Financially difficult and blighted by the homeless
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10/24/2020
I've lived here for 10 years and my view of the city has turned as we (barely) managed to buy a home, started a family, and the blight of homelessness has escalated out of control. When I moved here the transients were a handful of local street alcoholics, and mostly crusty punks who would roll through in the Summer months. This has taken a radical turn and West Broadway is a blighted neighborhood, overrun with dangerous meth addicts from out of state, drawn by the concentration of free services. The Western river trail system, frankly, is no longer safe after dark.
I do believe we share a responsibility to help each other, but enabling a self-destructive lifestyle of addiction and violence is not help. Many of those drawn to the Poverello simply do not deserve the services. By offering a, "no strings attached" bed and meal, residents who are dangerous and prone to violence are not turned away, which forces the vulnerable who do need those services to move on. My wife deals with these people in a medical capacity and from a sample of 80 people who listed the Pov as their primary residence, 92% of them admitted to daily meth use. Whats more is nearly every person who said they were homeless but did not list the Pov as their primary address, mostly women, said they felt the Poverello was too dangerous to visit. The Pov has created an environment which appeals primarily to adult male meth addicts, many of whom traveled to Missoula from out of state after being kicked out of other shelters. Let's be clear about this - the Poverello is a free bed and meal, which simply serves to perpetuate homelessness and does nothing to solve the problems that created it. Then everyone is turned back onto the streets in the day to aimlessly wander municipal parks while they look for drugs.
In my opinion the City of Missoula should start by forcing private ownership from the homeless shelter. Then they can transition to providing full time services to fewer people. The shelter should be a permanent residence which doesn't turn people back onto the streets, but focuses on providing supervised living and development of critical life skills through group programs. Less availability will require focusing on selecting Missoula residents who are legitimately mentally ill or otherwise wish to help themselves in good faith. God willing if we actually help people it might lead to personal independence, not just a roof over their head.
We need to admit there are those who don't deserve help, and agree there is a difference between help and enabling. By removing the services which attracted the enabled to our public spaces, maybe we can focus on helping the homeless AND reverse course on the blight facing Missoula.
Look, if you don't think there's a problem then you don't live on the West Side. I am just one person. Twice this Summer I found needles around the river beaches where my children and I used to play. I have found people sleeping in my garage, human feces in my alley. I looked out of my sleeping daughter's window to catch the gaze of a transient standing in my fenced back yard at 2AM. I have been assaulted TWICE trying to walk across the California st bridge at night, punched in the side of the head TWICE just minding my own business trying to bike across the bridge. My wife used to walk home from work until she was literally threatened with rape by a passerby on the sidewalk. This is a serious problem. The Poverello brought it here on an unprecedented scale when it opened the doors of its new facility 5 years ago and expanded services beyond what our city needed. It comes down to what we value more as a society, the illusion of empathy, or actually making a difference in peoples' lives.
Zach | Missoula, MT