In 2018, there were an estimated 76,000 homeless people living in New York. The Daily News described one abandoned rail bed in the South Bronx, located directly across the street from a school, as blanketed with used hypodermic needles: “There are needles scattered on the ground like twigs and needles clumped under trees like piles of leaves. Needles are staked into a mud wall. Needles are floating in the pools of standing water below. Some of the syringes’ tips are still stained with blood.”
