Entrepreneur and Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy gave voters an inside look at Philadelphia’s “third-world” Kensington neighborhood, asking the homeless there what solutions they need.
“You don’t have to go further than Kensington to visit the third world,” Ramaswamy tweeted with a video highlighting the area’s squalor. “The ground littered with needles. People shooting up on the streets mid-morning.”
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The presidential candidate also shared personal interactions with those living in Kensington.
You don’t have to go further than Kensington to visit the third world. The ground littered with needles. People shooting up on the streets mid-morning. We will fix our country. pic.twitter.com/l3WJYDiNbR
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 20, 2023
“What do you want to see by way of solutions?” he asked.
“For one, I want to see, like, help with better shelters … Open up more shelters, more rehab, more help,” one man said. “We not just gonna do it on our own. If we had the shelter, then maybe somebody might take the mindset of going somewhere else.”
Ramaswamy pointed out a shelter that members of the community described as no more than a tent.
“They call them ‘poverty pimps,'” Ramaswamy said. “That’s what the volunteer was just telling me. They get the money, but they don’t, actually, they don’t do much with it.”
“Even the lady at the shelter will fight you,” said one woman.
The workers pick who can and who cannot come into the shelter, the woman said.
It sounds like “classic government corruption,” Ramaswamy suggested.
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Heroin and crystal methamphetamine also plague the area, community members said.
“Biden hasn’t even walked through here,” a man told Ramaswamy. “So, you’re taking your own incentive to go through each neighborhood, poverty, if it’s bad or not, and see what you can do to better it, and I respect you for it.”
