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What a sad commentary that we need “Safety Ambassadors” for downtown. I would like to see that job description.
“pay a fee to help fund cleanliness, beautification, public safety and homeless-outreach efforts within the district.” Funny, every time I suggest there is a homeless problem in this city, the libs come trashing the idea. But here it is and the victims have to pay for this problem the city created.
Homelessness is a problem. It is a problem everywhere. A nuanced problem. It has worsened for numerous reasons over the past decade (housing affordability, cuts to mental health, cuts to health care, rise in addiction, inflation, etc, etc). This is a nuanced issue. Homelessness is more visible and “worse” in large cities for variety of factors but most notably programs to serve unhoused people/shelters/transit. As a physician who works with folks primarily with substance use disorders and mental health struggles, I can vouge that many individuals who are unhoused in city’s core are not local to Indianapolis. Many are from politically right leaning areas who do not offer any resources and as a result many wind up in Indianapolis. Right wing approach to homelessness is to sequester or to criminalize it. This sadly will only address the tip of the iceberg and are not serious ways of addressing systemic issues that all areas of Indiana are dealing with but not all work to address. The city of indianapolis as well as city of Bloomington subsidize the rest of the state of indiana in this arena. The other areas will happily “dump” their issues onto these cities and will then turn to right wing talking points about how dangerous these cities are and how homelessness is rampit. The city of indianapolis did not “create” the issue of homelessness and to believe that it did is absolutely ignorant. The politics of homelessness are quite complex and also can be quite uncomfortable to address no matter what side of political isle one stands. It is difficult to move the needle with evidence based practices when other entities do little to pull their weight.
My take aways are that the cities did not create homelessness. Yes, homelessness is an issue, and an uncomfortable one at that. However, the city of indianapolis is not a lawless danger zone of unhoused people as right wing suburbanites who post on here love to allege. This, I would argue contributes even more to the perceived issue as people are too scared to come to the core of the city which creates a less vibrant urban core and will reflect negatively on everyone in the community, including the right wing suburbanites.
As a conservative suburbanite Jacob, my take away is that you get more of what you reward. It’s a simple math formula that the services unhoused people need are located in cities, so that’s where they migrate. It’s not “right wing” that there are fewer services or shelters in small towns. It’s the centralization of services that brings homeless to downtown.
At issue is, once they are in a centralized location with all the services they need, how does the city then handle the homeless? The low-barrier shelter is a great partial solution. Another solution, as you know well, would be mental health and drug addiction hospitals that can help treat that subset of the homeless causing issues. As a professional in this field, I hope your focus is on championing that instead of denigrating the public who rightfully observe that homelessness creates dangerous situations downtown.
Who is best suited to step in and fund mental health and drug addiction facilities – the city or state?
Jacob is spot on !!