ROW Park

ROW Park

Inspired by nearly 1.5 miles of ugly, mostly barren land under an electrical right of way (ROW). In other words an area with those high voltage electrical lines.

You need at least half a mile for a scale model of the solar system. If you have an area like this, you could install that as part of a park.

I also want a sun dial and other "space" themed educational bits. Plus informational stuff about any plants in the park.

There should be multiple bathrooms. Ideally about every half mile which is four places for the area in question (at each end, two others spaced appropriately). 

I want two individual bathrooms at each place, for a total of eight private restrooms. Individual non gendered bathrooms. Preferably open 24 hours but there are logistical questions involved. 

Passive solar design for the bathrooms that helps keep them cool in summer, warm in winter with a minimum of heat or AC (preferably none if achievable).

Hot water on demand system, not boilers which breed legionella. 

Near each bathroom: Covered areas with several picnic tables. A trash can conveniently close but not so close it causes hygiene issues.

Electrical outlets at all tables and benches.

Per previous writing on this site:

Those "seatless" stainless steel toilets that are resistant to vandalism, motion activated faucets and hot air hand dryers.

I want easy to clean, robust, hard to vandalize fixtures. If a homeless person wants to pee at 2am in freezing temps, the bathrooms need to be clean and functional. 

Most homeless people will clean themselves up IF given the opportunity to do so. Most US cities have too few public bathrooms.

Checklist for development must include: Picnic tables, benches, trash cans, greenery. Also: Water fountains, electrical outlets, free wifi.

Vending machines on site that sell drinks, including Gatorade or similar, and lunches.

Vending machines should take EBT.

Electricity should be supplied by solar power (on roofs above the picnic areas?). Any excess produced can be sold.

Signs should indicate "Vending machines and solar power help defray costs for the park."

Outside food is allowed in.

Scale model of solar system should be as realistic as possible. Every piece of it should have explanatory/educational text nearby.

I imagine this will become a field trip for all the schools.

I think it would also be cool to have separately a large moon showing actual moon terrain and talking about the temps etc and that the mild (around freezing), relatively stable temps at the poles make those areas the best candidates for establishing a colony on the moon.

If space and funding allow, you could also do a kiosk about lunar phases as a space-themed educational thing.

The land in question is broken up into sections by cross streets. I would like each section landscaped differently and a different aromatic plant associated with each section.

There should be informative signs about what kinds of plants are there etc.

One section should be dog friendly but not a dog park. Dogs confined overly much to small homes tend to not be mentally well. They need access to outdoor spaces.

Challenging detail: If it's a ROW, the electric company probably owns the land. All development, including trees, needs to be below their wires and not interfere with their stuff.

IF you can get them to even agree.

How to Ideas for ROW Park

Get the permissions from the Electric company etc, build it in phases while you come up with funding.

The bathroom and picnic areas really only need ONE design and can be built one at a time as money allows.

One public bathroom is better than none. Just start installing that while lining up resources and plans for the scale model of the solar system and other details.

Talk to the libraries or anyone in the city providing free wifi in parks, on buses, etc about providing wifi. 

You need unlocked, weather resistant design for electrical outlets. Make sure you find a design appropriate for local weather conditions and don't lock them up.

I think the park should be open 24/7 and if homeless people being in the park at all hours to charge their phones or whatever becomes a public nuisance, find some other solution. Don't just take it away.

Contact a local university. See if they can get science students and artists to collaborate on the scale model, the moon sculpture etc.

You can research cool educational art pieces. I bet someone could do cool things with the moon phases idea, like mapping where to look in the sky or something. 

You could have a contest for astronomy related educational art pieces to flesh the space out of the listed ideas are not sufficient to fill the space. Maybe make it a local college student thing.

You could also crowd source landscaping ideas for each section. Let university students of the appropriate major work on it and submit ideas as a contest or part of one of their classes, have a paid professional review them for appropriateness of plants chosen and other details.

I would ideally like each section to have different plants to some degree and botanical drawings and information about the pieces so it serves as an educational resource.

You will need some parking. Expect to need bus parking, but try to avoid making this "we paved Paradise and put up a parking lot "

The ROW that inspired the idea has bus stops not far from each end and a park-and-ride at a church near one end. Have someone review available resources and try to plan a minimum amount of parking.

At the same time realize that if it is done properly and serves as both an astronomical and botanical educational resource, you can expect K-12 field trips from every school within an hour or more drive of the park. Plan to have some means to schedule them so you don't have too many school buses showing up at the same time.

Reducing the "Attractive Nuisance" Factor 

I've been thinking if they really build ROW Park, most US cities have too few public bathrooms and very likely putting in public bathrooms would initially constitute an attractive nuisance BUT if you don't let the homeless vandalize them etc, over time your unhoused population will improve their hygiene, health and functionality and may be able to get jobs, arrange housing etc.

So I've been thinking if they built bathrooms with a covered eating area, trash cans and all that at EACH end first while developing plans to fill out the middle part, there would be time for that initial demand problem to resolve before you install educational artwork and plantings.

And you probably don't want to install bathrooms and eating areas in the middle until you have installed your scale model of the solar system so they don't interfere with what should be the crowning glory of the park.

Adding more public bathrooms in OTHER parks would help protect ROW park from excess interest by homeless people and if you have enough public bathrooms plus public places to charge a phone, get free wifi, take your hot deli food from a grocery store and sit and eat, etc, you need fewer homeless services.

I'm not a big fan of homeless services. It's an extreme concentration of poverty and it crowds people together who have a lot of personal problems and staff is really not equipped to deal with people whose lives are in the toilet picking fights with each other.

I always preferred to keep to myself while homeless and have my sons help me deal with my personal problems while I was homeless, not some undereducated, underpaid stranger quick to think the worst of me.

There are exceptions and I realize I'm very picky about food quality, but most free meal sites don't really feed you very well. They wouldn't survive as paid restaurants. 

And this matters because a high percentage of homeless people have health problems as a contributing factor to their inability to make their lives work. I am not the only homeless person who found that a lot of the free food offered to me made my health worse which was a recipe for never solving my problems.

I would like to see more help for getting on food stamps -- I only got on food stamps while homeless because Catholic Charities helped me apply. I was too sick to cope with the paperwork on my own.

And I would like to see more healthy Brown Bag meals given away to homeless where you can stuff it in your backpack for later and go where you need to go for the day.

One of my goals is to actively undermine the current standard of developing a concentration of homeless services in a particular area and thereby effectively chaining the poorest of the poor to that area, then blaming them when the area is trashed out, property values drop etc.

Let them get healthy food to go, food stamps they can use in normal middle class stores and have adequate places to eat their food undisturbed and adequate access to public bathrooms so they can spend their time as they see fit. This will empower many to resolve their problems and get off the street instead of making homelessness night impossible to escape because of the way "help" is given.

Our world is currently DESIGNED in a fashion that makes it challenging to survive on the street, resolve your problems and get your life back. I want to design a world where currently being homeless isn't such a huge barrier to every stupid little thing in life.

It probably wasn't like this historically because historically a lot of people lacked running water, lived in a shack with a dirt floor etc. There was much less difference in hygiene etc between someone sleeping in a blanket in the woods and someone sleeping in a boarding house with just one room not an apartment.

The solution is to make it generally easier for everyone to find a private bathroom to use so they can use the toilet or brush their teeth or whatever without anyone looking at them funny for taking care of their needs.

This is not just a problem for homeless people. Delivery people and people with other jobs where they work out of a vehicle can't find bathrooms either.

Initial demand will be greater in part because if you haven't had a shower in a year, it takes a few weeks to raise the standard of hygiene once you have access.

For about a year, I cleaned up at sinks and had no access to actual shoers. I then began going to hotels about once a month. At first, I took baths, not showers, to soak the layers of dead skin off my feet.

So at first, homeless people will each need more time in the bathroom to deal with stuff. It will take a while before they just use the toilet, brush their teeth and wash up briefly and are done.

Brown bag lunches are explicitly intended to oppose the tendency for big cities to develop an area with soup kitchens and other homeless services that becomes an attractive nuisance trapping the most destitute in that area and becoming a horrifying concentration of extreme poverty bringing down land values, raising crime stats and driving out other people and services.

I explicitly try to find solutions that break that pattern, help people get out of homelessness and even while homeless help them be more mobile and more empowered.

Footnote 

Section one was originally published elsewhere on August 13, 2024. Section two was originally published elsewhere on October 29, 2024. 

Section three began as notes I made on a site for homeless resources that never got cleaned up and published. That site will be folded into this one and my ideas about addressing homelessness effectively will stop being separate from general community development because the best way to address homelessness is to do good community development which makes homelessness less likely