Sunday, June 12, 2016

"A place for the hungry and the neighborhood dealing with it: the dilemma of Trinity Cafe"

Below is from a well-written, balanced column about a tough issue by Sue Carlton at the Tampa Bay Times. If you're a newsie and enjoy news and commentary then you should add the TBT to your favorites list; use this link. Here is an excerpt:

     Trinity Cafe faces hardscrabble Nebraska Avenue. Behind it is a neighborhood called V.M. Ybor, just north of the Ybor most people know. It's a scrappy community of historic bungalows now burglar-barred, with others restored to glory, an old city neighborhood with good bones. This is not high-end South Tampa, to be sure, or even the nearby Heights neighborhoods flourishing lately, but a place with promise.
     Neighbors say the cafe's clientele can mean washing urine off your porch and sometimes discovering trash and worse in your yard. It can mean people hanging out and drinking on your streets. Maybe you could argue this was already an urban core neighborhood before Trinity moved in, but seriously, would you want this in your back yard?
     And so the dilemma: a place doing nothing but good, and some neighbors suffering for it.
The problem is what happens on surrounding streets after Trinity closes up shop and some of its patrons wander, says Tampa City Council member Frank Reddick, whose V.M. Ybor constituents regularly send him photo evidence of garbage and even feces. "Trinity has done just about anything they can do to clean up the place," he says. "But it's difficult once they stop feeding people.

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