Some residents of Fairmount, an upper-middle-income neighborhood of Philadelphia, are irate that a nearby homeless shelter is being turned into an addiction “triage” center without input from the surrounding community. News of the shelter’s expansion came just a week before the high-profile closing of an encampment of people experiencing homelessness and addiction in Kensington, a North Philadelphia neighborhood that has long been the center of the region’s opioid crisis.
Neighbors quickly started a petition to halt the triage center project, and they garnered over 1,100 signatures. At a contentious community meeting, they expressed fears of their neighborhood becoming “Kensington 2.0.”
