Roy Exum disparages Chattanooga's homeless for where they satisfy nature's routine requirements.
Where would he have these U.S. citizen human beings take care of this required business?
Chattanooga has no public restrooms, much less bathrooms the homeless have a right to use when nature calls.
Chattanooga businesses and government agencies do not let the homeless use their facilities. The Community Kitchen has very limited hours during which the homeless can utilize bathrooms, shower, launder clothes, make phone calls or use computers to apply for jobs or communicate with social workers. Even the public libraries cannot accommodate the hundreds of street homeless in Chattanooga.
(There are actually thousands, but many of them are employed, and couch surf or live in vehicles.)
Even the railway property, city and county parks, and campgrounds have excluded or arrested homeless for the crime of "existing" on their private or government property.
It's easy for Roy to criticize the destitute from his mountaintop perch. But solutions are harder for him to envision. Jail is his favorite solution. Sheriff Hammond already this year has had hundreds of homeless brought to his steel bar hotel for their "attempts at survival on the street." But taxpayers have to pay the $75 per day cost for each of them, many of whom are handicapped, elderly, or veterans.
Unfortunately, Tennessee either has no effective public accommodations law which requires any government agency or business to allow any member of the public to use their facilities during the hours they are open, or our community has hateful, callous business and government officials who would rather pay higher taxes than for jails, than to support public use of facilities they have reserved for use only by their customers, or to build a secure 24/7 facility where homeless could shave, shower, wash clothes, use the toilet, store their valuables and ID in a secure locker (the school system scraps hundreds of lockers which could be repurposed.)
Helen Keller lamented that people have eyesight, but no "vision" -- there are solutions to the problems the homeless face daily. When those solutions are envisioned, funded and implemented, then Sheriff Hammond won't need as many cells and guards, downtown merchants and building owners won't have to pay security guards to stop homeless human beings from using their toilets, rich people from Lookout Mountain will feel safer barhopping downtown, and Roy won't find poop behind dumpsters or in planters.
Mark Regan