Wichita city leaders say that when it comes to the beds available to shelter homeless people, they have question marks ... but not hard numbers.
Investments made over the last year by Wichita city leaders into Second Light, a shelter and services facility in the former Park Elementary School building, have made headlines. The council has directed about $13 million to renovate the building and retrofit it to carve out space for congregate sleeping quarters and wraparound services.
The investments are intended to build out the city's capacity to respond to its homeless crisis. But during a recent City Council discussion around stricter enforcement of Wichita's camping ban, it became clear that city leaders don't have a good sense of where people can seek shelter if enforcement increases.
Second Light currently has the beds and service capacity to support 128 men and 72 women. Dan Clifford, Second Light’s executive director, said that earlier this week 103 men and 45 women were using the space.
Ongoing construction at the property will ultimately mean there will be more privacy in the congregate sleep spaces, Clifford said. As that work continues, the number of beds available will decrease. The director said Second Light should have space for 120 men and 50 women when work wraps up.
Clifford said that while Second Light has rarely hit full capacity for women, it did reach full capacity for men on Aug. 18 when it shifted from purely offering bed space to a shelter and service model. That model assigns someone a bed when they enter Second Light, which they keep, as they access services from daily meals and medicine, mental health and substance misuse support and work with housing navigators.
The bed count and capacity became a focus of city leaders at a City Council meeting earlier this week. During an impromptu discussion about Wichita’s homelessness response, council member Maggie Ballard asked a pointed question of staff.
“If Second Light is at capacity … where can folks go?” Ballard said. “Where are you allowed to be?”
City Manager Bob Layton said that besides Second Light and Union Rescue Mission, which has emergency shelter beds for men, he didn’t know what other beds were available. Layton and Wichita police officials say they’re waiting on a new dashboard effort to be able to answer that question.
Matt Lowe, the director of community impact at United Way of the Plains, said that his organization and the Coalition to End Homelessness are developing a dashboard that would show the number of shelter spaces available on any given night.
Lowe said that the group “sees a need to communicate more effectively regarding the number of available shelter beds for a variety of audiences.”
City staff and service providers have described the design and access to the data differently. Capt. Aaron Moses told the council that it would be an app that officers could use to see what shelter space was available in the city. He mentioned the possibility of having it in use by the winter season.
Clifford said Second Light and United Way were working “to build a community dashboard that captures space on any given night” and said he’d hope to see the effort completed before the end of the year.
Lowe said United Way was still “actively convening service providers and community partners to better understand the scope of real-time information available and determine the best ways to communicate the data.” He added that he hoped the dashboard could be in place by the end of the year.
The question of capacity came to the forefront again because of Mayor Lily Wu’s request for a status report on the city’s camping ban. Wu told the council she’d asked Layton to prepare a status report on enforcement of the ban because of two recent incidents she’d had downtown.
The first happened on Saturday evening, when Wu said she and a group of people passed several people sleeping underneath the railroad crossing on Douglas in Old Town. The mayor said that as she noticed the people sleeping, she also watched a woman with a stroller join her group because “she was afraid to walk” by the sleeping people.
The second incident came on Monday during Wu’s morning commute to City Hall. She said she watched a person defecate in the street on Central.
“That is not indicative of this community,” Wu said. “That is not a healthy community.”
Wu’s call for an enforcement update was taken up by council member Dalton Glasscock. He and the mayor repeatedly asked the city’s legal and police departments for ways to rework or better enforce Wichita's camping ban to continue to reduce the number of encampments downtown.
“We have committed significant resources and — tangibly or anecdotally — I haven’t seen change in the streets,” Glasscock said. “With the amount of resources we have, I want to see hard numbers of if there are changes in the streets.”
Moses told the council that since April, the department has handled 184 encampment cases. Some of those cases have involved cleaning up reported encampment sites, while others have called for officers to educate people about the camping ban and connect them to a shelter bed.
Moses said the department has not issued a citation in any of the 184 cases.
That data follows two updates made to the city’s camping ordinance in December and January. The ordinance now lists several areas where police are allowed to clear out encampments without notice — areas like under bridges or near roadways, doorways, childcare facilities and golf courses.
The ordinance also gives police the ability to issue a citation — which may result in a fine, jail time or community service — if someone violates the statutes. Officers are not allowed to issue a citation to someone who is homeless if there are no shelter beds available.
Police Chief Joe Sullivan told council members during the meeting that he was “confused” and “disappointed” by the tenor of the discussion and answered Wu and Glasscock's suggestions for more intensive enforcement bluntly.
“Enforcement is not the answer to this problem,” Sullivan said. “We’ve seen around this country time and time again — too often — tragedies that have occurred because of confrontations between police and unhoused citizens.”
Sullivan said that he’s tried to make sure that his officers have training to mitigate those kinds of incidents. The chief said he remains a strong proponent of programs that use a combination of police and civilian outreach to build trust and get people in touch with resources.
Several members of the council spoke out against the idea of increased enforcement, pushing instead for continued investment into building out Wichita’s shelter capacity and resources.
In a statement issued after the meeting, council member Brandon Johnson wrote that “fining someone who is unhoused and unemployed is not only ineffective, but cruel. Instead of criminalizing poverty, we should be investing our time and resources in the programs that actually work.”
