Homeless on the streets in Columbia: Who is to blame?

Peter M. Brown, President of Colite

People often cite the phrase attributed to Albert Einstein that “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

For at least a decade now, Columbia’s disruptive and ongoing homeless issue and the many problems it creates has seen the same resources put into place, the same lack of urgency expressed by local governments and law enforcement, and the same rhetoric with unfortunately the same predictable result—a complete failure in our Homeless Strategy.

Having homeless people scattered around Columbia sleeping on benches, pestering customers eating al fresca at restaurants, and intimidating clients coming in early to work out not just on Main Street and Five Points but now Forest Drive and Harbison, too, can no longer be tolerated as acceptable. Ignoring the issue does no service to the homeless or to the public. Both groups deserve better, and both should get it.

That has to change, not just to serve the city’s economic and public safety interests but also to offer real hope to those in need. For those who are mentally ill or have addiction issues, we have a duty to help them by providing access to the appropriate resources and incentivizing their participation. For those, however, who are in the business of panhandling as a profession, like the ones at I-77 exit ramps, for instance, that’s something else entirely that needs to be recognized and addressed by law enforcement as criminal behavior.

I’m not making this up: Last week I was talking with an elected official who had just left a meeting with a big box retailer. He told me one of his store managers walked out to the street corner to talk with a panhandler and during the discussion offered the man a job. The panhandler asked what it paid and the manager says “11.” The panhandler said, “Well, I am making 14. The manager said if he wanted to come inside they’d see what skills he had and he might be able to get him close to $14 an hour, to which the man said “You don’t understand, I am making $1,400 a week.”

We need two things right now we’ve lacked in the past: accountability and focus. Notice I didn’t say money, because the city is already spending $1 million in tax money annually on the problem with four separate organizations that provide zero accountability for their success or failure, and therein lies the problem— the financial incentives to reduce the homeless problem in Columbia, including the money contributed by the community, are upside down and ineffective. To be frank, Homelessness is Big Business. Groups receiving money aren’t held accountable to show they are succeeding or even asked to provide the goals they have and their plans to achieve them. They don’t even work nights or weekends. In fact, all these groups are incentivized to do is sustain or increase funding for their own staff and leadership, not solve the one problem that, were they successful, would put them out of business.

We need to take control of the money we spend as a community and a city and require groups receiving funding to produce a public plan for the coming year that includes measurable goals, realistic benchmarks and funding tied directly to performance. So, those who are successful will receive the most money, while those who aren’t will get nothing.

This effort will require sustained focus, which must come from elected officials, community members, and law enforcement. We need regular meetings with funded organizations to see what’s working and what isn’t. We need our police and sheriff’s departments to act in concert with each other to arrest and book, not move along and ignore. And finally, we need our judges and public defenders to offer arrested individuals the opportunity to avoid fines by participating in either treatment or work programs that can truly change their lives or refuse and face criminal penalties.

We can no longer afford to turn a blind eye, not about something this important, because when we do it’s not potential multi-million dollar companies looking to locate here who suffer—it’s the little guy whose property taxes already are maxed out thanks in part to having to support the most expensive public library system in the state whose daily transient population is so large it’s turned librarians into social workers and its flagship location into another homeless shelter.

Columbia must change. It must change the way it addresses our homeless situation. It must change the general attitude to make Columbia the best place for economic investment and raising a family and for our citizens to not be afraid to just walk down the street. Maybe doing the same thing over and over isn’t insanity, it’s just stupidity.

Peter M. Brown is a native of Columbia. He attended Cardinal Newman School and the University of Notre Dame. He is the founder and president of Colite International and is the former chairman of the S.C. Jobs and Economic Development Authority.