'Some Sort of Hell': How One of the Wealthiest Cities in America Treats Its Homeless
http://www.alternet.org/some-sort-hell-how-one-wealthiest-cities-america-treats-its-homeless
SAN JOSE, Calif.—When San Jose dismantled the "Jungle," the nation’s largest homeless encampment, many of its residents with nowhere to go scattered. They found hiding places in the scores of small, less visible encampments within the city, where more than 5,000 people sleep unsheltered on a given night.
But one group of about three dozen evictees gathered what they could salvage in backpacks and trash bags, and crossed a bridge to a spot about a mile away. They found a clean patch of grass near Coyote Creek, the same creek that the Jungle abutted. There, they pitched tents donated by some concerned citizens, assigned themselves chores and hoped for the best.
Instead, they got marching orders. After weathering the hardest rains to fall in these parts in a decade, the campers found 72-hour eviction notices on their tents. Once again, a little more than a week after their forced flight from the Jungle, they had no idea where they might live.
“This is some sort of hell,” said Raul, 57 (who didn’t want his last name used), a life-long resident of San Jose who had lived in the Jungle for nearly eight years. He had nothing left of the home he had created, just a knapsack, his chihuahua Pepe, and a new pup tent. He was so depressed, he could barely lift his head.
= new reply since forum marked as read
For fear of "attracting" more poor.
Berkeley has actually sold all its public housing units, and our mayor is on record as saying that it's a bad idea to build low-incoming housing. (The implied reason is that it attracts "the wrong type"
. He has kept measures and monies to build low-incoming housing stalled in committees and consultants and reports for years while luxury apartments get built by a company called Panoramic Interests that has made 60 million dollars off the city of Berkeley. The black population of Berkeley has decreased from 30% to 10%: I think that's just been within the time I've been here - it's been a visual decrease!
During a recent City Council meeting in which "the people" were given an open mic to speak, one "homeless girl" talked about coming to Berkeley because it had "better resources" and making it her home. I suspect she was a plant, paid to make that statement by propertied interests who want to propagate the idea that homeless people are invading Berkeley just to take advantage of our resources. My suspicion is based on two reasons:
1) The meeting was about Police Misconduct - this statement was just inserted in there like a random troll comment from someone that didn't even read the article they are commenting on.
2) Berkeley's resources are a myth. This girl didn't name any specific ones because there aren't any. This was a preemptive strike because the recent protest activity looked like Berkeley's "hippie spirit" might be reviving and people might be looking around and wondering where their old generosity went. While Berkeley has a myth of generosity to the homeless based on the 60s, Berkeley has actually been relentlessly cruel about withholding and denying services in order to avoid "attracting" people for years.
This isn't to say the poor girl wasn't actually a drifter of some sort - she seemed a bit confused. I think someone just slipped her a few bucks to say something and she was grateful for the money. She probably thought it was a great thing to say how wonderful and generous Berkeley was.
Anyway - with "noise" like this, it's really hard to get the signal through that the people at the bottom of the social scale - the ones who are doing all the service jobs that keep the city going - don't have a local place to live. It's unfair to expect a person making minimum wage to commute 2 hours from a suburb. In San Francisco, families are packed like sardines into single rooms, with a shared bathroom down the hall, and still have to hold down 2 jobs to pay the rent. This is only a step away from homelessness. Exhaustion, depression, physical disability...and then you've slid from minimum wage "servant" to one of these drifters. This is because Social Services in the Bay Area does not focus on keeping you in a stable housing situation first. They focus on their documentation, and driving you crazy with their documentation, first - and in the East Bay they do nothing to help you with housing, and in fact make stable housing impossible because they provide neither the housing nor enough money for the housing. So how are you supposed to "get a job" under those circumstances? This is nuts!!!
To address this problem, there needs to be more Social Services caseworkers, and more customized treatment of people who have tumbled to the very bottom of the heap. There needs to be focus on HOUSING FIRST. And - sorry NIMBYs - the housing needs to be IN THE CITY because that is where the services are, and otherwise who is going to pay for transportation to those services? The time to get to all those appointments is extremely draining on poor people who are holding down multiple "full time jobs" in terms of bureaucracy and medical care even as they are trying to get work.
HOUSING FIRST.
HOUSING FIRST.
HOUSING FIRST.
HOUSING FIRST.
HOUSING FIRST.
THIS MEANS YOU SAN JOSE, SAN FRANCISCO, OAKLAND, BERKELEY, and EMERYVILLE!
