WyCo homeless task force won’t keep anyone warm tonight: Stop criminalizing poverty
Never, during his controversial tenure as Wyandotte County administrator, was Doug Bach accused of being any kind of an ally to people living on the street. Yet on his way out of the job a month ago, Bach “gave us the keys” to the Reardon Center, one advocate said. And thus helped circumvent new Mayor Tyrone Garner’s unfortunate opposition to opening a temporary warming center there.
That last-minute largesse, which was really just following through on an agreement that had already been in place for months, seemed to have more to do with the relationship between Bach and Garner than between Bach and those with no place to stay. At the emergency meeting that followed, commissioners voted unanimously to keep that agreement in place, and keep the warming shelter open through April.
Still, with only 35 spots available at the Reardon Center, the unhoused in Kansas City, Kansas, were in great jeopardy even before this week’s snowstorm. “The cold weather shelter is at capacity, turning people away,” Dustin Hare, a co-founder of WyCo Mutual Aid said. Yet requests to expand capacity have so far gone nowhere.
The situation is absurd, actually: There is no real, permanent shelter in KCK. Over 700 people are on the waiting list for public housing, and hundreds are unhoused.
There’s really nowhere outdoors that it’s legal for those without homes to be for any length of time. So wherever they do go, they’re moved along and harassed by police, who also move through low-income neighborhoods knocking on doors and even stopping people just walking down the street while doing so-called “warrant checks,” according to two people who’ve had this experience.
Why officers are out writing tickets that make it exponentially harder for the poorest people in the community to ever get out of the hole they’re in is something that KCKPD Chief Karl Oakman might want to look into. Unless that’s the goal, for the love of God stop it.
Many people defecate behind the bus station at 7th and Minnesota because they don’t even have access to a public restroom. Or water. When advocates started pushing for these basic facilities a couple of years ago, the response was to remove the benches and trash cans across from the station, taking away amenities rather than adding any. Robbing people of their dignity in this way is cruel, and so unnecessary.
The day we talked to Hare, he’d just gotten the news that someone he knew would have to have his foot amputated as a result of frostbite from sleeping outside. “Lucky for him, he got COVID, because then we could use FEMA money to keep him housed.” Do we even have to say that you should not have to contract a potentially deadly virus to get some help?
Similarly, Nick Proctor, a disabled 35-year-old Iraq War veteran with PTSD, told us he wouldn’t be able to stay in the Salvation Army halfway house where he is now except that he has an addiction for which he’s in treatment. He’s working, and trying to save some money to get a place, but “I have had to sleep outside quite a few times. I’d be sleeping in a park down the street” in downtown KCK, and police “would be like, ‘You can’t sleep here.’ I’m like, ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go.’”
Of course, he had to be on his way anyway. And had to endure what he, the grandson of a police officer, sees as the attitude of all too many cops who “like to abuse their power” and “think they’re better than people who are struggling.”
Now Garner, who backed out of commitments to meet with advocates after the whole Reardon Center debacle, has announced a task force on “Neighbors in Need/Unhoused Residents” that is supposed to “look at the need for warming centers, shelter and food insecurity.”
A task force isn’t going to keep anybody warm tonight, and the best first step would be to stop criminalizing poverty.
Until then, Mr. Mayor, maybe a few people can take turns warming up in your $85,000 new Denali.