Homelessness is hitting close to home in Lawrence…
And it’s not pretty. Downtown has long been a refuge for trendy locals and Kansas Citians with a penchant for the hip lifestyle. Forget KU basketball, think upscale small town living, a stones throw from KC.
Now set aside those idyllic images, and get your head around the hundreds of ‘homeless’ types descending on a post COVID college town. And they’re taking a toll on Lawrence’s charming downtown.
To the extent that wooden pallets are now in play to create what they’re calling a pallet shelter village to house some of the scary-looking transient types that have taken up residency in small settlements like the one behind the original Johnny’s Tavern in North Lawrence.
By day, they’re largely invisible, but as evening approaches they drift onto Mass Avenue unsettling downtown merchants, and leaving drugs and bodily fluids in their wake. So much so, that the fabled downtown toy store installed a water spigot to hose down its sidewalk out front.
And while winter temps may send many of them south and west, the city appears reluctant to enforce laws on the books that might prevent loitering, littering and licentiousness. Activities that are scaring off a number of the clean cut family types.
One local – who asked his name be withheld – thinks the problem is out-of-control.
“I don’t think, I know,” he says. “Because I’m reading people on Facebook talking about how unruly they are. The transients use the free local busses to go places where they can panhandle or scout out places to crash. Last week around 2 p.m. this homeless guy walked into our office building into a restroom off the lobby, and took his shitty pants off and tried to clean himself. He left his underwear on the floor and then walked out.”
“And there was a woman panhandling outside the entrance to Dillon’s with a bunch of kids. And the next day, a different woman was there with the same kids, and there was some guy in a truck or a van watching them. I’m telling you, the police are too busy to deal with it all.”
Word on the street is that people in California and places where homelessness runs rampant are telling people to come to Lawrence, the businessman says.
“They’re dropping them off in Lawrence from all over because they think we have better mental health services and we look the other way. It’s unbelievable. Have you seen the stories about people being chased by machetes, knives and hatchets? This is all a transient mess that we’ve been dealing with for a year now.”
I visited a transient camp behind Johnny’s near I-70 called, Camp New Beginnings.
“New beginnings, my ass,” quips the businessman. “It’s unbelievable. It’s like the wild west in Lawrence, Kansas. Whoever is leading the charge on this is horribly misguided. Everything favors the undesirables, and the business people are just horrified…They’re everywhere. They’re in all the parks – they’re going wherever they can hide at night – and they’re breaking in wherever they can, and getting anything they can to pawn or sell for cash.”
The bott0m line:
“They’re not homeless people, they’re transients,” the source stresses. “Yes, some people have hosted homeless people, and we have programs for that. But we don’t have programs for transients – they’re criminals.”
Estimates of Lawrence’s “homeless” population range from 200 to 400 or more.
“When police start saying, we have serious issues that’s major,” says the source. “There was a woman totally naked in front of the library recently – that was reported in the Lawrence Journal World – she got dropped off by a sheriff in Anderson County. So our sheriff called their sheriff and said, ‘What are you doing?'”
