Residents living near Richmond’s injecting room battle syringes, trash and human waste
Blood-filled syringes, filthy mattresses and drug addicts defecating in front of children – residents living next to Richmond’s injecting room say the area has become an open air slum and nobody cares. See the shocking pictures.
Victoria
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Streets surrounding Richmond’s injecting room have become littered with huge amounts of rubbish, needles and human waste that has transformed the area into a “ghetto”.
Disgusted residents say several areas surrounding the controversial site have become dumping grounds for drug-affected people to discard their unwanted waste despite the almost $2m cleaning bill.
Mattresses, trolleys, shoes, bongs, syringes and even human waste have been littered in and around the injecting room site in recent weeks.
In one photograph, human faeces was smeared across one resident’s front gate.
They say schoolchildren are forced to put up with the “appalling” amounts of rubbish on their way to and from Richmond West Primary School.
Those schoolchildren were instructed to leave via the back exit after a man was found dead outside the school earlier this month.
Yarra City Council claims to have spent $1.7m on its “syringe management services” in and around the precinct sine July 2020 to June this year.
One fed-up local said the area now resembled a “ghetto” with the amount of rubbish left in and around streets, footpaths, alleyways and gardens.
“It’s just appalling, it’s disgusting,” Chrissy told the Herald Sun.
“It’s all over the place, no one gives a shit, the place looks like a ghetto.
“There is rubbish all through the garden’s playground, I saw a guy doing a shit in the garden with kids everywhere, no one cares.
“There are signs saying ‘no dumping’ but people just dump boxes of needles everywhere.”
The resident said security cameras installed were having little to no effect.
“Security guards are supposed to walk around and not one of them has reported rubbish,” she added.
“They opened this hole of a facility and they don’t look after it at all.”
Homeowners within walking distance of the site have had roughly $60,000 shaved from the value of their homes and are furious with its operation.
Residents say parks and alleyways along Lennox and Egan streets, as well as Bastow Place, have become some of the worst hit areas that “no one cares about”.
They said piles of rubbish and waste would return to those sites within days of the council removing it.
“The amount of rubbish is next level,” one fellow resident said.
Another local said: “(We are watching) our beloved suburb turn into a drug squalor … it’s disgusting, unacceptable and shameful.”
Yarra City Council said they encouraged locals to report any hard rubbish left on the street.
“Our cleaning teams are on the ground in the Lennox St area daily Monday to Friday to monitor and collect litter from Council managed areas,” a spokesperson said.
Originally published as Residents living near Richmond’s injecting room battle syringes, trash and human waste
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