What is Progress?
On Fish Toast + the Collision of Affluence + Poverty.
This is a FB post from someone in my neighborhood about the rising visibility of unhoused people in our downtown Las Vegas community:
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I witnessed something in our neighborhood last night that was the straw that finally broke this camel’s back. I went to the 702 Mart on 15th Street and Charleston Boulevard, and this man walked out of the convenience store as I was parking, walked over to the front wall of the building and began urinating.
I’ve lived in our Huntridge neighborhood for over 13 years and this type of issue has only gotten worse. Our park is closed due to the homeless issue in the area. I get asked for money every time I go to the 99 Cents Store, Albertsons, or Smiths on Maryland Pkwy. And our elected officials haven’t done anything to resolve this.
As much as I love my home, I will begin looking for properties to relocate to either in Henderson or in the Summerlin area just to escape what our area has become.
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Although I am writing about the urban core known as downtown Las Vegas, what is happening here, exciting and challenging, is happening in cities across the country. Frankly, someone urinating is hardly a pressing concern for me personally. If you’ve read my book, you know we are way past public urination.
But we all have our last straws and I get it.
People moved to our neighborhood, and to Nevada in general, primarily because it is cheaper to live than in a lot of other cities. We have comparatively low property taxes and no state income tax. Of course, we also have the second most challenged education system in the country because we do not put our gambling, weed or sport team money and resources towards it. Not to mention we live in a desert where water is always scarce and threatening to disappear on us.
But downtown, the area I live in, like many urban spaces, is changing rapidly.
Main Street, which sits between the iconic Strip and Fremont Street was once the arts district, block after block of dilapidated warehouses, home to a vibrant local art scene that was pushed out as breweries, restaurants and shops now line the street.
Sidewalks are jammed with people sightseeing, enjoying themselves, and consuming. When you are there, you think: This is amazing! Progress is so good. We can have nice things!
But there are cracks in the foundation. And they have been forming for decades.
The FB post (above) is one of them. The more affluent people who flood the downtown area, the more nice things we have. The more high end services. The more we cater to tourism and people with voluminous expendable income. And local business owners make money, of course, this is great. And this area of town goes from becoming hyper-vacant and barren and crime-ridden to thriving and full of people.
Add to this: A new apartment tower going up nearby called Cello Towers, offering a 32-story high rise with 240 residences. The lowest price to buy in is $700,000 and the penthouses are going for the “upper $6 million range.” Another proposed complex going up a block away from the old arts district, now called the brewery district, offers 311 new apartments, a shit ton more of retail space (more opportunities to consume) and 86 studio units, 185 one-bedroom units, 38 two-bedroom units and two three-bedroom units. All we know is these “resort style” units will be “market price.”
So we have happy people in the streets, local businesses making money and new residences for people to live in. How can this have a downside?
Well, the pancake has two sides no matter how flat you make it. We have to ask:
Who can live here? Who can eat/drink/leisure/hang here?
Who isn’t living or eating/drinking/leisuring/ hanging here?
We live in a mixed income neighborhood. And even though every one wants high-quality neighborhood institutions and amenities, we don’t always agree on what that means. High-quality when you make half a million a year is different than when you make $50,000 a year. It’s just numbers.
While I was eating with David at one of the restaurants in the neighborhood - I was eating an $18 fish toast, our date-brunch was over $100, a meal many cannot afford - I looked out the windows and saw a disheveled man with a luggage cart over-stuffed with possessions, signs, balloons, a piñata, bedding and jackets just hanging out, right outside. Another man laid on the sidewalk, barefoot and dirty, a block down, sleeping on his jacket.
What will happen to the lower classes, the unhoused and people in crisis as more affluent people make this neighborhood their home?
Well, we already know. The research is clear and it’s happened over and over.
There will be more police interventions, higher rents and more financial struggle, more evictions, more homelessness, more private equity and flippers taking over, more displacement, more instability, and as a result, more distrust, more crime. The backdrop pf poverty will become more obvious set against the affluence of the community. More people will have less patience with loitering, petty crime and encampments, which means humans will be shuffled around like songs on a playlist.
The mayor of Las Vegas recently came out strongly demanding that all communities across the valley take in unhoused people, so that we are not creating a skid row in one part of the valley. She has double downed on replicating The Courtyard - a 24/7 open air shelter for anyone to sleep at night, including pets. People here can receive medical assistance, employment services, showers, bathrooms, use of a kitchen, mail boxes, etc. - across the city.
It’s a fantastic idea - that the unhoused actually despise. I know because in doing research for my book, they told me. Over and over again. They don’t want to be there. The Courtyard is well-meaning. But it is not freedom. It’s an open air pavilion, not a home. It’s a line to use the bathroom. Not a home. It’s a mat on the concrete floor, not a home. It is a lovely band-aid. So planning more of these across the valley feels like a waste of money, a fools errand, that only serves to move people out of sight.
And then they move and we put them back.
And then they move and we put them back.
Shuffle Shuffle.
When really what we need - and the only answer -is to house people in and throughout all our communities. We can do that. We have land to build here in Vegas, expansion is happening everywhere. But this means not simply building low/no-rent housing for the vulnerable - although this is a great and necessary start - but lots of supported housing for mental illness, addiction, parenting programs so people in crisis can parent their children instead of losing them to CPS. We need houses, real homes, for the most chaotic and lost people in our communities and that means the answer to it all is this:
We - people in our communities, the suburbs, the inner city, the rural areas - need to welcome with open arms supported housing into our neighbourhoods.
And this is a hard hard sell for regular folks.
Your neighbors might be schizophrenic men, whose meds are given to them by nurses and who are managed with case plans with on-premise case managers. Maybe it’s one building of a Siegel Suites (weekly hotel chain) that has case managers, and is supervised by a nurse manager and counselors, for mentally ill people who need support to live in the community. And Siegel can’t evict them because it’s funded. (Tax the rich, close the loopholes, use the IRS) There might be 12 people next door who are addicts in recovery trying to parent their kids. It means allowing houses inside our communities with potentially troubled people, in supervised, well-maintained and funded environments, who will be given context and support by trusted professionals, so they can be a part of the community.
We have to say a resounding yes to opening our communities to all kinds of people.
This is not easy.
I wrote about how we are neurobiologically predisposed to lumping people into them/us. So, we are fighting our own biology from the get. In my neighborhood with some amazing people, a bunch of folks came out last summer to try to shut down Hebron, a nearby permanent housing program in an old Las Vegas Boulevard hotel. It houses formerly unhoused people. The woman who runs it basically does so on ribbon, string and lint from the dryer. I think it is the only one of its kind in the valley. Instead of being lauded as a solution, some community members saw it as a problem, inviting in the chaos of street life simply by existing. But really, Hebron is one of the good guys, walking the walk, providing supervised care for vulnerable folks as a neighbor and community partner.
We need more of that. Not less.
And this is hard because most people want poor people, housed or not, to simply disappear with their problems. Because exciting things are happening and we like our fish toast without any problems.
The sign of a great and strong community is not just how many places we can spend money in, or the number of gourmet supermarkets in our footprint. (Although all that is great too!) It’s also how we care for the very least of us.
Whoever is running for city council, mayor, all the positions this year, we are watching. Your job is not just to nurture business and tourism. It is also to make a plan to house everyone in our communities, to steward in affordable housing, better transportation options, open our parks, give us free spaces, more beautiful libraries, community and cultural centers and experiences. And maybe while you’re at it, pay our teachers a decent living. We want you to build affordable housing on city land in lagging neighbourhoods like the historic West side.
And reader, I want this for wherever you live as well.
Can we have nice things? Yes. Can we call that progress? Absolutely. Give me all the fancy fish toast. But that means nice things that matter to all kinds of people, not just me or rich people. If we are going to be doing this end stage capitalism thing, we need to be bringing back supports for people who can’t make it in the system, funded by the rich. That was always supposed to be the promise. If we can change hearts and minds inside our communities, everything changes, and the politicians and bureaucrats must follow.
I know I’m beating a drum that no one wants to hear. But the answer starts at home. With us.
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END NOTES:
When you look at this photo what do you see?
Me: People yearning to create a home, with a roof and walls, for themselves. People yearning to create a community, a neighborhood.
Isn’t it so obvious, they want a home?
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I have my eye on Proposition One which just passed in California: “The measure will raise $6.4bn over 20 years to build more housing and treatment facilities for people with mental health and substance use disorders. It will also enact new requirements on how the state’s mental health budget would be spent – redirecting about a third toward housing and rental assistance for unhoused people with serious mental illness or addiction, and another 35% toward treatments for that population.”
Nevada, let’s take notes!
Thanks, as always, for reading. xo Kim
The over-medication of hospitalized patients resulted, years ago, in an abhorrence for forcing people to be medicated against their will. As someone who has worked in short-term involuntary psych hospital units, I have seen how difficult it is to give meds to someone who doesn't want to take them--it is a legal and bureaucratic nightmare. Someone who is in a floridly psychotic state does not have the ability to make informed consent, but many hearings must be held and hoops jumped through before the Dr's judgement that they need meds can be accepted. The pendulum swung so far in the diretion of patients' rights, that patients sometimes need to be restrained, or in seclusion to keep them from harming themselves or others, when a shot or a pill will return them to a semblance of reality. The pendulum has to swing back to the middle. Freedom is a very elusive concept when you are trying to help, or manage the symptoms of someone who has no internal capacity for self-control.
Your analysis of how end-stage capitalism has fueled the crisis of homelessness is excellent, but there's more to it, that stems from the closing of state mental hospitals during the Reagan administration. Not only were the community resources for medical care and housing never funded as promised. The entire premise was based on the belief that people with chonic, severe mental illness would be willing to voluntarily take medication, and live in situations where they would be required to follow rules of behavior. As a retired psychiatric social worker, I can tell you that this whole model is a fallacy. A huge percentage of the unhoused and also those housed in prison are not willing to take medications to control the symptoms of their illnesss that cause them to be unable to manage their lives, or who often turn to alcohol or street drugs instead. Nor do they want to live anywhere that requires them to take meds, abstain from alcohol or street drugs, or follow basic rules. To solve a big part of the homeless problem, and the reality that our streets and jails have become de facto psychiatric facilities, mostly unmedicated, we need to re-establish state hospitals--hopefully more humane than those of the past. If the laws were changed to make it easier for a court to require a chronic miscreant to take meds, it might be possible for some to live in the community with adequate support services, and if they refuse, they live in the hospital. Some are simply too sick or disorganized to care for themselves and need to be mandated to live in a state facility. It is less cruel to make sure that the chronic, severely mentally ill are adequately housed, fed, clothed --and required to take medication--than it is to allow them to continue to live in bedlam and befoul the streets of our communities, even if that is what they prefer to do.