Neighbors meet future alder, Occupiers

Tonight's Sherman Neighborhood Association meeting featured both candidates for District 12 alderperson and a delegation from Occupy Madison presenting their Fordem Avenue project. Overall, it was a successful 90 minutes (props to SNA co-chair Megan Maguire for keeping the discussion moving and on-topic!) that left attendees with a better sense of who's seeking to represent them and what's going on in our community.

Recap and early reaction after the jump...

District 12, Occupy Fordem updates

Following up on a couple of recent items...

• A second candidate emerged late in the filing period for the District 12 city council race. Leslie Peterson, owner of the Amsterdam boutique off State Street and a freelance medical interpreter, declared her candidacy on December 28 and filed her papers right under the wire. She was briefly in the news last year during the Capitol protests, when a DOA maintenance worker went after her balloon with a knife. Ms. Peterson has been invited to Monday's neighborhood association meeting (Ald. Larry Palm has already confirmed he will attend).
• I won't take credit for it, but Brenda Konkel (possibly joined by other Occupy representatives) will also be meeting with the neighborhood on Monday. Here's hoping they'll take the opportunity to engage with us, rather than try to overwhelm the meeting.

Come see all the excitement this Monday the 7th at 6:30 p.m. at Warner Park CRC!

Occupy Fordem Avenue

Update 2/2/13: News broke this week that the owners of 2132 Fordem couldn't wait for Occupy to get its financing together and sold to another buyer.

Original post:

Thursday's Isthmus broke the news that the "Occupy" group is working to buy the vacant commercial building at 2132 Fordem Avenue. Chief spokesperson/organizer/strategist Brenda Konkel was rather displeased that word got out before the deal was done. Once again this small and vocal group is the topic of conversation on the Northside.

So why would anyone have a problem with this? Can we write off voices of concern or criticism as nothing but NIMBYism? I don't think so. There are two major issues that the new Occupy Madison Inc. must address if they want the neighborhood to be a partner in this project: standards and image.

4 questions on "Occupy Northside"

The Northside "Occupy" encampment was removed from Lake View Hill Park just before the Thanksgiving holiday, and this being Madison there is a community meeting scheduled tomorrow night to debrief. Like most Madison public meetings, it's scheduled at a lousy time for working parents so I won't be there, but if I could go here are the four questions I would ask:

1. Is there a concise statement of what the "Occupy" group wants?
2. What is it specifically about these 15-odd people that they aren't being served by existing supports -- how are they different from the hundreds of other homeless individuals served every night? Are there systematic problems causing this one small group to fall through the cracks, or is this an idiosyncratic group?
3. If there are systematic issues, how do we address them without falling into a "San Francisco trap" of spiraling costs, assumption of the entire region's homelessness problem, and loss of our public spaces?
4. Does the expectation of responsibility go both ways -- if the community as a whole is responsible for supporting those in the "Occupy" group, do they have a reciprocal responsibility to meet reasonable conditions upon that support (e.g. observance of shelter rules, participation in treatment programs, etc.)? I mean this as a general question, not a debate over whether specific conditions in specific places are reasonable -- without the premise, discussion over a particular policy or provider becomes meaningless.

Occupy Northside?

Like most Northsiders, I was surprised to hear that the long-term homeless group Occupy Madison had decamped to Asylum Hill last night. There was some question as to where they'd go after the City kicked them off the Don Miller site they'd taken over last winter, and the County's initial plan to open up a site on Wright Street ran into stiff resistance after being proposed a couple of months ago.

It's hard to know exactly what's going on with this specific group of folks, with conflicting information filtered through multiple sources. Both Mayor Soglin and County Executive Parisi have stated that housing is available for the members of the original encampment, but former Ald. Brenda Konkel - who has taken on the role of the residents' chief spokesperson - insists otherwise. No one has said for sure if this is the same core group from last year's Occupy Madison encampment, or if the sobriquet is being used to brand this new group.

Did these folks fall through the cracks, or are they the most chronic of the chronic homeless? Have they been kicked out of Porchlight or other shelters, or are they languishing on a waiting list? Is this a savvy, self-organized group looking to better themselves, or a stunt organized by Konkel and others? Given the involvement of several high-profile individuals on Madison's political scene, it's difficult to see through the agendas.

The only clear fact we have is that there isn't a simple solution. But I will say that, as long as they're occupying the hill, the residents of the tent encampment need to be good neighbors...or whatever goodwill they have on the Northside will evaporate quickly.