Out of Sight

A week or so ago, I took my lunch to the park in Olde Town and discovered that the picnic tables were gone. Only empty concrete pads remained. I thought I knew why, but I posed the question to my neighbors on the Next Door website, and they confirmed it.

Homeless people had congregated there, so the city solved that “problem” by removing the picnic tables.

Brilliant, right? Homeless people had to find someplace else to relax and it cost the city very little. Except for this: Why can’t people who live on the street or in their cars use a picnic table in a public park? Yes, one table was right next to the playground, and I’m sure the moms and dads who take their kids there to play are happy it’s gone even though homeless people are much less likely to commit crimes than to be the victims of crime.

Of course, the poor people didn’t disappear; they simply moved on. One Next Door neighbor said, “now they are all in the square, so it just moved them from one location in Olde Town to another.” Another commented, “Yes the homeless have changed old town.”

It’s kind of funny if you think about it. The city moved the people out of a park tucked in out-of-the-way on the edge of town and into the much more central and visible location of the town square. Unintended consequences.

Apparently, people around here think the homeless problem isn’t that our society pushes people to the margins and beyond, but that we have to look at the results. They put dividers on public benches so people can’t sleep on them and pass laws prohibiting sleeping in parks and panhandling. Some smaller cities in the area have addressed this visibility problem by giving people bus tickets to Denver.

Look, they make me as uncomfortable as anybody, yet it seems obvious to me that taking away their rights only exacerbates the problem. Hiring them for jobs, as Denver has started to do, following the lead of Albuquerque, can help. Arranging for housing and social services can turn things around.

We’d rather just get them out of Olde Town and off our minds.

Problem solved.