Greensboro police last week stepped up loitering enforcement and effectively cleared the place known as “The Block.” Just like that.

Through a series of 30-minute patrols, officers shooed away the clusters of mostly men who routinely gather at the notorious hangout near the corner of South Elm and Eugene streets.

People who live in the neighborhood see The Block as a blight and a nuisance, if not a danger.

The owners of a nearby convenience store also blame The Block for panhandling, theft and fights on their premises. “If we only call the police once or twice in a day, that’s a lucky day,” the manager of the FastServ at Elm and Eugene, Sun Post, told the News & Record’s Lorraine Ahearn last week.

Ron Surgeon, who once owned a McDonald’s franchise at the same location, voiced similar concerns eight years ago.

What took the city so long?

The groups who congregate there also tend to be clients of the Greensboro Urban Ministry’s soup kitchen and homeless shelter, as well as the HealthServe clinic. Most of them are addicted, unemployed or otherwise down on their luck.

The Block, of course, is only a symptom of other, tougher problems: homelessness, drug abuse (especially crack cocaine) and the state’s failed mental health reform efforts, to name a few.

The opening of a revamped, county-funded substance-abuse treatment center on Wendover Avenue has been helpful but provides very limited bed space for crack addiction.

A planned new homeless day center at Murrow Boulevard and East Washington Street also should help. The county commissioners’ pledge last week of $275,000 to help pay for the project should now allow construction to move forward.

The Block seems to have been around forever. But it drew renewed attention during a recent debate over the placement of artistic benches along a leg of the Downtown Greenway that passes through the area. Residents of the neighboring Warnersville community complained that the benches only made a bad situation worse, attracting more drug use, vagrancy and “lewd acts.”

As the greenway project expands, says one advocate for the homeless, Michele Forrest, expect more harsh realities to be exposed to plainer view. A homeless camp in the Freeman Mill Road area lies in the path of the next leg of the greenway, she says.

As for the benches, they eventually were removed, though some people disputed allegations that they attracted unsavory behavior.

No one disputes the existence or impact of The Block.

Residents have a right to expect to live free of the daily nuisances, and worse, that came with it. But enforcement won’t succeed in the long run without sustained attention to what drives people to street corners in the first place.

Until that happens, they simply will create a new Block somewhere else.

I usually just quote and link, but this time I’m reprinting the entire editorial. Sometimes older N&R links expire, and this a really good editorial, so I want to make sure I have copy of it.

Be sure to click through to the original, though, for the comments.

NOTE: The editorial says: “The groups who congregate there also tend to be clients of the Greensboro Urban Ministry’s soup kitchen and homeless shelter…” This is incorrect. While the guys on the block do eat at Potter’s House (soup kitchen), none of them stay at Weaver House (homeless shelter). Greensboro Urban Ministry has a strict policy that any shelter guest found hanging out on the block gets kicked out. You won’t find shelter guests on the block.

“The location of artistic benches, which were removed from the Downtown Greenway on Friday after neighbors complained, looked good on paper but ignored some basic urban topography. Just a stone’s throw from where the benches were removed, amid complaints that they drew drunken and lewd behavior, sits ‘The Block.’ At the southwest corner of Eugene and Lee streets, at the entrance to HealthServe clinic and Greensboro Urban Ministry’s night shelter, this stretch of sidewalk has been a magnet for loitering, drugs and prostitution for 20 years….”

The benches were never the problem, so removing them won’t solve it. The problem on the block is primarily addiction. People drink there, and buy and smoke pot and crack. And where you find crack, you find dealers and prostitutes.

The people hanging on the block are not all homeless. But a lot of them are. The day center is probably not going to solve the problem. You can’t drink and smoke there.  (And the day center opening has been delayed.)

In Lorraine’s article, Greensboro Urban Ministry director Mike Aiken talks about the ten year plan to end homelessness and says that “real steps had been taken to offer services to the chronically homeless for mental health and substance abuse problems.” With all due respect to Mike, who I know and admire greatly, our local services for mental health and substance abuse are lacking. They’re also voluntary. You have to want to go. And even if everybody on the block decided tomorrow that they wanted to go get help, where would we send them? Mental health and substance abuse treatment beds are full and outpatient services often have waiting lists. Some types of treatment are scarce or don’t exist, unless you have private insurance. (None of this is a judgment on our providers. It’s about mental health “reform” and lack of funding.)

The only way I can think of to clean up the block is to do heavy enforcement and stay on it. Right now, there is enforcement, but as soon as the police cars leave, the people come back. In order to clear the block and have it stay cleared, you’d have to keep officers there. We don’t enough officers now. And let’s face it. Even if you clear the block, those folks are going to continue to be addicted. They’re going to go somewhere — to someone else’s neighborhood. I don’t have an answer. That means I need to pray. Maybe God is already giving the answer to someone far wiser and more creative than me. If so, I’m excited to hear it! But I’m looking for a solution that heals, not hurts. I have friends on the block. I don’t want to just sweep them away. I want to see their lives changed.

“Mentally ill, addicted to pain pills, homeless at 53, Betty Ann Scott went through jail, hospitals, rehab, every place but where she wound up the afternoon of Feb. 15.

For once, her hospital stay would be long — 15 days. But there is no treatment here, and the room temperature is 42 degrees in this part of Moses Cone Hospital: the county morgue, where Scott was dead on arrival after a suspected drug overdose…”

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