‘Shoot, ready, aim’: Kansas City’s sweep of homeless camps causes new set of problems
Kansas City dealt with the weekslong homeless encampments at City Hall and the Westport area like a sudden emergency. But was it? And if so, was it a humanitarian one or a public relations one?
“Somebody’s going to have to define what the perceived emergency was at that particular point,” says Councilman Dan Fowler, chair of the City Council’s Special Committee on Housing Policy.
The city’s precipitous action in sweeping those living in the homeless camps into hotel rooms for 90 days in April, however well-intended, has caused a fine mess of its own — including damaged hotel rooms, huge spikes in crime calls, alleged threats and assaults, beleaguered hoteliers and guests, and pressing questions about the quickly-arranged program’s financing and administration.
A Kansas City police officer shared statistics at a Wednesday meeting of concerned parties that show exponential increases in calls for help from hotels in the Northland — home to a remarkable eight of the 12 hotels housing the homeless.
While Fowler endorses decisive action to help the homeless, he adds, “There are a lot of unanswered questions I think we need to get some answers to, and that would certainly be among them: How is this process playing out?”
Actually, in many cases, very well. At least a couple dozen of the 400-some homeless participants have been able to seek and obtain employment from the comfort and safety of a hotel room.
And Marqueia Watson, executive director of the Greater Kansas City Coalition to End Homelessness, said the new nonprofit administering the program, Lotus Care House, is marshaling social services and igniting unprecedented collaboration in the homeless advocacy community.
On the other hand, there are the above-mentioned problems.
Moreover, one hotelier, who asked to identified only by his last name, Mr. Patel, accused the city’s chief contractor for the homeless-to-hotel program, Mark Patel, of the Lotus Hospitality Group, of threatening him in a phone call after the contentious public meeting on the issue Wednesday in the Northland.
“You know what I can do. I will destroy you,” Mr. Patel said he was told by Mark Patel, who is no relation. He also said Mark Patel said he wanted him “beaten.”
Mark Patel does not deny “defending myself” from baseless allegations, but denies making any threats. “How could I destroy somebody?” he said. “That is not even accurate.”
Others, including Mr. Patel, allege that Mark Patel orchestrated things so that hoteliers in his sphere of influence won bids to house the homeless at the city’s expense — so far over $1.7 million. Mark Patel denied that, too, saying as a longtime hotelier here, “I have relationships with every hotel owner that’s participating. But that doesn’t mean they’re influenced by me.” He said he sent invitations to select hoteliers to attract low rates — which he said has saved the city nearly a million dollars.
The bottom line, though, is the hastily thrown-together program has stoked animosity, suspicion — and some dread: A number of parties involved wouldn’t talk on the record for fear of reprisals.
Indeed, a homeless advocate involved in the situation, who requested anonymity, confirmed reports of the above problems of property damage, bad behavior and physical threats by some homeless people against staff relocating them to hotel rooms: “I felt like I’d been doing great work in the homeless community. And then after doing what we did with this hotel project, I felt like it undid everything that I had ever done.”
What was Mayor Quinton Lucas’ involvement?
Councilwoman Teresa Loar notes the council has also been largely left out of the process, and hasn’t even approved any contracts between the city and Lotus Care House. Fowler will chair a meeting on the matter June 9.
“We’ve got all of this (federal) money that’s coming, and it’s coming in huge amounts,” Loar says. “And I don’t know that we know where it’s going. I’m just nervous about squandering huge amounts of money like drunken sailors. In all my years at City Hall, I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. There is no accountability for this stuff.”
It didn’t have to be this way. While even temporary housing can help get people on their feet, the city’s rushed sweep of the homeless camps into hotel rooms has created its own set of problems. It also remains that Lotus Care House, the nonprofit recently started by hotelier Mark Patel, was chosen to lead the effort with no bidding process after nonprofit Hope Faith dropped out.
Even Watson, who’s excited about the possibilities now, concedes that at the outset of the effort, “We kind of saw a program go live that didn’t have a whole lot of forethought and planning. It kind of was a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants kind of a situation.”
“It was kind of a ‘shoot, ready, aim’ approach,” says Fowler. “That is generally not conducive to long-term, sustainable results. There was an immediate reaction, I think, without thinking through the whole problem.”
Why was this urgency even necessary? What was the emergency, when the year-old COVID-19 pandemic was clearly ebbing and the weather warming? Best that Mark Patel can guess is that the urgency came from Mayor Quinton Lucas’ efforts with the ad hoc Kansas City Homeless Union to end the encampments at City Hall and Westport.
The mayor’s spokeswoman merely responded to questions about all this that any contracts surrounding the hotel program were between the city manager and outside agencies — as if the mayor had nothing to do with any of it.
“I have no idea what the emergency was,” Loar says.
“I’ve kind of got that same question,” says Fowler. “I suppose one could say the emergency was people camping out on the south lawn of City Hall or at Westport. Homeless have been around for a long time, and unfortunately probably will be for a long time. People in distress are always an emergency, to some degree or another. If we can help them, we need to help them.
“I don’t regret doing something at all. But our city processes are also there for a reason, and that’s to make sure that questions get answered up front. And that’s kind of fallen apart at this point.”
Absolutely. In trying to solve one problem too hurriedly, the city appears to have created others. Now that the problem has been folded up, it’s time to unravel its very problematic solution.
