Anticipating the homeless population’s foreseeable use of Margaret T. Hance Park should be integrated into the park’s current revitalization planning, a committee member said during a city meeting last Tuesday.
“The elephant in the room is the homeless … whether it’s verbalized in the plan or not,” Alan Silverman, a member of the Margaret T. Hance Park Master Plan Steering Committee, said during its meeting.
The nearly 20-year-old public park is currently undergoing a visioning process to create a “master plan” that aims to transform the park into a “unique destination” that “fosters and activates community and cultural connectivity,” according to previous meeting notes.
Because a piece of the park will possibly serve as the future location for the Arizona School for the Arts’ auditorium, balancing student safety with a proposed plan to accommodate homeless people was a topic of debate.
Joan Kelchner, a member of the committee, expressed concern about including a proposed community center for the homeless into the plan for the park’s future.
“This is going to sound very negative,” Kelchner said. “I’ve got to say this from a totally personal point of view: I’m really sick and tired of people assuming that everything is going to be solved with some nice volunteers taking care of problems that are really expensive … I’m trying to get something else done with the park.”
Scott Jacobson, development director and co-founder of Arizona Organizing Project, proposed that a center to help the homeless be built at the park, given that they’ll be at the park already, he explained.
“We need to make our parks wonderful. We want to make an urban center have a pulse and a vibrancy, and that’s for everybody,” Jacobson said.
Kelchner acknowledged that homeless people will use the park, but said spending money on building a center for the homeless at the park is counterintuitive to plans for the park’s transition into an active and safe destination for events and visitors.
“I’m not sure I could take your proposal back to my neighborhood and get any kind of a positive response,” Kelchner said.
“I think there is a way we need to look at populations differently. I am now living life believing that we’re not looking at this population correctly,” Jacobsen said regarding his proposal involving the homeless.
Sarah Porter, a member of the committee, added in response to Jacobson’s proposal that the committee needs “to be honest with ourselves and admit that urban centers attract homeless people,” and move on to deciding “what is the park we want that has homeless people using it.”
According to Carmela Ramirez, director of the Phoenix Center for the Arts, there are an average of 35 people at the park during the evening on weekdays, and 35 percent of that number appear to be homeless.
A handful of other presentations regarding the park’s future were presented during the meeting, including one by an assistant professor of the design school at ASU, the head of the Arizona School for the Arts and two officials from the Arizona Department of Transportation.
Ed Walsh and Rod Collins spoke on behalf of the Arizona Department of Transportation about the water leakage problem at Hance Park during the meeting, which is the problem that relocated the recently constructed skate park donated by the Rob Dyrdek Foundation from Hance Park to Cesar Chavez Park about 10 miles away.
According to Walsh and Collins, the cause and extent of the leakage at the park is still unknown.
Further discussion about the park’s future will continue with the committee’s next meeting at the Phoenix Public Library on Aug. 24 at 3:30 p.m.
Contact the reporter at ejfranco@asu.edu
