A good perspective from someone who went out on the homeless count, though he is mistaken that choice doesn’t play a major role in homelessness, validated by the fact that virtually all of the people on the streets receive government funds from one source or another and though, on their own, they may not be able to afford to provide themselves with housing, it is not that difficult to choose to bunk up with one or two others to secure housing, but most of them choose not to do that.
Just this week one article about a woman who has been homeless in Carmichael for some time, recently noted:
“Janet Moore-Anderson pushed her shopping cart filled with aluminum cans and glass bottles down Fair Oaks Boulevard last week.
"I've been on the streets on and off for the past two years," said the homeless 62-year-old woman, who sleeps nights at supermarket shopping centers where the lights provide some safety and overhangs keep her dry on rainy nights.
“Moore-Anderson, in full makeup, was on her way to a recycling center to augment her $856 monthly Social Security check. After spending almost an hour traversing cars, bus benches and telephone poles, she earned $15….
“Moore-Anderson has been in Carmichael for three months. She came from Santa Barbara.
“She is divorced, and her five children have their own families, she said. Her oldest is 45.
“She arrived in Carmichael to gather signatures at shopping centers and liked the area, she said. She prefers Carmichael to Sacramento because she feels safer at night. "At 2 to 3 in the morning, I get a little apprehensive, but I'm not scared," she said.”
Taking it to the streets
Our writer joins a one-night survey to count Sacramento’s homeless
By John Motsinger
Like anyone who has lived in an urban center for longer than a few months, I learned to ignore the homeless long ago. Not ignore, exactly, because I definitely still notice them, even make eye contact sometimes and give a little nod what’s up. I’ll hand off my Styrofoam carton of half-eaten enchiladas or forfeit the 40 cents jangling in my pocket, but I rarely look beyond the surface. In most big cities, there are simply too many of them to care about any one mangy-looking guy on the street. Why give this dude money but not the next?
My dismissive attitude probably stems from years spent living in San Francisco’s Mission District, where muggings were common and vandalism was a near nightly occurrence, and the police were legitimately needed on regular patrol. My limited encounters have never answered fundamental questions like, how do these people become homeless in the first place? And how can I really help them?
The 2008 street count seemed like the perfect opportunity to find out. So on Tuesday, January 29, I joined a team of intrepid volunteers to learn more about this marginalized population. For the second year in a row, the Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance has coordinated a massive effort to count the homeless living on the streets as part of the city and county’s 10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness. An accurate “point-in-time” count is instrumental in determining the extent of the need and securing federal, state and local dollars to implement a solution.
The picture painted by last year’s count was not pretty. A total of 2,452 people were counted, including 1,005 living on the streets. Within the population counted, 54 percent had alcohol- or drug-related disabilities, 28 percent had mental-health disabilities, 23 percent had been victims of domestic violence and 16 percent were veterans. Using a statistical method of extrapolation developed in New York City and Los Angeles, those 2,452 counted on January 30, 2007, represent an estimated 4,367 people countywide who were homeless at some point during the year.
Anyone who thinks, as I did, that these people are out on the streets by choice is wrong. They are not the anarchist punks on Haight Street bumming your change to buy weed so they can frolic in Golden Gate Park stoned all afternoon. No, the folks out there in Sacramento on a cold, wet night in January were the truly down and out, the sick and troubled, the shattered … but not broken.
