NEWSWORKS TONIGHT

The City of Philadelphia is pushing Occupy Philadelphia protesters to move across the street to make way for a $50 million renovation project that would include an ice-skating rink and a café. Occupy Philadelphia officially has voted to stay. As a confrontation brews outside City Hall, among Occupy Philadelphia participants there is anger, frustration and disappointment.

Since Occupy Philadelphia began, it's ranks have been bolstered by an influx of homeless people. Now many who once slept on sidewalk grates live at Occupy Philadelphia, including a man in a Vietnam Veterans hat, who's sitting around a tent near the north side of City Hall,

"John Charles Robinson, the 100 First Airborne, combat airborne. Recon!"

When asked what he'll do if the city tells him to move, Robinson said, "What am I going to do? You really want to know? [expletive] them! I done fought a whole war, you mean to tell me I can't come back and get some decent housing? I have to live in a tent! I'm a homeless vet. Why should it be like that? Why?"

Robinson says the money the city's spending on the construction project should be used to help veterans and people with mental and emotional problems.

Sitting just outside Robinson's tent is Joe McGraw, a homeless man from South Philly who gets around in a wheelchair.

"There's a lot of homeless I know. We will stay," said McGraw. "We have to do it to protect ours because this is a family here and before Occupy was here, the homeless was here. Nutter and everybody else didn't do nothing about it. Occupy helped us—the tents, the food and everything. Occupy did more for the homeless than what Nutter did."

Another homeless member of the movement, Jeremy Rasmussen, disagrees. He wants the group to move.

"I wanted to squat in abandoned buildings," said Rasmussen. "Like everybody staying here, we're going to get brutalized by police and I'm going to leave and watch it on CNN."

A LaSalle University student says he could go either way, but if a majority of the group votes to move, he'll go.

South Philadelphia resident Christine Collins, a union worker in the service sector, was on the losing side of the vote: she wanted to move the encampment.

"There are some who think they're anarchists or nihilists but I think a huge contingent of people—I hate to say it but it's true—who see it like it's just a party, where they're with their friends and they don't really care about a long-term solution to anything," said Collins. "They just don't want to be moved because it's inconvenient to them."

Collins says she was sad when the group voted to stay.

"I'm just here trying to hear from them in person why they want to stay when ... it doesn't seem to accomplish anything that helps the 99 percent," said Collins. "One person I spoke to who wanted to stay said historically every movement that changed things, they just drew their line in the sand and said, 'We won't go because you're giving us lame excuses about why we must go.'"

Collins says the city's construction project is a valid reason to relocate the movement because it will create jobs and improve wheelchair access.

"I don't think this is something worthy of being arrested for," she said. "When you think of moving to the front of the bus or occupying the lunch counter in the Civil Rights Movement there were very clear symbols involved that were making a clear statement."

Collins admits to being afraid of getting arrested and says she still hasn't been convinced it's a good idea for the group to stay. She says this will probably be her last visit to Occupy Philadelphia at Dilworth Plaza.