Shannon NickinsonThis is a problem that needs more than a blanket.
Social media exploded with the word that Pensacola was a city where it was illegal to have a blanket if you slept outside.
Not exactly what you want to see trending with your city’s name on Twitter or Facebook, I imagine.
But underneath the outcry is a truth laid bare about the limitations and unintended consequences of government intervention into complex social problems. As Chief Dan George said in “Little Big Man,” sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn’t.
Pensacola City Councilwoman Sherri Myers has proposed the amendment to a controversial ordinance that includes the “blanket ban,” an ordinance she and fellow councilmembers Gerald Wingate and Charles Bare voted against enacting at the time.
The measure passed first reading Feb. 13 and will have to pass a second reading later this month.
The ordinance, enacted in May 2013, banned camping on public property in the city and a host of related activities including cooking over an open flame, bathing in public, and sleeping outside under a blanket, newspaper, bed roll cardboard or other covering.
Myers’ amendment would lift the “blanket ban” and would specify that it is law enforcement’s responsibility to advise the homeless of the shelters available to them.
Myers has brought up the issue before. It gained traction as we felt the sting of a snap of freezing weather atypical for our area, and after Mayor Ashton Hayward wrote in his emailed newsletter to city residents he had a personal change of heart about the matter and decided to support the revision.
The change.org petition to rescind it started by social advocate Nathan Monk on Jan. 28 had 13,209 signatures as of Wednesday night.
Several media sites, blogs and social media threads picked up the story and the comments attached to each generally wonder what kind of hard-hearted community we have here.
Rick Dye has spent the last seven years or so working with the homeless community. He hopes the push to reconsider at least part of the ordinance comes from people realizing that Pensacola is not the kind of community that wants to live in Internet infamy as somewhere that treats the least among us like criminals for covering up in the cold.
It also, he says, highlights the unknown consequences that can arise when government tries to insert itself in the issue of “the homeless.”
A chief mistake, Dye says, is lumping “the homeless” into an amorphous group that can be saved with one or two specific interventions.
Rather, as his experience has taught him, people who are homeless are there for a variety of reasons and need five resources to begin to pull themselves out of their spiral — dependable housing, a dependable source of food, dependable mental and physical healthcare, dependable transportation and healthy relationships.
“Then and only once these resources are in hand are they ready to look for and maintain a job. If they are forced to seek a job before these five needed resources are obtained, they will not be able to keep the job due to the fact they will get sick, act out, be worried about their next meal or have their clothes and personal belongings stolen from them while at work. Then the cycle begins again,” he says.
There are things that municipalities and well-meaning citizens can do to help some of the conditions that led a person to be homeless, but you won’t get to all of them. If the goal is to get people who are homeless to a point where they can get and hold a job, some of the homeless are low-hanging fruit, Dye says.
Some may just need help getting access to the social and government services they are entitled to.
Some are chronic homeless who may get up on their feet for stretches of time, but they end up back in it. Dye says most agencies focus on the needs of the poor, and where the needs of the homeless intersect with those areas, they are getting help.
People who can be reached by spiritual intervention can be helped by faith-based programs. People who most need help cleaning up from an alcohol or drug problem can be reached by interventions in those areas.
But, he says, “despite the advertising and marketing to these shelters, none of them are equipped with the right people with the right authority and enough time to eliminate the root causes of a person’s homelessness. We confuse our activity with accomplishment.”
No one has been cited or arrested under the “blanket ban” according to the Pensacola Police.
City Councilman Larry B. Johnson’s proposal to create a task force to look at the homeless issue also passed first reading. He hopes the taskforce will come back with solutions, potentially modeled on efforts in other cities.
In a place that loves to study things into oblivion, is another taskforce really the answer? Johnson views it as promise-keeping.
“Not doing this is not an option. I see no harm in this. We’ve promised this, I think we should follow through.”
Johnson voted in favor of the ordinance package when it was approved last spring. Now he has changed his mind based on how things have played out in the meantime.
“I’m not afraid to say I’ve changed my mind,” he says. “I’m willing to take a look at most anything.”
Repealing the “blanket ban” is, of course, the right thing to do. But the path forward lies in a more thoughtful approach than the one that went into the crafting of the original ordinance.
Things can change at the drop of a tweet, but a comprehensive solution to the issue will take more than a change.org petition. It means committing to finding safe transitional housing and ensuring adequate access to mental health and other medical care.
And, Dye says, it requires the commitment of enough people of faith who will commit to helping people who have been on a long hard road for a good long time.
This is not a problem we can just cover up under a blanket.
Shannon Nickinson is a columnist who lives in Pensacola. Follow her at twitter.com/snickinson.
