City must balance compassion with public interest

The Chattahoochee RiverWalk, built with sales tax money collected to upgrade the city's combined sewer overflow system, is one of the more popular and appealing amenities in Columbus. Unfortunately, like so many other public venues in many other cities, parts of it have occasionally become the kinds of public gathering places that were never intended.

One such place is the pavilion just downriver from 22nd Street between the river and First Avenue. The covered shelter area, equipped with electricity, public restrooms and, initially, picnic tables, has not really been a "public" facility in the way it was designed to be for several years now. It has become a gathering place for many of the city's homeless and jobless, who have congregated there during the day and in many cases been sleeping there at night. Homeless people "had clearly moved in and set up an encampment," Columbus Police Chief Ricky Boren said. "There were tables, chairs, cooking utensils, you name it."

Such colonizing, so to speak, of a public area had already become a problem at a park owned by Columbus Water Works. And exacerbating the problem was the fact that area outreach organizations, acting out of the most charitable and humanitarian of intentions, were using the area to distribute food and other necessities to those in need.

A few, let us say, less than humanitarian suggestions notwithstanding, this is not an easy situation for the city -- any city -- to deal with. Leaders don't want to just chase the needy and dispossessed away from one area only to have them congregate in another. Neither can they allow them to be the occupying, and frequently menacing, population of an amenity built at public expense for public enjoyment.

"Those who were staying down there had developed a sense of ownership," said Neil Richardson, executive director of Chattahoochee Valley Jail Ministries, "and when others were coming in, fights were breaking out. That began to get folks' attention."

The approach the city is taking is probably the best balance that can be struck in the real world. Police have been enforcing ordinances that close the part overnight; at the same time, they are working with Home for Good, the United Way agency working to find housing for the homeless, including those who have been using the pavilion as an encampment.

"Our goal here is not to put people in jail," Boren said. "We are trying to get them off the streets and into a safe haven."

The ideal, of course, is not just to move homeless people out of public recreational areas, but to do what we can to help them not be homeless at all. The more success Columbus and its partners in Home for Good and the other service organizations have with the latter, the closer we get to the former.

This story was originally published November 7, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "City must balance compassion with public interest."