The San Diego Point-In-Time Count is a federally mandated annual report that identifies the number of homeless individuals and families in the county on one particular day. The 2016 report, which was released at the end of April, showed less than a one percent decrease from the previous year in the number of homeless people in San Diego County.
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San Diego’s Crisis of Compassion: Scorn, Indifference Don’t Solve Homelessness
It doesn’t take the recently released Point in Time Count report to know that the number of unsheltered people in downtown San Diego is exploding. Seeing every vacant lot encircled with blue tent and tarp encampments propped against chain-link fencing, has ceased to evoke alarm. It’s now the norm.
Last week, homeless advocates, including myself, confronted the mayor for authorizing installation of a $57,000 rock bed under an overpass where homeless people frequently camped. On social media, we were accused of being bleeding hearts who were giving aid and comfort to creatures who don’t deserve our concern. They called the ugly barrier that was built without a shred of effort to be attractive, a “rock garden”! When one of our group spoke at City Council about the inhumanity of using pest-control tactics to repel human beings, two councilpersons actually giggled!
When did we get to be so heartless and mean? When did it become acceptable to scorn those who are less fortunate and mock those who are compassionate? [Read more…]
San Diego Homeless Advocates Rock the City Council
Anatomy of a successful press event
Some days I marvel at the value of the network of good people that has grown in our community—people involved in so many different areas, all so critical, who come together to support one another in our various efforts. Without that, we could have never pulled off the very successful action on Tuesday April 19 in protest of the City’s reprehensible decision to fill an underpass in Sherman Heights where homeless people take shelter with rocks.
This was a case where all systems were running at peak performance. For the sake of all of those younger people who are just starting to dip their toes in the art of community organizing, here’s how it goes when you have a cadre of like-minded friends to call upon for a cause. (I’m using actual first names here because all of those people deserve the kudos.) In the end, that’s more valuable than a pile of money and hired hands. [Read more…]
Is It All Coming Together?
Is it all coming together,
or all falling apart?
I can’t tell anymore.
I came with love,
but can’t find your heart. [Read more…]
San Diego’s Old Central Library: Public Benefit or Profit Center?
A not-so-common idea for a building that belongs to us
For three years, 150,000 square feet of space in downtown, belonging to the citizens of San Diego, has stood vacant. Each night, for these past three years, impoverished human beings have spread their cardboard beds on the brass inlays of the terrazzo at the entrance of the old Central Library on E Street.
But any suggestion that this place could provide shelter for homeless people is dead on arrival, so I won’t be wasting words on that idea. But I do think we need to come up with a fair and just use of this building that retains the spirit of its original reason for being built. After all, it belongs to us, if we are willing to fight for it and put a little imagination into its transformation. [Read more…]
Vertigo
Spinning a web,
a wisp, a hair, a thread,
flings from her matted head
spinning, spinning,
nauseous with terror,
I watch helplessly
as her skin
slides along that sliver that binds us. [Read more…]
Tiny Village of Tiny Shelters for San Diego Homeless: Small is the New Sexy
No question about it—being involved in a coalition to build a tiny village of tiny shelters for people who are without a place to live, is damn exciting! I can’t put my finger on exactly why this is taking over my brain activity—from waking up in the morning ready to get online and share ideas, to dreaming about it at night. Maybe it’s what someone at our community meeting last week said about it—tiny homes are sexy! [Read more…]
Emergency Shelter in San Diego: Getting Beyond the Game of ‘Mother May I’
Back when I was a kid, about a billion years ago, all the kids in the neighborhood would hang out after school until it got dark, or we got hungry, playing games like tag and Hide-and-Seek with the entire neighborhood for our playground. We didn’t get in trouble or kidnapped … (well there was the time 5-year-old Johnny Pappa disappeared and everyone in the neighborhood was out looking for him well past bed-time, until his brother found him sleeping UNDER his bed).
One game we played was “Mother, May I?”. The kid who was the “Mother” stood at one end of the yard and everyone else stood some distance away facing her. The Mother would tell each kid what kind of step they could take towards her or away from her. The goal was to get close enough to tag the Mother and then you would become the Mother. The catch was that if you didn’t ask, “Mother May I?” before taking the step, you missed your turn. [Read more…]
Emergency Shelter for San Diego’s Most Vulnerable
Using school data, we can prove that close to 10,000 families in San Diego County are homeless and are not included in the Point-in-Time Count (PITC) that is conducted every year throughout the country to determine how to allocate HUD funds for homelessness programs.
They are not being counted because single mothers, who for a myriad of reasons become homeless, will wisely prioritize their personal safety and the safety of their children over anything else. So while their male counterparts will often sleep “rough” on the streets or in the canyons, or compete for the few emergency beds in City and County shelters, 80% of the kids reported as homeless by the schools are spending their nights doubling up with “friends and relatives”. [Read more…]
San Diego Police Impound Tiny Shelter, Arrest Homeless Man
A wooden box is not a home…but…
Part three of the quartet of storms pounding San Diego this week is in full force as I sit here at my computer. The alert goes off on my phone signaling a flash flood warning. The shade cloth over my neighbor’s garden has disengaged itself from two of the poles securing it to earth and is preparing for takeoff.
Peering out the rain-whipped, sliding-glass doors that safely separate me from the deluge outside on my patio, I can’t help but wonder how the people living out on the streets are faring in this godawful storm. Even those fortunate enough to have a tent can’t be feeling protected right now.
Earlier today, local homeless advocate Lisa Kogan had given me an update on the 4’ x 7’ wood structure that she had built for Red, a homeless man she befriended. [Read more…]
HUD Bureaucrats to San Diego’s Homeless Service Providers: My Way or the Highway
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently came out with a 55-page document titled “Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing: Defining “Chronically Homeless”.
I can only imagine the thousands of dollars spent to clarify that: agencies receiving HUD funds to serve chronically homeless people cannot use those funds for persons or households if any of the periods separating the requisite “4 separate occasions in the past 3 years” where they were homeless (according to the HUD definition of homeless) were less than 7 nights.
If that sounds convoluted to you, imagine being an underpaid, intake staff person at an underfunded homeless service agency, interviewing a homeless client to determine if they can accept him or her into the program without jeopardizing their HUD funding. [Read more…]
This Supersedes Everything
I drove over the crest of the hill to my home,
just as the sun was departing in a glorious inferno of red orange yellow.
Oh Nature, you can be such a show off!
I had to pull over and pause to pay tribute,
pause to marvel,
as human eyes have marveled for millennium.
I have never seen a creature not human
watch the sunset in awe,
and I muse that perhaps this is our raison d’être,
to simply pay homage to the magnificence of creation. [Read more…]
