Action Alert 11/13/07
Dear Loaves & Fishes Action Group Member,
A caveat: this Action Alert is much longer than usual, but if you read all the way to the end, there’s good news.
As Thanksgiving approaches, the activity level at Loaves & Fishes soars. We are overwhelmed by the numbers of people volunteering to cook turkeys, bake pies, come down and serve, and asking “What can I do to help?” I think we are all saddened to think someone may spend Thanksgiving outside and alone when it is such a family and home centered holiday. Churches and community groups throughout Sacramento serve special meals at locations all around the area.
This Thanksgiving we are particularly thankful that a change is in the air. For years, the city and county have cited homeless people for sleeping outside in doorways or river camps or empty fields. The difficulty is that the shelters are always full, the waiting lists for affordable housing are long, so where are people to go?
Just two indicators of the dimension of the unmet need:
1. When the Section 8 waiting list was opened for just 5 days a year ago, 35,000 households applied. Officials estimate that equals 100,000 people.
2. The official Sacramento County count last January found 1,000 homeless people living outside.
When a large tent city materialized in a rather visible vacant field recently, it precipitated a recognition that the problem of homeless camping was not primarily a criminal matter but a visible proof of the lack of sufficient shelters and affordable housing in Sacramento.
Two excellent Sacramento Bee Editorials ensued. And the New York Times wrote about two friends, both alcoholics who had been homeless for years in Seattle, who moved into the type of permanent housing with voluntary social services that will be an integral part of Sacramento’s effort to end chronic homelessness. If we look at the two Bee editorials as describing the “before,” the Times article describes the “after.” All three are copied below.
Stuart Leavenworth: Rousting the homeless embarrasses our community
By Stuart Leavenworth - sleavenworth@sacbee.com
Sacramento Bee: Published 12:00 am PST Sunday, November 11, 2007
Two weeks ago, I was riding my bicycle past Sacramento’s field of dreams – the downtown rail yard – when suddenly I came upon Sacramento’s field of broken dreams.
Just north of the rail yard, dozens of homeless people had established a makeshift tent city on a vacant lot on North B Street.
The encampment looked reasonably clean, considering that its occupants had apparently been living there for a week or more. Several of the tents were shiny and new, as if someone had bought them straight off the shelf at REI.
Yet no one would mistake this camp for Bohemian Grove. The lot was dusty and forlorn, and the faces in the crowd revealed a gnarled, leathery look that comes with years of living on the street. As I rode by, some the squatters were gathered around a sedan whose well-coifed driver was either a preacher or a dope dealer. I didn’t stick around to find out.
As I expected, the North B Street encampment didn’t last long. Last week, the police rousted the squatters, as they were obligated to do, following complaints from nearby property owners.
Now the tent dwellers are scattered elsewhere. Some are at the Cal Expo winter shelter that the county opened early. Others are probably back at the river. Soon they will be rousted again, as they have been before, again and again, in a pattern of predictable police action that harkens back to the days of Woody Guthrie, and before him, Charles Dickens.
Dickens wrote about street urchins and beggars, and the ability of more privileged classes to treat these people as subhuman. To treat a person as subhuman, you must build a wall of moral superiority between them and yourself. To prevent any sympathy from permeating this wall, you must conclude that everyone who is homeless, or at least an overwhelming majority of them, bear sole responsibility for their plight. All they lack is the will and the fortitude to upright themselves.
For more than a decade, efforts to help the homeless, in Sacramento and elsewhere, have run up against this wall. Writing in The Bee in 1995, a midtown resident declared that “a considerable segment of the transient population got that way as a result of deliberate lifestyle choices … Many have destroyed the usual safety net of family, friends, employer and church through substance abuse, criminal involvement and irresponsibility.”
Last week, after The Bee reported on the rousting of the North B Street encampment, some readers posted their approval.
“Obviously, homeless people need some motivation to change their lives,” wrote one reader who posted a message on The Bee’s Web Site. “Most people work and keep a residence because we are motivated to eat, sleep and raise a family. Unfortunately, we cannot find a good way to motivate homeless people to become productive.”
Not everyone in Sacramento shares such sentiments. Many people are sympathetic. An equal number are frustrated, and rightfully so. Anyone who has been harassed by vagrants or encountered the trash they leave behind must wonder if Sacramento suffers from an excess of tolerance.
Yet stereotyping the homeless won’t get rid of them. Quite the opposite: It invites paralysis. If you can convince yourself that all homeless are the same – whether they are serial inebriates, disabled veterans, families who have just lost their homes or people with long-standing mental illnesses – then you are less likely to press for solutions and hold local leaders accountable.
On paper, both the city and county have endorsed a 10-year plan to end homelessness by 2016. (Read it at www.communitycouncil.org/homelessplan). Tim Brown, former director of Loaves and Fishes, says some 500 units of housing are now in the works – along with services – to “break the cycle of homelessness.”
Despite its merits, the 10-year plan skirts a key question: How will authorities deal with the 1,000-plus people, right now, who are sleeping on the streets?
In recent years, the city and county have been playing a shell game with the tent dwellers. Authorities roust them from parks and sidewalks and – wink, wink – let them camp elsewhere. When the complaints get loud or frequent enough, the police and the park rangers move the homeless elsewhere, and the cycle begins again.
Aside from accomplishing little, this shell game is legally questionable.
Last year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Los Angeles was practicing cruel and unusual punishment by arresting the homeless on public property without providing adequate shelter. The basic legal argument: You can’t criminalize people for sleeping on the street if they have nowhere to go.
In August, a coalition of local homeless individuals and advocates filed a similar federal lawsuit against Sacramento city and county, claiming that authorities were violating the constitutional rights of the homeless by rousting them without adequate options for shelter.
Since that lawsuit was filed, the city and county have changed some of their practices. Instead of citing and arresting the campers at the North B Street lot, authorities first gave them warnings. Later they handed out 70 motel vouchers so the homeless would have a place to stay until the county opened its winter shelter at Cal Expo. It did so on Friday, one week early.
Yet once the Cal Expo shelter closes at the end of winter, its occupants will go back on the street. The shell game will continue.
City and county leaders need to settle this lawsuit. They have several options. They could agree to stop arresting the homeless for sleeping in certain public spaces at night, as Los Angeles and San Diego have done. Better yet, they could establish year-round shelters as they work to expand permanent housing.
They could also consider something more radical: Establishment of a semi-permanent tent camp, with rules and sanitation facilities, similar to the one that has survived in Portland, Ore., known as Dignity Village. (Go to www.dignityvillage.org for more information).
It’s optimistic to think that, in a mere nine years, Sacramento could end homelessness. Given the state of the economy and our mental health services, it seems a bit dreamy to me.
But one thing’s for sure: The practice of rousting the tent camps is a failed policy. It embarrasses us as a community. It scatters the homeless into places where they are more likely to face harassment and attacks. It’s Dickensian in its application. It needs to come to an end.
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/482019.html
Editorial: Progress, slow progress
Here and nationally, homelessness wanes
Sacramento Bee: Published 12:00 am PST Monday, November 12, 2007
Almost overnight, a vast homeless camp sprang up recently on vacant land north of downtown. In the gentrifying neighborhoods of the center city, an endless stream of homeless people can be seen huddled in doorways or trundling by pushing grocery carts.
To the weary public, homelessness looks intractable. It is not. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last week announced “a 12 percent decline in the number of persons experiencing chronic homelessness in the nation.” Based on homeless counts that took place in 3,900 cities across the country, the number of chronic homeless fell from 175,914 in 2005 to 155,623 in 2006.
Loaves and Fishes, the private charity that feeds homeless people in Sacramento, reports the number of diners at its facility, half of whom are chronically homeless, has been trending down for years, from 907 a day in the mid-90s to about 460 a day now.
Sacramento County launched a 10-year program to end homelessness last year. This year, it has moved 90 chronically homeless people into permanent shelter.
But while there is progress, homelessness is still a real problem. And it’s neither fair nor effective to dump this problem into the hands of police officers, even ones as capable as Mike Cooper and Mark Zoulas.
Dubbed Batman and Robin by the homeless, the two veteran cops make the difficult calls to arrest and confiscate meager belongings of homeless campers or steer them someplace else where they can squat safely for a while. They do it as well as it can be done. But criminalizing the homeless is costly and solves nothing.
Sacramento needs permanent, year-round shelters. These need to be tailored to special populations, such as the mentally ill and drug addicted. We need shelters that can accommodate couples and families.
For a weary and frustrated public, it’s important to understand that progress is being made, in Sacramento and across the nation. It’s slow and sometimes hard to see. But the progress is real. And we can’t afford to let up on efforts to build on it.
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/484948.html
This Land
On the Bottle, Off the Streets, Halfway There
New York Times: November 11, 2007
By DAN BARRY, SEATTLE
The Moocher introduced them years ago down by the ferry terminal, near that “No Loitering” sign scratched up to read “Know Loitering.” It was Ed, meet Daryl, Daryl, Ed, between sips and slugs of bottom-shelf whiskey and high-octane beer.
Soon, in the blathering small talk that kills time, Ed Myers and Daryl Jordan identified a bond beyond a shared dislike for the Moocher, who drank but never bought. They both had survived the same firefight in Vietnam, it seemed; brothers now, in blood and booze.
Together they panhandled with Nam Vet Needs Help signs at the highway entrance, converted their proceeds into Icehouse beer and Rich & Rare whiskey, and shared their nights in the perpetual dusk beneath the elevated highway, taking turns seeking the full sleep that never came, so loud was the traffic above, so naked were they below, in addled vulnerability.
Now and then they came in from the elements, sometimes to the same shelter, sometimes to separate shelters, sometimes to the Sobering Support Center on Boren Avenue, where you store your shoes and coat in a black plastic bag, have your vitals checked, accept the soup and juice or not, then fold up on a thin mat over concrete.
If separated, Daryl would spend the early morning pacing the dark streets, until finally here would be Ed, already to drinking to quell those first shakes of the day. And the two would return to Know Loitering.
They came to know the jagged pieces of each other’s bottle-shattered past, the broken marriages, the lost jobs, the ghosts. Daryl still sees what he saw in Vietnam. As for Ed, he was working on a fifth one day in his Iowa hometown when suddenly, there before him, stood his father and grandfather, telling him for shame. That both were dead only underscored the point.
Ed dumped the bottle and didn’t drink for 12 years — until one day he did. Back he fell to the hard, hard streets, which at least offered up another man who understood. Daryl.
Hell, Daryl was there that Thanksgiving time when a woman slipped Ed two twenties; they gave thanks with two days of beer, whiskey and chicken-fried-steak dinners. And Daryl was there when some young cop poured out most of a fifth and tossed the bottle on the ground, prompting Ed to say he didn’t appreciate littering.
Early last year, some people, not cops, tracked Daryl down at the sobering center, where he had slept off a drunk 360 times in one calendar year. They were from a homeless outreach organization and they had some news, good for a change.
The organization had just built a 75-unit residence for homeless chronic alcoholics at 1811 Eastlake Avenue, and was offering rooms to the frailest and costliest to the system, as determined by time spent in the sobering center, the emergency room and jail. The idea: provide them first with housing and meals, gain their trust, then encourage them to partake of the available services, including treatment for chemical dependency.
No mandatory meetings or church-going. And one more thing, crucial to all: You can drink in this place.
Welcome, Daryl. A month later: Welcome, Ed.
“I damn near bawled,” Ed recalls.
The $11 million project has endured the angry complaints of some that it uses public money to enable, even reward, chronic inebriates. And Bill Hobson, the director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, has met that anger with some of his own.
First, he says, the complaints reflect no understanding of the grip of alcoholism: Do you really think these men and women would rather live on the streets? Second, the cost to the public appears to have dropped as the number of visits to the emergency room, jail and the sobering center has plummeted.
Finally, he asks, what kind of equation of humanity is this: Since you refuse to stop drinking, since you refuse to address your disease, you must die on the streets.
“These guys have nothing going for them,” he says. “They could not be more dispossessed.”
So, welcome. Pay a third of your disability income for rent, and remember to behave; this isn’t a party house.
The handsome building at 1811 Eastlake stands on the shores of Interstate 5, a short walk from both the sobering center and a convenience store that sells cheap staples like cans of Icehouse and Midnight Special tobacco. Its first floor includes a laundry, a nurse’s office, counseling rooms and a bulletin board adorned with photos of smiling residents.
Captured in those snapshot smiles, evidence of this life: missing teeth, ill-fitting clothes, faces disfigured by subdural hematomas — from beatings and falls to the pavement. Some residents snatch these photos to decorate their rooms, along with the cardboard signs they once used while panhandling.
Above are three floors of studio apartments, including one for Daryl and one for Ed, both immaculately maintained. Daryl, 59 and with a left forefinger burnt orange by tobacco, was July’s resident of the month. Ed, 61 and with a taste for western-style clothes, was August’s. The poster boys for visiting journalists , forever twinned, it seemed.
Then something happened. On July 1, one day not blurred in memory, Ed felt he needed some nutrients, so he fixed himself a tomato beer: tomato juice and a can of Rainier. He took a sip, winced, took another sip, winced, and that was that. He hasn’t had a drink since.
“It didn’t taste good anymore,” Ed says.
Ed has been drinking ginger ale, and Daryl has been struggling. For a long while Daryl would not go to Ed’s apartment, with its coffee table and La-Z-Boy, and the occasional sound of a resident falling to the floor upstairs. He didn’t want to drink in front of Ed because he didn’t want to tempt his friend, and because, because — “I’m done trying,” he says, eyes tearing.
The other day Daryl was back in Ed’s cozy apartment. Ed was drinking coffee he had just brewed, and Daryl was drinking a can of Rainier from that six-pack Ed never finished. They talked around old and fresh wars for a while, but it was clear that whatever Ed was looking at, Daryl could not yet see.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/us/11land.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
So let us be grateful for our present and future blessings this Thanksgiving.
Joan Burke
Director of Advocacy
Loaves & Fishes
