Mixed Moss

Last night I went to a West End community council meeting. Ugg. It was awful. The meeting had to be shut down because people were so disorderly. I’ve never felt so hated in my life– and channel twelve was there to record it all.

Check it out: Channel Twelve News Story

The organization I’m working for, Focas Ministries, is one of the organizations who helped charter the CityLink Center. It is like a social services mall that is going to be built in the West End. (Not a homeless chelter, as some people persist in calling it). It will basically be several organizations who are already in the West End, locating in one building for easier access and better transitions for people moving from one life-stage and set of needs to another (i.e. “OK, I’ve gotten a hot meal or two and dealt with my drug problem, now I need help writing a resume and getting a job placement and getting a suit from Dress for Success and a decent haircut, and soon I’ll need a job-mentor from JobsPlus. And do you know anybody who can provide safe and affordable childcare while I’m working at my new job?”)

The people in West End are very upset about this. They want, I guess, a grocery store or a Target or something to go in in the space where CityLink will be built. But the space has been sitting vacant for forever and a day and nobody’s even bid on it until now. Not exactly prime real estate. And they say that having the center there will attract homeless people, addicts, ex-cons, mentally handicapped, and other people they consider “undesirable” into their neighborhood and increase crime levels. In short, they think the West End and Clifton Heights, which they’ve managed to make a little headway in recently as far as getting people to fix up the gorgeous old houses in, into Over-the-Rhine.

Well guess what? I live in Clifton Heights. And I work in Over-the-Rhine. So I think I’m able to speak to this subject when I say, the West End and Clifton Heights are not without their issues! The purpose of this center requires that it be easy to access by the people who need it. In fact, it needs to be in walking distance of them. Do you think they would build in our neighborhoods if there were no people already in our neighborhoods who need the services provided? The danger is that people will begin to value a safe and pretty community more than they value justice for the poor and needy. Both are important; neither should be sacrificed for the other.

It is an age-old struggle.

The tough part was that nobody, with the possible exception of my sweet-hearted and mild-mannered friend Candyce, walked into that building saying to themselves, “I think I might change my mind tonight.” No, they already had their lines drawn, their positions staked out, their horses mounted and their helmets on. (The opposition even had professionally printed signs bearing the words, “CityLink” in a red circle with a red slash through it.) That is not a frame of mind conducive to a discussion. It is a frame of mind conducive to a fight. And that is just what occurred– albeit very one-sidedly. It’s difficult to reason with somebody who won’t let you say anything without yelling you down, and disputes your statistics with projected fear.

At the last meeting, residents spoke against the center. The representatives from CityLink there were taken aback a bit. The President of the council said, alright, you’ve asked CityLink to be more forthcoming and accused them of not being transparent enough. Since you’ve run down our time at this meeting we’ll have to do that at the next meeting. And everybody seemed fine with that. But at this meeting, while there may have been some people there who genuinely wanted to hear what CityLink had to say, there were certainly enough who didn’t. They shouted down the President, and were very rude to him and accused him of some awful things, and so a couple of cops came up to the front and said, if they didn’t settle down they were going to have to shut down the meeting. Everyone was so angry they couldn’t afford to let things get out of hand, I suppose. I was certainly intimidated; maybe a hundred angry people? It seemed like a real recipe for trouble. Anyways when the President proposed to let CityLink representatives talk, the crowd shouted him down, said they didn’t want to listen to them, they’d heard all they needed to and they wanted to vote. The President, frustrated with being treated with so little respect, said fine, if you can’t behave in an orderly manner we’ll shut this meeting down until the January meeting, at such time as we will vote without any further discussion from either side. The crowd shouted that that was fine with them, and he shut the meeting down and left in disgust– and my friends and I left shortly after.

I’ve never seen anything like it. The really sad thing is that we’d like the community to be on board with this. But they won’t listen– and until we all listen to each other how can we ever hope to understand?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 at 10:36 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.