Setting people up to expect something for nothing could be more treacherous than causing them physical harm. I’ve seen the damage of well-intended welfare to sustain the protoplasm while destroying the character of the soul in the do-gooder world of volunteering and in corporate arrangements. In a letter to Asheville City Councilman Jan Davis, Mike Watson expressed the results of giving people too much time to play without any sense of obligation to the needs and sacrifices of those around them.

My name is Mike Watson and I am a principal in the Architectural firm of Bowers, Ellis and Watson, 168 Patton Avenue. I am writing to express my cumulative frustration with what seems like an endless supply of homeless people that are content to trespass, urinate and defecate, sleep – all within 10 feet of my front door. I have had to rouse sleeping people from my front porch, clean diarrhea from the steps and install several thousand dollars worth of steel gate and fence. I have caught people having sex and completing drug deals in the parking lot.

I have four women working for me that often are harassed by indigents in my parking lot, even during business hours. Today, I have had a man urinating in front of a car just outside of the front door. I yelled at him and he basically told me it was a free country and to take a flying leap. We have requested an increased police presence, but I have not seen them. Lately, we have had about $100 worth of gasoline stolen out of our cars during the day. I am going to install about $6,500 worth of fence just to keep the pedestrian traffic off the lot.

These people pay no taxes, contribute nothing to society and have no respect for any normally held principles of property ownership or even public decency. The police cannot or will not patrol the area and I am overrun by people living off the Asheville charity system. Patton Avenue is the western gateway to our city and I see a great amount of tourists driving in and out of the city on it. Several of Asheville’s shelters are located here and I see them being used as youth hostels, judging by the amount of backpack toting 20 year olds I see in line about 4pm. Overall, I see Asheville as a “destination” for the non-working, free-loading type of person. We should not allow this to happen to our beautiful city.

I remain firm in my belief that government is obliged to look after the general welfare. This does not mean government can extract sums from hard-working, moral characters to pay for food and housing of bums so the bums have dollars freed up to drink, drug, boogie, and partake of worse forms of instant gratification the middle class can’t afford. The best solution to the problem to my knowledge remains Norman Spinrad’s gray rooms wherein there is no proof of poverty. Everybody is entitled to access to a dry room kept around 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Everybody is entitled to one bowl of mush a day. If anybody wants more, whether it’s a private home with a yard or a bottle of booze, they have to get up and work for it.