This fencing was put up by the City in the fall of 2024 to make it much harder for anyone living homeless to rest on comfortable ground. Based on monthly costs reported in the media at that time, taxpayers have spent $26,000 to keep the rickety, weed-filled, garbage-catching fencing in place along 900-block Pandora. The fencing preceded the Community Safety and Wellness Plan, and was supposed to have been gone a year ago. I guess we should have seen the plan for the sign that it turned out to be in terms of whose safety and wellness was being talked about. “I think the individuals who will be able to choose to be inside will eventually welcome (the change),” said Mayor Marianne Alto at the time, as if there WAS a choice to be inside. The fencing has added a desperately seedy and sad edge to this entrance to the downtown, especially right now when spear grass is taking hold and the boulevards that were supposedly being protected are invisible beneath thick layers of untended weeds. City of Gardens indeed.