I no longer speak for city government, but from my years of experience there I can tell you that "what happened to their belongings" is that people took whatever they wanted and left behind what they didn't. There is always abundant notice -- a minimum of 72 hours -- before any camp is cleared. What the public service crews tend to find left behind is garbage and discarded items that nobody wanted to take. In terms of where people are sleeping now, some of them may have gone into the shelters -- which always have available beds. Others went elsewhere. It's not as if an asphalt lot under the interstate was exactly a permanent location for anyone. Most of the people there had arrived at some point during the past six months, and have now moved on to somewhere else.

Tent cities are not solutions to anything. They have no water and no sanitation, and the larger they get the more they tend to attract drug dealers and pimps and any number of other kinds of predators. They generate tremendous amounts of trash and human waste and they are not healthy places either for the people living in them or the community around them. I have talked about these issues with city officials from around the country, everybody struggles with them and nobody has a simple solution. But it is easy to grandstand and wring hands about the injustice of any particular temporary camp being moved, without grappling with the actual complexities of the underlying issues.

A cousin who works in Manhattan reports that the homeless have set up encampments under building scaffolding. Ironic that much of new construction is condo housing with units ranging from $1 million - $20 million.

If Salvation Army won't put the building to some productive use, the city - through KCDC - can draw a line around it, designate it as 'blighted,' and seize it for public use through eminent domain. Bill Lyons knows how to do this ...

And I don't mean 'public use' in the Kelo vs City of New London sense by giving the building to a private developer for profit.

Submitted by michael kaplan on Mon, 2018/11/19 - 12:27pm.

"If Salvation Army won't put the building to some productive use, the city - through KCDC - can draw a line around it, designate it as 'blighted,' and seize it for public use through eminent domain. Bill Lyons knows how to do this .."

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The City does not have the authority to "seize" property that is deemed (not sure by whom) not to be in "productive use There is extensive due process in a redevelopment area through which elements of the property must be shown to be blighted after which the owner is given the opportunity to remedy that blight. Then there is further public vetting and, in most cases, legislative approval, especially for any expenditures necessary to both build and operate a city facility. FYI, There is, of course, a different, less complex process is utilized for parks and public infrastructure projects.

We much prefer to work with providers and other stakeholders if possible in arriving at solutions. In any case, owners are paid fair market value in any eminent domain process so some might quarrel a bit with the use of the verb "seize." But to each his or own mode of expression.

i am with kaplan's criticisms & suggestions in spirit, and i understand why he gets the responses posted from the representatives of our political(economic) system. i'll leave the thread before i start posting quotes from oscar wilde about the immorality of charity :)