Sunday morning at the dead end of SE Balfour Street, Ardenwald Johnson neighborhood activist Kim Hutchinson stood on a plastic stool in the middle of a crowd of neighbors holding protest signs and delivered a fiery impromptu speech. “If you look at the signs, at no time do we discriminate against the mentally ill. Mentally challenged – fine. Criminals – NO!” The crowd of 40 or so neighbors cheered.
I wrote last week about the conflicting opinions surrounding Balfour House, a 15-bed secure treatment center for mentally ill people Columbia Care plans to build at the end of the street of single family homes. While neighbors are upset at the size of the facility and its impact on traffic down the barely-paved street, the issue that really scares them is that some of the mentally disabled people treated their will be “forensic patients” found guilty except for reason of insanity of some serious crimes. It’s hard to convince neighbors that someone can be insane and dangerous at one point but now be state-okayed to live near families and children again.
At one point, a man cut through the crowd and approached Hutchinson, asking for his turn on the soapbox. He turned out to be Mike Bowen, of the National Alliance of Mental Illness. “I’m not going to argue statistics with you,” Bowen began his off-the-cuff address of the crowd, “What I want to say is I live here. I’ve lived in your neighborhood for 20 years and my son is schizophrenic… He was delusional because he wasn’t in treatment.” Bowen pointed to treatment as a turning point – wit proper medication and care, he says his son is able to live on his own and isn’t a danger to anyone, just like the people who will be living at Balfour House. Bowen’s arguments didn’t go unchallenged by the impassioned crowd.
“This is about civil rights -” said Bowen.
“Whose?!” shouted someone in the crowd.
“What about ours?!” called out another neighbor.
Mike Bowen on the hotseat, debating Kim Hutchinson on the right and upset neighbors all around.
Eventually Bowen stepped down and, as he wandered to the back of the group, wound up in one-on-one conversation with anti-Balfour House neighbor Lisa Grunion-Rinker. Bowen explained that he thinks the most constructive thing to do is monitor the facility closely once it’s built, to be a persistent watchdog to make sure security is tight and treatment effective. Grunion-Rinker, meanwhile, thinks a lot of the fear and anger in the neighborhood stems from Columbia Care “stonewalling” discussions with the neighborhood. The neighbors haven’t gotten any input on the center’s design and no one from Columbia Care shows up to debate them at neighborhood association meetings. “If you want to have a bond with the neighborhood, if you want to get them behind you — you’ve got to talk to them,” she said.
Along Balfour Street, homeowners planted protest signs in their front yard: “House for Sale.”