By Kylie Cameron/The Wichita Eagle
Wichita City Council members sparred over the enforcement of the city’s homeless encampment ordinance Tuesday.
The conversation came after Wichita Mayor Lily Wu questioned whether the ordinance could be more strictly enforced downtown.
She said over the weekend she was walking through the Douglas underpass downtown and saw a woman with a child afraid to walk by someone who was sleeping on the sidewalk.
She also recalled recently seeing someone she assumed was homeless defecating along Central Avenue near downtown.
“That is not indicative of this community, that is not a healthy community,” Wu said. “A healthy community is compassionate and would allow this individual to get inside, to utilize a bathroom, or to have a phone number where I could connect him to the actual resource.”
The ordinance allows for rapid removal of homeless encampments by eliminating the need to post notices to vacate. However, a homeless person can not be charged under the ordinance unless a shelter bed is available.
Numerous council members pushed back against stronger enforcement of the ordinance in the city’s core area, citing the limited number of beds at Second Light, formerly known as the Multi Agency Center.
The homeless shelter has reduced the number of beds available as it undergoes construction to expand the services it offers for people staying at the facility. The shelter currently has capacity for 125 men and 69 women, according to Second Light.
“We are making incredible strides in our community, and unfortunately, it’s not fast enough,” council member Maggie Ballard said. “But we are really laying the groundwork for projects that have been talked about for decades and for areas that have been cut for decades, and we are literally trying to pick up the pieces for our community.”
Since April, the Wichita Police Department said it’s seen 184 cases of educating the homeless about the ordinance or sent a request to the Parks Department to clean up a homeless encampment.
The department says it has not issued a citation using the new ordinance.
“Not quite sure what good it would do to issue a homeless person a citation that they don’t have the money to pay,” Police Chief Joe Sullivan said. “Enforcement is not the answer to this problem, and we’ve seen around this country time and time again, too often tragedies that have occurred because of confrontations between police and unhoused citizens…
“So kind of disappointed in some of the things that I’ve heard today. I’m kind of confused. I look forward to talking to all of you more to find more of your questions.”
Some council members voiced frustration with not seeing immediate results after the new homeless shelter began operations last year.
“When I go to Chicago, and I see less people living on the streets than we are, I don’t know if we’re addressing this well,” council member Dalton Glasscock said.
“I know we’re continuing to make investments. … I’m confident this council is committed to doing that, but we have to see more change, because individuals have not seen change in the past year despite the investments that we made in this community.”
City staff and some council members agreed that underlying issues, including mental health, had to be addressed to get people into stable housing, but that won’t happen overnight.
Among the services being expanded at Second Light are mental health and substance use treatment. Those services are set to begin next year.
Our focus should be on how we continue to build out that foundation to make this community better empowered and to see less instances of people losing homes, better paying jobs, so they can stay in some form of housing,” council member Brandon Johnson said, “and then resources to pull people from homelessness into being stable again, so that they can have a decent life.”
This article was republished here with the permission of: The Wichita Eagle