There’s a section of Nanaimo Square that has a chain across it nowadays, reserving it for the customers of a nearby business.
Nanaimo Square, by the way, is where, on Monday evenings, a group of kind people makes sure some of Penticton’s homeless have a meal.
Is the city’s leasing of this area connected to trying to drive the Monday night dinners out of the square? It’s hard to say for sure, but there are certainly a couple of things wrong with it.
To start with, Nanaimo Square is public property, a relaxing area designed to allow seating for everyone, a little stage area for the occasional performances and so on. Essentially, a bit of urban park space.
So why should a quarter of that be off-limits to people who didn’t happen to go to a particular shop?
You would think that city hall would have learned a lesson about leasing public property from the water slide debacle. Parks, recreation and relaxation areas, indeed all public access properties, are not there to be converted into income-producers. They are for all of us to use, unimpeded by chained off areas that turn it into private property.
Combined with city hall’s move to ban sitting on the sidewalk in tourism season, it seems more like another attack on the homeless, as well as an ‘everything should produce income’ move.
Street people, including homeless, are a problem shared by all cities. The solution, though, isn’t to pretend they don’t exist by driving them out of downtown.
We really need to rethink how we deal with homeless and street people since what we have going on now, isn’t working. The street is their home. If we take that away from them, we better be prepared to replace it with something else.