As well-in­ten­tioned as San Fer­nan­do May­or Ju­nia Re­grel­lo might be in his lat­est ef­forts to deal with an in­flux of street dwellers in the south­ern city, he needs to pro­ceed with cau­tion and en­sure he works with and fol­lows the ad­vice of pro­fes­sion­als in this mat­ter.

The prob­lem is a lot more com­plex than he imag­ines and there is no quick fix in solv­ing an is­sue that has been chron­ic in ur­ban ar­eas across the coun­try for decades. It is not as sim­ple as mo­bil­is­ing to get these peo­ple off the street. If any­thing, that is just one as­pect of the sit­u­a­tion.

What is need­ed is a mul­ti-faceted ap­proach, aimed at a lot more than clear­ing city streets of in­di­vid­u­als who are re­gard­ed as an eye­sore and a nui­sance.

Every ef­fort aimed at T&T's very size­able pop­u­la­tion of street dwellers should be de­vel­oped on the clear un­der­stand­ing that these are hu­man be­ings, cit­i­zens of this coun­try ex­ist­ing at their low­est ebb. There can­not be a cook­ie-cut­ter ap­proach in ren­der­ing as­sis­tance be­cause the prob­lems that have re­sult­ed in them sleep­ing on pave­ments and open spaces are many.

Some of them might be men­tal­ly ill, oth­ers are in the throes of sub­stance abuse. In some in­stances, peo­ple have been dri­ven out un­to the streets by fam­i­ly prob­lems or pover­ty.

There­fore, any so­lu­tions that in­volve sim­ply cart­ing them off to the St Ann’s Hos­pi­tal, or over­crowd­ed and un­der­manned fa­cil­i­ty for the so­cial­ly dis­placed will be no more ef­fec­tive than “spin­ning top in mud.”

May­or Re­grel­lo must be care­ful not to re­peat the mis­takes of past may­ors who have tak­en up the is­sue with zeal, on­ly to have those pro­grammes fiz­zle out in a mat­ter of weeks.

Louis Lee Sing, dur­ing his tenure in Port-of-Spain, fa­mous­ly mo­bilised re­sources to con­duct some late-night ex­er­cis­es of round­ing up va­grants. Al­though there were some fleet­ing suc­cess­es, the sit­u­a­tion in the na­tion’s cap­i­tal was back to square one in no time at all.

How­ev­er, if there are any lessons to be learned from these past at­tempts it is that the prob­lem is well be­yond the ca­pac­i­ty of city au­thor­i­ties. While the var­i­ous mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties have their parts to play, this is a sit­u­a­tion that de­mands a larg­er state ef­fort.

While she is still new to the port­fo­lio, So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Camille Robin­son-Reg­is should make street dwellers a pri­or­i­ty project. How­ev­er, she will need sup­port from oth­er min­istries and agen­cies, such as the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS), Health Min­istry and, of course, the var­i­ous mu­nic­i­pal bod­ies.

A range of sup­port ser­vices will have to be avail­able to house, treat and re­ha­bil­i­tate. This will have to be a long-term ef­fort con­sid­er­ing how deeply en­trenched the prob­lem has be­come over the years.

Street dwelling isn’t a San Fer­nan­do prob­lem or a Port-of-Spain prob­lem. It is a na­tion­al prob­lem and that is how it should be tack­led—at the na­tion­al lev­el