Sunday, August 26, 2007

Is Putting A Park Here A Good Idea?

Seen today on Kenmore, the future site of the Graeme Stewart School park addition. Click the pic to enlarge and notice the shopping carts lining the street on both sides, although a bit difficult to make out.

8 comments:

  1. Kenmore between Wilson and Broadway.

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  2. Every single time that I have ever walked down that one block, I have had to call the police for public drinking. I have seen as many as 25 people camping out on that block as well.

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  3. So does it make sense to anyone why this stretch of Kenmore has been blocked off for months now, if work has not begun on the park? It has turned into "party central" for many of our residents. We wonder if the shopping cart brigade has been chased from Dearborn Grocers to this new spot.

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  4. I haven't seen the crowd outside of Dearborn Grocers for a while, so your hypothesis may ring true. Until the root causes of this loitering/drunkeness are taken care of, it's just going to be pushed from place to place.

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  5. There are many solutions... a good place to start would be requiring social services that need City funding to rely on the use of best practices to stabilize their clients.

    A well run social service agency has the skills and know-how to motivate the chronically homeless to turn their lives around. DHS told me the #1 reason why we have so many people hanging around on the streets is because people and various social services keep enabling their behavior.

    Our only alternative right now is to make it uncomfortable for people to live on the streets, and this will serve to motivate them to get the help they need to stabilize their lives.

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  6. I have always thought an no-camping-allowed ordinance would help do the trick. Why wouldn't the city be able to limit the uses of parks through city ordinances?

    You can't remove people from a park for just being there, but why not define camping in such a way as to disallow the most egregious current behavior?

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  7. The current laws for city parks are:
    No one allowed inside "unfenced" city parks from 11pm to 4am.
    No one allowed inside "fenced" city parks from 11pm to 6am.
    Playlots generally close at dark and open the next morning, often when a neighbor opens the playlot.

    My understanding is that anyone can "camp" in the park.... however they must follow the park's curfew.

    There has been a huge improvement in the enforcement of the park's curfew over the last couple of years. Sleeping on the sidewalk is another matter. It's easy to enforce if the sleeping person is blocking the sidewalk. The problem on the 4500 block of N. Kenmore comes from people camping out on the sidewalk.

    However, when you go out there, you will often see people drinking beer. When the police are called, it's to enforce no drinking, public urination, drug use, etc.

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