on the streets and stuff like that, but if that’s the case, the city can put out porta potties and clean them up. There’s money for that. They can put out porta potties, they can put out things like hand sanitizer, things like that.
Moses: The reason they’re moving these encampments is because they want to make money. They’re trying to gentrify that part of the city. That’s the only reason Quinones is trying to move them. It’s sad, because they need help. But they don’t really have a solution, they just keep making problems. I’m talking about City Council, not the people. City Council doesn’t want to come up with a solution. Just, “Get them out of there. They’re going to move somewhere else. Get them out of there, and they’re going to move somewhere else.”