Committee Formed to Address Issue of Homeless on Main Street -- Not Yet -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

These are the three stories on the front page of today's Williston Herald.

First, this may be my favorite of the three: the landlady who raised the rent from $700 to $2,00 on senior citizens says she "felt sick when she raised the rent, and feels sicker now."

Then these two articles should have been printed side-by-side but due to spacing one was printed above the other: "Planning and Zoning Committee votes against a 450-bed man-camp" that would have been built north of the city.

The companion article: "Committee formed to address campers in city." The sidebar includes this quote: "We're starting to see a campground mentality."

That was predicted just a few weeks ago. It's not worth looking for the link right now.

If the natural progression plays itself out, one can expect we will soon see the following headline: "Committee formed to address the homeless camped out on Main Street." 

Remember tent cities in Williston? Look where this article appeared -- AthleticBusiness.com. Darin Krueger says he was brought up “like any North Dakota kid.”

“I was taught that if people need help, you do what you can to try to take care of them,” says Krueger, the director of the Williston, N.D., parks and recreation department. That was the thinking that drove Krueger and his colleagues to officially allow a small group of men to live in tents on a portion of Williston’s main outdoor recreation complex. The accommodation became temporary, after it “kind of blew up on us,” Krueger says.

Shortly before this article was published in Athletic Business.com, the tent cities were banned in the city's parks.

This is interesting. This is the Canadian experience, from the same link:

In December 2009, a British Columbia appellate court upheld a lower court’s ruling that a ban on tent cities in public parks violated a person’s constitutional right to security, if there is not adequate shelter space available. The ruling stemmed from a 2005 lawsuit that resulted when the city of Victoria shut down a tent city that had as many as 70 residents at one of its parks.

There are options which I have alluded to before but some things are left best unsaid.

I first blogged about the housing problem more than a year ago, April 21, 2010, following a New York Times article highlighting the problem. It is not as if the current situation was unpredictable. Obviously if the New York Times was writing about it in April, it must have been known locally as early as January 2010. In just two months, it will have been two full years and the county is denying man-camps and wondering what to do about RVs on residential streets.

I know the study regarding campers on residential streets won't include the issue of residents parking their pickup trucks on sidewalks but that issue also needs to be addressed, along with motorboats, trailers, and recreational vehicles. If someone cannot use the sidewalk and takes the street instead (especially someone in a wheelchair or pushing a stroller) and gets hit by a passing motorist, I'm not sure where the liabilty rests, but my hunch is that a good lawyer would. In Boston, the owner of the house is held liable if an injury occurs on the snow-covered sidewalk in front of the house. Boston requires that walks be cleared of snow by the owner -- the ordinance was first put into effect in 1976.