Our organization was an early supporter of the Housing First approach to dealing with the chronic homeless as the best method to address the long-term and large-scale illegal camping in the American River Parkway that had deprived the residents of the adjacent communities from safely using their part of the Parkway.
This approach, now adopted by the city and county, calls for placing the chronic homeless in housing before delivering services to them that can help them climb out of their homeless state.
Congruent with the solid reasoning of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, that until you have a sense of safety and security (housing and food), the chronic homeless (those who have been homeless for years) can’t really deal with the larger issues of work, education, and building a future.
This is a good approach, but it seems to be lately overshadowed by the legal one of fighting the very ability of local communities to regulate sleeping/camping in public by the homeless, which strategy has had some success in Los Angeles and is now being implemented here.
The outcome of this is an acceptance by community leadership of camping in public, and establishing tent cities in a certain area; which will virtually destroy the ability of those who are doing business or living in or near that area, from pursuing their futures without having to deal with the results of tent cities, so well outlined in the recent article in City Journal we summarized in our blog post of October 30th at http://parkwayblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/homelessness-in-la.html
Stuart Leavenworth: Rousting the homeless embarrasses our community
By Stuart Leavenworth - sleavenworth@sacbee.com
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 railyard – when suddenly I came upon Sacramento's field of broken dreams.
Just north of the railyard, 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…
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."…
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?...
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).
