New Jersey's homeless surge exposes political rot

Veterans burrow into soiled sleeping bags near Newark Penn Station like corpses, beside working mothers clutching eviction notices, might realize that Cory Booker’s Washington ladder-climbing means nothing here.

This is the reality behind the numbers: 13,748 human beings counted homeless on a single January night, the highest tide of desperation since 2014, surging 8% in just one year. A damning monument to bipartisan betrayal, festering under the neon glow of the American Dream’s rotting heart.

Black New Jerseyans drown in this engineered catastrophe. Though merely 12% of the state, they comprise a grotesque 47.4% of the homeless—a statistical scream of systemic racism turbocharged by political indifference.

In Essex County, shelters hemorrhage at 90% capacity while the Trump administration butchers safety nets: 350,000 residents stripped of Medicaid, 424,000 families losing food stamps, and the evisceration of the $34.7 million HOME Investment Program that once built affordable roofs.

"We're not headed toward authoritarian fascist government, we are already there," said Lisa McCormick, a progressive insurgent who is possibly Booker’s fiercest in-state critic, slamming the charade with surgical precision. "We do not have homelessness because poor people are lazy. We have homelessness because the world is unfair, and our governments have failed to remedy greed."

Her words hang like a guillotine over Booker’s silence as corporate landlords—emboldened by federal deregulation—snatch 1 in 4 single-family homes from working-class neighborhoods.

Rents now demand $83,173 a year for basic shelter while wages flatline at $33,290.

The math is a death warrant signed in Trenton and rubber-stamped in D.C.

Veterans, twice betrayed, sleep on cots in Camden’s overflowing shelters—543 veterans were experiencing homelessness, representing close to a five percent increase since 2024—sacrificed to Trump’s gutting of VA hospitals and Booker’s performative patriotism.

All while the White House unleashes police to jail the destitute under July’s executive order criminalizing homelessness. Governor Phil Murphy compounds the rot, zeroing out South Jersey housing programs while posing as a progressive.

Solutions gather dust: Bernie Sanders’ $2.5 trillion Homes Guarantee, RFK Jr.’s 3% mortgage revolution, or taxing billionaires to fund housing-first programs that actually work.

“New Jersey boasts some of the brightest people in the nation, and we need to stop wringing our hands and mobilize,” said Connie Mercer, the CEO of the nonprofit New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness. “We need to harness the power of grassroots action to find new ways to keep New Jersey a dignified and humane place to live for all our citizens.”

The January 2025 Point-in-Time Count isn’t data—it’s a crime scene.

And the fingerprints of Booker, Murphy, and Trump stain every sleeping bag on every street from Paterson to Cape May.

The tents multiply. The moral bankruptcy deepens.

And the only question echoing through Newark’s frozen underpasses next winter will be: When does accountability arrive?