Our city is just silly. We deal with issues related to homelessness by attacking homeless people in the press and promoting stereotypes and misleading information, removing pieces of art (the “stones” at the top of State St.), threatening to ticket them, banning them from parks, libraries, hotels, whole business areas and services. And now, removing bus shelters. How long are we going to ignore the root causes and real solutions and keep coming up with the absurd?
WE ALL KNOW THE SOLUTIONS!!!!!!
1. Housing First! Housing. Housing. Housing. Have agencies housing people stop evicting them for silly reasons (owes $74) and get people into housing FIRST, and then deal with issues instead of keeping them homeless until they are “housing ready”. We have to address the fact that we failed to invest in affordable housing for the last 30 or 40 years. Make the conversion of existing programs to Housing First principles and the Zero 2016 campaign to end veteran and chronic homelessness a priority, including hiring a housing locator.
2. Downtown Comprehensive Day Center run with overarching values of trauma informed care and harm reduction. Give people a place to be without harassment, make it a pleasant and happy place to be. Allow people to take a shower, wash their laundry, store their things and grab a meal without running all over town. Offer transportation services to get to places people need to go (doctors, mental wellness appointments, aoda treatment centers, housing appointments, social security office, DMV, etc etc etc) And provide services. Have the Homeless Hotline/Coordinated Intake operate out of the center instead of out of an office at Hwy 51/151 that doesn’t accept walk-ins.
3. Highly trained and skilled outreach workers who are appropriately supported. We need a team of highly trained people with medical, mental health, alcohol and drug abuse, and social worker training out there on he streets helping to get people off the street if that is what people want. And that I believe 95% of the people on the street (or more) want that.
I suggest we take two police officer positions away from the police department and with that $150,000 hire 3 or 4 social workers. Criminalizing homelessness, giving people more tickets and jailing them is not going to help them get into housing. In fact, it does the opposite, it creates barriers. If someone is truly committing crimes, arrest them. But don’t use the threat of arrest and actual arrests as harassment to get them to leave certain areas of town. Instead of watching homeless people on video cameras, send people out there to talk to “them”. Recruit landlords to rent to people who are struggling to get back on their feet. Support people once they get into housing. Include them in creating a plan to help get them off the street or help with whatever else they need.
4. And for the love of all that is good in this world, could we think about EQUITY when we approach these issues. We say the words, but have yet to put ANYTHING in action when it comes to our community decisions.
5. We need to hold our social services and business community accountable. We have homeless outreach workers and a mental health and aoda system. Where are they? What are they doing? What is their plan to help with these issues? Where are they in this conversation? And why is the business community leading on this issue and not including members of the homeless services consortium in these conversations about issues when they come up. The business community needs to also be held accountable to include ALL STAKEHOLDERS in these solutions, including those most affected, the people on the street as well as advocates. We could greatly inform the process and likely help arrive at solutions that are more acceptable, if they would just talk to us.
This isn’t that hard. But removing a bus stop will not, WILL NOT solve a damn thing. Our city disappoints once again. No surprises . . . we’ve been talking about this for 4 years . . . or more . . . election cycles come and go, promises made, and always the excuses . . . we’re a bright, intelligent community, we can solve this if we work together.
NOTE: I do believe several members of the Transit and Parking Commission actually removed the bus stop and shelter for transit reasons, in fact I know 3 of them did, not sure about the rest. Not sure that the business community is going to like that they removed the stop and will likely remove 3 parking spots. But hey, they don’t think of those unintended consequences.
