Homelessness and Hidden Spaces in Montgomery County, MD

Glenn Feldman, welcome back to I Hate Politics.

Thank you for having me, Sunil.

For several months now, you have been pursuing a project on homelessness in Montgomery County.

How did you start on it?

I have a second website called Montgomery Leak.

It's a satire and humor website.

I do physical pranks, sometimes in communities.

And I was scouting an area in Wheaton that I had a prank in mind for.

And it was right across the street from Wheaton Plaza.

And I noticed in an area where there used to be a building, the Ambassador apartment building, which was leveled to make room for a new development, that there was an underground parking garage that was still in place.

They had taken away everything above it, but left the garage.

And from the sidewalk, I could see through cracks in the fence and the screening there that there was quite a few people living in the shelter there.

underneath the parking garage.

When was that and how many people were there?

December 25.

And I could guess that there were at least four or five, it was hard to really know.

When I went in there, I was absolutely floored.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

I've been in homeless areas before but the level of uh filth and degradation and and needles and just all kinds of crazy stuff going on was i was shocked i've never seen anything like that in montgomery county i never would have imagined something like that even could exist in montgomery county so i took a video and i um narrated it and then i put it online And the reaction was phenomenal.

And people were just shocked.

They were as horrified as I was.

There were tens and tens of thousands of views.

The following business day, Tuesday, the county was out there with the police, the Department of Housing and Community Affairs, the owner of the property.

They shut it down.

They boarded it up.