Tuesday, January 6, 2009
40 Jealous Whores / Law and Order / Politics / Woods Nashville Launches New Front in War Against Poor
Posted by Jeff Woods on Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 1:17 PM
First, the police rousted the homeless from their cardboard sleeping places and handed out hundreds of $50 "quality of life" tickets. Then we made it illegal to beg anywhere after dark. Now, the council is thinking about banning inner-city markets from selling one beer at a time.
The idea is to prevent drunks from buying 40s of malt liquor and littering downtown with bottles. And here's the real beauty of this latest salvo in Nashville's war against the poor: It wouldn't inconvenience anyone who matters.
It would apply only to stores downtown and on two North Nashville streets where the drunks apparently are particularly bothersome. Of course, the beer still would flow freely at LP Field, and tipsy Titans fans still could litter downtown with their plastic cups. And the ordinance would include a "yuppie exception" for those tasty microbrewery products. You couldn't buy a can of Bud or PBR, but who cares? You still could saunter into any downtown market and walk out with a frosty bottle of Red Hook.
Unfortunately, as with many great ideas, it may be a little ahead of its time. True, all the yuppies living in downtown's luxury lofts and high-rise condos would love this law. But in what some observers might call a sweet little ironic twist, it's causing serious consternation within a different segment of the urban pioneer population--the ones who live in all those cute remodeled bungalows just across the river.
If the drunks can't buy beer downtown, where will they go? That's what is worrying these residents. They foresee hoards of thirsty vagrants pouring up from their riverside encampments to hang out in plain view in East Nashville's parking lots, drinking and smoking and cussing.
Council member Mike Jameson, who represents parts of both downtown and East Nashville, is caught in the middle of this tragic dispute. The bill, sponsored by Erica Gilmore, is up on first reading at tonight's council meeting.
"There's an army of people downtown who are begging and pleading for this ordinance," Jameson tells Pith. "But the concern is that it may drive problems to the fringes of downtown and put problems in neighborhoods that already have problems and don't need any more."
Luckily, we can offer an easy solution. Instead of passing this ordinance, why don't we enforce the existing laws against loitering and public drunkenness? Does anyone really think that banning single beer sales will stop homeless alcoholics from drinking? They'll buy mouthwash and drink it instead, according to social service workers. Scope is already increasingly popular on the street. So while we're at it, we might try to develop a few new ways to help to these people deal with their addictions. I know, I know. I'm talking crazy again.
Comments (9)
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And your proof that existing laws are not being enforced is what?
You got any data or evidence from urban neighborhood watch reports that residents haven't been working with police to deal with all of the secondary problems (litter, verbal harassment, drug dealing, etc.) that arise from high-volume single-serve beer sales?
As someone who has actually been living and documenting these conditions that you characterize so cavalierly as a choice between beer and mouthwash: I have a different view or two.
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Gnome: with almost everything that is a clear case of classism in society (like for instance the corporate beer and spirits elite who target strategic locations near halfway houses and missions that house poor people in recovery), I am fascinated that the philanthropists single out valid neighborhood concerns about crime and blight as the clearest of all.
Maybe ya'll should spread some of the compassion and advocacy saved for after hours clubs and single-serve sales (why is alcohol constantly the sacred cow here?) around to less sexy, but no less worthwhile causes than the oversaturated beer racket to the masses held in rundown cinder-block markets on corners journalists rarely visit.
Jeff, We welcome you to Salemtown any morning to come help swear warrants at Volcano Discount Tobacco if the ordinance fails.
The most impactful time would probably be mornings and afternoons when the kids are getting on and off the bus surrounded by brown-baggers. Given your deep concern for education, I'm sure you'd want to relieve teachers of some of the burden that begins at home.
Who says journalists don't frequent cinderblock markets for beer, even single bottles, large single bottles? If that's what you were trying to say STown. It was hard to deconstruct that convoluted sentence.
Stella: How about leaving deconstruction to the grown-ups?
Freddio: The tacit defense of industry in the name of defending the poor is the most laughable part of the local media's concerted attack on Gilmore's bill. Their screeds are akin to defending slum lords in the name of poor people having a place to live; granted that place is hazardous, unfit and a rip-off for the residents themselves, but arguing against closing down the slums can be just as easily spun into an attack on tenants, rather than on the slum lords who are generating blight and injustice.
Likewise, now we're all anti-homeless because we're fighting against high-volume single serve sales as a precipitator of crime. We should instead join the media in blaming the police; the same police who get raked over the coals for other crackdown measures like neighborhood traffic stops; the same police whose reports of actual enforcement in Salemtown you and I have heard over and over again. Instead, they would have us pick up a bottle of mouthwash and wave in the face of all those people we don't know in "luxury lofts." Never mind giving a tinker's damn about those school kids who wait for buses at the Volcano Discount Tobacco Market. Drunks absent their Colt 45 are more vulnerable than school kids.
"Luckily, we can offer an easy solution. Instead of passing this ordinance, why don't we enforce the existing laws against loitering and public drunkenness?"
Go back and read your own articles Jeff. Police have been enforcing these laws, but without legislation that allows judges to sentence repeat offenders to community service or jail time, the courts are powerless to hand down anything but fines.
