By Juan Montoya
The recent cold snap and its effect upon the city's homeless who seek shelter where they can find it is nowhere more graphically demonstrated than in the photo above sent to us by another of our readers.
In this case, it's a wheelchair-bound man who is huddled in a doorway across from Market Square on Adams Street, a budding nightclub area.
There are some who say these people should be rounded up and hauled off to jail for vagrancy, while other more progressive advocates say that the city has failed to address this very visible human necessity.
The Ozanam Center on Minnesota Road sends a van to pick up homeless at designated places, but if they don't make it there on time, they are left on the street exposed to the elements to await the coming of the day and a warm meal at the Good Neighbor Settlement House on Tyler Street. Some merely gather cardboard boxes and fashion out abed to sleep in alleys or doorways.
Other cities prefer to ignore the problem and say these types of scenes give the city a bad name and image. But some are of the opinion that unless you face the problem squarely, a solution will never be found that addresses their needs and the improvement of the downtown area. The city dealt with car washers who worked on the city parking lots and streets by assessing a $250 fine for working without a permit and they have moved to private parking lots and homes to work instead.
This problem has been festering in our city ever since a bond issue was passed that gave money for the establishment at the old Mother of Perpetual Care Center only to have successive city administrations ignore it and use the funds for other projects. That site is now going to be a Brownsville Community Resource Center which aims to serve as a one-stop shop that will provide "community services with a special focus on veterans."
The Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation states that the Center has the "potential to improve the quality of life for our veterans and that of the Brownsville community in general."
Will that include the homeless?
We know that so far it has benefited the contractor – Ziwa Construction – to no end.
Then the contractor said he needed an additional $82,919 that depleted the contingency fund and required $70,279 more to do the job right.
That made the cost of rehabilitating the old Mother of Perpetual Help building a staggering $953,754, almost $1 million. Now, some would say, wouldn't it have just been better to get a brand new building with that $1 million?
There's money in human misery, we guess. Meanwhile, get used to the people living on the street.