Editorial: Cold hearts at City Hall

Thursday, Dec. 23, 2004 | 8:56 a.m.

Once again, at Christmastime no less, the city of Las Vegas has shown that its national reputation for being mean to homeless people is warranted. Acting on its own, without bothering to coordinate with police, Clark County, homeless advocates or nonprofit groups such as the Salvation Army, the city orchestrated the sudden removal this week of about 100 homeless men and women from a five-acre vacant lot just north of downtown.

Until April of this year, the lot had been the site of the Sky Vue mobile home park. Acting properly then, the city shut down the park because of its wretched condition and because its owners did not have a business license. The city acted properly again in September, when it removed the squalid trailers after a series of fires and after an agreement could not be reached with the owners to clear the park themselves. But it did not act properly this past Friday, when it quietly ordered the owners to "secure" the park.

The order was issued shortly after the city settled with the owners over the misdemeanor charges they faced regarding their lack of a business license. The order to properly secure and clean the lot would have been perfectly proper -- if the city had shown some heart by notifying agencies that could have helped the people who would be most affected by it.

After the lot had been cleared in September, homeless people, with nowhere else to go, began moving in. By Friday, more than 100 people, including pregnant women, were living there in makeshift shelters. In the city's order, it said the owners faced stiff fines and jail time if they didn't swiftly comply. The response was almost instantaneous. On Monday the owners notified the homeless people that they had less than 24 hours to clear out. By early Tuesday the whole encampment had shifted to just outside the park's boundaries. With their belongings crammed in shopping carts and boxes, the people were milling about, once again with nowhere to go.

Had the city acted properly, the impact on the homeless people could have been lessened. Clark County Manager Thom Reilly and Clark County Director of Social Service Darryl Martin said if they had been informed, they could have been better prepared to assist the people. Linda Lera-Randle El, director of the nonprofit homeless advocacy group Straight from the Streets, said that had she been informed, she would have gone to the lot much earlier to help prepare the people for relocation. Metro Police Sgt. Eric Fricker, who oversees a team of officers assigned to work with the homeless, said his only information came when events began unfolding on Monday. "I was pretty shocked when I drove up there," he told the Sun. Even the Salvation Army, which borders the lot, wasn't informed.

The city of Las Vegas has led a loud, vocal campaign for five years now, proclaiming that homelessness in the Las Vegas Valley must be addressed through a "regional" approach. By acting in a vacuum on its order to secure Sky Vue, by making no provisions for more than 100 people it knew would be left out in the cold, the city certainly proved that it cannot lead on this issue by example.