Several public benches were removed from Chattanooga’s downtown last week in an attempt by the city to reduce crime.
While city officials and business leaders said the change should make the Market Street area safer, others said it removed vital gathering – and sleeping – places for Chattanooga’s homeless population.
“They call it beautification, but it’s really displacement. Now, homeless people have to go find someplace else to sleep,” Matthew May, a man experiencing homelessness, said in an interview Wednesday. “But the crime has not gone away.”
The city announced the bench removals last week along with several efforts to curb homelessness in Chattanooga. Officials said in a news release that the “problem” benches had been linked to “panhandling, harassment and littering.”
The decision came after business owners, employees and residents in the area voiced concerns to the city, spokesman Ellis Smith said by phone Wednesday. But people without housing, with no door or lock to protect them, may be even more vulnerable to crime, Smith said.
Most of the removed benches were on Market Street near Sixth and Seventh streets, plus one in Phillips Park a few blocks away. About a dozen of them were outside the County Courthouse and adjacent police memorial. Most of the benches discouraged sleeping, with bars separating individual metal seats, but the memorial still served as an overnight gathering place for people experiencing homelessness because it’s well-lit and set back from the street.
“A lot of people sleep at night there,” Raymond Wilkey, who has been homeless in Hamilton County for nine years, said in an interview at Phillips Park on Wednesday. “Now, there’s nowhere to sit.”
The city also removed two public tables on Market Street, Smith said. Now, nearly all of the remaining public seating there is in bus shelters, where the seats are small and triangular.
The benches are only gone temporarily, Smith said.
“Is it the optimal approach for every situation, and for every resident? No, I would like to have the benches back as quick as we can so people can sit on them,” Smith said. “It was a response to a specific need and some specific public safety concerns.”
The city doesn’t yet have an exact plan or timeline to reinstall them, he said, besides waiting for further progress on its planned low-barrier downtown shelter and crisis training for workers in the area.
The city also said last week there will be more police officers on foot, bike and golf carts downtown to, hopefully, deter crime and respond more quickly to calls.
Female workers in the area had reported repeated catcalling and other inappropriate comments from people gathered around the benches, said Steve Brookes, executive director of the Downtown Chattanooga Alliance. There were also problems with drinking, outbursts and fighting, Brookes said, and some workers felt uncomfortable being in the area at night. The alliance worked with the city on addressing problems posed by the public benches.
Brookes said he’s already noticed a difference since the benches were removed.
“Just going by it since then, it seems cleaner, safer, the feeling’s better,” he said by phone Thursday.
But others say it’s only changed the problem, not solved it.
“It’s a lot less crowded in that one area, but at the same time, there’s more foot traffic with the community that was there,” Bantam & Biddy general manager Tegess Herren said by phone Thursday. “We’ve had tremendous trouble with that, just coming into my restaurant, whether it’s causing a scene or cutting through to get somewhere else.”
Herren said those problems aren’t necessarily new – but without a place to sit outside, people experiencing homelessness are coming into businesses more often. Colder weather on the horizon means that will only get more common, Herren said.
“It disrupts my business multiple times a day,” he said.
Contact Ellen Gerst at egerst@timesfreepress.com. Follow her on Twitter at @ellengerst.