The Opinionated Bastard

To quote Ann Coulter:

Historically, the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents' home, get a job, and start paying taxes.

Flagstaff seems to have hit upon a new method.

What has been happening lately is that Flagstaff is starting to have problems with the homeless. Now mind you, there have always been a fair number of homeless hanging out in Flagstaff in the summer. For one thing, they could camp in the National Forest, and as long as they moved every 14 days, that was pretty much legal. The reality would be that there would be a couple of camps where the rangers would more or less leave them alone, and a couple of hints from the rangers if they rousted someone would usually serve.

With temperatures reaching 110 degrees at 10pm at night in Phoenix, it was just part of the changes of the seasons, the homeless showing up in Flagstaff for the summer. When it got cold again, the homeless would usually drift back. Meanwhile, the mission on San Francisco street would provide services to them. It wasn't ideal, but it was an uneasy truce.

Lately though, the truce has been getting broken by the homeless. There are a couple of locations in Flagstaff with an “urban trail”. These have turned into “homeless sleeping areas”. So the people who live next to those trails have had the following problems:

• Garages and Sheds getting broken into.
• Petty Theft
• Trash getting filtered through, then tossed around

Which is one thing, but lately something much worse has been happening, because those “urban trails” were also the way that most of the kids walked to and from school. Basically, if you're a teenage girl, you can no longer walk safely on the urban trails. So the parents have been having to form neighborhood groups to walk the kids to and from school.

In previous years, the homeless had always sort of known the line and didn't cross it. Lately, they've been crossing it. From talking with some of the poorer people in town, its been the Indian homeless who have been the worst lately. I suspect what's been going on is that the Indians have been kicking them off their reservation, and they've been drifting over to Flagstaff.

So while its one thing to be reasonably tolerant of the homeless (especially since lots of people in Flagstaff are only about 2 paychecks from being homeless themselves), its another thing to have your kids accosted.

The city council has discussed this a bit, with one of the more liberal members saying we shouldn't do anything until “we improve the services for the homeless”. Well, that's a nice theory, but Flagstaff isn't a very rich town. We can't really afford more homeless services.

I'm not offering any solutions either. This is a tough problem. While it may be socially unacceptable to rummage through a persons trash and leave it scattered all over the street, or to say rude things to a young girl, the first one is only littering, and the second is free speech. Rudeness is not a crime.

Though its getting colder, this whole issue may blow over by the end of the month. I suspect what will happen is there will be an ordinance passed against camping within the city limits; that will give the police the tools they need to selectively roust the homeless. Given that the worst of the homeless tend to prey on the other homeless, that's probably a good thing all around.