It’s up to us to make sure Quince St. Village doesn’t become a fenced-off ghetto

The Quince Street Village and its 100 micro shelters are slowly coming together.

The Village is a major upgrade from the downtown “mitigation site,” a city-run tent camp established in 2018. It served people being evicted from unsanctioned downtown camps that had infuriated downtown businesses and visitors.

A court decision had forbidden eviction of campers from public property unless there was somewhere else for them to go. Thus, the mitigation site was created to make eviction of the unsanctioned camps possible. It was the official “somewhere else.”

The Quince Street Village will be a bigger, better-planned and better-financed upgrade, located near downtown but not in it. It’s still not completed, but some mitigation site residents are already moving in. Each micro shelter will have an electric light, a USB port for charging phones, and heat. That’s a big improvement over the mold-ridden mitigation site.

When one woman moved into her new micro house and switched on the light, she cried tears of joy — joy that people had cared enough to make this investment in her safety and well-being. Gabe Ash, the program director for Catholic Community Services, says it has motivated her to make good on that investment by making changes in her life.

That, of course, is the hope for everyone who moves there.

The Village will still be a very long way from permanent housing. It will have six showers and six flush toilets for 100 people. It will have laundry facilities. Those are also huge improvements over the mitigation site.

But its kitchen facilities will consist of two carport tents with microwaves and sinks. Some weekday meals will be delivered from the Community Kitchen, but weekends people will be on their own.

Ash emphasizes that this is “shelter, not housing.”

The people who live there will be the “most vulnerable,” meaning those who are at the highest risk of dying if left unhoused. This means people with chronic disabilities or illnesses, including mental illness and/or addiction. These are usually people who have been homeless for a long time. No sex offenders will be allowed.

It will take a lot of staff to manage a village of 100 residents — a number so big that all residents won’t know each others’ names. Ash says they will divide it into neighborhood subgroups to promote some degree of self-government.

Ash also reports that some former residents of the mitigation site who have moved up in the world will be among the staff, as living beacons of what is possible.

All this sounds both promising and challenging.

One challenge is that, like the old mitigation site, the Village looks way too much like a prison camp, with its straight rows of shelters, chain link fences, and bare, unrelieved gravel surface. That grim setting will not help promote mental health, hope and healing.

Ash says there is a conversation going on with Home Depot, which may provide materials and volunteers to help establish gardens. We hope they are thinking big, because it will take far more than a few raised beds to change the ambiance of this enormous site. It cries out for trees and grass, and for a basketball court or other recreational facilities.

This may be intended to be temporary shelter, but it is folly to think there will be housing for all its residents in the next few years. Many people will be living here for a long time.

We should not let this be a ghetto, fenced off from the rest of our community.

People need nature, and culture, and connections. People need art, sports, music, comedy and poetry. And people need friends from outside the fences.

Even the best staff — and Catholic Community Services is the gold standard for staff — cannot provide all that. Neither can government funders or policy makers.

But we can, and we should.