For Hough neighborhood resident Justin Stanley, the tipping point wasn’t the people camping in the Mill Plain Boulevard sound wall’s alcoves. Or the needles, trash, clothes and feces they’d leave behind.
Stanley, 40, decided he’d had enough when he discovered his own mail among the garbage. Now he calls police when he spots suspicious activity along the high concrete wall, which abuts his West 16th Street backyard. The alcoves are being used for more than sleeping and shooting up — in early May, Stanley came upon a couple engaged in oral sex.
“I told them that wasn’t exactly what we wanted going on in our neighborhood,” Stanley said. “The guy tried to make some kind of argument about it being his neighborhood, too, and it’s a public place. I’m like, ‘That’s exactly the point.’ “
Fifteen years ago, the city of Vancouver finished the Mill Plain extension project and built a $715,000 sound wall between the Hough neighborhood and the road to muffle the traffic noise. In 2001, neighborhood residents, senior citizens and students from several schools carved scenes on 2,400 colored ceramic tiles to decorate the north side of the wall’s alcoves — three recessed openings through which pedestrians can access Mill Plain at Markle Avenue, Harney Street and Grant Street.
But those same openings in the wall that provide a convenient door to Mill Plain also provided a secluded place for undesirable activity.
“In theory, the alcoves are a nice idea, but they are not serving our neighborhood,” Hough resident Heidi Owens told The Columbian in a May 10 email. “Our issue is that the alcoves are not being respected, our neighborhood and city is not being respected by people who want to engage in inappropriate and illegal behavior in these spots. You never see neighbors sitting in them having a discussion.”
In 2002, vandals spray-painted graffiti across the community tile project and continued to regularly tag it. In the ensuing years, the sound wall’s built-in lights and glass bricks were smashed. People began camping out in the bushes and strewing garbage around the benches — beer cans, bags of chips, shoes, jeans and even tires.
They use the area as a toilet. They scream at each other and fight. They sort the mail stolen from mailboxes, leaving stacks of it behind, said Owens, who is in her 50s and lives near the Markle alcove. One time a neighbor was jumped, and his money and groceries stolen, she said.
Fed up, Hough neighborhood residents are mobilizing, perceiving that the undesirable activity is ramping up. Some are concerned about their children’s safety.
“Every neighborhood meeting this comes up. Every single meeting,” said Sacha Amundson, 38, co-chair of the Hough Neighborhood Association.
Residents have been talking to their city neighborhood liaison and working with police, who instructed them to report drug and alcohol use and graffiti in the alcoves as soon as they see it. (The city sends a response team to clean up graffiti.) Vancouver Police spokeswoman Kim Kapp said police are aware of camping in the area, and that most calls for service don’t come in while crimes are in progress, but after the fact. As a result, few calls result in arrests, she said.
Some residents, such as Stanley, feel the openings in the wall should be closed off. Others favor opening up the alcoves, which overlap with the sound wall to reduce the roadway noise. And others think adding more lighting to the alcoves and pruning the vegetation would suffice.
City Councilor Alishia Topper, a Hough resident for eight years, thinks opening the alcoves to increase visibility might help. She once came across a man bathing in one of them.
“He didn’t have a place to go, so he was hiding in an alcove,” Topper said. “To me, it’s tragic, but at the same time, it creates issues of livability in our neighborhood. … Some of the things they’re doing over there are absolutely inappropriate and shouldn’t be happening in a public setting.”
City Manager Eric Holmes said the problem isn’t the sound wall.
“It’s really a broader issue of homelessness in the community,” and the city is working on the problem, he said Thursday.
The city has taken the step of forming an Affordable Housing Task Force, and it allocates Community Development Block Grants to nonprofit agencies to improve the lives of community members who are low income or live in low-income areas, he said.
“I think modifying or tearing down the sound wall will not be a cure — it will just move the symptom somewhere else and likely create more problems, different problems in the process,” Holmes said. “The sound wall was built for a reason. … It was to mitigate the noise impacts of a major industrial road expansion, and it’s doing that. … And I think that’s an important thing for us to recognize.”
The Hough Neighborhood Association will discuss the sound wall problems at its next meeting at 7 p.m. June 16 at the Hough Elementary School media center. The association’s May meeting was canceled.
