The membership of the newly-formed Downtown South Business Association (DSBA) met at Woodlawn Christian Church on Thursday, June 26, to elect officers and hear concerns expressed by the membership regarding the Knoxville Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness proposal to house 48 homeless and mentally-ill individuals at the currently-unused Flenniken Elementary School on Martin Mill Pike.
“In light of these questions, it would seem wise, both for the benefit of the homeless themselves and for our neighborhoods and businesses, that we hold off on the headlong rush to approve this plan until these questions can be answered,” said President of the DSBA, Ron Emery.
The concerns expressed by the business owners, who are also in many cases residents of the south Knoxville area, stemmed from what seem to be open questions about the current plan as put forward by the Ten Year Plan’s Executive Director, Jon Lawler.
The questions brought forward at the meeting included:
• Has a plan of this scope ever been tried before? In Tennessee? In the southeast?
• What are the implications of putting 48 mentally-ill people in one building? Isn’t it a public health issue?
• What happens when these newly-housed mentally-ill begin to wander the neighborhood?
• Won’t their previous and still-homeless acquaintances follow them to the neighborhood?
• Why will there be no full-time psychiatric care at the facility for these mentally-ill?
• Why haven’t alternate sites for the facility been fully explored?
• Why aren’t medical facilities a part of the plan?
• How will property values be affected when the homeless and mentally-ill begin wandering the neighborhood?
• How will local businesses cope with the influx of chronically homeless and mentally-ill in their public spaces?
The consensus of the membership was that these questions remain unaddressed by the Ten Year Plan, and must necessarily be answered before the plan should be approved.
However, a request for rezoning the Flenniken School property will come before the Metropolitan Planning Commission (MPC) on July 10, at their next regular meeting at the City-County Building beginning at 1:30 pm.
At that meeting, Flenniken Housing L.P. will ask the MPC to recommend to rezone the property from C-3 (general commercial) to O-1, office, medical, and related services). It is listed on the preliminary agenda as item 56, 7-L-08-RZ. Should MPC recommend the request, it would go to City Council for review, requiring at least two readings.
Although the Flenniken Plan could not go forward with O-1 zoning, having the property rezoned to high-density residential would only require MPC to perform a Use On Review, provided MPC recommends for and City Council approves the O-1 request.
