The incident at the Finance Committee last night should be Exhibit A about why the city should spend money on services, and not more police and security at Tree Lane (Housing First Apartment Project for formerly homeless families). Issues can be dealt with without police/security, and the resulting trauma and escalation. Issues should be addressed with services and community.
FINANCE COMMITTEE DISRUPTIONS
Last night at the Finance Committee people who came to testify about Tree Lane had to wait hours. One person who was there has mental wellness challenges and was making some noise talking while he was video taping. It was handled absolutely horribly all the way around by “officials” . So, members of the community and audience successfully took care of things after the police and “officials” escalated things.
Here’s the video of what happened at Finance Committee last night.
As you can see, instead of Paul Skidmore letting Enis Ragland, and eventually others at the call of Alder Barbara McKinney handle things. Which they did. Alder Paul Skidmore thought that he should call the police.
SERVICES NOT “SECURITY”
It should be noted, that the issue this gentleman in the video, Doug, was there to speak about was Tree Lane. Tree Lane is the Apartment Complex in Alder Paul Skidmore’s district for formerly homeless families. I believe many of the issues at that apartment complex are because Alder Paul Skidmore and the Police department are trying to use policing “tools” to solve the “problems” they perceive. In doing so, just like Skidmore did at the Finance committee, they escalate things.
If instead, the city (AHEM, and county and United Way) had put the same amount of effort into services for the people who live in the building, we wouldn’t be talking about Tree Lane at all. Anyone seen the County or United Way?
When we were dealing with “increased police calls” at Occupy Madison, Captain Gloede. explained that of course you are going to have increased police calls. If you had a vacant piece of land, and now you add 100 people or more, its no surprise that police calls increase. I sure wish Captain Gloede had been appointed chief instead of Koval. Sadly, Captain Gloede left the Madison Police Department.
Of course, the police are looking for “problems”, instead of the community being left to handle things as they did at the Finance Committee. And when the police step in, they escalate. And then record more “problems” and report an increase in crime. In a way, they create the problems, as they did when Paul Skidmore called them to the Finance Committee. Everything had settled down and was fine, until the police arrived.
Vanessa McDowell, the CEO (a.k.a. Executive Director) of the YWCA here in Madison, that was providing services at Tree Lane, further explains. (Again, scroll down after the video. grrr.)
THIS IS NOT HOUSING FIRST
The biggest danger here is that we are jeopardizing future “housing first” type projects. Ons such project is the one at 1202 Park Street that is in the process of getting approved.
We have over 800 homeless single adults that we have identified, and over 200 that desperately need “housing first” permanent supportive housing. (We are closer to solving family homelessness – with 100 or less families looking for housing.)
However, we are doing the same thing as we did at Rethke, when we, as a community, botched the opening and there was a huge outcry about police calls there. Again, “Housing First” gets all kinds of bad publicity. The police department wrings their hands, the mayor bellows, the alders suddenly pay attention to the needs of poor people because there are “problems”.
However, we are focusing on the wrong “problems”. We, as a community, didn’t put in the necessary support for services. And by that, I mean money. The funders wanted to fund the shiny new building and take credit for building affordable housing, but they didn’t want to support for the people in it. That is because the shiny new building takes capital funding, which is easy to borrow and pay for over time. The services come from the operating budgets and have to be funded year after year after year.
What our community needs to face is that we are funding the police department at $79 million in 2019. They’ve had an $5M increase in expenses in 2 years. By comparison, the total community development budget is $21M, down $2.5M from 2017. And those services are for affordable housing, economic development and employment, neighborhoods, and funding nonprofits for community services.
I’m pretty sure that if we looked at how we are spending this money, in a real serious way, the logical conclusion would be that we get better results and spend less dollars funding services to work with the community, instead of sending police to control the community.
In the end, the formerly homeless people who should be having a wonderful experience moving into housing are instead re-truamatized and suffering because we, as a community, didn’t make good choices. And as we, as a community, try to “fix” things . . . we make things worse . . . and re-traumatize people. I’ll let Wanda explain. We can do better than this. (I should apologize for the crappy audio, I’m going to have to invest in some mics . . . sigh . . . )
We. can. do. better. then. this.
