Daily Mail
Philadelphia’s Skid Row: Shocking video captures city’s homeless crisis with dozens camped out along ‘largest open-air drug market on the East Coast’
The video looks like a scene from an apocalyptic movie – dozens of disheveled people shivering in the middle of a winter night as they camp out around a trash bin on fire among a street strewn with litter. But the footage isn’t a Hollywood production but a candid snapshot of Kensington Avenue in northeast Philadelphia. The neighborhood has previously been dubbed the ‘East Coast’s largest open-air drug market’ by DEA officials.
‘It is well known here [in Philadelphia] that the Kensington neighborhood has been heavily impacted by the opiate crisis, and that numerous encampments have arisen among this population in that area,’ Dr. Dennis Culhane told DailyMail.com. Culhane, a professor and researcher of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania, co-authored a 2019 report on the city’s policies as they relate to the encampments that sprung up on Kensington Avenue.