Three mondays ago, activist Frank Perna met with government officials, police and several Wilson Street property owners to chat about the homeless turning the street into an open-air outhouse.
"But the whole thing turned out being a talk about homelessness and how it's so bad," Perna says. "So I decided to complain about using a county organization as a hammer against the homeless."
Perna claims the county health district pressured the Wilson Street businesses into drastic action. The Las Vegas Rescue Mission, which has fed the homeless for 34 years, halted its daily 5 p.m. feedings for a week. The food stoppage nominally reduced the number of indigents and inspired vocal backlash from advocates.
"That was totally unfair ... the Rescue Mission doesn't own Wilson Street," Perna says. "The problem is a lack of facilities. Any homeless person on the street, if they can't find a bathroom, they're going to pee against the wall or poo on there. They [county officials] are just dispersing the homeless instead of trying to come up with a solution. They're calling the people feeding them enablers, when they're actually helping people."
Health district environmental protection officer Glenn Savage was a no-show at the meeting at the city's Neighborhood Services Department, continuing what Perna calls a pattern of governmental brush-offs.
Savage explains: "We weren't invited to that meeting." And he's informed Perna that the health district is a public safety organization, not a homeless advocate. "I talked to Mr. Perna a couple weeks ago. He thought it was the health district's jurisdiction to install Porta-Potties [it's not], and he was concerned we were rousting the homeless. We weren't."
Says district spokesman Dave Tonelli: "It's not under our purview to come up with a solution to the entire homeless problem. We're only peripherally involved. The only way we're involved with the Rescue Mission pertains to public health. We were notified of a health hazard—people defecating, urinating and leaving trash behind and we made contact with the [Rescue Mission] folks via letter because it's the responsibility of the owner of the site to clean up waste on the site. Our concern is public safety."
Activists claim the root cause of what some of them call "homeless cleansing" is fear of another Tent City, the shantytown on Owens Avenue and Interstate 15 demolished by the city in 2001. Housing nearly 100 homeless, the encampment made headlines after the city evicted indigents. Former City Councilman/now attorney Matthew Callister's complaint on behalf of the homeless berated the city for doing little about a longtime problem and asked to give charities more time to meet demand for shelter services. (U.S. District Judge Kent Dawson ruled for the city).
Patricia Martinelli-Price, founder of Southern Nevada Advocates for Homeless People, casts the meeting as more of the same bureaucratic muddling she's seen in recent efforts to address problems. The county hung the fear of fines over the Rescue Mission and neighborhood U.S. Foods.
"They did the same thing at Foremaster Lane—pressure businesses to address problems they weren't causing," she says. "They did the same thing with Tent City: The homeless were in a concentrated area and they eventually booted them out."
Savage says homeless advocates' beef shouldn't be with the health district, but other governmental entities charged with dealing with homelessness. Savage says his inspectors have since witnessed cleanup improvements on Wilson Street.
Much like Tent City and Foremaster Lane before it, Martinelli-Price says, Wilson Street has become a resting place for the indigent—familiar, even comfortable. At one point, a philanthropist donated Porta-Potties, which were eventually removed. She's now concerned that the health district's complaint could excise the homeless from Wilson Street, forcing them elsewhere and starting the cycle all over again.
"You have veterans, undocumented workers, runaways, mentally ill, abuse victims, those with substance addictions, senior citizens—people with all sorts of problems among the homeless and when you force them to move, they lose a sense of place and they lose their belongings," Martinelli-Price says. "Everyone needs to all work together for solutions that are humane."