urbanSTL

STLEnginerd wrote: ↑

Oct 13, 2022

Still a question of jurisdiction.  If they sold the food its one thing but i don't think taking food to a pot luck is subject to regulation and neither should free sandwiches to homeless.

Setting up an operation is a bit of another question which speaks to the context question.  I could imagine some kind of permitting would be necessary to post up on a sidewalk and set up a soup line.  Health inspection seems overkill for free food though and simply a straw man justification to restrict support for homeless people in general.

All that said i don't know what happened in the incident referenced or what law was cited.

I don’t know with taking food to a potluck is a good comp either. I’m going to a Friendsgiving dinner next month and we all know each other, I have no suspicion that any of my friends with poison anyone. Someone randomly handing out sandwiches could do that, like dumb kids spiking it with all kinds of things to be funny and see homeless sh*t themselves all over downtown.

City of St. Charles taking some action: https://www.kmov.com/2022/10/19/city-st ... -homeless/. 

Good to hear they are doing something.

One more fence/barrier at Laclede's Landing (this one around the homeless camp they're evicting) ought to fix the problems.

sorry unhoused/homeless
Now lets clean up that area and fix it up !
Dont just move these people out than let it sit for nothing!
It has the potential to be a nice public area small outdoor performance area and more

Sorry for the homeless people but they should be somewhere else. You can’t allow your downtown to be destroyed because some people like doing drugs in public or because they’re just down on their luck.

We should build shelters and provide resources for them but seeing tent cities, open air drug markets, and homeless people begging for money in your downtown is just not acceptable.


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 as we got closer to the encampment we were told "this is our land this is where we live this is ours" 
ahhh NO ITS NOT!

I've been by there a ton of times and nobody's ever said anything other than "hello."

That was a pretty great spot for them. It was half a block south of the permanently closed Carr Street floodwall, so there wasn't even through traffic, pedestrians/cyclists or cars. It's covered.  It's three blocks from any restaurant or other attraction and surrounded by parking lots and vacant lots and buildings.

The amount of manpower we deployed to kick them out is ridiculous given we can't even complete basic city government tasks.

I'm not even sure you can really call that area "downtown" since it's beyond where anybody walks.  It's one of those downtown by technical definition only spots. It's more like the Near North Riverfront wasteland than downtown.

I walk down there daily and never been threatened. Idk why people make up stories

There's still a fence and a sign saying the park north of St. Patrick's is being refurbished despite zero progress. The landing is, short of like two blocks, full of barriers. Every single block has barriers. Some of them are the swinging kind that are sometimes open.

So now we have two different fenced off areas downtown where we evicted the homeless. We have acres of parks that are nothing but grass in order to be inhospitable to the homeless. We want to destroy everything then get angry when somebody sleeps on the squandered leftover land. It's the land equivalent of being angry that a homeless person is scrounging through the dumpster.

It's absurd for everybody involved.

KMOV - City of St. Louis to bring 50 additional tiny homes to North City village as wait-list within homeless community grows

https://www.kmov.com/2023/04/06/city-st ... ity-grows/

Sweeps of homeless people are in fact deadly, new medical study shows
https://48hills.org/2023/04/sweeps-of-homeless-people-are-in-fact-deadly-new-medical-study-shows/

Stltoday - Neighbor opposition dooms plans for homeless shelter in Carondelet church

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/gov ... 2c0f7.html

^That's too bad. The site makes a lot of sense, especially if the Sisters of St. Joseph were on board with it, which I assume they must have been for it to get that far. There's been a lot of friction down here of late as the neighborhood has changed. Never heard about that. Very sorry I missed it.

It sounds like Abstrakt has turned to the media after getting nowhere with the city.

It's a tough situation. They already fenced off the area under the old casino shelter a year(?) or so back. We don't have the manpower to stop encampments on empty lots. A fencing of the current area would likely just result in the encampment moving a few more feet away.

https://www.kmov.com/video/2023/10/17/l ... ncampment/

https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local ... 84ead99952

Watching the city waste thousands of human hours and millions of dollars for a few dozen people has really brought me to political center on this issue.

Stop accommodating them. It’s like a parent reinforcing bad behavior.

^What about spending those millions on housing them?

However we deal with the homeless issue, it will be a long term process. We need to figure out how to make the issue less disruptive to business and civilians in the meantime. Maybe a large tiny home village in the unincorporated county, where we could move people from downtown to? We could also turn south city hospital or the workhorse prison into a locked door mental health facility where drug addicts can be held to get clean and get psychiatric help. I know it can sound a bit harsh but anything would be better than letting them wonder the street.


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dtgwvc wrote:However we deal with the homeless issue, it will be a long term process. We need to figure out how to make the issue less disruptive to business and civilians in the meantime. Maybe a large tiny home village in the unincorporated county, where we could move people from downtown to? We could also turn south city hospital or the workhorse prison into a locked door mental health facility where drug addicts can be held to get clean and get psychiatric help. I know it can sound a bit harsh but anything would be better than letting them wonder the street.


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Are things like “large tiny home villages” effective? Do we have any long term success stories? I’m only asking because I’m not familiar with results. I’m somewhat skeptical because housing poor/homeless in one concentrated area has historically led to bad results.

They’ve gotten positive news coverage and I think giving people separate living facilities gives them more dignity and privacy than the tradition homeless shelter model. I don’t have any data though.

I think the best approach here is to give a disruptive, clearly mentally ill homeless person a few different options for treatment and shelter, but don’t give them an option to continue to live on the street. That clearly does not work


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PeterXCV wrote:^What about spending those millions on housing them?

How? Is housing just free for people who don’t feel like working or getting help with a drug addiction?

This isn’t an LA housing issue. Housing is affordable and resources are available for those who take their life seriously.

I feel similarly to those who drive recklessly then get in crashes. It’s sad but what responsibility does a local government have to convince someone their life is valuable?

addxb2 wrote:

PeterXCV wrote:^What about spending those millions on housing them?

How? Is housing just free for people who don’t feel like working or getting help with a drug addiction?

This isn’t an LA housing issue. Housing is affordable and resources are available for those who take their life seriously.

I feel similarly to those who drive recklessly then get in crashes. It’s sad but what responsibility does a local government have to convince someone their life is valuable?

What is the alternative if we don’t spend money on transitional housing? More of the same?