Bridge to Business Blowback

By Sarah Owens and Michael Livingston

Revised: 25 February 2019

Out-of-towner Brian Hines recently announced his upset at seeing people sleeping on benches downtown and belongings parked in doorways, and his concern that Salem's "homeless problem" is hurting downtown businesses.  Hines suggests the answer is compassion, both for the homeless, and the businesses, a sentiment oft expressed by our Chief of Police, Jerry Moore.      

To explain what that would look like, Hines published an opinion piece by downtown resident Carole Smith that she wrote for the Statesman Journal, but the Statesman declined to publish. 

The would-be op-ed refers to the recent camp clean up under the Marion Street Bridge and asks rhetorically, "Does the City of Salem realize that when they clean out a homeless camp they drive them right onto downtown property?"

It seems Smith would have preferred that the camp not be cleaned up, even though most others seemed to feel the City waited too long.

As far as Smith is concerned, the entire situation is something that "the Mayor and City Council are doing to [downtown] Salem businesses -- every day."

For Smith, compassion for the homeless looks like the City building "a covered tennis court (or two) at Riverfront Park with a heated concrete slab. During the summer it can be a tennis court, in winter, a heated pad for homeless to camp on the warm cement. When it gets dirty, move them and power wash the cement and let them come back." 

Once the tennis court/slab is built, Smith  says, "Then, [the City should] build 'tiny home villages' to house them permanently and provide mental health and addiction treatments."

Smith's compassion for downtown businesses carries a similar theme: the police should remove people who are reported to be behaving in an offensive manner, rather than expect business owners to respond humanely.  She claims that "store owners have been assaulted and injured by violent homeless people" when they've asked the people politely to move from entrance ways.  She doesn't claim to have witnessed this, and provides no names, dates or other substantiating information. 

"Compassion for downtown businesses" thus translates to an enforcement approach to the problems of homelessness and mental illness downtown.  Call it code, if you like, but that's all this is about.

The Downtown Homeless Solutions Task Force (DHSTF) wrestled with this question for six months last year, and ultimately rejected the enforcement approach, in part because downtown business and property owners like Smith wouldn't support it publicly. 

Smith did not, as far as we know, participate in those proceedings.  Nor has she come to CANDO with her concerns, or she would have been made aware that the efforts of community partners from the LEAD program, Northwest Human Services, The ARCHES Project and others to create a program of coordinated outreach, and also heard about the proposed Good Neighbor Partnership between downtown businesses, residents, service providers and people experiencing homelessness, the purpose of which is to provide a resource other than law enforcement when problems arise.

We've said it before.  The law enforcement approach to problems of homelessness and mental illness does not work, and no one knows that better than law enforcement.

Smith and Hines are or were part of the core of people that constitute Salem Community Vision.  They are both very well off and consider themselves "progressives", but their views in this area are quite outdated, authoritarian and regressive.  If they truly cared about downtown, they would work with CANDO and the City to support initiatives offering practical solutions for neighbors living in the streets.  (Smith's neighbors, not Hines's, because he lives out of town).

One such initiative is the City's Homeless Rental Assistance Program (HRAP), which is permanently housing dozens of Salem's most vulnerable downtown residents.  There's a donate button at the link.

2/25/19 Update: Salem Community Vision (SCV) member Susann Kaltwasser wants readers to understand that Carole Smith left SCV "at least a year ago", and that "the opinions expressed by Mr Hines and Ms Smith are solely their own."  The post was revised accordingly.