NBC 7's Gene Cubbison has this analysis on the redevelopment of East Village.
Street crime like Wednesday’s knife attack on two San Diego firefighters has been a longstanding and growing problem in East Village.
It's gone far beyond something that law enforcement can properly manage.
Since redevelopment began overtaking the old warehouse district of East Village in the '80s, high-end residents, businesses and hotel guests have come face-to-face with people of the "mean streets": criminals, drug addicts, mental health patients, all manner of homeless.
Finally, "degrees of separation" are being created.
Take, for starters, Alpha Square, a six-story, $50 million full-service housing complex that'll open later this summer at the southeast corner of Market Street and 13th Street -- three blocks away from where the firefighters were stabbed.
It’ll offer longterm if not permanent housing to a lucky 200 people usually found on the streets.
It's just a promising start on a more comprehensive strategy to reduce the problems in a community caught between the 20th and 21st century.
"The wrap-around services are in the building,” said Bob McElroy, founder of Alpha Project for the Homeless, who’s spent three decades of activism on the issue.
“The neighborhood all had to buy in to develop this building,” added McElroy in an interview Thursday. “It's obviously more conducive to the neighborhood, to folks inside and outside. Living in peace and harmony.
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“All their case management. They don't have to go through the community to get to their clinics and medications. It's all in one place."
It’s a concept East Village residents and business can get behind -- unnerved as they are about Wednesday’s firefighter stabbings.
"Words can't even describe the negative impact that events like that can have on a small business,” said Jon Wantz, an East Village resident who manages the Stella Public House and Halcyon Coffee bar on lower 14th Street.
"It's a sad day for SDFD; it's a sad day for East Village," Wantz told NBC 7. “A lot of the talk about East Village right now is about how it's gentrifying and it's growing and expanding -- and this just knocks it down a few notches."
Warns McElroy: “Until we have a place for everybody, we're going to continue to chase people around the streets. We literally herd the folks from one block to the next … I mean, it's an endless cycle."
There’s no time to waste, because there's concern in neighboring communities -- Barrio Logan, Golden Hill and Sherman Heights -- about the problems spreading there.
