Downtown Wilmington: A vagrant’s paradise?
Since I’m in the hospitality business and communicate via email with dozens of tourists or potential tourists a day, I receive a lot of feedback. The vast majority is about Carolina Beach and Kure Beach and is positive, but I’ll occasionally get a headscratcher. I’m not sure what category I’d file the following under, but I offer it up for the appraisal of Grove Project readers. I’ve edited out any personal details or information that is not relevant:
We recently rented a Carolina Beach condo and enjoyed it very much. Unfortunately, when we went to the downtown Wilmington area (as we’ve done many times before) we were VERY dismayed to be aggressively approached by multiple vagrants asking for handouts of money. There were quite of few of them, mostly on the riverwalk at the bottom of Market Street, but also on the surrounding sidestreets. My family has been very happy to visit your area for 5 years now, and we are thinking about relocating in a few more years. The vagrants were sleeping and/or loitering on the benches and tables on the riverwalk by the information booth (opposite the Water Street Restaurant), as well as by the Federal building. They seem to be solidly installed there, and this was MOST disheartening to us.
On Friday evening on one of the sidestreets we assisted a young college girl who was being chased down the street by a very drunken, dirty-looking man demanding money from her (and then from us). It was VERY frightening to experience in what used to be one of our favorite places to visit.
The complainant then asked for a contact to address her issues, and when I provided one, I asked what time of day or night she visited downtown. Here is her response:
During the 3 days that we were in Wilmington we were in the downtown area in the morning, afternoon, and at about 9PM for various meals, shopping, tours, etc. The vagrants were always there, but sometimes they got up and moved to different sections of the riverwalk for a while. EMS had to be called for the woman who was with them, because she seemed to be bleeding from the head (in the afternoon). The college girl was being chased down the street around the corner from Fat Tony’s (where we had just eaten dinner) at about 9PM Friday night by a very drunken, very demanding African-American man about 35-40 years old. My daughter and I were also followed by a younger African-American man, very tall, in army green clothing when we finished the horse-drawn tour and were walking up the street to meet my husband at Fat Tony’s.
That was Friday night at about 7:30PM, and when he got right up behind us we ducked into The Irish Pub because there were a lot of people in there and we were frightened. He kept walking and passed by after we went in. These are NOT college students; they are older.
The vagrants on the riverwalk are both Caucasian men, a woman, and several African-American men. One Caucasian man has a long ponytail and seemed to be wearing the same striped shirt and jacket for 3 days. He approached my husband for money 5 minutes after we had arrived in Wilmington. We were hoping that it was an unusual occurrence, but unfortunately it was not. Did a Rehab center or Halfway House open in the area recently? A few of them definitely seemed to have substance abuse issues. I am very grateful for your assistance in forwarding my email to the appropriate agencies. Wilmington is such a beautiful and safe family area, and it would be tragic to have it disintegrate due to the influx of unwelcome elements of society. We drove 11 hours from New York City to spend time in one of our favorite areas, and it was VERY distressing to see the change in the safety level since we were there in August.
I spend a lot of time in downtown Wilmington and often wonder why I don’t actually live there. Well I can tell you that one of the reasons is NOT due to the increase of the homeless population.
While I’m not unaware of the fact that Wilmington has its share of the homeless, I have never been aggressively or persistently harassed by “vagrants”. I have been asked on occasion if I have any spare change, and if I do, I hand some over or say “no, sorry” and keep on going.
I was surprised when I read this woman’s email account of her downtown Wilmington experience. I am sorry that she and her family felt threatened, but I also feel that, perhaps, the perceived threat may have been higher than the actuality.
I agree that the writer may be a little hysterical, and I don’t think things have changed that much since her August visit. However, it is naive to think she’s making it up.
I don’t spend much time downtown any more, but I recognized a couple of the characters she described, and the aggressiveness of the one man’s begging is indeed frightening, especially to one or two people alone on the sidewalk with him after dark. In my neighborhood downtown, I left a wardrobe box with hanging clothes in it on the verge for 10 minutes, outside the UHaul I was unloading it from, and looked down from an upstairs window to see a woman with an armload already pawing through the rest. She was rather annoyed when I told her I wasn’t actually throwing them away and rather reluctant to part with them, although in the end apologetic. And the entire time I lived there, more than 15 minutes in the porch swing guaranteed at least one offer of yard work or other assistance for small cash. That may not be panhandling, but it’s not that comfortable, either.
I don’t know that the homeless population has increased, and I turn up my nose to those who inquire whether some social-service agency is attracting “unwelcome elements of society.” However, if the social service agencies, specifically our splintered mental health system, were doing their jobs properly, there wouldn’t be so many of their potential clients on the street harassing people.
On a related note, I never ever give money to panhandlers. If no one did, they would stop bothering people and look to shelters, etc., for help or food. Of course, they may also turn into muggers, of which there are quite a few on some of the side streets downtown, but at least our police department recognizes that as crime. I hate to be hardhearted, but in my experience panhandlers rarely *need* food or shelter, they need a bottle of wine or some other mind-altering substance, and I’m not about helping meet that need.
When I was moving out of downtown last year, I did hire one of them to do some heavy lifting for me, which he did a fine and enthusiastic job of. But I ended up with him on the phone several times, thinking I would have work for him every week or something, and finally a strange call from a social worker or employment counselor about how much work he did for me and how much I paid him, etc., that made me wonder if by hiring him for $60 for a half-day’s work, I was somehow going to get in trouble myself.
I didn’t move from downtown because I was scared of or annoyed by these folks, rather because I was tired of parking on the street and paying outrageous heating bills for high ceilings and bad insulation in the attic and roof. But they are definitely there, to various degrees of scariness and annoyance.
This story was cross-posted to the Wilmington, NC topix.net forums, where the reply comment is making a good case for more public dollars being spent on public education.
http://www.topix.net/forum/city/wilmington-nc/TKCR9T7VAE1SFO1MS
By the way, I stole the feature image for this story from a nice collection of Wilmington photographs at http://imagesofwilmington.blogspot.com.
Hope that photographer doesn’t mind this reuse, with attribution.
Speaking of which: WHQR piece on the “labyrinth” of mental health care in NC:
NC’s Mental Health Care System
[…] issues brought to light in Downtown Wilmington: A vagrant’s paradise? reside in waters much deeper and murkier than a tourist’s observations can possibly shed […]
Hey while we’re on the subject, you know where the vagrants’ suburb is?
I’m not sure if it’s because of the proximity to a rail line, or because there’s an unlimited supply of shopping carts streaming out of nearby Target, but Sigmon, south of Market on New Centre (map), has all these bushes where people are squatting, collecting things, arguing, collecting things.
I do live downtown, and there are definitely plenty of vagrants hanging around. They’ll get aggressive, verbally, sometimes. It isn’t like they’re coming after you, but they don’t like to be told “no”. I caught one of them seen one digging in the backyard next door, and my upstairs neighbor had one just walk in one day and start asking about taxes.. lol.
despite this, it hasn’t bothered me. they don’t seem like dangerous people. I’ve met quite a few homeless people in bars down here. Port cities just tend to have a lot of vagrants; Charleston, Mobile, Savannah and New Orleans all have plenty. I’ve heard that lots of them are veterans, from Lejeune or Bragg. I also wouldn’t be surprised if lots of them are old port workers or come off the container ships.
You were doing fine till you got to the last sentence …. at which point I laughed out loud. Not to say that no one who worked at the port ever went down hill later, but they are state employees and those who spend a career there get a nice state retirement package which includes, for now at least, free state employees health insurance for life. The longshoremen are not state employees, but they are in a union, tend to work till they die, and make exceptionally nice wages if for less than glamorous work and also get insurance if they work enough hours each year. And the container ships, which are in port for 12-18 hours, carry a crew of about 15, all of whom are foreigners, most of whom never even get off the ship and none of whom ever stay when the ship leaves - unless they have been hospitalized, in which case they are either flown to rejoin the ship at another port of call, or home if that isn’t possible. You have a fine imagination, though.
It’s not port cities that attract vagrants, or homeless people, however you describe those particular neighbors of ours. It’s places with good weather and some possibility of social services, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, or generous people of whatever sort. Many of them are veterans, but they rarely transition directly from service to homeless - the proximity to the military installations is a coincidence, has no more to do with it than perhaps the availability of some veterans’ services, if clearly not enough. There is no port in Santa Monica, and it is the homeless national capital, as far as I can tell from stepping over or around a couple of dozen on any given morning walking the dogs.
The main source of all these homeless people is the broken mental health system, which if it were functional would help those with organic mental illnesses and those with substance abuse problems - and lots of those folks have both. Just as anyone with these issues, most of the homeless ones are dangerous mainly to themselves. But there certainly is some danger, especially as I mentioned earlier, in being confronted on a dark sidewalk without others around. Some of the mentally ill, or someone jonesing seriously for their poison of choice, can be desperate enough to be dangerous, too.
“There is no port in Santa Monica..” My understanding is that Long Beach has our nation’s 2nd largest port, which is a hop, skip, and jump away from Santa Monica. There also happens to be a tremendously large veterans’ hospital near Santa Monica, too. In any event, my personal experience is that port cities have consistently more homeless than non-port cities. Compare Wilmington to Greensboro, Charleston to Columbia, Mobile to Montgomery, or Savannah to any city in Georgia. There’s a pattern there.
But I’ve met quite a few of these folks we’re talking about - a lot of them claim to be marines; one fella showed me his USMC tattoo. Some were in the merchant marine, which is port-related. Others worked on a tugboat. So I can’t pinpoint which particular port-related operation that they are a part of, but suffice to say that some of them wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the port. It’s not not clear why you “laughed out loud” at my comment - that seems to be an extremely smug response to me, considering that I’ve held conversations with many of these individuals.
As far as mental health goes, I know very little about that, other than North Carolina’s state system is more or less non-existent.
It was the container ship part I laughed out loud at. Very few of their crew speak enough English to hold a conversation with, and absolutely none of them have ever ended up homeless in Wilmington for you to converse with. The other part of that sentence was just mildly overreaching in its conclusion, and when you have displayed, forgive the bluntness, total ignorance as to who and how ports work, then it’s easy to dismiss the rest of your conclusions.
The port of LA and Long Beach are indeed the largest port complex in the U.S., but it’s a lot more than a hop skip and jump, more like 45 minutes on the freeway on a really good day. And there are lots of other places (and millions of people) in between, like say Long Beach itself, that are easier to get to if the port bore any relationship to the state of homelessness.
A USMC tattoo does not a Marine make - but assuming its owner is indeed a former Marine, that still doesn’t mean he’s homeless in Wilmington directly from Lejeune. He may have been from the area, he may have gone home to Michigan before his life went into a tailspin and realized that there is no fatal weather in Wilmington, or he may have settled in Pender County with his family before the demon rum drug him into the gutter, and the closest gutter was here. Each of them has an individual tragedy behind their situation, many of them related to military service. My point was that the military installations have little impact on them being in Wilmington.
The pattern is not that there are ports in the cities, the pattern is that the weather and general atmosphere is almost universally better in coastal cities, and the reason many cities exist on the coast is that they are historic ports. Homelessness is pretty uncomfortable in small towns, especially if you’re not from there - and tourist-oriented beach towns on the east coast aren’t about to tolerate any of that in their world. On the east coast, the coastal cities of any size are all historic ports, so the places in the desirable location that have enough people to blend in with, to panhandle from, and to get some social services, are those places. That is what brings them to Wilmington, Savannah, Charleston, Mobile - I have no idea if there are really more in those cities than their inland counterparts, but I would expect it.
Think of it this way - if you don’t live anywhere, you can live anywhere. Why wouldn’t you pick a place that people choose to visit, rather than the places they escape from when they visit?
Susan,
How do you know if any individual off a container ship ended up homeless or not? Good lord, have an ounce of humility. Yes, I know you lived in California, but you don’t know everything.
I articulated a loose group of half-ass suggestions based on my personal experience, and you’re sitting here insulting me, and coming up with theoretical reasons about why my personal experiences didn’t happen, and why my “conclusions” (which were merely suggestions) are “wrong”.
I came here to have a civil, friendly discussion, but apparently I’ve run into the archetype of the asshole Yankee. Folks like you come a dime per dozen on the streets of Wilmington, and if this website if full of folks like you, then I don’t want any part of it.
Matt
Matt - I didn’t mean to insult you, merely to continue the discussion.
In case you didn’t deduce it from the absoluteness of my pronouncements, I am one of the “port workers” who are not yet homeless, and so am qualified to rebut your misconception that container ships are the source of any residents of our area, much less homeless ones.
I’ve been in Wilmington on and off since 1972 and lived here almost half that time. I wasn’t born here, but I’m the next thing to a true local. I happen to have lived and traveled to a lot of other places as well.
Your technique in the areas of civil and friendly could use a little work.
Matt - It’s taken me a while to get used to Susan’s tone as well. And I don’t mean that in a conciliatory way: I think I literally now read through a tone that you’re objecting to here, and that others have commented on.
The discussion you two have been having is a case in point: I’ve been enjoying this exchange quite a lot, as I think many readers have, and finding compelling assertions on both sides. I really value what Susan contributes here (though, as I said, that may be because I’ve become inured to something that really is, to use one of Susan’s own terms, “overreaching”), and I’m also really pleased to see you joining in, interpreting the site and its use in exactly the way I’d hoped.
Susan is not the Grove Project any more than you (now) are. Or than I am. Looking forward to hearing more from you in the future.