Yesterday was an exhausting day. On my way to work, walking as I do the last mile in order to get a little exercise into my day, I received a couple of curious texts. One about "an interesting day ahead" and the other from a co-worker inquiring if I had "made it to work yet." I didn't know what the texts were about but within a couple of blocks I saw the flashing red lights and police barricade.
A man from the street community, living in a tent outside my place of work, had been shot in the back. He is in critical condition as I write today, stable but perhaps paralyzed as the bullet apparently hit or lodged near his spine. The perpetrator was not apprehended.
As an advocate for homeless campers, I am incredibly distressed. No one should have to sleep on the streets unprotected from violent people. Before Christmas two campsites were burned down in the same area, one right in front of my church. Public safety people, fire department etc., told us that camps had been burned in several different areas of town where homeless people congregate to sleep.
Generally the conversation around public camps has to do with unsightliness or the fears that local housed residents or business people have. These concerns need to be addressed but the fundamental issue is that people, human beings with all the needs of any other human being, are sleeping on concrete sidewalks in makeshift huts or in tents without sanitation, running water or garbage service. Theses shanty towns are smaller than the ones we see in the news outside large cities in the developing world, but for the people who live in them, life is anything but pleasant even though they are living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
In the campsite that is currently being cleaned up - now that an incident has taken place- there were men and women, couples and a family with children. Likely they felt safer in a place with other people near a church and a school where people treat them with some dignity. But it is not a good place for campers. Along with the Director of a small school across the street we have been pushing for the last year for a protected zone around the school - a block or two around the school so that parents don't have to guide their children around tents and sleeping people to get them into school. Although we had been assured that our request was a good one and that the street would be kept clear while the city worked for longer term solutions, there was little follow through after the first few weeks.
What we need in our city is more housing that is affordable and accessible to families and individuals just starting out or for those who work in necessary service industries where the pay is not high enough to cover the cost of the market rate apartments that are springing up everywhere that a developer can manage to purchase the land. Long term thinking needs to include the needs of people at all levels of income or the creation of ghettos and shanty towns will continue to be the only option left for the poorest of the poor. When the low cost studio and one bedroom apartments are filled with working people who cannot afford to move into market rate housing or cannot find affordable housing near enough to their jobs, then there are no places left for the poorest people even when there are housing vouchers to assist them.
Other countries, other cities have figured out how to care for their citizens. We need to do the same.
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