On Soledad Street, where junkies and angels reside, a clash is coming.

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On Sept. 20, CSUMB students walked out of an evening class on Soledad Street to find the windows of two cars bashed in and planters tipped over. The next day the tires of the Franciscan Workers’ van were slashed. Students will not be allowed on Soledad Street after dark for the rest of the semester.

Robert Smith of Dorothy’s Place says he has never seen anything like this since he started handing out sandwiches in 1982. He is still shaken from the incident.

Stepped-up police enforcement has temporarily unsettled the drug trade in Chinatown.  

Salinas Police Cmdr. Kelly McMillin explains that he can only tackle crime in the area by sending out his entire graveyard shift of officers. There is only one beat cop for a large section of Salinas that includes Chinatown.

“The problem is solvable,” McMillin says. “It just takes resources that we don’t have.”

Without officers dedicated to patrolling Chinatown, Saunders, of the Oldtown Association, says it’s up to the social service providers to better monitor the area. Homeless people are now sleeping in doorways on Main Street, possibly because they are afraid of the drug dealers.

The Oldtown Association wants to curtail the drug trafficking before the long-awaited hotel-and-condominium complex is built a block away from Soledad Street. A view of Chinatown would not be a good selling point for potential condo buyers.

Wally Ahtye, a Soledad Street property owner and Confucius Church member, laments the fact that his childhood neighborhood is now overrun by homeless people and drug addicts. Ahtye grew up here in the 1930s, when about a dozen Chinese families lived in rickety houses or in the back of storefronts on Soledad Street.

The 77-year-old remembers when the Wheel of Hope was founded in 1994 by the Franciscan Workers and the Buddhist Temple. An effort to resolve a conflict between temple members, who wanted the homeless out of Chinatown, and volunteers who wanted to stay and serve the needy, it was given a 10-year lease, and then given the option of a two-year extension.

The placement of Dorothy’s at the Green Gold Inn, a former crack house, was supposed to be temporary.

Those 12 years have run their course, and the fundamental conditions of poverty, addiction, and mental illness remain.

“The way it’s going now [the Franciscan Workers] just go about their business,” Ahtye says. “It doesn’t seem they have tried something new to keep the elements out of there.”