The amount of youth transients who populate the sidewalks, alleys, and puplic institutions in downtown Eugene is growing to an intimidating number and showing no signs of slowing.
By: Brianne Limani
Eugene, Ore — On a chilly Tuesday afternoon Eugene station and the surrounding streets are bustling with people making their way to and from the city center. However, it is the large groups of youth that occupy these streets, who are neither coming nor going, that have public safety officials and community leaders scratching their heads.
“We are always aware of them.” Burrito Boy employee, Guadalupe Melendrez said of the group of teenagers huddled on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. Melendrez has been working at the Burrito Boy on Broadway for six years. According to her, the loitering youth are an increasing inconvenience to the business and its customers, as their presence will sometimes intimidate people from entering the restaurant.
“Some of them come in and eat and they’re okay. But some of them sit on tables and smoke and spit on the sidewalk. When we ask them to leave they can get mouthy.” Melendrez said, “Sometimes when we come in the morning there is urine and vomit out front.”
The public safety officials who bike around downtown are helpful when it comes to removing the loitering youth, but sometimes Melendrez has to call the ‘red caps’ (downtown security) to come remove them. In an attempt to fix the problem, Burrito Boy’s landlord is going to put up a gate to help keep people from loitering.
However, Burrito Boy is not the first business to take loitering matters into their own hands. Just down the street, the Eugene Public Library put up signs prohibiting bicycling, smoking, and loitering. According to library security guard Rick Rhoades, the library now owns the surrounding sidewalk; hence all rules that apply inside the library now apply outside as well.
Rhoades spends 90% of his workday outside enforcing the new rules that the library has implemented. According to him, the teens are blocking the walkways and deterring people from coming to the area.
“People are afraid to come down here because of the big groups of kids,” Rhoades said “you look down 10th and you can’t see anything but kids.”
While the library’s new rules have been successful in vacating loiterers from the sidewalk in front of the entrance, it has not fixed the problem. The March 12th introduction of the signs simply caused the youth to migrate down the street to the LTD bus station.
“The problem is all over the place,” Tom Keating said, “They don’t mean any harm but it discourages people from coming downtown, especially older people.”
Keating, like Melendrez, didn’t like the fact that these large groups of youth are constantly spitting, smoking, and throwing their cigarette butts on the ground. “There is a lot of inconsideration” he said.
While the problem is evident, the solution is still to be determined. The prevention attempts done by places such as the library and Burrito Boy are merely temporary fixes to an ongoing, and some would say increasing, dilemma.
Rhoades thinks that a good solution would be to turn the pit on 10th and Charnelton into a community center where the kids can work, play, and just hang out.
“Some kids that look like they are troublemakers can be pretty decent,” he said. “If we gave them a place that was their own and they were in charge of the building it would give them a chance to show their responsibility.”
Keary said he would like to see the pit turned into a nice, big public area. However, he believes that even if something was built in the pit there would still be the same problem. “They are kids and kids just want to hang out.”
According to Keary, the question is “How do you balance that undesirable element?”
The city of Eugene is still working on a solution to the problem. Until a decision is made, the city has increased police enforcement of the downtown area from two assigned policemen to six. However, in order to solve the problem, community leaders need to do more than deploy police officers – they need to find a way to keep the youth off the streets.
