Downtown Sioux Falls is turning into a great place to take a nap

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Mind you, the guy below may have been just legitimately taking an ‘intended’ nap, though I think laying in the sun at 6 PM in the evening probably wasn’t ‘planned’. He also didn’t look homeless, he had on brand new sneakers and a nice backpack.

But the bigger point is more and more I have been seeing people DTSF taking ‘naps’ in some of the most random spots, and others have noticed. It happens a lot around the Dudley House and Nelson Park. The other day I saw a guy passed out in front of the Holiday Inn on the sidewalk.

While I have seen this along the bike trails for years, it seems this summer the locations of these ‘naps’ are becoming more dangerous.

I guess yesterday a drunken brawl broke out by the Dudley House until a citizen broke it up. I have thought all along concentrating our homeless services in a neighborhood was NOT a good idea. I had suggested like the County’s Safe Home that a shelter should have been built by the jail.

New Housing Director Unruh wants to charge $20 to attend public housing summit on a Thursday

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It seems more training needs to be done on open government, and since Unruh lost her city council race in Tea yesterday (24/33 – That’s the vote count, not percentage) she will have plenty of time to figure it out.

She did a presentation yesterday on a Sioux Falls Housing Summit during the Sioux Falls City Council informational meeting. While the concept is a good idea, it ignores the whole purpose of having a public summit without making it available to the public. Yes, the public input sessions later in the day ARE open to the public w/o paying a registration fee, but there are some other issues with this summit.

• They are only asking people who are basically (dirt) poor to comment about housing. Most of the people who are affected by affordable housing are actually people who are working and struggling to pay rent or mortgage and spreading themselves thin working multiple jobs. These are the biggest ‘chunk’ of people that need to be served, but see, there is very little ‘government handouts’ for these folks so they focus on the very poor and underserved so they can gobble up that grant money. Who wants to hear from the working poor anyway? Please, get back to work!

• The event is NOT being filmed (or planned to be filmed) and they are hosting it on a Thursday instead of a Saturday when persons from the public could attend. This of course is done on purpose so the bureaucrats don’t have to work on a Saturday for the people they SHOULD be working for, the public. We would hate to inconvenience them while collecting a paycheck from us.

• They are charging a $20 fee for people to attend a public event. They argue this is to pay for the grub. Couldn’t they find a sponsor for the grub? The past mayor used to host a Saturday neighborhood conference that was FREE, with FREE food at a public venue (The Orpheum) and was filmed. Even if the most transparent mayor in the history of our city (snarc) can figure this out, I’m sure a Tea, SD resident can figure it out.

Once again, in attempt to make all the Harvardy, Bloombergy, New Yorky peeps happy about PTH’s night courses on leadership and innovation, the administration is missing the bigger picture about serving the public . . . it’s about serving the public.

City of Sioux Falls & Minnehaha County share the cost of Homeless study

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So at the non-televised joint city council and commission meeting today, the entities decided to split the cost of this study; Homeless-Study

While I think the study is needed, I’m wondering why Augustana (a private university) had to get reimbursed for a ‘research’ project? I guess Augie has trouble scrounging together $27K. Well that’s what you get when you have a Democrat running the joint, poor fundraising skills . . . ouch.

What is also ironic, the local government entity that serves the most homeless, poor and underpriviledged in our community didn’t contribute a penny to the study (SF School District). I guess they have already identified their homeless issues.

City wants input from poor crippled homeless colored folk

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So the city wants your input, well really not YOUR input;

People of low and moderate income, people who are homeless, racial and ethnic minorities, people of limited English proficiency, people with disabilities, and entities that provide services to these populations are specifically encouraged to attend.

Yet, they don’t want these people showing up to public input at the regular council meetings? What gives?

We don’t have an affordable housing issue in Sioux Falls, we have a wage issue.

I have often said our affordable housing program needs an entirely different approach. Instead of tearing down houses (that we could fix up for much less) and building new structures (that we take a hit on when we sell them) we could be using the money to re-fab older homes and apartments. The city gets about $2.1 million in Federal funds a year. You could fix up between 60-80 homes for that money instead of just building 20 homes at a loss. You could also set up financing, etc. which could triple that number easily.

Mayor TenHaken needs to clean house in community development and affordable housing and take a new approach that is committed to providing more core neighborhood cleanup than just a couple houses here and there and setup a program that focuses on entire neighborhoods instead looking for poor people to fill their quota.

Marc Eichenbaum, one of the country’s leading innovators with expertise in the area of ending homelessness

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This is NOT an endorsement of Jolene, I just liked what Marc had to say. Especially his thoughts on celebrating reducing numbers instead of celebrating helping more people. He also brings up how it is cheaper (for taxpayers) to find the homeless housing than continuing to leave them homeless. This is something I preach constantly. It just makes economic sense to get people working and providing for themselves instead constantly dependent on programs. We really do make it too easy in SF.