Lawmakers in Columbia, South Carolina, are worried about you. Yes, you — even if you don’t live there. They’re worried you won’t want to visit them. They’re worried if you do visit, you won’t patronize their businesses. They’re worried that if you do visit and you try to buy something, you’ll be afraid to get out of your car. It turns out Columbia city officials are much more concerned about you — a potential visitor — than about some people who currently reside in the city. In order to protect you, the city council passed a plan to outlaw homeless people from the downtown area.
Richard Blasser, a business owner in Columbia explained that the homeless “scare people.” To quell the scariness, City Council put an end to homelessness, just not in the way service providers and social justice groups might have hoped. There was no Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness used, no input gathered from service providers or people experiencing homelessness. Instead, City Council member Cameron Runyan wrote a plan on his own, a provisional version of which was approved by the council, and which will be reviewed in full in September.
It is now illegal to be homeless in Columbia. Anyone found committing the crime of homelessness in the downtown area will be asked if they would like to be transported to the city shelter, the city jail, or if they would like to leave town (and as appealing as it might sound to leave a city as intolerant as this one, there is no assistance provided for this option). Since the city shelter contains 250 beds, it is unclear where the remainder of the city’s estimated 1,500 homeless individuals should sleep.
By trying to become a thriving economic center, the Columbia City Council has placed their city last in the race to end homelessness. Michael Stoops, from the National Coalition for the Homeless, even awarded the plan with the title of “most comprehensive anti-homeless measure that [he had] ever seen proposed in any city in the last 30 years.”
At the same time, Interim Police Chief Ruben Santiago seems unwilling to let his city lose this race so easily. Santiago opposes the police involvement proposed by the plan. City Manager Teresa Wilson has also expressed confusion in regards to implementing the proposal, and has not yet allocated police to enforce its rules. While Santiago and Wilson are still in talks with the City Council, Santiago stands committed to the rights of Columbia’s homeless. He has stated that he and his team are not about to coerce people into jail because homelessness is not a crime.”
In Columbia, Chief Ruben Santiago is doing more to change his city for the better than the City Council, and others can learn from his admirable stance and follow his lead. The ideas of the Columbia City Council may not be law everywhere, but these baleful attitudes exist across the country. May every city be lucky enough to also have a voice protecting these supposed “criminals,” because only then can it move forward in the Race to End Homelessness.
