Joe Anybody Homeless Blog

VIDEO: Sleep is a Human Right - Metal at City Hall Homeless Vigil 1.5.12

2012-01-15T10:47:00.000-08:00

Sleep is a Human Right - Metal at City Hall Homeless Vigil 1.5.12

http://youtu.be/yr3YXBjGNng [13:44 minute video}

I stop by the vigil for housless folks that is going on 24-7 in front of Portland City Hall.

This was around noon on Thursday 1.5.11.
Metal tells me what is happening with regards to this vigil outside of city halls front doors.

He tells me about his involvement the vigil, which began after Occupy Portland protesters was evicted from the parks across the street.

1438 Flags displayed for the homeless in my community 2008 video

2012-01-08T12:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.archive.org/details/HomelessOnMayDay1438Flags

May Day 2008 I filmed this in Portland Oregon at the May Day celebration. A display with flags for those that were homeless on May Day in my community.

Adopt a Homeless Person - Portland website

2011-09-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

A website that I stumbled upon today that looks like it may be one that is produced here in Portland Oregon. It seems like it has some good ideas going on it. I only briefly looked.

http://liv-n-on-the-streets.com/mission-statement/

One concern was the topic "Adopt a Bum"
Not sure if that is PC to be saying / using the word "bum" in that fashion.
The term is derogatory and demeaning in my opinion.

I do have some reserve about the integrity of the website when I see words used like that being used.

But am giving some print space here to ...look into this more and see "just what going on"

http://liv-n-on-the-streets.com/

State of the Union (blogspot) Pictures and more

2011-09-28T15:17:00.001-07:00

http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/

Worth checking out folks - good pictures & more

Solidarity = Love

Thanks From Joe Anybody

LACAN - What I found about them .... is all good stuff!

2011-07-20T19:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.cangress.org/our_work.htm

Our Mission

The mission of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) is to help people dealing with poverty create & discover opportunities, while serving as a vehicle to ensure they have voice, power & opinion in the decisions that are directly affecting them.

Our overarching goals focused on social change are:
•Organize and empower community residents to work collectively to change the relationships of power that affect our community.

•Create an organization and organizing model that eradicate the race, class, gender barriers that are used to prevent communities from building true power.

•Eliminate the multiple forms of violence used against and within our community to maintain status quo.

Organizing Principle

The organizing principle of the LA CAN is to build indigenous leadership within the Central City East community to address the multitude of problems faced by homeless and very low-income residents of the community. Our community has long been disenfranchised and ignored or has had “leaders” that were not representative of the community speak on its behalf. The service-rich community of Central City East has led to a dysfunctional culture of dependence reinforced by outdated program rules and illegal practices utilized by slum-lords and oftentimes law enforcement. This “culture,” based on taking orders and not questioning the necessity of those orders, has led to the creation of community norms which counter those things needed to achieve widespread systemic change. This reality is what led to the formation of LA CAN and continues to drive the need to build indigenous leadership equipped to build power and make systemic change.

The four organizing strategies employed by LA CAN are:
1. Legal: Protecting the civil rights of homeless and low-income people utilizing impact litigation that protects the overall community. For example, a) City Center Redevelopment Plan Lawsuit, b) Anti-poverty litigation such as, anti-sweep and quality of life defenses, and c) Residential Hotel lawsuits aimed at unfair business practices, ongoing tenant defense and habitability complaints.

2. Community Education & Empowerment: Building a broad base of informed residents that possess the tools necessary to defend their tenant, civil and human rights, both on the streets and in residential hotels. For example, one-on-one education in the streets [as a part of overall outreach], monthly teach-ins for downtown residents, community lawyering and ongoing legal clinics.

3. Community Organizing and Leadership Development: Building a broad base organization of informed leaders and constituents who understand gentrification and its many tenets and are equipped to fight for progressive redevelopment policy and its tangible benefits. For example, implementation of the LA CAN leadership development program, securing local hiring agreements, stopping the 28-Day Shuffle, and promoting voter engagement as a means of civic participation.

4. Grassroots Policy and Community-Based Research: Developing grassroots policy that promotes opportunities for living-wage employment and affordable housing that meets the income levels of our constituents. In addition, investigating, monitoring and enforcing current policy that should benefit our constituents. For example, the Share the Wealth Platform, local hiring and training provisions in redevelopment law, and changing the Rent Stabilization Ordinance to create parity between residential hotel and apartment tenants.

May 2011 Commissioner Kafoury - homelessness and help

2011-05-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

Commissioner Kafoury: In this economic crisis, County must make wise investments.
By Deborah Kafoury, Contributing Writer: with Street Roots.

http://streetroots.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/commissioner-kafoury-in-this-economic-crisis-county-must-make-wise-investments/#more-5205

May 16 2011

On a cold night last winter, I took my 10-year-old son with me to serve dinner at the Winter Warming Shelter. By the time we arrived, families were already lined up outside.

The evening flew by. While I helped dish out servings of lasagna, salad and roasted vegetables, my son played with the children who were staying at the shelter.

As we were driving home, I thanked my son for coming with me and asked him what he thought about the evening. He was silent for a minute and then, remembering the families waiting by the door, said “it was really cold out tonight.”

My children are used to dinner time conversation about those in need. We talk about poverty, homelessness and helping others. But all the words in the world cannot replace an evening’s experience.

We all know times are tough. Sometimes the problems feel so daunting that you don’t know where to begin. As your Multnomah County Commissioner, one of the best opportunities I have to make a difference is through the County’s Budget.

On May 5, County Chair Jeff Cogen released his proposed budget. My fellow Commissioners and I have just over a month to ask questions, propose changes, and adopt a balanced budget.

Over one third of the County’s budget comes from the state and federal governments. We are expecting anywhere from $17 million to $60 million of cuts to essential services like mental and physical health care, public safety, and energy assistance.

On the one hand, given the unknown cuts ahead, I feel the need to be conservative with our general fund. If the state cuts programs that people in our community can not live without, we may have to step in.

On the other hand, the hard times are here and I believe we need to invest in people who need help.

My priorities for this year include a few items that I know will make a difference in people’s lives immediately. Some of these items I’ve highlighted below were in the Chair’s proposed budget and some I will propose as amendments to the budget.

+Short Term Rent Assistance. It works. With small amounts of money we can prevent and end homelessness. This year, the County devoted a little more than $354,000 to short-term rent assistance. In this budget, Chair Cogen added an additional $500,000, which is tremendous. But with stimulus funds going away, this increased investment will only maintain the current level of rent assistance. Already, agencies that distribute rent assistance run out by the 5th of every month. For that reason, I’m going to ask the Board to double the proposed addition to $1 million. (If you need rent assistance, please call 211).

+Bridges to Housing provides 139 previously homeless families with housing and intensive case management. The private grant funding that built this program is now finished. It is critical housing for families that we’ve built over the last five years and we can’t afford to let it go away. Thank you to the Chair for including an additional $480,000 to fully fund Bridges to Housing.

+ East County Outreach. People are sleeping outside from Forest Park to Thousand Acres outside of Troutdale. Last year, the County partnered with JOIN on a pilot program to reach out to people camping in East County. Our small investment of $75,000 was much more effective at ending homelessness than continued sweeps by the Sheriff’s office. I will propose that the County continue to fund this effort.

+ Rapid Re-Housing. For the last two years, I’ve requested emergency funding to house families in our winter warming shelter. The first year, we housed 32 families in 30 days. Last year, we housed over 65 families. At my request, Chair Cogen added $325,000 to the budget again this year, so we don’t have to wait for an emergency. This strategy works to get families quickly out of shelter and into stable housing.

+ Action for Prosperity. The County’s dedicated anti-poverty providers are trying new ways to address homelessness. The newest approach pairs rent assistance, case management, and job training together for families in crisis. Stimulus dollars initially funded this program, named Action for Prosperity. I will be advocating adding $195,000 for another phase of this initiative, leveraging investments from the Housing Authority of Portland and Worksystems Inc, our partners in this effort.

+ Street Roots’ Rose City Resource. County staff and those we contract with use this guide on a daily basis. It’s time we started paying our fair share of the cost to produce and distribute it. The Chair included $20,000 in the proposed budget to make sure the Street Roots’ Rose City Resource continues to exist.

Together, these items total just over $2.1 million. In light of the economic crisis we find ourselves in, these are wise investments that will help people immediately. I would appreciate any feedback you have on these proposals and on the budget in general. Email me at district1@multco.us or come to a budget hearing and share your opinion. The full schedule and link to the proposed budget is available at here.

Deborah Kafoury is a Mult. County Commissioner.

Portland junkie street kids - a corporate media TV clip

2011-04-10T22:17:00.000-07:00

2011 posted online

A story of sucess and hope - A hand up - In Solidarity

2011-01-15T21:19:00.000-08:00

2011 in Jail For Sitting on a Sidewalk in SF California

2011-01-01T23:58:00.000-08:00

Police State: "Lefty" San Francisco Can Throw People in Jail For Sitting on a Sidewalk
Propelled by wealthy donors and business interests, a new sit-lie ordinance in San Francisco gives police the power to fine and arrest people for resting on the sidewalk.
December 20, 2010 |

Photo Credit: AFP
http://www.alternet.org/story/149266/police_state:_cops_can_throw_people_in_jail_for_sitting_on_a_sidewalk?page=entire

When Jon Paul, a 69-year-old who's been homeless for 39 years, pulls off his cowboy hat and bows his head, I think he's being chivalrous. Instead he knocks on his forehead to show me his steel plate. He got it in Vietnam about 39 years ago. He says that when he came back from that war he had to live on the street because he "couldn't stand to be inside anymore."

In addition to the metal in his forehead, Paul's stint in Vietnam earned him a whopping $400 a month, or just enough to pay for about two weeks in a SRO (single residence occupancy). So partly through choice ("I like being out here because I can help people") and partly through necessity, he sleeps on the street in San Francisco's Mission District.

Starting last Friday, Paul and the rest of the city's homeless (numbering between 7,000 and 10,000) won't legally be allowed to do that anymore, a development that leaves him shaking his head in bewilderment, saying “fuck that.” On November 2, as the GOP swept into a majority in the House on Teabagger juice, voters in freewheeling San Francisco -- one of the haloed liberal utopias bookending dreaded "flyover country" -- passed Proposition L, a sit-lie ordinance that outlaws sleeping (or resting or sitting) on a public sidewalk between 7am and 11pm.

Police are supposed to give a warning, but after that they can issue a citation that carries a $50-$100 dollar fine. A repeat offense within 24 hours earns the unrepentant sitter a $300-$500 ticket, and/or up to 10 days in jail. If caught sitting or reclining again within 120 days of the original conviction, the individual can be fined $400-$500 dollars and end up in jail for 30 days.

So what does the city of San Francisco have against sitting down in public? Nothing, obviously, as long as you don't look like you're prone to criminal behavior (e.g., homeless).

“If the law were enforced the way it is on the books," the ACLU of Northern California's legal director Allan Schlosser tells AlterNet, “We'd be living in a police state." But as Schlosser explains, the sit-lie ordinance is unlikely to be enforced against, say, the millions of tourists who flood the city with billions of dollars in annual revenues.

Police officials have basically admitted as much. At a March public safety hearing in which the measure was discussed, public defender Jeff Adachi presented a series of slides showing people engaged in the offensive behavior: an attractive (white) woman sitting on a nice suitcase, a (white) kid holding his skateboard on the curb, and a couple of tourists. But the shots were interspersed with pictures of homeless people. Adachi wondered if they'd all be criminals under the new law.

In his rebuttal, assistant police chief Kevin Cashman assured the board that the “good” people depicted in the slides would be warned first and were unlikely to end up getting citations, saying, "Obviously, common sense is going to be part of the training with enforcement of this statute." An earlier PowerPoint presentation by Cashman also contained the creepy promise that the law "Enables Preventative Intervention, Before Accident or Crime Occurs." As Greg Kamin noted on Fog City Journal, Cashman emphasized the law's Minority Report aspect further by adding that sit-lie would "prevent a criminal act from occurring in the first place.”

Actually, what the law is most likely to do is exacerbate the city's horrific homelessness problem. As Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of Coalition on Homelessness pointed out in a phone interview with AlterNet, homeless people are not eligible for housing programs if they have a criminal record. "People wait for years to get housing and then they get knocked out. It's depressing as hell." Since sit-lie carries criminal penalties, a measure designed in part to manage the city's homeless actually plants obstacles to getting them off the streets.

Clearly aware of the optics of a law that fights pre-crime and targets people for the way they look, the city is being mindful of how the ordinance is rolled out. Sgt. Michael Andraychak told AlterNet that although the measure took effect last Friday, the SFPD is still formulating an enforcement policy. Once a game plan is drafted, the department will train officers in the proper use of the ordinance. Andraychak says the law will likely not be enforced until February 1 of next year.

But Bob Offer-Westort of the Coalition on Homelessness says there have already been incidences of individual police officers wielding the rule to hassle the city's homeless -- even before the ordinance became law. As early as election night, Offer-Westort claims there were multiple reports from the Haight and the Castro of police telling homeless youth they weren't allowed to sit on the sidewalk anymore. Offer-Westort says he witnessed a police officer tell a young guy he'd better "move along" because of the new law. Was the guy doing anything to attract police attention? "No. He was sitting cross-legged, hands tucked into his sleeves, because it was a cold day."

Over the course of the campaign, proponents of the measure -- which included Mayor Gavin Newsom, police chief George Gascon (who'd spearheaded a similar campaign targeted at Los Angeles' Skid Row) and other high-level police department representatives -- insisted the law would not be used to harass the city's poorest residents. As homeless advocates raised concerns over the impact of the discriminatory measure on San Francisco's most vulnerable, the Yes on L campaign spokespeople claimed police needed the law to curb aggressive and dangerous behavior by the city's homeless (even though San Francisco has plenty of laws that target people living on the street -- Jennifer Freidenbach says there are about 34 laws aimed at the homeless population).

In fact, the campaign for sit-lie allegedly grew out of efforts to manage a small population of homeless that mass around the Haight. As the story goes, Mayor Gavin Newsom was taking a walk with his daughter down Haight Street last February when he saw someone smoking crack on the sidewalk. The scandalized Newsom announced soon after that he would put a sit-lie measure to the board (but neglected to submit a police report).

Newsom's sudden realization that some homeless people use hard drugs was not the beginning of the push for sit-lie though; a well-oiled PR operation had already been cranking out reports of dangerous, aggressive street culture overtaking the Haight. In the six months leading up to the vote for Prop L, C.W. Nevius, a conservative columnist and former Republican fundraiser, wrote 20 fearmongering op-eds pushing for a sit-lie law. In Nevius' overheated columns, crazed thugs terrorized the neighborhood's law-abiding citizens, and the police were powerless to stop them. "The problem is that in the last year or so, the Haight has gone through an unpleasant transformation," he wrote. “Instead of the usual drowsy drunks and affable stoners, a new group has taken over the sidewalks. They're young, aggressive bullies who confront residents, sit on the sidewalks with pit bulls, and even prey on small-time marijuana dealers." So intimidating were the Haight's street kids, wrote Nevius, that residents were too scared to report crimes to the police.

Teresa Barrett, then police chief of Park Station, which oversees the Haight, held a series of community meetings with Haight residents in which she drummed up fears about rising crime in the neighborhood. (During the course of the campaign Barrett ran afoul of ethics rules when she appeared in an ad for the measure in her police uniform.) Like Nevius, Barrett claimed the police did not have enough authority to curb violent behavior in the area.

But despite dire reports of assault and aggressive behavior, crime stats in the area hadn't increased. At least one of the stories promoted by Nevius turned out to be bogus -- he wrote about a man who was jumped by a homeless man, but the district attorney found that the fight was mutual and ended up dismissing the charges.

Of course, jumping peaceful residents already tends to be illegal. So are many of the other behaviors cited by Nevius, Barrett, Gascon, and others campaigning for sit-lie. Aggressive panhandling and sidewalk obstruction are against the law. The city has strict laws against loitering. In fact, San Francisco was named the seventh "Meanest" city in its treatment of the homeless in a report by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty and the National Coalition for the Homeless. The SFPD issues around 10,000 citations each year for "quality of life" crimes such camping and blocking the sidewalk. Religious Witness for the Homeless found that the city used up $9,847,027 on 56,567 such citations between 2004-2008. (That money, they determined, could be used to house "492 people, put 300 people in a three-month detox center, or pay the salaries of 113 psychiatric outreach workers.)

One of the main arguments for sit-lie was that current laws were inadequate because they required a third party to report threatening behavior. But in a review of local and state laws, the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco and the Bay Area found that a third party was not necessary for police to get involved. "As this report makes clear, these laws can be enforced by police officers without requiring citizens to complain of violations prior to their enforcement," they concluded.

Many of these questions were raised by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which voted overwhelmingly (8-3) against the measure on June 8. "I've got to believe that we can do better than this law and do something that's more meaningful for the public," said Supervisor Bevan Dufty.

Undeterred by the board's vote, Newsom put sit-lie on the ballot as Proposition L, optimistically termed "Civil Sidewalks" by advocates. While some Haight Street business owners and residents who voiced complaints about aggressive street behavior supported the measure, the Prop L campaign was, for the most part, promoted not by the community but by high-level figures in the police department and government, the city's financial interests and its wealthiest residents.

The SF Chamber of Commerce lobbied for the measure and pushed businesses to give money, including the owners of the San Francisco 49ers. Other business interests, few of which have a direct presence in the allegedly dangerous streets of the Haight, followed suit, including the Building Owners and Managers Association of SF, Coalition for SF Neighborhoods, Cole Valley Improvement Association, Mission Merchants Association, Polk District Merchants, and the San Francisco Apartment Association.

The campaign was flush with cash from the city's wealthiest residents. Investor Ron Conway, beloved in Silicon Valley for bankrolling pretty much every big startup to come over the last 20 years, donated a total of $55,000 to the Civil Sidewalks campaign. Conway even lobbied for the measure in a speech at the Bay Area Council Dinner. Other generous donations came from Charles Schwab ($25,000), 49ers President Jed York ($10,000), Kevin Lynch, of Adobe Systems ($1,000) and Jeff Fluhr, the CEO of StubHub ($500). Overall the Yes on L campaign amassed about $280,000 -- cash that went to slick consultants and TV advertising, with ads running during the heavily viewed Giants playoffs.

"It was a classic 'buy the election' campaign," says Friedenbach. The opposition had only $7,802.

The results of the election were also telling. In an analysis of votes by precinct, Chris Roberts of the SF Appeal found that the city's wealthiest neighborhoods were instrumental in passing the legislation, while less affluent areas mostly voted against. "Sit/Lie fared poorly in most voting precincts where one can actually find homeless people sitting on the street," wrote Roberts. The measure failed in the precinct that includes the Haight.

Beyond the many non-Haight business interests and wealthy conservatives that propelled the measure in San Francisco, sit-lie advocates also got help from as far away as New York. The right-wing Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald penned an almost 7,000-word screed in favor of a measure in a city across the country, painting the homeless in the Haight as spoiled, violent vagrants and denouncing homeless advocates and progressives as weaklings whose inaction would sink the city (when tourists suddenly decide to stop coming to San Francisco because of the mean homeless people, an argument that would later crop up in Nevius' columns).

The Manhattan Institute has promoted laws targeting the homeless before. In the early 2000s senior fellow George L. Kelling got $500,000 to consult on the campaign for L.A.'s Skid Row sit-lie law, which was spearheaded by current San Francisco police chief Gascon. Over the years, the conservative think-tank has been instrumental in promoting the "broken windows" theory of local governance, which calls on police to patrol poor neighborhoods for low-level "quality of life" crimes. Scrubbing the bad elements is supposed to trigger magical neighborhood rejuvenation; tax dollars go to police, not all those pesky social programs.

In sit-lie measures, which have cropped up all over the country, including Seattle, L.A., Miami and Chicago, that theory reaches perfection -- criminalizing the poor without the bother of waiting for them to commit a crime.

"We have to look at this in the big-picture context," said Friedenbach. "When the federal government created the homelessness crisis, local governments did not have the means of addressing the issue. So they use the police to manage homeless people's presence." Fueling this is the standard conservative mindset that paints people who have fallen on hard times as weak, criminal and subhuman. "They have to set up a framework to understand homelessness that it's not about systemic causes, but about the person."

An older guy who calls himself Birdman, who resides near Valencia Street in the Mission, articulated the humiliating dehumanization inherent in laws like sit-lie in a self-published flyer: "What if ur homeless and broke and have nowhere to go? Are u forced to stand like in Abu prison? While a DOG is free to sit or lie?
Tana Ganeva is an AlterNet editor. Follow her on Twitter. You can email her at tanaalternet@gmail.com.

Women’s Warming Center opens at TPI

2010-11-18T07:41:00.000-08:00

Portland Oregon Women’s Warming Center opens at TPI

Posted on November 17, 2010
by rocketpoetry
http://streetroots.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/womens-warming-center-opens-at-tpi/#more-4338

On the one of the worst nights of the year to date, the Women’s Warming Center will be opening tonight with a capacity of 70 women.

Women can reserve a space at the warming center by contacting Transition Projects. Women can stop by 475 NW Glisan Mon – Fri, 8:30 -7:30 PM. They can also call 503-823-4930 24 hours a day (after hours, press 5 to reach the shelter staff).
The Women’s Warming Shelter is made possible by a $180,000 grant from the Portland Housing Bureau.[ http://www.portlandoregon.gov/PHB ]

In partnership with other City departments, Multnomah County and community partners, the Portland Housing Bureau coordinates Winter and Severe Weather shelter and day services for homeless individuals in our community.

For the most up-to-date information on shelter or assistance, call 211info by dialing 2-1-1. [ http://www.211info.org/ ] In Multnomah County, the call line is open from 8am and 10pm, Monday through Friday; and between 8am to 10pm on Saturdays and Sundays.

For more information on severe weather shelter go here: http://tinyurl.com/32mtkkt

I have nothing to loose - a music video

2010-10-10T17:43:00.000-07:00

CALIFORNIA: When Home Has No Place to Park

2010-10-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/us/04rv.html?_r=1

LOS ANGELES 10.5.10

Every day, Diane Butler and her husband park their two hand-painted R.V.’s in a lot at the edge of Venice Beach here, alongside dozens of other rickety, rusted campers from the 1970s and ’80s. During the day, she sells her artwork on the boardwalk. When the parking lot closes at sunset, she and the other R.V.-dwellers drive a quarter-mile inland to find somewhere on the street to park for the night.

Their nomadic existence might be ending, though. The Venice section of Los Angeles has become the latest California community to enact strict new regulations limiting street parking and banning R.V.’s from beach lots — regulations that could soon force Ms. Butler, 58, to leave the community where she has lived for four decades.

“They’re making it hard for people in vehicles to remain in Venice,” she said.

Southern California, with its forgiving weather, has long been a popular destination for those living in vehicles and other homeless people. And for decades, people living in R.V.’s, vans and cars have settled in Venice, the beachfront Los Angeles community once known as the “Slum by the Sea” and famous for its offbeat, artistic culture.

Yet even as the economic downturn has forced more people out of their homes and into their cars, vehicle-dwellers are facing fewer options, with more communities trying to push them out.

As nearby neighborhoods and municipalities passed laws restricting overnight parking in recent years, Venice became the center of vehicle dwelling in the region. More than 250 vehicles now serve as shelter on Venice streets, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

“The only place between Santa Barbara and San Diego where campers can park seven blocks from the beach is this little piece of land,” said City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, whose district includes Venice. “Over the years, it’s only gotten worse, as every other community along the coast has adopted restrictions.”

In the past, bohemian Venice was tolerant of vehicle-dwellers, but, increasingly, the proliferation of R.V.’s in this gentrifying neighborhood has prompted efforts to remove them.

“The status quo is unacceptable,” said Mark Ryavec, president of the Venice Stakeholders Association, a group of residents devoted to removing R.V.’s from the area. “It’s time to give us some relief from R.V.’s parking on our doorsteps.”

A bitter debate has raged between residents who want to get rid of R.V.’s and those who want to combat the problems of homelessness in the community by offering safe places to park and access to public bathrooms. Last year, residents voted to establish overnight parking restrictions, but the California Coastal Commission twice vetoed the plan.

However, a recent incident involving an R.V. owner’s arrest on charges of dumping sewage into the street has accelerated efforts to remove vehicle-dwellers. Starting this week, oversize vehicles will be banned from the beach parking lots; an ordinance banning them from parking on the street overnight could take effect within a month.

While Mr. Rosendahl supported parking restrictions, he has also secured $750,000 from the city to pay for a pilot program to house R.V.-dwellers. Modeled after efforts in Santa Barbara and Eugene, Ore., the Vehicles to Homes program will offer overnight parking for vehicle-dwellers who agree to meet certain conditions, with the goal of moving participants into permanent housing.

“For people who want help, we’ll support them,” Mr. Rosendahl said. “The others can take their wheels and go up the coast or somewhere else, God bless them. It’s not our responsibility to be the only spot where near-homelessness is dealt with in the state of California.”

While some have expressed interest in the program, many said they did not want to subject themselves to curfews and oversight or had no means or desire to return to renting. Mr. Ryavec believes few will participate.

“I will not debate that some people are mentally ill, indigent or drugged out,” Mr. Ryavec said. “But my stance is that the bulk of these people are making a lifestyle choice.”

Still, according to Gary L. Blasi, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an activist on homeless issues, most people choose to live in vehicles only when the alternative is sleeping in a shelter or on the street.

“The idea of carefree vagabonds is statistically false,” Professor Blasi said. “More often, these are people who lived in apartments in Venice before they lived in R.V.’s. The reason for losing housing is usually the loss of a job or some health care crisis.”

Even if all the vehicle-dwellers in Venice wanted to participate, the pilot program will accommodate only a small fraction of them. In Southern California, though, there may not be anywhere else R.V.’s can legally park. According to Neil Donovan, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, ordinances banning R.V.’s have spread from metropolitan areas into the suburbs as vehicle-dwellers venture farther afield in search of somewhere to sleep.

“Communities are now forming a patchwork of ordinances, which virtually prohibits a geographic cure to the situation,” Mr. Donovan said. “If you’re in a community and they tell you to leave, you can’t just go to the next community, because they establish similar ordinances, especially in California.”

Mr. Donovan said vehicle-dwellers often end up on the street after their vehicles are towed or become inoperable. When his organization surveyed tent camps in California, they found that many residents had come from R.V.’s.

Vehicle-dwellers in Venice are now considering their options, but few expressed any intention of leaving.

“They can keep throwing more laws at us, but we’re not just going to go away,” said Mario Manti-Gualtiero, who lost his job as an audio engineer and now lives in an R.V. “We can’t just evaporate.”

Hassling The Houseless - VIDEO from the streets of Portland

2010-09-28T07:02:00.001-07:00

Poor Magazine/PNN

2010-09-24T11:01:00.000-07:00

Poor Magazine/PNN:
"POOR NEWS NETWORK"

http://www.poormagazine.com/

PNN is a multi-media access project of POOR Magazine, dedicated to reframing the news, issues and solutions from low and no income communities, as well as providing society with a perspective usually not heard or seen within the mainstream media.

PNN news is generated in the Community Newsroom, and is published each week on Wednesday. If you would like to participate; email deeandtiny@poormagazine.org.

POOR needs your help. subscription/donation
Read how to Save Co-editors Dee and Tiny"

Houseless Resting - Portland at 3 PM

2010-09-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

Resting and Napping
I love to take a nap in the afternoon
Those that are house-less ...."cant just take a nap"
Those with no home "cant rest"
Lets work for solutions together

World Homeless Day Sept 10

2010-09-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

Overview

The purpose of World Homeless Day is to draw attention to homeless people’s needs locally and provide opportunities for the community to get involved in responding to homelessness, while taking advantage of the stage an ‘international day’ provides.

The Official World Homeless Day website exists to resource local groups to take the concept of World Homeless Day and run with it to benefit homeless people locally in their area.

Note: This is an annual event on the 10th of the 10th every year.

INFORMATION HERE:
http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=29079402&postID=6810039586710764924

Homeles children in Russia

2010-08-18T20:40:00.000-07:00

Seen this page with pictres of homeles children in Russia. It was dated 2009
http://theoriens.com/homeless-kids-in-russia/

10-10-10 World Homeless Day - Portland Oregon

2010-08-03T07:25:00.000-07:00

World Homeless Day Countdown Website
http://www.101pdx.org/

What can you do?
You may not have much to offer. But you do have something that can help.

You probably have...
• Influence in your workplace or organization.
• Friends and family you can gather.
• A skill to work with your hands.
• The ability to think creatively.
• Some time to volunteer.
• A few dollars to share.
• A smile and conversation.

Get started.
• Subscribe to our blog for new ideas and resources each week.
• Check out the Top 10 lists -- something to spark conversation.
• Spread the word by sharing this page on Twitter and Facebook.
• Share some ideas of what you could do to participate

A Homeless "Cat in the Hat"

2010-07-18T17:49:00.000-07:00

On the streets of Portland - Demotix News

2010-06-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

On the streets of Portland

Life on the streets for a young woman struggling with homelessness and an addiction to heroin in Portland, Oregon, USA.

13/06/2010
NORTH AMERICA United States Portland in Society, on the 13th of June 2010

By: Jeff Brandt
(original article is here)

http://www.demotix.com/news/357203/streets-portland

After leaving her home near Toronto at age 15 due to family strife Niki has been living on the streets for 10 years. She came to Portland after meeting her 42 year old boyfriend Christian on the Internet. She says that even if they hadn’t met she probably would have still ended up in Portland. Niki goes on to explain that the pleasant climate and easy access to heroin are just a few of the things that make the area attractive to her. As she sits down to claim her usual spot outside of Michelle's on 5th , store employee Hasib Haider comes out to greet her. Hasib says he doesn’t like most of the people that set up outside of the store but Niki keeps to herself and doesn’t bother the customers.

Within a few minutes of placing an empty hat out on the sidewalk to collect change in a young lady walks by and directs insults her way, shrugging it off She tells me “ ya gotta take the good with the bad". as we spend the afternoon chatting I notice the hat she put on the sidewalk is almost full. I tell her I’m impressed With the amount of money she has in the hat, she retorts "I’m not proud of that, I’m living this way because I have to, I’m just doing what It takes to survive". She turns to me and asks what I would have done if I was put into her situation? I don’t respond because we both know the answer.

As the afternoon goes on she rolls up her sleeve to reveal the tell tale signs of a heroin addiction.
Niki see’s me looking at her track marks, she says that she has been clean for about 3 weeks. I can tell from the dried crusty blood in the crook of her arm and the fresh track marks that this is not true.This would be the last time I see her. After almost a week of searching and asking around I run into her boyfriend Christian, he tells me that in an attempt to get clean Niki has returned to her home near Toronto.

Tags addict, addiction, Drugs, heroin, heroin addict, homeless, homelessness, poverty, Street life, Streets, Homelesness, Drugs, Society

Commissioner Deborah Kafoury | District I > News & Events > Previously Homeless Families Find Homes, Now Seek Employment

2010-05-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

Previously Homeless Families Find Homes, Now Seek Employment

April 19, 2010

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Responding to the local housing crisis for families, Multnomah County’s Board of County Commissioners approved funding in January for immediate rent assistance for 30 families to be housed in 30 days. The effort, a partnership with non-profit organizations Human Solutions and JOIN, successfully housed 34 families who were homeless. Now, these families are seeking employment.

“Securing housing for these families was the first step,” said Commissioner Deborah Kafoury, who brought this initiative to the Board of Commissioners. “Now that they have housing and their children have settled in school, a second yet critical step for the long-term stability of these families is to find a job.”

Program participants seeking employment hold a wide range of skill sets, including teaching, food service, handyman, housekeeping, construction, swim instruction, medical reception, child care, forklift driver, hairdresser, flagger, landscaper, and more. The common thread is the desire to work and care for their families.

“So many people in our community have been struggling. A simple suggestion that leads to a stable job can be the foundation for longer term success,” said Jean DeMaster, Executive Director of Human Solutions. “We hope that employers will call us with opportunities so these individuals can apply and offer their skills and experience for consideration along with other applicants. Ending homelessness in our community is a huge task, but it can be accomplished by giving homeless people the opportunities they need to become self sufficient.”

If you know of employment opportunities, please call Amie Diffenauer at Human Solutions
(503) 548-0224, email adiffenauer@humansolutions.org or Commissioner Kafoury’s office at (503) 988-5220.

Dignity & Dining

2010-05-04T13:05:00.000-07:00

Dignity & Dining: "Restaurants are very often the first industry to jump to the aid of those in need. Nine out of ten restaurants are involved in some kind of charity; most donate food to shelters and food banks.
Dignity & Dining was inspired by Clifton’s Cafeteria in Los Angeles. They have been serving quality food at affordable prices, as well as free meals to those in great need, for over 70 years.
The goal of the Dignity & Dining program is to find restaurants willing to provide free, no-questions asked meals and to make this information available to the public."

Heather Lyons talks homelessness - (reposted)

2010-03-10T09:09:00.000-08:00

Heather Lyons talks homelessness
(reposted from STREET ROOTS)
link --> http://streetroots.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/heather-lyons-talks-homelessness/#more-3124

March 9, 2010
Ending homelessness starts at home. And, my most consistent home this month has been an airplane. As I write this, I am on a 5-hour and 17-minute flight from D.C. to Phoenix, where I get to sit in the airport for an hour and a half. Then, I get to sit on another “bus in the sky” from Phoenix to Portland.

I was eyeing the empty row next to me when I saw the last couple came on, with a baby in tow. I am positive their ages combined do not equal my age. Their baby, who I learn is named Bryson and is fourteen months, is very cute. Before we took off, he was flirtatious and full of smiles. But unlike a lot of kids that I see on airplanes, Bryson has an old baby t-shirt and pants that are dirty and stained, and not just little fruit juice stains. The parents, barely adults themselves, look worn, weary, and reek of cigarette smoke. The father has acne that goes on for days; the mother looks like she hasn’t been able to wash her hair in over a week. As they struggle to figure out how to use the seatbelts and ask me if they can use their cell phone after the plane takes off, it’s clear this is the first time they’ve flown.
I have a strong feeling that my petty little problems of not having extra elbowroom and travelling for nine hours paled in comparison with whatever Bryson’s family faced.

Coincidentally, I happened to be reading an article in the Atlantic about the jobless recovery, and the reason I was travelling from DC was because of a meeting to help shape the national strategic plan for ending and preventing chronic homelessness. While it may not be obvious, particularly the chronic homeless part, I believe the two are inextricably part of Bryson’s family future.

Later in the flight, I strike up a conversation with Bryson’s dad, who talks about his life very openly. I have a feeling that he has talked about his situation so many times it seems normal to share so much to a complete stranger. Turns out that he isn’t Bryson’s “real” dad, and that he was in foster care for 10 years. Because of that, he wants to “do right” by the kid because he was left on his own too much. Sadly, this means when Bryson gets just a little cranky he says even louder to him to STOP and pats him hard on his rear because, as he tells him, “he is almost two and needs to stop being coddled.” I ask if they want a break, and take Bryson for a walk, and they say no. I realize they probably don’t want a stranger holding their kid. Though, I’m almost positive that 90 percent of the women around them wanted to grab Bryson and do the same.

And then the dad tells me they are going to Anchorage because that’s where his mom is and when I ask where, he says he doesn’t know but that it’s about four hours from the city and he is looking forward to it because at least he hears there are jobs there. He had dropped out of school, so he needs to make money, and he says again, “to do right by my family.”

The Atlantic article on the jobless recovery has this to say about chronic unemployment in young families – “… the stresses and distractions that afflict unemployed parents also afflict their kids, who are more likely to repeat a grade in school, and who on average earn less as adults. Children with unemployed fathers seem particularly vulnerable to psychological problems.” And this – “By the time the average out-of-wedlock child has reached the age of 5, his or her mother will have had two or three significant relationships with men other than the father. … This kind of churning is terrible for children — heightening the risks of mental-health problems, troubles at school, teenage delinquency, and so on – and we’re likely to see more and more of it, the longer this malaise stretches on.”

At the meeting in D.C., a group of us, when asked what we thought it would take to end chronic homelessness, responded resoundingly — supportive housing. It’s a no-brainer. Then we were asked what prevents chronic homelessness, a little more difficult. One answer resounds with me as I think of Bryson. Norm Suchar from the National Alliance to End Homelessness said, “If we want to prevent homelessness, then we need to make sure that every person who exits the foster care system is guaranteed not to be homeless.” Exactly. Though, clearly not easy to implement, it’s a good starting point. The foster care system is the best intervention point we have for preventing homelessness, including and especially chronic homelessness.

Bryson’s dad takes him to change his diaper, and I look over and see his mom who has a few minutes alone for the first time and who has said maybe five words this whole trip. She’s put her head in her hands and she is crying.

It’s hard to hold hope when faced, head on, with one of the overall contributing factors of homelessness, poverty. Not just poverty of money, but poverty of people’s promise, and children’s promise like Bryson’s, and earlier, Bryson’s dad, and probably Bryson’s mom, too.

The 10-year plans to end homelessness that so many communities embraced, including Portland, focused on ending chronic and street homelessness. While there were many provisions to open the door for ending family homelessness, the solutions, save for a few, generally did not, and do not, get to the heart of the problem.

I think of 10 years and sometimes think how arbitrary that seems now. Especially as Portland and other communities are looking at mid-term updates to plans to end homelessness. Then I think of Bryson’s dad, and imagine his 10 years in foster care. Then I wonder when people who lead, politically and bureaucratically, will make the connections and do the right thing and not the expedient thing. When will people start making systemic changes to give chronically poor, un- and underemployed, and unhealthy families opportunities so that Bryson does not have the same experience that his “now” dad had? If that doesn’t happen, no matter the greater economic issues of our time, we will never prevent future generations of homelessness and chronic homelessness.

NASNA Street Newspaper National Meeting

2010-03-09T16:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.nasna.org/join-the-movement/

In order to build power and strength in cities where local street newspapers operate, the North American Street Newspaper Association must build support from a broad and diverse community throughout North America.

We are asking individuals, non-profit organizations and businesses to sign on to the NASNA declaration to support local street papers to:

- Provide thousands of individuals experiencing poverty and homelessness to gain immediate income and dignity through the sales of street newspapers
- Provide an avenue of free speech and to give voice to people experiencing homelessness and poverty
- Build a movement that encourages independence and dignity among people experiencing homelessness and poverty
- To deliver journalism, commentary and unique perspectives on homelessness and poverty to build the political will necessary to fight poverty and homelessness in North America
- To build quality relationships with people experiencing homelessness and the housed community through grassroots media

Together, we can build a movement of lasting change through grassroots media and offering individuals on the streets a dignified manner to gain income. Together, we can make a difference. Show your support and sign on today!

Your Name (required / please sign the petition)
http://www.nasna.org/join-the-movement/
~joe anybody

Housing Discussion - Housing Protests and Displacement:

2010-03-05T15:18:00.000-08:00

An Event on Housing Tonight!

author: Judy Fleming
e-mail: publicsocialuniversity@gmail.com

Portland Indy media Link: http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2010/03/397678.shtml

Public Social University: The latest in a series of public education forums, Public Social University will explore HOUSING in its myriad forms and facets in a series consisting of several parts. Come to learn from Community Alliance of Tenants, Marc Lakeman and residents of Dignity Village, Brendan Phillips and Julio Vascuez from Sisters of the Road, and three speakers from NO Vacancy project.
Part 1: Approaching Space and Place

Friday March 5th, 2010
6-8pm
SEA Change Gallery
625 NW Everett #110 Portland, Oregon

A Free All Ages Event Featuring the Following Presentations and Discussions:

Housing Protests and Displacement:
Brendan Phillips and Julio Vasquez of Sisters of the Road will share their experiences during the WRAP (Western Regional Advocacy Project) protest, which took place in San Francisco, CA on January 20th. They marched for housing rights and against 'crimes of status' to Nancy Pelosi's office.

Know Your Rights:

With CAT (Community Alliance of Tenants) representative Erica Boreman. Erica will explore the history of CAT, renter's rights, and the legislative side of housing.

Utilizing Vacant Space:
NO Vacancy project presentation of the what, who, why and how of using vacant spaces in Portland, legally. Facilitating this discussion are Becky Dann, Brianna Meier and CEIC (Central Eastside Industrial Council) Executive Director Terry Taylor.

Drink Tea with City Repair:
Share stories with the folks from City Repair, who work lovingly to make our city better place, and have had a hand in founding Dignity Village.

About Public Social University:
Public Social University began in 2008 as a collaborative project in Harrell Fletcher's Art & Social Practice class at Portland State University. The first three Public Social University events were loosely organized forums for idea and skill sharing at Portland Oregon's Central Public Library. In 2009, Public Social University organized free/all ages events in Portland art galleries: Food, Water, Apocalypse, Friendship, Healing, and Oral Histories, presenting attendees with the best array of workshops, discussions, presentations and activities on the respective themes as possible. Culled from Portland's diverse community, artists, experts, and academicians alike volunteered their time, knowledge and energy. Additionally, Public Social University Co-Directors Rozzell Medina and Judy Fleming installed exhibits in Portland's MK and White Galleries, organized a free/all ages community event in San Francisco's Dolores Park, and won November's STOCK Grant.

homepage: http://publicsocialuniversity.blogspot.com

Portland Business Alliance against homeless

2010-03-03T12:57:00.000-08:00

-------- CLICK Here FOR ORIGINAL LINK ---------

Portland Business Alliance against homeless
These are the businesses that are against the homeless and support the police sweeps and the elimination of fareless square...

The Allison Inn and Spa
American Family Insurance
Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects
Ashforth Pacific
Ash Grove Cement Company
Associated Business Systems
Aurora Industrial Automation
Automatic Data Processing, Inc.
Avalon Hotel & Spa
Azumano Travel/
American Express
Ball Janik LLP
Benson Industries
Best Buy - Cascade Station
Best Buy - Jantzen Beach
Big Belly Solar
Bradwood Landing LLC
Brooks Brothers
Brooks Staffing
Capacity Commercial Group
Cintas Corporation
Coast Office Products, Inc.
Columbia State Bank
CommonWealth Properties Management Service
The Daily Grill
Davis Wright Tremaine
DeAngelo Brothers Incorporated
DePaul Industries
Dex R.H. Donnelley
Dunn Carney Allen Higgins & Tongue
Dynamic Consulting
El Hispanic News
Emerson Hardwood Group
Enterprise Rent-A-Car
EnviroMedia Social Marketing
Ferguson Wellman Capital Management
First Tech Credit Union
Franz Family Bakeries
Governor Hotel
Hewlett-Packard (HP)
Hitachi Consulting
The Holland Inc.
Hotel deLuxe
Hotel Lucia
Inkwell Creative
InterWorks, LLC
Kalberer Company
KGW Northwest Newschannel 8
KPFF Consulting Engineers
LA Fitness
Lauro Kitchen
LinenTableCloth
M Financial Group
Maxim Integrated Products
Metropolitan Exposition Recreation Commission
Multonamah
Athletic Club
Nel Centro
Norris, Beggs & Simpson Companies
North Pacific
Northwest Boardroom, LLC
Northwest Pipe Co.
Opus Northwest LLC
Oregon Institute of Technology
Oregon LNG
The Parcel Place
Perkins Coie LLP
Platt
Portland Development Commission
Portland Marriott City Center
Portland Spirit River Cruises
RBC Wealth Management
REC Solar
S.D. Deacon Corp. of Oregon
Saks Fifth Avenue
Salishan Spa and Golf Resort
Sealy Mattress Co.
Shorenstein Realty Services
Signs Now Northwest
Sinju - Pearl District
Solberg/Adams
Southwest Airlines
TMT Development
Tonkon Torp LLP
TransCanada
Travel Vaccinations
United Pipe & Supply Co.
Vindalho
Warner Pacific College
WeClik
The Westin Portland
Wieden & Kennedy
Willamette Management Associates

Street Roots Hits The Nail on the Head - Damn The Torpedoes"

2010-02-24T10:15:00.000-08:00

Editorial: So much happens and nothing changes

STREET ROOTS EDITORIAL

http://streetroots.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/editorial-so-much-happens-and-nothing-changes/

February 18, 2010 · 2 Comments
The story goes: Police shoot an unarmed individual. The district attorney handpicks evidence, often without key witnesses. The grand jury declines to indict¬. The community responds with sadness, then anger. The police say they need more money to correct the problem. City Hall does damage control. The media delivers the play-by-play. The community speaks of coalition building. A series of rallies happen. City Hall and the police get sued in civil court. The city doles out hundreds of thousands of dollars to the victims family. Ultimately, nothing changes.

What makes the shooting of Aaron Cambell different? We’re not sure anything. Street Roots has been around for 11-years. In that time, four unarmed individuals have been shot and killed in controversial scenarios by the Portland Police Bureau.

Of course, with both Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton becoming involved, the energy does seem higher. Both the Mental Health Association of Portland, and the Portland Skanner have come out and said to their communities that in a time of crisis, don’t call the police. That’s pretty bold. And to be honest, Street Roots doesn’t disagree.

For many years, regardless of violence, SR has worked to take care of its own problems, knowing full well that if the police are involved, there’s a chance something bad may occur. Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t call the police at times (very rarely), or have an open relationship with them, or respect officers, because we do. But the reality is the bureau treats us more as adversaries than as an organization that works to stabilize poor folk on street corners.

Take the case of Sisters Of The Road, which is more or less being targeted by the police (see our front page story on the situation). The organization has been reprimanded by the bureau for having too many calls for service to their corner, and for the drug activity in Old Town around the block it inhabits. After 30 years of service helping the people who need help the most, at a time when drugs and violence on the streets are as bad or worse than when Sisters opened, it is now all Sisters’ fault. The organization is under a screw, yet there is no public oversight of the police and City Hall which has lost control of what the bureau does.

Stakeout operations on the homeless for infractions such as jaywalking. Moving poor people from one hot spot to another when the needed housing doesn’t exist. City Hall that time and again backs down to the police while people’s civil rights are ignored, knowing full well that criminal records are a major reason why many people can’t access housing. The list goes on and on. And honestly, down here on the block, no one is listening to the message anymore — not on these issues anyway.

How does this relate to Aaron Campbell? We are all connected, yet as we choose to act in a vacuum, all of our communities are ignored, discredited and harped upon for calling the shots as we see them.

What we see is a city that continues to target the homeless, minorities, the mentally ill, and in this case, an individual who was shot in the back and left for up to 40 minutes before medical responders are called in, long after the individual is dead. With this attitude you are more or less saying to us we are animals. And we’re damn tired of it. We want a fair playing field. We want peace. And we want justice.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2 responses so far ↓

Candice comments // February 19, 2010 at 10:07 am
Well said.

========================================================
joe anybody comments // February 24, 2010 at 10:10 am

Excellent summary and assessment.
The wheel just keeps spinning around.
We want Change, Respect, Dignity, Civil Rights, and Justice. (not more spin)

It seems the city / police are at direct odds with the poor and those needing “help” in Portland.

Where is our city leaders going to “lead us?”
If it is not down a road to Justice & Peace then, lets be really clear….. “I’m Not Going!”

Damn the torpedo’s!

I stand in the light by my brothers and sisters.

If the city leadership and the police are against us (we the people) and continue to harass, jail and kill those who wont “do as they say” it leaves us all with one obvious option … and its not a good one.

But at least it will be crystal clear: “What side you are on?” ….and for me it is a “no brainier!”

This all is certainly a tragedy, and is compounded even worse when leaders and authority criminalize & IGNORE the people they were hired to serve and protect. Respect was once considered to be a two way street.

“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”
======================================================

Leave a Comment on Street Roots Website Here:
http://streetroots.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/editorial-so-much-happens-and-nothing-changes/

Homeless Vet - Written by Vietnam Vet

2010-02-10T09:06:00.000-08:00

Homeless Vet In America

In war,
what happens in the field,
stays in the field.
It never happened.
Everything is a cover up,
to protect the public back home.
As the years go by,
veterans become homeless in the mind.
Their lives become classified,
to make room for the next generation.
It's all about lies,
and the betrayal that destroyed a generation.
A Vietnam vet friend hung himself in a motel room.
Another one died homeless on the streets.
Then there was the unexplained car accident that
killed another vet friend.
All of them had honorable discharges from the military.
All of them dishonorably destroyed by the U.S. Government.
Everything is a cover up.
What happens after the war,
stays in the field.
It never happened.
The whole war was a war crime.
That is the deep dark secret that absolutely
has to be kept from the American public.
Here rests in silence,
an American veteran know but to God.

Mike Hastie
U.S. Army Medic
Vietnam 1970-71
February 10, 2010

Homelessness Doesn't Have to Be a Death Sentence by Noah Jennings

2010-02-07T13:59:00.000-08:00

Homelessness Doesn't Have to Be a Death Sentence
by Noah Jennings

categories: Health, Innovation, Stories From The Streets

Published February 02, 2010 @ 04:24PM PT
http://homelessness.change.org/blog/view/homelessness_doesnt_have_to_be_a_death_sentence

As I write this post, I spot a client across the street who will likely die soon. All the signs point to this possibility: the substance abuse issues, an absent network of support, a fear of shelters and closed spaces because of trauma, being HIV positive, the cold winter -- the list goes on. All this fits with what we know about homelessness: for many people, it's fatal.

If that's not shocking, please read it again: when you see the chronically homeless, you're very likely looking at someone who's dying. That's not melodrama. It's fact.

Because of this, I was positively thrilled to read about new efforts in Hartford, Connecticut. There, as in an increasing number of cities, outreach workers have made use of the Vulnerability Index, a method of strengthening support for the homeless by targeting those who need help immediately.

What's happening in Hartford is inspiring. There, armed with questionnaires and a willingness to make real contact with their clients, outreach workers set out to find homeless people and ask about health history, resources, times homeless and so on. All of this is done with an eye toward determining how dangerous it is for each individual to be on the streets. This evidenced-based approach can influence the number of nights a client is offered at a given shelter, or may even result in the homeless person securing housing more quickly.

Those utilizing the Index have discovered that many of their homeless are without housing "comma-but." In other words, there are resources available to them (comma but) they don't know about them. Some of the examples might include a veteran who only needs transportation to the Veterans Affairs office to complete that final interview, or a disabled woman who, with the right advocacy, could get her benefits and a housing voucher more quickly. Imagine it: more homeless could get housed if we put resources into finding out what precisely they need to stay alive.

And that's what's revolutionary about the Vulnerability Index. By placing homelessness within the context of public health, it makes the need to strengthen communication with street communities one of dire consequence.

If you're surprised this isn't already implemented everywhere, I share your disbelief. The truth is that much of what we do for the homeless isn't based on evidence or direct feedback from clients. It's best guesses all around. That plus the lack of awareness among the general population that homelessness is in large part a public health issue means that the people who need help most are the people most often left behind. But if we're to believe the statistics, use of the Vulnerability Index is a reform we can't afford to ignore. One study notes that the average age of death for those without shelter is just 48.

What this means is that if you're homeless for too long in America, you can expect to die about 30 years before your time. Whether that remains a reality is up to us.

If you're interested in introducing the Vulnerability Index to your community, please check out the resources at Common Ground here:
http://www.commonground.org/?page_id=789

Homeless Sit Lie Sharing Sidewalks Discussions / Advisory

2010-02-01T22:33:00.000-08:00

Host: The Sit/Lie Ordinance is Unconstitutional. Really. Stop Trying To Fix It.
Type: Meetings - Business Meeting
Network: Global
Date: Monday, February 1, 2010
Time: 3:30pm - 5:00pm
Location: Portland Building, Second Floor Room C

Description It appears that the city is going to have an ongoing advisory committee about sidewalk use. I am not sure who is on the committee, but these are public meetings so please make sure you attend if you are able and willing to make your voice heard.

The email from Commisoner Amanda Fritz's Office:

Good afternoon,

I hope you are able to attend the Sharing Public Sidewalks Advisory Committee, which will be held this coming Monday, February 1st, 2010 from 3:30 - 5:00 pm in Room C on the second floor of the Portland Building, located at 1120 SW 5th Ave. Meetings will continue to be on the first Mondays at this time and location, until the group decides we no longer need to meet so frequently. The agenda for this meeting is attached, along with the notes from the previous meeting. If you notice errors or omissions, please tell me before the meeting.

Also attached to this email is the Sidewalk Management Plan Resolution, which was adopted by City Council on October 21, 2009. The Sidewalk Management Plan outlines the City's multi-faceted approach to ensure safe and useable sidewalks for everyone.

Please let me know by email or phone (503-823-3994) if you or a delegate will not be able to attend this meeting. Commissioner Fritz very much appreciates your participation.

Sara Hussein, MPA

Lawsuit due to Portland's anti-camping law

2010-01-04T21:23:00.000-08:00

I received an interesting email about a recent lawsuit regarding Portland's (sic) anti-camping law. What follows below is the email I received today:

-------------------------------------------------------

I haven't seen this reported anywhere yet, but:

City Council was supposed to vote on a class action lawsuit brought
against their anti-camping ordinance, which would have give $30,000 to
the plaintiffs and their lawyers, and clarified new rules for enforcing
the (draconian) policy.

It's not clear whether more work is being done, and if so who asked for
it, but it seems as if the rules being proposed (set up camps only after 9
PM, clean up by 7 AM) will just make things more confusing and complex for
people who already have no place else to go.

I've pasted in the "juicy parts" of the postponed ordinance and
accompanying documents below. As of this evening, you can still download
the .pdf at
http://www.portlandonline.com/auditor/index.cfm?c=50265&a=279418

***************
***************

From the Council item which was postponed on the City website:

7. BACKGROUND/ANALYSIS

This ordinance would settle a class action brought on behalf of homeless
individuals without shelter challenging the enforcement of the City's
anti-camping, temporary structures and park exclusion ordinances as
unconstitutional.

Individual plaintiffs allege that they were harmed and suffered the loss
of property in the past when they were told by police to move from the
public right of way. The settlement would provide seven individuals with
amounts between $200 and $500 for a total of $2,400 and $27,600 to the
Oregon Law Center for their attorneys fees on this case.

The plaintiffs sought an injunction from a court ruling that the City's
ordinances are illegal because there are no other alternative places for
many homeless people to sleep. In order to address this complaint, the
ordinance would authorize the City to enter into a settlement agreement
with the plaintiffs that sets out reasonable time and place restrictions
on when the camping and structures ordinances will be enforced and
provides a commitment that the City will continue with efforts to assist
with outreach and services for homeless residents of Portland.

It is the recommendation of Risk Management and the City Attorney's office
that this settlement be approved by ordinance in order to resolve the
lawsuit and clarify policies regarding when and where people can sleep on
public property

Non-monetary terms of settlement:

A. The City will condition any funding of homeless shelter capacity on the
contractual commitment of the shelter facility to allow meaningful access
to the shelter by housing outreach workers.

B. The City will not enforce its camping law (PCC 14A.50.020 or successor)
against persons who camp on public property or public rights of way that
are open to the public if they comply with the following rules:

a. A camp may not contain more than four people after 10:00 p.m.

b. A camp must be out of sight and earshot or more than 50 yards away from
any other camp.

c. Campers may not set up a campsite until 9:00 p.m.

d. A camp must be quiet after 10:00 p.m.

e. A camp must not cause any health or sanitation problems.

f. A camp must not draw significant complaints from neighbors.

g. A camp must be off the sidewalks and roadways and away from nighttime
high volume traffic areas.

h. A camp must be packed up and removed from the site by 7:00 a.m.

C. The City will not enforce its prohibition against the erection of
structures on public property (PCC 14A.50.050) against tents or other
structures designed for the primary and limited purpose of protecting
outdoor sleepers from the elements when the occupants of a campsite comply
with the rules set out in subsection B and no more than two sleeping
structures are present at a site.

D. The City will not enforce its camping law against people sleeping at
night in vehicles as long as they comply with the rules set out in
subsection B and the camp is limited to one vehicle and no more than two
adults.

E. The City agrees that it will not consider sleeping in a bedroll,
without more, to meet the definition of "camp" in PCC 14A50.020.

F. The City will conduct a pilot project to examine the feasibility and
benefits of providing storage to homeless people living on the street. The
City will issue a request for proposals for the creation and management of
two types of storage: one for documents and other small valuables and one
for larger items. The purpose of this effort will be to reduce the need
for homeless people to carry large amounts of personal property through
the community and reduce the potential for nuisances and conflicts with
the police over nuisance abatement. The City will endeavor to establish
storage capacity on both sides of the Willamette River. If the City is
able to find contractors willing to run the pilot project, it will fund
the project for at least two years. Continued operation will depend on
whether, in the City Council's judgment, the project proves to be
practical and politically viable.

G. The City will review and improve the procedures used during the
collection, storage and return of property found at campsites. The City
will endeavor to better connect property owners who are not present when
their property is taken with the process by which they can recover their
property. The City will document more carefully what is collected at
campsites and what is left behind or taken away as trash.

H. The City will continue with its effort to provide more public
bathrooms.

I. The City will fund an outreach effort that is sufficient to
consistently make contact with aggregations of campers before they reach a
size of eight.

J. The City will not rouse non-obstructing, otherwise lawful sleepers
before 7:00 a.m.

K. The City will make these guidelines available to the public, and the
City's police officers will tell potential campers and outdoor sleepers
about these guidelines.

---------------------------------------

To read more information regarding the issue of homelessness and law enforcement I suggest the following website: http://www.portlandcopwatch.org

How to get 1,000 of homeless of the streets RIGHT NOW

2009-12-23T00:13:00.000-08:00

How to Get 1000 Homeless People
in Off the Streets of Portland Oregon
Right Now for Cheap!

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/12/396325.shtml

author: Pearl E Moon
e-mail: queen@activist.com

The Portland Scrooge commission must read this, it only takes one signature or maybe several, to get possibly hundreds or even potentially 1000+ homeless people in off the streets right now this week. Read the article to find out how simple, quick, and do-able this could be.
A Portland Victorian Industrial Revolution Christmas Carol....
IT'S SO SIMPLE. one way to get hundreds or thousands of homeless/ near homeless men, women and youth housed right now, with the stroke of a pen:

REVISE the Housing Authority of Portland regulations so that anyone on Section 8 or Public Housing can allow their immediate family to come and stay/ live with them if the homeless person is currently below poverty level, etc. Use a reasonable criteria that includes those factors (person to be added is closely related, homeless/ at risk for homelessness, at or below poverty level, etc).
Close relatives such as parents, grandparents, greatgrandparents: children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren; brother, sister.
If you are afraid of "abuses", then for God's sake establish some parameters, instead of shutting down this much needed housing completely!
Currently it appears that a very scroogey change was made that will not allow this. So a 60 year old disabled Mom can't allow her 40 year old unemployable daughter to come live with her in many instances, even if the daughter is homeless and she is direct family. Only under certain circumstances could she come in out of the cold mean streets and NOT create a violation for her Mom. (She would have had to be on the Mom's benefits when Mom first applied for them 5 years ago, in order to be allowed to come live with her mom when needed later).

This fairly recent rule also makes the Mom, for instance, endangered if she allows her adult child to come stay with her to keep her off the streets. Why? because she currently could lose her Housing and end up on the street herself if she lets her daughter stay with her. Talk about emotional abuse. Tear a Mom's heart right out with such a choice. SCROOGES!

BUT WITH THE STROKE OF A PEN, the Housing Authority could restore the lost right of a family member to allow their adult child or other homeless close relative, to live with them in their Housing unit. Doesn't this only seem reasonable and normal? Anything short of it is just plain, senseless and inhumane.

ok Scrooges, Christmas Day is almost here! believe me, Hell will be colder than the streets of Portland for you, if you don't sign such a revision. Because there is a God, He cares a lot about the Least of These, and He is watching. He's meaner than Santa when you're bad. You won't just get a lump of coal. You'll get raked over the hot burning coals, no doubt in public.

I really hope we'll hear you singing a different Christmas Carol, before the winter progresses and the Ghost of Christmas Future gets you; the current one is way too Dickensian. Fitting for Victorian Industrial London, but NOT modern Portland.

God Bless us, every one.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/12/396325.shtml

Homeless Vets and Veterans Village

2009-12-08T19:46:00.000-08:00

THE WAR COMES HOME

Iraq war veterans feel they are
being cast aside. Three vets explain in their own words.

http://www.veteransvillage.org/Homeless.html
- - - - - -
700,000 Homeless Veterans
STRIPES: Helping vets resume civilian lives
March 23, 2008
By Rena Fulka, Staff writer
Former airman Michael White considers himself a success story.

"I was in the Air Force for almost 21 years, and when I retired, I couldn't find a job," said White, who spent most of his military career stationed in Europe.
"I felt disassociated from civilian life, and I had trouble fitting in. I was depressed, and I wanted to talk, but I had no network. After 20 years, when you have to put the Mr. back in
your name, it's not as easy as you thought it would be."
With help from the Rev. Al Garcia at New Life Oak Forest Church, White made a successful transition back to private citizen.
"Al kept me uplifted, got me through the hard times, and I got a job," said the medical administrator from Oak Forest.
Now, White wants to do the same for other returning soldiers through STRIPES, a community forum designed to help able-bodied veterans acclimate to civilian life.
"An able-bodied vet can be just as disabled as anyone who got shot, but he hides it better. He looks fine and smiles, but he's a mess," White said.
National statistics show 700,000 veterans are homeless, unemployed or a combination of both, White said.
"And the homeless ratio is growing and being filled with vets coming out of the service."
White and the Rev. Rob Schoon, of Orland Park, are laying the groundwork for the new Oak Forest ministry, which is an acronym for "Surviving trauma, receiving inner peace,
enjoying salvation."
Schoon is a Marine veteran who now serves as a chaplain with the Marine Corps League. He visits veterans organizations and hospitals on a regular basis.
"Veterans are people who had such productive lives before the service," Schoon said. "They served their country honorably and did what they were supposed to do. Now, they're
back, they're hurting, and someone has to help them. And most people in the civilian world don't understand the problem these guys and girls are having."
go here for the rest >>http://www.southtownstar.com/lifestyles/852080,032308VETSTRIPES.article

When we get figures from the government, we need to think twice if we believe them or not. 700,000 comes from a more realistic rate because some veterans are homeless at
some point during the year. This is not a new trend but it is a higher one. There are chronically homeless veterans who never find a place to live and there are some who find a
place with family or friends. Their luck usually runs out if they happen to have other issues like PTSD and are not getting help. While the government would want us to believe
they have suddenly reduced the number of homeless veterans below 200,000, we still have not seen the data on where the other homeless veterans w
- - - - - - -

Words are another way. Below are the stories of three veterans of this war, told in their voices, edited for flow and efficiency but otherwise
unchanged. They bear out the statistics and suggest that even those who are not diagnosably impaired return burdened by experiences they can
neither forget nor integrate into their postwar lives. They speak of the inadequacy of what the military calls reintegration counseling, of the
immediacy of their worst memories, of their helplessness in battle, of the struggle to rejoin a society that seems unwilling or unable to
comprehend the price of their service. Strangers to one another and to me, they nevertheless tried, sometimes through tears, to communicate
what the intensity of an ambiguous war has done to them. One veteran, Sue Randolph, put it this way: “People walk up to me and say, ‘Thank you
for your service.’ And I know they mean well, but I want to ask, ‘Do you know what you’re thanking me for?’” She, Rocky, and Michael Goss offer
their stories here in the hope that citizens will begin to know.

Bonnie Tinker shelter named in her Honor on 12.5.09

2009-12-07T23:35:00.000-08:00

Portland women's shelter renamed
for late activist Bonnie Tinker

(reposted)
By Allan Brettman, The Oregonian

December 05, 2009, 8:18PM
Allan Brettman/The Oregonian
http://sz0101.ev.mail.comcast.net/service/home/~/Bonnie%20Tinker%20honored%20in%20PDX.pdf?auth=co&loc=en_US&id=42460&part=2

Mary Dzieweczynski (left) executive director of Bradley Angle, talks about the legacy of
Bonnie Tinker, the founding director of the emergency women's shelter.
The shelter was named for Tinker at a ceremony Saturday. The audience of about 100 people included
Adah Crandall (foreground in picture on original post /see link) who is holding the hand of her mother, Anne Crandall, who
is sitting next to Tinker's son, Alex Tinker.
Robin Kandel dashed down the sidewalk from her Southeast Portland
home, her two young daughters in tow, when the beatings became too
much.
The assaults were a regular part of a 10-year marriage. None was worse
than the time the stitches were torn following a Caesarean delivery a
week earlier.
But she did leave.
Kandel ran to a phone booth and called the Portland Women's Crisis Line,
which patched her through to the Bradley-Angle House for abused
women. The shelter immediately gave Kandel and her daughters a
temporary home.
"That was the first time I realized what I was going through wasn't
normal," Kandel said.

Where to go for help

The Portland area has several resources for battered women, including the
Bonnie Tinker House operated by Bradley Angle, an organization with
emergency, transition and community-based services:
www.bradleyangle.org

The Portland Women's Crisis Line, 503-235-5333 or 888-235-5333, with 24-
hour resources and support for survivors of domestic and sexual violence,
includes a comprehensive list of agencies at http://pwcl.org

Fifteen years later, she is the emergency services manager for the
women's shelter. And she shared her story of survival Saturday afternoon
at a gathering to honor the founding director of the Bradley-Angle House,
Bonnie Tinker.

Several friends and family also recounted their memories of Tinker, who
was honored in a ceremony that renamed the shelter the Bonnie Tinker
House, a part of Bradley Angle's domestic violence programs.

Tinker, 61, was killed July 2 in a crash with a truck while riding her
bicycle in Virginia, where she was attending a Quaker conference.
Almost immediately, friends of Tinker thought of naming the emergency
shelter after her. It would be an honor, they believed benefiting the
Portland activist who was a leader in the anti-war group Seriously P.O.'d
Grannies and director of Love Makes a Family, which supports
nontraditional families, including those led by same-sex parents.
They couldn't know that the date they chose to honor Tinker -- the
founding chairwoman of the National Coalition Against Domestic
Violence -- would land in the midst of continued horror for abused
women. Seven women in the region have been victims of violence in the
past 30 days by estranged ex-husbands, husbands or boyfriends.
Before remembering their friend, the 100 or so people gathered in
Southeast Portland observed a moment of silence to remember the slain
women. Then individual voices read each of the women's names and
those of their killer.

"It's really hard to understand, isn't it?" Tinker's partner, Sara Graham,
said before the ceremony began.

But Saturday's event, held at Tinker's spiritual home, the Multnomah
Friends Social Hall on Southeast Stark, was focused most on Tinker -- her
personality, her passions, her efforts to make the world a better place, no
matter who got ticked off in the process.

Betsy Kenworthy, a Social Hall employee, said, "She could be prickly."
The remark elicited laugher.
Kenworthy recounted a remark years ago from someone else at the
Religious Society of Friends, the Quaker group that the feisty Tinker
attended.

"Don't you think it's amazing that Bonnie Tinker comes here every
Sunday and sits here in silence for an hour?"
More laughter.

But nothing got more laughs than the comedy tag-team routine from two
of Tinker's sisters, Mary Beth Tinker of Washington, D.C., and Hope
Tinker of Fayette, Mo.

Each took turns reading from a 1978 "Intelligence Report" about Bonnie
Tinker and Mary Beth Tinker that Mary Beth said a friend of Bonnie's
retrieved from a Portland police file.

The two-page document casts suspicion on the two women promoting the
National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, "an organization of grass
roots, radical, women-controlled shelters, and hotlines."

The laughter grew loudest at the last line:
"The Tinker girls are true revolutionaries and they will use anything in
their power to aid the revolution."

Throughout Saturday's speeches, a plaque with Tinker's image sat on a
table, surrounding by burning candles. The plaque, which will hang on a
wall in the emergency shelter, features this quote:

"We understood very clearly from the beginning that starting a house was
help for the people who were going to come there to live, but it also had
to do with our own survival; we had to do something that had some
meaning to untangle this whole mess for all of us."
-- Bonnie Tinker, 1979

-- Allan Brettman
http://sz0101.ev.mail.comcast.net/service/home/~/Bonnie%20Tinker%20honored%20in%20PDX.pdf?auth=co&loc=en_US&id=42460&part=2

Father & Daughter make sacks lunch for homeless on Thanksgiving

2009-11-27T10:18:00.000-08:00

A father's donation of food leads to family tradition

By Amy Hsuan, The Oregonian
November 26, 2009, 6:07PM

Olivia Bucks/The OregonianIn front of the Portland Rescue Mission, Stephanie Jones, 9, center, passes out brown bag dinners to the homeless Wednesday night while her father, Kwik Jones, wearing black hat, carries a box filled with the bagged dinners.Each brown paper bag holds a few slices of turkey on white bread, packets of mustard and mayonnaise, a bag of chips and a box of juice.

It's a meal that 9-year-old Stephanie Jones might pack for school at Beach Elementary in Northeast Portland.

But on the eve of Thanksgiving, each brown bag also holds a gift of goodwill to 100 men and women living on the streets.

Every family has their Thanksgiving traditions, and Jones and her father, Kwik, have theirs: For the past four years, they've made sack meals for the homeless.

"It makes me happy," says Jones, a fourth-grader. "I want them to have a home, too."

This year, like every year, the brown bags went a long way on a cold Wednesday night.

For the father and daughter, each holds a quiet lesson in humanity and a reminder of life's riches.

For the crowd of men and women standing outside the Portland Rescue Mission, the modest meal was a simple gesture that spoke volumes.

Wading through the crowd, Jones held a sack lunch in her small outstretched hand. At the receiving end, a wrinkled man in a tattered coat reached out.

"God bless you," he said. "You're an angel."

An inspired tradition

It started with $30 and a stroke of inspiration.

On the eve of Thanksgiving 2006, Kwik Jones had a production-job paycheck in his pocket and a generous feeling.

"God just put it in my heart," says Jones, 36. "I wanted to do something."

Jones had enough money for two loaves of bread, two packs of sandwich meat and some other supplies. It stretched to 20 meals.

It wasn't much, but it was enough.

From a working-class Arkansas family, Jones wanted to teach his daughter an important life lesson. He and his wife, Maria, both work to support their blended family of seven children. They aren't rich by any means, but say they feel fortunate for what they have.

"This is something she'll store in her mind always," Jones says. "We're obligated to help the poor. I want her to know it's her responsibility in this community to help others."

Stephanie, 6 years old at the time, was happy to help. The duo headed downtown, where Jones remembered seeing crowds of homeless sleeping on sidewalks. When they arrived, they realized some of the people in line wouldn't be fed when the shelters ran out of food.

Afterward, Stephanie asked her father, "Can we do this again?"

A Thanksgiving tradition was born.

Olivia Bucks/The OregonianUnderneath the Burnside Bridge, Stephanie Jones, 9, left and her father, Kwik Jones, carry brown bag dinners to the homeless.A humbling distribution

The following year, Jones started saving early. He put away $80. And the pair assembled 100 sack dinners, which they distributed with the help of Stephanie's oldest brother.

Last year, Jones, who also writes and produces plays, had money leftover from one of his shows. With $130, Jones recruited his childhood friend Ayric Payton for help. Payton, 37, enlisted a couple of his kids.

Together, the Joneses and the Paytons made 175 sack dinners. In front of the Rescue Mission, the bags were gone in minutes.

"It's humbling," says Payton, a Coca-Cola salesman. "We're not giving them much. It's not turkey, it's not gravy, not stuffing. My job is good, but it wouldn't take that long, especially in this economy, for me to end up homeless."

The feeling spread to his children.

"I want to do it every year," says son Ayric Thomas, 18, a recent Parkrose High School graduate. "The people are nice. They take what they can get."

This year, the economy took its toll on the families' finances. But at the last minute, members at their church, Hughes Memorial United Methodist, chipped in for enough food for 100 sack meals.

It wasn't as much as last year, but it was enough.

Already Jones has started fundraising. After handing out bags Wednesday night, he held a small performance of his new play at the Someday Lounge in Chinatown. He called the fundraiser "The Brown Bag Benefit."

"I'm trying to raise awareness, hoping that we'll inspire people to do something for their community," Jones says. "Even this little thing we do means something to a lot of people."

Portland Oregon Day Shelters 11.17.09

2009-11-17T19:33:00.000-08:00

The following is an email I received from: Deborah Kafoury (District 1) Multnomah County Commissioner

I appreciate your concern for our friends and neighbors who arestruggling with homelessness and do not have a warm, safe place tosleep. I want you to know that I share your concern and yourfrustration.

I also want you to know that I am taking steps right nowto help those in need. Last week, Multnomah County and the City of Portland, in conjunctionwith our community non-profits, opened winter warming shelters forfamilies, men, women and couples. For the next five months, theseshelters will provide a warm, safe place to sleep for an additional 120people each night.

For more information visit
http://www.multco.us/portal/site/newsite/menuitem.b656599fe90ca805e1965010a36c41ca/?vgnextoid=d75db98674894210VgnVCM10000016c614acRCRD

My first priority is to find the money necessary to keep these sheltersopen year-round, so that April 1st, the individuals who still need aplace to sleep can go to these shelters for help.

Second, I support your suggestion to change current camping policies sothat churches may allow people to camp in their parking lots. While Iam interested in changing additional camping policies, my ability toaffect policy in this area is limited. The County's jurisdiction onlyapplies to the rural areas of Multnomah County; the City of Portlandregulates camping policy within the city limits.

Third, I am working to increase the number of churches and faith groupswho provide shelter through the Daybreak family shelter. Daybreakrelies on churches to provide nightly shelter to their guests. We hopeto add an additional twelve churches during the winter months. If youare interested in getting involved, please visit

http://www.humansolutions.org/homelessness-services/daybreak-shelter.php

Multnomah County is also considering a short-term rent-assistancecampaign for homeless families that we hope to launch within the nextfew weeks. I wholeheartedly agree with you that affordable housing isthe most human way to end homelessness. None of these actions will solve the problem, but I know we can make adifference for many people who are currently without shelter. Iappreciate your thoughts and hope you will keep in touch.

Sincerely,Deborah Kafoury
--------------------

The Daybreak Shelter Network is a unique collaboration between Human Solutions and 30 area congregations. It is one of the very few homeless family shelters that keeps families together and the only one in Mid and East County that is completely secular.

A bit about the Daybreak Shelter:
• The Daybreak Shelter provides shelter for 365 days and nights each year. Last year Human Solutions provided more than 4,500 nights of shelter and13,500 meals to homeless families.
• Daybreak houses families for 30 days while providing intensive and one-on-one case management
• Ensures that most families coming into shelter move directly into permanent or transitional housing in about 30 days.
• Families of any configuration can stay – including single parent, two parent, same sex parent, extended families, families headed by mothers, fathers, grandparents, etc. – and the family stays together while at our shelter .
• Families have access to Human Solutions’ other services: employment training, helpful
classes, computer lab for job and home searches, access to other educational tools, and a supportive network to help the family overcome homelessness – for good.

Some host congregations take turns housing homeless families overnight, while other supporting congregations assist by providing services and volunteers. Volunteers cook meals, implement enrichment activities to engage children in play and learning, and assist in transporting families from the host congregation’s site to Human Solutions’ Day Center.

Human Solutions’ holistic approach to breaking the cycle of poverty begins as soon as the family enters the Daybreak Shelter Network. Our goal while families are staying at Daybreak is to provide a set of services to give them the tools they need to become self-sufficient.

Looking for shelter?
If you and your family are homeless, or know of a family that is experiencing homelessness, call 503-548-0200 to find out about our Daybreak Shelter or housing opportunities for homeless families.

Want to help?
If your faith organization would like to find out more about joining the Daybreak Shelter Network, either as a host or supportive congregation, please call 503-256-2280.

How did the Daybreak Shelter make a difference last year?
68 households received shelter and support at our Daybreak homeless shelter.
87% of families who stayed at the Daybreak Shelter moved directly into safe, stable housing.
100% of the school aged children staying with homeless families at Daybreak Shelter will attend school within three days of entering the program.
75% of the homeless families placed into permanent housing will remain in permanent housing for one year or more.

What support does the shelter need?
In 2008 alone, Human Solutions received 3,486 requests for shelter, a significant increase from the year before. With this increase in families seeking solutions to homelessness, Human Solutions needs to keep our operations at full capacity. Please consider a donation to our Homeless Children’s Fund to make a difference in homelessness in our community. We also need more volunteers to help us keep our Daybreak Shelter operating. Click here to find out more about volunteer opportunities!

Many thanks to the Daybreak Shelter Network!

The Host and Supportive Congregations who make the work of the
Daybreak Shelter Network possible include:

Ascension Catholic Church
7507 SE Yamhill, Portland 97215

Sacred Heart Catholic Church
3910 SE 11th Ave., Portland OR 97202

Bennett Chapel United Methodist Church
13047 SE Ramona, Portland 97236

Cherry Park United Methodist Church
1736 SE 106th Ave., Portland 97216

Montavilla United Methodist Church
232 SE 80th Ave., Portland 97215

Tongan Fellowship of the Untied Methodist Church
4600 SE 97th, Portland 97266

East County Church of Christ
24375 SE Stark, Gresham 97030

Faith United Methodist Church
27400 SE Stark, Troutdale 97060

Eastrose Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
1133 NE 181st, PO Box 298, Gresham, 97030

Gresham United Methodist Church
620 NW 8th, Gresham, 97030

Havurah Shalom
825 NW 18th Ave, Portland, OR 97209

Gethsemane Lutheran Church
11560 SE Market, Portland, 97216

St. Timothy Lutheran Church
14500 SE Powell, Portland 97236

Metro Church of Christ
1525 NW Division, Gresham 97030

Parkrose United Methodist Church
11111 NE Knott, Portland 97220

Resurrection Lutheran Church
1700 NE 132nd, Portland 97230

Gateway Baptist Church
13300 NE San Rafael St., Portland OR 97230

Rose City Park United Methodist
5830 NE Alameda, Portland 97213-3426

Fremont United Methodist Church
2620 NE Fremont, Portland, 97212

St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal
1704 NE 43rd, Portland 97213

St. David's Episcopal Church
2800 SE Harrison, Portland 97214

All Saints Catholic Church
3847 NE Glisan, Portland OR 97232

Colonial Heights Presbyterian Church
2828 SE Stephens, Portland, 97214

St. Ignatius Catholic Church
3400 SE 43rd Ave, Portland, OR

St. Philip Neri Catholic Church
2408 SE 16th, Portland 97214

Waverly Heights United Church of Christ
3300 SE Woodward, Portland 97202

Peace Church of the Brethren
12727 SE Market, Portland 97233

Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church
9800 SE 92nd, Portland 97266

PDX Bible Church
14950 SE Gladstone, Porltand OR 97236

leave ...

2009-11-16T02:27:00.000-08:00

Leave, says Mayor Adams to homeless campers outside City Hall
By Janie Har, The Oregonian

October 13, 2009, 5:31PM

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2009/10/leave_says_mayor_adams_to_home.html

Homeless campers assembled outside City Hall for the last two weeks were quietly booted out Tuesday morning by Mayor Sam Adams.

Homeless advocate Art Rios said the mayor arrived about 7:45 a.m. and told the crowd to leave. Adams' spokesman Roy Kaufmann confirmed the mayor's actions, saying that the city has a firm anti-camping ordinance.

"We recognize there's an issue to be addressed and we're working on it, but the anti-camping ordinance has to be enforced equitably and fairly," Kaufmann said.

The campers had been sleeping on the sidewalk outside City Hall since Sept. 28, arriving after city parks closed at 9 p.m. and leaving before 7 a.m. The number of people in sleeping bags ranged from a dozen to 23 a night. The group became visible Monday when they stuck around all day.

Rios and his group have called for a temporary ban of the camping ordinance and the creation of more shelter beds for the winter. They plan to hold a press conference at 7 p.m. tonight in front of City Hall.

In 2008, homeless people camped outside City Hall to protest sweeps. Then-Mayor Tom Potter let them stay, but was forced to ask police to move them out when the crowd swelled to 100 and got out of control.

In June, a circuit court judge threw out the city's ban against sitting or lying on sidewalks. But the city still maintains a prohibition against camping.

-Janie Har

UN investigator accuses US of shameful neglect of homeless

2009-11-12T19:45:00.000-08:00

UN special rapporteur Raquel Rolnik says the burden falls most heavily on the very poor, leaving the extent of the housing crisis invisible to many in the US. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

A United Nations special investigator who was blocked from visiting the US by the Bush administration has accused the American government of pouring billions of dollars into rescuing banks and big business while treating as "invisible" a deepening homeless crisis.

Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur for the right to adequate housing, who has just completed a seven-city tour of America, said it was shameful that a country as wealthy as the US was not spending more money on lifting its citizens out of homelessness and substandard, overcrowded housing.

"The housing crisis is invisible for many in the US," she said. "I learned through this visit that real affordable housing and poverty is something that hasn't been dealt with as an issue. Even if we talk about the financial crisis and government stepping in in order to promote economic recovery, there is no such help for the homeless."

She added: "I think those who are suffering the most in this whole situation are the very poor, the low-income population. The burden is disproportionately on them and it's of course disproportionately on African-Americans, on Latinos and immigrant communities, and on Native Americans."

Rolnik toured Chicago, New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Wilkes-Barre, a Pennsylvania town where this year the first four sheriff sales – public auctions of seized property – in the county included 598 foreclosed properties. She also visited a Native American reservation.

The US government does not tally the numbers but interested organisations say that more than 3 million people were homeless at some point over the past year. The fastest growing segment of the homeless population is families with children, often single parents. On any given night in Los Angeles, about 17,000 parents and children are homeless. Most will be found a place in a shelter but many single men and women are forced to sleep on the streets.

Los Angeles, which is described as the homeless capital of America, has endured an 18-fold increase in housing foreclosures. Evictions from owned and rented homes have risen about tenfold, with 62,400 people forced out last year in Los Angeles county.

Welfare payments are not enough to meet the rent, let alone food and other necessities. A single person on welfare living in Los Angeles receives $221 (£133) a month – an amount that hasn't changed in a decade. The rent for one room is typically nearly double that.

Rolnik said that while she saw difficult conditions in all the places she visited, the worst was on the Native American reservation of Pine Ridge in South Dakota.

"You see total hopelessness, despair, very bad conditions. Nothing I have seen in other cities compared to the physical condition of the housing at Pine Ridge. Nothing compared to the overcrowding. They're not visible, they're isolated, they're far away. They're just lost," she said.

Rolnik says that one of the greatest matters of shame is that the US has the resources to provide decent housing for everyone.

"In the US, it's feasible to provide adequate housing for all. You have a lot of money, a lot of dollars available. You have a lot of expertise. This is a perfect setting to really embrace housing as a human right," she said.

Rolnik has given a verbal report to the US state department, which has a month to respond to her observations. She will submit a final written report to the UN human rights council early next year.

Homeless in Portland Oregon in Winter Nov 2009

2009-11-04T11:30:00.000-08:00

This was an email message I recieved, that looks like the writer is very well informed on this topic for the Portland area.
I wanted and needed to share this with all the readers of this blog.
Thanks !
Joe Anybody 11.4.09

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 08:05:55
From: GROWS Committee
To: The GROWS Committee
Subject: Lacking Indoor Shelter Options,
Hundreds in Portland Hope to Be Allowed to Camp

*One month and 3.5 inches of cold rain into the rainy season already, AND
The right to simple shelter is still not on the City Council's Agenda this
week.*

November 4, 2009
Portland, Oregon

Dear Citizens,

*Should hundreds of cold, damp, un-sheltered Portlanders be allowed to camp
legally - if in an orderly manner, in approved places?*

Is it in the public interest to rationally de-criminalize camping in
Portland, so that record numbers of homeless local people can legally cover
themselves against the wind and rain*?*

Should people be allowed to camp in plain view, rather than have to find
places to hide in order to avoid being randomly roused by police or thugs in
the night*?* (Hiding in order to sleep is dangerous, especially for those
more vulnerable)

Should healthier, less vulnerable adults be allowed to camp out-doors, which
would likely free up indoor shelter spaces this winter for use by more
vulnerable people, who might otherwise be turned away from shelters already
at capacity*?* (Improved triage would not be the intention of "easing the
camping ban," but a likely and increasingly necessary side effect of this).

*Yes. For many reasons, we believe that and easing of **the camping
ban**is clearly in the public interest.
*

We are calling on all *people of conscience* to help try to convince a
remarkably slow-to-react Portland City Council that a public-emergency has
for some time been unfolding all around us.*
*
There is *unprecedented* suffering among *record* numbers of (mostly
first-time) homeless people in Portland today. Legal, orderly camping in
designated places would offer immediate relief for them.

Public health and public safety are increasingly at risk because of the
current situation.

We are all connected. The suffering of the poor will inevitably affect each
of us. They need to stay dry and safe.

Portland's "anti-camping law" will soon be up for debate and modification by
the City Council.
(see, City Code Ch.14A.50.020)

Please consider contacting each City Council member to let them know *your
views*, and thus help to *counter the heavy-handed influence* of various
business alliances, right-wing elements within the Portland Police Bureau,
their favorite politicians, and other insensitive or misinformed people who
want to leave the camping ban in place. Behind the scenes efforts are being
made to water down the upcoming reform of the camping ban.

You can check to see when and how the *camping issue* (and other issues)
will come up on the* Portland **City Council’s Agenda* by looking at the *
City Auditor's web page* at
http://www.portlandonline.com/auditor/index.cfm?c=26979
(there click on “Current Council Agenda” and/or “Upcoming Agenda Items")

*For more facts and perspectives about the camping ban . . .
*as well as other local efforts to provide opportunities for all
un-sheltered and jobless people
for food-growing, shelter-building and other sustainable work opportunities,
visit our WordPress.com Blog at:
http://DignityAdvocate.wordpress.com

**

*Trying to muster peace through simple justice,*

**the **G.R.O.W.S.** Committee
** *(a policy advisory council of gardening enthusiasts)

*Portland, Oregon*
*GROWS.committee@gmail.com*

*-->* (end of the short version of the G.R.O.W.S. e-mail message) *---*
*__________________________________**__________
_____________________________**______
___________________________
__________________
__________
_____
_**
*
Here now, if you'd like to read on, you may find the perspectives below
interesting.
If you're not in the mood now, Portland's anti-camping law (along with other
human rights and economic development issues) are discussed further at
the August and
OctoberArchives of
DignityAdvocate's
Blog )

Some Facts and Misconceptions About Portland Area Homelessness:

The great majority of those experiencing homelessness *as of this year* in
the Portland metro area are *not* 'homeless by choice', as un-informed or
judgmental people like to suggest. Most of them are *not* mentally ill --
though continued life on the streets can lead to this. Most of them are *not
* addicts, nor criminals, nor road warriors. How many excuses for continued
ignoring or persecution of the socially disadvantaged do we need to keep
hearing?

There has been a *great shift* in the homeless population locally, and
across the U.S. Because of the economic downturn (and the prospects of a
"jobless recovery"), most of the homeless today are on the streets for the
first time. The majority of those without shelter are seeking work and can't
find any. Thousands are working only occasionally as temps or part-time for
lack of a better economy, and they simply can not afford housing. Waiting
lists for assistance are two years long. Hundreds of the newly homeless in
the Portland area are families with children.

The numbers we hear vary greatly, depending on when and how the count was
conducted. If we count those who are in temporary or precarious housing
situations (staying with friends, or mere acquaintences, or allowed to sleep
in garages, etc.), the numbers in the Portland area reach beyond thirty
thousand.

Among those on the streets, suffering from the rain and cold is made worse
by persecution. They are foced to hide in order to sleep, since it is
illegal under the current Portland law to cover themselves with a tarp or
tent. It is also illegal to "camp" in ones car, even if that is the only
safe place you have.

*The shelters are full already.*

Hundreds are being turned away nightly in Portland alone. City officials
admit they are well short of the ability to allow all who are suffering to
come inside. We are at least a thousand shelter spaces short in Portland
alone.

Locally, this issue -- the criminalization of sleeping in a tent or car --
is among the most important *human rights issues* of our time. Sally
Erickson, Director of Portland Coordinating Committee to End Homelessness
(CCEH) told those in attendance at the Oct. 21 (public) meeting of the CCEH
that, "*so far** *the City Council has mostly only been hearing from people
. . . who want to keep the camping ban in place." There are powerful people
in our City who would rather that the homeless remain hidden. 'Out of sight
out of mind' is a dangerous philosophy when it comes to so many sick,
stressed people.

We need to tell the City Council that with record numbers of homeless people
on the streets for the last year already, we had hoped that the City Council
would have taken up the camping issue long before the start of the current
rainy season. There are too many people on the streets!*

At least 10,000 People Are Now Sleeping Outside in the Metro Area*

The economy has thousands of people terribly stressed for lack of any
shelter. The camping ban is a shameful way to treat people who have no
shelter options. Half way through the so called "Ten Year Plan to End
Homelessness," the number of *newly* homeless citizens has quickly gotten
way beyond the reach of our local Bureaucrats. The Ten Year Plan uses a
housing-with-case-management approach developed by the Bush Administration,
focusing primarily on the chronically homeless.

Most of those experiencing homelessness today are *not* 'chronically' prone
to homelessness, but rather are high functioning, unemployed people who are
seeking work. Most of these people do not know where to turn. Most of these
people are *not* "homeless by choice" as many like to suggest. Locally, most
of them are long-time Portlanders who were working and housed up until
recently.

The *majority* of homeless among us locally these days have become homeless
for the *first time* in the just the last two years. Most of them are still
looking for work. Far from 'choosing' homelessness, they are very
disappointed, stressed, and afraid.

Most of the Portland area homeless today are either not qualified for
housing assistance, or are on two year long waiting lists. Our
homeless *shelters
are already full*, with hundreds being turned away nightly. Most don't even
bother trying to check in any more.

*Under the anti-camping law as it is, it is illegal for a property owner or
a church to allow anyone to camp on their grounds. *

What is left for those stuck without options in the rain? Pitching a tent or
a tarp or a piece of cardboard in an out-of-the-way spot? Sorry, that's
illegal. Adding to their misery is the fact that the Portland Police Bureau
has a serious problem with bullies in their ranks. Police often illegally
seize and dispose of the property of homeless citizens. Oppressive sweeps
can leave a person devastated, and without any possessions. It is happening
nightly. *
*

The camping ban is *dangerous* for *public health* and *public safety*. The
suffering of thousands of our neighbors across the Metro, caught out in the
cold and rain, will inevitably affect each of us. Like ignoring a forecast
hurricane, a culture which forces its homeless to hide is like an arrogant
mariner in a storm path, failing to make preparations.

*Most decent citizens agree that the camping ban should eased or** set
aside.
*
The question is, how effective will the Council's measures be? The homeless
population in the Portland metro area has reached 10,000. At least 20,000
more are 'couch surfing' or living temporarily with friends or family. Most
of these are stressed out people are looking for jobs that aren't there.
With these kinds of numbers at hand, the City Council is now likely, it
seems, to modify the camping ban to allow limited camping.

This past summer, the CCEH ( the homeless helping government agency) of
Portland/ Multnomah County, called together an Alternatives Workgroup to
examine options to expand immediate sheltering needs of our fast growing
homeless population. They have recently made their recommendations to
Commissioner Nick Fish, who has pledged to propose some "alternatives for
safe, dry places to sleep" to the full City Council.

Note: *many* individuals, churches, and activist groups have been asking the
CCEH and more recently Nick Fish's Office to take such an initiative years
now> We had been hoping that they would do so *before* the start of the
current rainy season. Better late than never! Opposition to earlier, more
timely discussions of the Anti-camping law in the City Council have been
lead by the powerful right-wing forces inside the Portland Police Bureau,
the Portland Business Alliance, and by City Commissioner Amanda Fritz.

*The Oregonian* headline of October 22 came out one day after the City's new
'Sidewalks Management Plan' (championed by Fritz) was given force of law.
Note: the old Sit-Lie prohibition was ruled unconstitutional in June of this
year. *Despite* all the foot-dragging about the camping issue, the Camping
Ban is *soon to come up for debate*. The Anti-camping law is now under legal
challenge by the Oregon Law
Center
.

*The Good News Is ...*

Upon the recommendations of the CCEH's Alternatives Workgroup, Commissioner
Fish is planning to propose an easing of the camping ban in early November,
along with other suggestions as to how homeless people can have more safe
places to sleep. The proposal which Commissioner Fish is *likely* planning
to present to the Portland City Council will include the following elements:

*1.* Portland would adopt a position similar to that of the city of Eugene's
'SAFE' camping program (see, Eugene City Code, Ch.4.816). This will allow
churches and private businesses to legally let small numbers of people sleep
on their property either in tents or in cars.
and
*2.* Portland would to ease the anti-camping law to allow for tents on *city
property* during night time hours during the winter months.
and
*3.* Guidelines for proper camping behavior (place, time, and manner
restrictions) will be made public so that the rules are clear to campers,
citizens and police.

Now that the Camping ban is up for debate, the question becomes, *How
effective* would these proposals be in helping the homeless to have enough
safe, dry places to sleep? Assuming that these proposals are passed by our
City Council, will this be enough to help so many unsheltered people? The
answer, we believe is yes and no.

*This month* the City Council is likely to begin talking more seriously
about these issues. Or they may continue to avoid talking about them.* It's
up to us* encourage them to get more serious, and to remind them that there
are far too many people living on the streets.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++
+++++++
+++
+

You can read more about the upcoming camping debate...
at Dignity Advocate's Blog.
*Other NEWS* there discussed includes:

How (as in Seattle and in Eugene) the churches and charities can play a key
role in Portland.
How Portland churches and (certain zoned) businesses will likely be allowed
to accommodate campers where possible. Where are the leaders of the Churches
when it comes to an effective summit on homelessness?

*The question of whether a policy is being drafted which would allow night
time tent camping only on public lands, requiring hundreds of people to pack
up and move on each morning, even in the rain.* While the proposal to
partially lift the ban is good, we are concerned that a watered down version
of a revised camping ban may just keep hundreds or thousands wet.

*The issue of utilizing idle City properties and mothballed resources for
LOWER cost sheltering.*
Not everyone who is homeless is likely to find a church or a business which
will allow them to camp on their property for prolonged periods. There are
too many un-sheltered people to expect that generous churches, businesses
and private citizens will accommodate anywhere-near-all of those seeking
shelter.

*The issue of another 'Dignity Village' and/or tent cities.*
Should non-profits which receive city funds be required to have clean/sober
leadership handling the community money? Should leadership of any new
'village' be more carefully selected? What does effective self-policing and
self-government need to involve? When, where, and how can *simple economic
development* best happen?

The need for donation drives for camping equipment for individuals as well
as families.
Will local government -- as much as they may spend on expensive rent
vouchers -- will our CCEH or the County buy any inexpensive tents, yurts,
strawbales or practical camping equipment for the homeless? Why citizens
need to help protect public health and safety when government efforts fall
short.
The issue of unchecked, consistent bullying by a few of the Portland Police,
and by certain private security forces. Making things even tougher on the
homeless, this law has been routinely enforced by the Portland Police Bureau
in a more aggressive than called for manner. The silence of the Portland
City Council on this is frightening even by L.A. standards. See Dignity
Advocate's Blog Page entitled,
"The Criminalization of
Homelessness."

*The issue of whether **a City or regional emergency **declarations **are
called for. IF modifying Portland's anti-camping law is Insufficient to
alleviate mass suffering, what's next? *The economy has become a disaster
for a quarter million unemployed Oregonians, and is already an (officially
undeclared) *EMERGENCY* for thousands among us.
*And 'The Bigger Picture':
The Need for Locally-Initiated, Ground-Up, Sustainable Economic Development.
* Don't let huge national and international corporate-sponsored-lobbyists
control YOUR local economic planning -- especially at time when greatly
simplified economy (i.e. deliberately lower consumption, not higher) is
needed for the sake of our species' survival.

http://DignityAdvocate.wordpress.com

P.O. Box 3482 * Portland, OR * 97208

Nickelsville’s

2009-10-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.nickelsvilleseattle.org/

Oct 5, 2009

As you know we were swept on Wednesday the 30th from the port of Seattle’s T-107 Park. It was shocking and shattering. Most of ushave been separated from everything we own, except what will fill abackpack or two.

Since then many of us have been at St. Andrews Episcopal Church on80th Ave NW. Many more, though, are floating between other places –temporarily couch surfing, sleeping in vehicles, staying in thejungle. A sizable number fled to Motels on Aurora.

There are some ideas to try and have a project there. That’s not Nickelsville’s goal, but we wish them luck.

Many of the Nickelodeons who were swept last Wednesday will not beable to get back together until we have another outdoor site. This, and our inability to get our things back until we have an outdoorsite, are two reasons why it is so important someone – most likely a church – stand up and let us stay for up to 3 months while we secure the permanent site.

On this Wednesday, the 7th, our core group of Nickelodeons will bemoving to Keystone Congregational Church at 5019 Keystone Place North (& 50th in Wallingford.)

It is a small building with a big hearted congregation. They are willing to share with us all they have, whichis very moving to us. We will be staying in their Sanctuary, and it is not yet clear how we will cook. It is not likely that more than 30 people can fit into the space. Because two Congregations use the space on Sundays we will have to be out from 8 AM to 7:30 PM on that day.

We would love to see you and visit, but must ask that you be careful in the donations that are dropped by – there isn’t much storage room. At the same time, we have a big quandary. All of our belongings have either been seized by the Port, or are in one storage group with friends. In both cases, we cannot recover and take responsibility for them until there is an outdoor site with storage. That means some of the clothes on our back have been the same clothes on the same back for a couple of days. We need to get some new clothes, and replace some of the other possessions we can’t yet retrieve.

If you have the following specific item their donation would be veryhelpful.

If it’s not on this list, please call either the camp number– 450-5268 – or the Staff number - 450-9136.

Then we can tell you whether to bring it now, or to wait until later. Here is what we are in need of right now:

Winter coats, blankets,sleeping bags. Men's pants, sizes 34 to 36 shirts, women's size 7 –18, large to ex large sweatshirts, and also hygiene such astoothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, shampoo, towels, and deodorant.Ready to eat food for about 30, tents and most of all money to pay forpast and future porta potties and dumpsters are also needed.

If you’ve seen a Nickelsvile Alert before, you know that there are over 40 pieces of property in Seattle that are sitting vacant right now that would be great for our permanent site. It’s just that we have not yet found an owner of such property – despite repeated requests – who is willing to share. In the same way there are many churches and charitable organizationswith a patch of land large enough to accommodate up to 100 Nickelodeons for the next 3 months while we secure a permanent site.

We must confess a little disappointment that almost one week after thePort shattered our community, no one with temporarily available land has yet contacted us.

Please remind those you know with an unused parking lot or patch of lawn that they are needed and have a chance to do a great thing!

Thanks!

97 year old homeless woman from LA is no longer sleeping on the streets.

2009-10-25T12:46:00.000-07:00

97 Year Old Homeless Woman Receives Housing

by Shannon Moriarty
Published October 20, 2009 @ 09:40AM PT

The 97 year old homeless woman from LA is no longer sleeping on the streets. Her story, published Friday in the LA Times, garnered national disbelief and prompted service providers to act quickly to move her into housing.
Bessie Mae Berger was 97 years old and living in a beat up 1973 Chevy Suburban with her two sons. The LA Times exposed their plight on Friday, detailing how the trio sleeps, moves from parking lot to parking lot, and occasionally panhandles for food. Their plight caught national attention, prompting LA and California authorities to take immediate action.
Today, the three are safely housed - together, as they wished - in the California Retirement Villa. It's a temporary situation, currently slated to last three months. But the organization says they are committed to helping this family obtain long-term benefits.

Let's breathe a collective sigh of relief now that one especially fragile woman and her two elderly sons are off the streets. What whatever you do, don't get complacent. There are thousands of other elderly homeless individuals hidden in cars, alleys, tent cities, and shelters across the U.S.

Where is the outrage that will move them into housing?

http://homelessness.change.org/blog/view/97_year_old_homeless_woman_receives_housing

Cirle A Radio and KBOO FM Radio cover protest in Portland

2009-10-24T01:08:00.000-07:00

Homelessness in Portland
Submitted by Erin Yanke on Wed, 09/02/2009 - 8:12pm
Categories:
Public Affairs
Housing/Homelessness
program date: Wed, 09/02/2009
program: Circle A Radio
As the number of people living on the streets continues to increase during this recession, many cities are passing ordinances restricting survival activities such as sleeping, sitting down, and asking for spare change. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty released a report in July called Homes Not Handcuffs.
The 190 page report says that city ordinances frequently serve as a tool for criminalizing homelessness.
The report also examines violations of the US Constitution and human rights law within these measures. Here in Portland, the Sit-Lie Ordinance has been declared unconstitutional twice. Still, it looks like Mayor Sam Adams is intent on finding a replacement for the defunct ordinance.
Tonight on Circle A Radio you'll hear mostly from people who are currently homeless in Portland.
We recorded this with the help of Heather Mosher and Wendy Kohn of Kwamba Productions, and Ibrahim Mubarek, one of the founders of Dignity Village. We visited several sites in Portland where homeless folks gather so we could talk to them first hand about their experiences.

Title: Homelessness in Portland
Date: 09/02
Year: 2009
Producer: Circle A Radio
Length: 55:12 minutes (22.11 MB)
Format: MP3 Mono 22kHz 56Kbps (CBR)
Add new comment
Download audio file

Videos From Portland Homeless Protesters

2009-10-18T12:39:00.000-07:00

I went by Portland City Hall on Sat 10.10 09

and there was a

camp-out-protest in the works.

It was around 8 pm

I reported the following to

Portland Indy Media here:

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/10/394760.shtml

These are the 4 video clips

that I posted on YouTube from that evening on 10.10.09:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReAzoyKUB-E
Video 1 Whats This Protest About
------------

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyT1oQTpGLs
Video 2 No Restrooms at Night
------------

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSuaKAeJrkI
Video 3 Conduct Contract
------------

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aCGhxU9460
video 4 Solidarity & Food
------------

Homeless in Portland

2009-10-08T11:36:00.000-07:00

Portland Oregon September 2009

MAYOR SAM ADAMS is seeking feedback on elements of a new sidewalk management plan, which will replace the city's defunct and unconstitutional sit-lie law. Adams and City Commissioner Nick Fish told business leaders two weeks ago that they planned a new kind of sidewalk management package instead of another iteration of the sit-lie
["We Mean it This Time," News, Sept 17].

The new draft plan, posted on the mayor's website on Thursday, September 17, plans to align all city codes affecting sidewalk use in the same place, create a criminal zero-tolerance approach to illegal activity like offensive littering and harassment, improve homeless services, designate sidewalk through zones, establish a downtown retail strategy, and increase the number of restrooms available on the street.

"Portland has 4,804 miles of sidewalks, including 37,744 street corners; the Westside of downtown Portland alone comprises 152 miles of sidewalks and 1,778 corners," says Adams' website, explaining that a multitude of uses "must all share a sidewalk between five- and 15-feet wide."

So far, reactions among homeless advocates and those who have watch-dogged these issues since the city last passed a sit-lie law in 2007 have been mixed.
"If it's going to be something that's fair to everybody and used equally, then I'm okay with it," says Patrick Nolen from activist group Soapbox Under the Bridge. "The city needs to govern such things. My problem with the old law was it was used unequally against people experiencing homelessness."

Others are more skeptical.
"I think they're still grasping at straws, trying to find some way of telling people they can't sit, lie, or stand on a given area of the sidewalk," says Copwatch activist Dan Handelman. "They're trying to paint a happy face on what they've done before, but I doubt it will be enforced fairly."
The mayor hopes to have the new package approved by December at the latest.

Portland City Hall Homeless campout 2009 Starts Back Up

2009-09-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/y9l4ppb

The Homeless protest Vigil at Portland City Hall is "back"

For the second time in less than two years, a group of homeless people are camping outside of City Hall to protest an ordinance they view as criminalizing and stopping them from getting a good night’s sleep.
Beginning at 9 o’clock this evening, 20 individuals set up their sleeping bags and other belongings along the southern side of the front entrance of City Hall. Art Rios, who is organizing the protest, says that the people are camping this year for the same reason as they were last year.
“We want the anti-camping ordinance to be suspended,” he says. “We want a campsite that’s safe.”
The anti-camping ordinance is a city-wide ordinance that bans camping on public property. Homeless people and many advocates says the ordinance criminalizes homeless people who are forced to sleep in public spaces at night because they do not have access to shelters or other places to sleep.
For three weeks during May 2008, a group of homeless people ranging in size from 40 to 120 people protested and camped outside of City Hall to protest the anti-camping ordinance and the sidewalk obstruction ordinance (known as the “sit-lie” ordinance), which illegalized sitting or lying down on the sidewalk during the day. In June 2009, that ordinance was ruled unconstitutional by Judge Stephen Bushong in district court.
Rios says that he plans to have organized camps at City Hall Monday through Friday, 9pm to 7am. That, he says, is enough to get eight hours of sleep, but also will not “interrupt City Hall’s business,” as well as get the attention of politicians, advocates, bureaucrats and the public.
“I want to show the City…that a camp size of 10 to 15 people can be here and not bother their day to day process,” Rios says.
There is currently a sub-group of the Coordinating Committee to End Homelessness, the group charged with implementing and overseeing the City’s 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness, that is currently looking at ways for homeless people who do not have access to shelter to sleep outside at night. The group is hoping to some of those proposals in place in the next three to six months. Rios is skeptical.
“I hear about all these proposals, and there is no action happening,” Rios says.
Check the October 2 edition of Street Roots for more information about the City’s efforts, as well as more information about the protest.
By Amanda Waldroupe
This article was originally found and written for STREET ROOTS

http://streetroots.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/breaking-news-homeless-people-camp-and-protest-once-again-at-city-hall/

More on this topic and related links on Portland Indy Media Here:

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/09/394446.shtml

Homeless Not Welcome in Washington DC City Parks

2009-09-18T15:15:00.000-07:00

Fenty: Homeless not welcome in city parks
Author: Luke reposting for Eric Sheptock

Date Created
16 Sep 2009
More details...

http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/147636/index.php
Date Edited
16 Sep 2009 03:20:54 PM

This work is in the public domain

Fenty: Homeless not welcome in city parks

Now that Fenty has closed Franklin Shelter and other shelters seem about to close, Mayor "Two Face" Fenty seems to have ordered the police to declare war on the downtown homeless. So far Fenty has failed in this, to the consternation of certain businesses in places like Chinatown.
From Eric Sheptock:

The Unwelcome Homeless

In November of 2008 a Washington City Paper article indicated that the homeless are not welcome in the libraries of our nation's capital. An August 2009 New York times article addressed the criminalization of poverty nationally. Then, a September 2009 Washington Examiner article mentioned that the homeless are not welcome in the parks of Downtown Washington, DC.

It's no military secret -- the homeless are America's most unwanted.

What's most disturbing about this news is that our public officials are often the ones leading the charge against the homeless.Most homeless advocates wouldn't take offense to any reasonable request, such as wanting a homeless person to be presentable and well-mannered; but the mentally ill are one of the most underserved populations in the city, often leading to some very public psychotic episodes. And many of the homeless wouldn't loiter around businesses and other public places if they had somewhere to go.

But, as this most recent article pointed out, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty closed the Franklin School Shelter on September 26th, 2008 and is now shutting down the Permanent Supportive Housing Program (Housing First). Insomuch as the Franklin closure was predicated on the creation of Housing First, this amounts to a bait and switch and to dirty politics at their worst -- leaving the homeless with nowhere to go.

As a matter of fact, the two parks that were pictured in the article were Franklin Park (which is right across the road from the now defunct shelter) and McPherson Park (which is one block from Franklin Park). Both business owners and tourists alike are bothered by the existence of homeless people in these locations -- the former because it "interferes" with business and the latter because they expect the poor to be treated better in the capital of the wealthiest nation in the world.It is not just the business community around Franklin Square that wants the homeless gone.

Several homeless people were put out of the food court at the One Judiciary Square government office building on September 9th, 2009 -- some having just made purchases. I just happened to be exiting the subway system nearby as they spoke to security and the cops. The homeless told me stories of abuse and of their rights having been violated. Upon further investigation, I found out that, just days earlier, the mayor had met with entrepreneurs from around Chinatown and Union Station.

They asked him to do for them what he had done for the businesses of Franklin Square, by getting rid of the homeless. The mayor then gave police the order to clear the homeless out of this part of town, which accounts for the incident at the food court. Oddly enough, one week later the Examiner article pointed out that the homeless are still present in that part of town. The mayor hadn't done what they gave him credit for doing after all.It is not just the homeless who have fallen victim to the anti-poverty policies of the mayor.

In July of this year, Mayor Fenty threatened to cut off the benefits of women receiving TANF (Temporary Assistance For Needy Families) if the mothers receiving $428/month through this program fail to seek employment. He is also slashing programs that enable those women to receive daycare for their children. Without daycare, the mothers of young children can't go to work and are left to wonder when those in government will make the connection.Tensions continue to build between the business owners who have the mayor as their champion and the poor of DC.

It is only a matter of time before things boil over into a major incident. The poor from across the city are spewing words of anger and hatred at the mayor. Protests against the Fenty administration's policies are being organized. The homeless are seriously discussing the possibility of open conflict with the police. As economic conditions continue to worsen (in spite of Bernanke's optimism), we're left to wonder just when people will reach their threshhold and unleash their wrath.

As for my part, I've instructed the homeless to come out in mass whenever the police bother any one of us or violate our rights. For the moment, all we plan to do is to stand together in large numbers and hope that's enough to send a strong message that we are tired of being pushed around. Time will tell.

Three more links

Sit - Lie Law in Portland Oregon (again) "Rulled un constitutional"

2009-06-23T19:52:00.001-07:00

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/06/392206.shtml

A ruling today coming from Multnomah County Courts tells The city of Portland that "they are unconstitutionally exceeding the city's authority, regarding the sit/lie law." The following report was found on (Portlands) Street Roots website

sit lie law
I re-posted this on Portland Indy Media at 6:45 PM The news just came out four hours ago. It looks like the state law over rides the cities inept law The original article is here from Street Roots breaking news: link to streetroots.wordpress.com (3:00 P.M.) Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Stephen K. Bushong has ruled that the city of Portland's sidewalk-obstruction ordinance - commonly referred to as sit-lie, unconstitutionally exceeds the city's authority.

The ruling was released today, and grants the motion to dismiss a sit-lie case being defended by attorney Clayton Lance. "This ordinances has been found unconstitutional on three separate and distinct ground," Lance told Street Roots. "That's a heck of a lot of unconstitutionality for one little ordinance out of the city. It just is not going to work and they just keep trying to make it fit, and it will never be able to fit in my opinion." The sit-lie law prohibits sitting or lying on downtown sidewalks between the hours of 7 a.m. and 9 p.m.

The city has maintained it is to keep the sidewalks free of obstructions. Records show that the majority of people cited under the law are homeless. Judge Bushong ruled that the city's law conflicts with and is preempted by state law; State v. Robison, which Lance says already allows the city to penalize people for obstructing sidewalks.

"The (sit-lie) ordinance does not at all deal with obstruction. That's a myth," Lance said."It was to move the transient and the homeless because the transient and homeless were sitting on the sidewalks in downtown Portland. Nothing else." As Lance noted, this is the latest round in the city's failed attempts to institute a sit-lie law.

In 2004, Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Marilyn Litzenberger ruled that the city's 2003 version of the ordinance was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad. The current version was a response to that ruling with more specific information on what was and was not prohibited. The Court of Appeals further ruled that the 2003 version was preempted by state law, the same as Bushong's ruling.

"In the United States, we fundamentally respect the rights of individuals to meet, to assemble, to communicate and to use public property. And (the city's) attempts at curtailing those fundamental rights have been unconstitutional every step of the way."

It is altogether likely the city will revise its ordinance for another round. Lance says he is ready to defend any charges under the ordinance for free. "Because of social justice and compassion," Lance said. "We need to have social justice and compassion. And this law lacks that completely."

contribute to this Portland Indy Media article

Yay!
22.Jun.2009 20:53
Yay!
link
Yay!

A long time coming
22.Jun.2009 21:15
Paco
link
At last: Take one for The People!

My Homeless Videos are here

2009-06-22T20:13:00.000-07:00

I have a page on Joe-Anybody.com that is just for my videos that document the homeless and their on-going battle for dignity and justice... not to mention their civil and human rights as well!

The page with all my videos is right here:
http://www.joe-anybody.com/id146.html

Kirsten writes about "The Privilege of Privacy"

2009-04-14T20:26:00.000-07:00

The Privilege of Privacy and Homelessness

http://users.resist.ca/~kirstena/pageprivacyasprivilege.html

Written By Kirsten Anderberg
www.kirstenanderberg.com
Written Feb. 5, 2007

Seattle, WA 2008 (Photo: K.Anderberg)
When I've been homeless, the hardest part has been the lack of privacy. The *privilege of privacy* is something many take for granted, but for those of us who have experienced homelessness firsthand, privacy becomes a mindset, rather than a physical reality. And that fortress of privacy within one's *mind* adds to the wide chasm between the housed and the homeless, often making homeless people seem "crazy" to housed folks. And when one has been forced to make *mental* doors that shut, since physical doors to shut for safety are nonexistent, it is as if there is a change to one's soul.

Homeless people are burdened with an obligation to hide, while given no privacy. Often homeless folks learn to "hide" mentally, like an ostrich hiding its head in the sand. It is a sanity tactic, even if it appears "nuts" to people with privacy privilege. The ability to shut a door with 4 walls is something many take for granted. Such privacy affords a human a moment to let down his guard, emotionally and physically. Physical privacy allows a person some rest, a moment to rejuvenate. But homeless folks never get that moment to relax, let down their guard, and rejuvenate. Kept on alert at all times, guarding all belongings, and self, in public, is exhausting, both physically and mentally.

To many people who have been homeless and lived on the street, getting away from people is their greatest dream. Already tainted as untouchables or the unwanted, people have collectively left a bad taste in many homeless people's hearts. And the constant exposure to other people is as eroding as any physical weather elements. Honestly, I found the constant exposure to people to be much more dangerous to my mental and physical health than the exposure to cold, rain, etc., when homeless.

Seattle, WA 2008 (Photo: K.Anderberg)

This human need for privacy to regroup, to heal and recover from life's traumas, to feel safe, emotionally and physically, is something the "housing first" movement understands. A movement to HOUSE the homeless, with no strings attached, is a big step forward, being promoted by organizations such as "Pathways to Housing" (http://www.pathwaystohousing.org).

"Pathways" says it is inhumane to hold homeless people *hostage* with these obligations to get stable BEFORE receiving help with housing. And it is true that many people WITH housing, and large incomes as well, cannot conquer their drug addiction and mental health issues. So to ask low-income folks who are homeless to conquer those demons FIRST, as a prerequisite for housing, truly is cruel and inhumane.

"Pathways" believes "only housing cures homelessness." That sounds so simple, but it is quite profound. They are saying that the issues of drug abuse, mental illness and homelessness are separate. They are saying those 3 issues entail separate remedies, and that the remedy for homelessness is actually quite simple compared with the other issues. Curing homelessness merely entails providing stable and secure housing for the homeless. "Pathways" provides permanent housing of the tenant's choice, and then offers voluntary, not mandatory, programs to help tenants with other issues, such as drug addiction or depression.

"Pathways" understands that when homeless, survival is first and foremost. Self-improvement tales a back seat to survival, when homeless. By giving homeless people some privacy, some alone time, and some safety, and by giving them a *physical* door, so they can open the *mental* doors they shut long ago, "housing first" programs are healing the souls of homeless folks.

I am saying I believe the thing homeless people often crave, miss, and desire most, is PRIVACY. Often privacy is the most necessary missing element for the recovery of a homeless person's hope and faith, and a return of their dignity. Often privacy is the missing prerequisite for peace in the souls of many homeless people. The privacy becomes a symbol of safety, even. We come to know we are safe, because we have privacy.

Although many homeless people appear to be anti-social, due to shutting emotional/mental doors to compensate for no physical doors to shut, I think there is a process to opening back up to people, to trusting again, to re-integration...and ironically, getting alone time, and privacy, can be the first step to overcoming anti-social behaviors.

I was a homeless kid: in institutions, foster care, as a homeless teen. The message I got was I was an unwanted party crasher on this planet. I was taught to hide myself in this society as a child. I have been homeless as an adult in my past, as well. I have reoccurring nightmares involving doors. I will rent an apt., move in, then realize the front door has a 10 inch gap under it, between the floor and its bottom, making it easy to enter under the door, even when locked. Or I move into an apt. and the front door literally falls off when I shut it, as if it has no hinges, etc. My father broke down my locked bedroom door in a drunken rage in my teens. As a child in MacLaren Hall, a torturous holding place for unwanted and severely abused children in Los Angeles, I had no privacy, no doors to lock out the violent guards and children who were acting out what they had seen adults do to them. Doors are a big thing to me....and many others like me.

Locking doors are a privilege. If you don't have physical locking doors, you will make mental locking doors, as exemplified by the "bag lady" who appears oblivious to those around her in public. Mental doors are a form of *sanity*, not insanity. And as I've said, and as people at Housing First programs have come to understand, homeless people cannot safely open locked mental doors until there are safe physical doors to replace them.

"What is a room without a door, Which sometimes locks or stands ajar?
What is a room without a wall, To keep out sight and sound from all?
And dwellers in each room should have, The right to choose their own design
And color schemes to suit their own, Though differing from mine." - Pete Seeger

Wristbands To ID Homeless (Canada)

2009-04-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

Ontario, CA, Tent City Residents Required to Wear Wristbands

Source: Los Angeles Times
Published on 03-31-2009

Tent City residents gather as the city of Ontario starts the process of sorting out who may stay and who must leave. The city issued wristbands – blue for Ontario residents, who may stay, orange for people who need to provide more documentation, and white for those who must leave. The aim is to reduce the number of people living there from over 400 to 170.

Officials begin thinning out the encampment, saying the city can provide space only for those who once lived there and can prove it.

Dozens of Ontario police and code enforcement officers descended upon the homeless encampment known as Tent City early Monday, separating those who could stay from those to be evicted.

Large, often confused, crowds formed ragged lines behind police barricades where officers handed out color-coded wristbands. Blue meant they were from Ontario and could remain. Orange indicated they had to provide more proof to avoid ejection, and white meant they had a week to leave.

Many who had taken shelter at the camp -- which had grown from 20 to more than 400 residents in nine months -- lacked paperwork, bills or birth certificates proving they were once Ontario residents.

"When my husband gets out of jail he can bring my marriage certificate; will that count?" asked one tearful woman.

Another resident, clearly confused, seemed relieved to get a white band -- not understanding it meant she had to leave.

Pattie Barnes, 47, who had her motor home towed away last week, shook with anger.

"They are tagging us because we are homeless," she said, staring at her orange wristband. "It feels like a concentration camp."

Ontario officials, citing health and safety issues, say it is necessary to thin out Tent City. The move to dramatically reduce the population curtails an experiment begun last year to provide a city-approved camp where homeless people would not be harassed.

Land that includes tents, toilets and water had been set aside near Ontario International Airport for the homeless. Officials intended to limit the camp and its amenities to local homeless people, but did little to enforce that as the site rapidly expanded, attracting people from as far away as Florida.

"We have to be sensitive, and we will give people time to locate documents," said Brent Schultz, the city's housing and neighborhood revitalization director. "But we have always said this was for Ontario's homeless and not the region's homeless. We can't take care of the whole area."

Officials believe the local homeless number about 140, less than half of those currently in residence. Schultz wants to reduce Tent City to 170 people in a regulated, fenced-off area rather than the sprawling open-air campsite it has become.

No other city has offered to take in any of the homeless who Ontario officials say must leave.

"So far I have heard nothing," Schultz said.

Even before the large-scale action Monday, police last week moved out parolees and towed about 20 dilapidated motor homes. A list of safety rules, including one banning pets, has been posted. The city says there is a threat of dog bites and possible disease from the animals.

The no-pet order caused widespread anger and tears Monday as some homeless people said they could not imagine life without their dogs. Many have three or four and vowed to leave Tent City before giving the dogs up.

"I will go to jail before they take my dog," said an emotional Diane Ritchey, 47. "That's a part of me as much as anything. The dogs are as homeless as we are."

Cindy Duke, 40, hugged Ritchey, who was sobbing.

"I had to give up my 6-year-old son because I was homeless and I'll be damned if I give up my dog too," Duke said.

Celeste Trettin, 53, rolled up in a wheelchair. She and her husband have an Ontario address but have lived for years in a truck, parking wherever they found a safe place. Trettin, who got an orange wristband, said she believed she would be able to find the paperwork to prove she was from Ontario.

"We thought if we came here we could save some money, but now they have pulled the rug out from under us," said Trettin, who has fibromyalgia, a painful disorder.

The City that Ended Hunger

2009-03-26T20:42:00.000-07:00

An Email I recieved with a remarkable

> The City that Ended Hunger
> by Frances Moore Lappé
> http://tinyurl.com/cge38l
>
> A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have
> yet to do: end hunger.
>
> In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not
> caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization
> was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like
> that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials?
> Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise
> here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food
> stamps—these questions take on new urgency.
>
> To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens
> making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt
> wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of
> Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such
> lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its
> population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children
> going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a
> right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy
> food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.
>
> The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger
> effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member
> council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in
> the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved
> regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the
> “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread
> across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy,
> perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of
> citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to
> more than 31,000.
>
> The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to
> food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It
> offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to
> sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on
> produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers.
> Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor
> people got access to fresh, healthy food.
>
> When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope’s Edge we
> approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned
> with “Direct from the Countryside,” grinned as she told us, “I am able to
> support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with
> the city, I’ve even been able to buy a truck.”
>
> The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that,
> as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw
> their incomes drop by almost half.
>
> In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by
> offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use
> well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese
> acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the
> city determines a set price—about two-thirds of the market price—of about
> twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners.
> Everything else they can sell at the market price.
>
> “For ABC sellers with the best spots, there’s another obligation attached
> to being able to use the city land,” a former manager within this city
> agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. “Every weekend they have to drive
> produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so
> everyone can get good produce.”
>
> Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s
> Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily
> serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent
> of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of
> diners—grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers
> with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still
> others in business suits.
>
> “I’ve been coming here every day for five years and have gained six
> kilos,” beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.
>
> “It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an
> athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been
> eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a
> house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.
>
> No one has to prove they’re poor to eat in a People’s Restaurant, although
> about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and
> allows “food with dignity,” say those involved.
>
> Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school
> gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government
> contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now
> buys whole food mostly from local growers.
>
> “We’re fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent
> administrator,” Adriana explained. “We’re showing that the state
> doesn’t have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels
> for people to find solutions themselves.”
>
> For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to
> “keep the market honest in part simply by providing information,” Adriana
> told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens
> of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and
> radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are.
>
> The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look
> for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves,
> and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for
> school kids’ daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school
> children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city.
>
> The result of these and other related innovations?
>
> In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as
> evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit
> almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period
> in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And
> between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption
> of fruits and vegetables went up.
>
> The cost of these efforts?
>
> Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget.
> That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.
>
> Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social
> mentality”—the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of
> us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food
> for all is a public good.”
>
> The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more
> public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean
> redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to
> participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships
> driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.
>
> And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in
> human nature is required! Through most of human evolution—except for the last
> few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where
> pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among
> unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an
> authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme
> privation, when some eat, all eat.
>
> Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We
> wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world
> taking this approach—food as a right of membership in the human family. So I
> asked, “When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was?
> How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?”
>
> Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to
> be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to
> know what had touched her emotions.
>
> “I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is
> so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy.
> It’s so easy to end it.”
>
> Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps
> Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to
> break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes—if we trust our
> hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for
> or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government
> accountable to us.
>
> ============
> Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the
> Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is the author of many books
> including Diet for a Small Planet and Get a Grip, co-founder of Food First and
> the Small Planet Institute, and a YES! contributing editor.
>
> The author thanks Dr. M. Jahi Chappell for his contribution to the article

Tent Cities On The Rise Across America 2009

2009-03-09T21:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/2991742/Tent-cities-of-homeless-on-the-rise-across-the-US.html

In Reno, Nevada, the state with the nation's highest repossessions rate, a tent city recently sprung up on the city's outskirts and quickly filled up with about 150 people Photo: AP
Robert Scott Cook, originally from Alaska, walks his dog Tramp through the tent city that sprung up next to the homeless shelter in downtown Reno, Nevada Photo: AP
Nearly 61 per cent of local and state homeless organisations say they have witnessed an increase in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, the Washington DC-based National Coalition for the Homeless study says.

And the problem has intensified since the report was produced in April, along with rising repossessions, soaring energy and food prices and job losses, the group says.

"It's clear that poverty and homelessness have increased," Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the coalition, said.

"The economy is in chaos, we're in an unofficial recession and Americans are worried, from the homeless to the middle class, about their future."

Homeless groups and government agencies from Seattle, in Washington state, to Athens in Georgia, report the most visible increase in homeless encampments in a generation.

"What you're seeing is encampments that I haven't seen since the '80s," said Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, an umbrella group of homeless groups in west coast cities.

In Reno, Nevada, the state with the nation's highest repossessions rate, a tent city recently sprung up on the city's outskirts and quickly filled up with about 150 people. Many, such as Sylvia Flynn, 51, who came from northern California, ended up homeless after losing their jobs and home.

Officials say they do not know how many homeless the city has. "But we do know that the soup kitchens are serving hundreds more meals a day and that we have more people who are homeless than we can remember," Jodi Royal-Goodwin, the city's redevelopment agency director, said.

In California, the upmarket city of Santa Barbara is housing homeless people who live in their cars in city car parks while Fresno, has several tent cities. Others have sprung up in Portland in Oregon, and Seattle, where homeless activists have set up mock tent cities at city hall to draw attention to the problem.

Meanwhile, new encampments have appeared, or existing ones grown, in San Diego, Chattanooga in Tennessee, and Columbus, Ohio.

A recent report by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development noted a 12 per cent drop in homelessness across the nation, but the latest figures – from 2007 – predates the current housing and economic crisis.

PDX Portland - Sit/Lie Law Unconstitutional - Feb 2009

2009-02-20T17:33:00.000-08:00

Sit/Lie Law Unconstitutional

This was posted by Matt Davis on The Mercury Blogspot
on Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:38 AM

PORTLAND OREGON
http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2009/02/19/judge_rules_sit_lie_law_uncons#Scene_1

A downtown judge has ruled the city's controversial sidewalk obstruction ordinance unconstitutional.

Judge Michael McShane made the ruling yesterday about the part of the ordinance that requires people to keep their personal belongings within two feet.

"I found that an ordinary person would not understand from the statute that mundane and everyday behavior would be prohibited by the law," McShane tells the Mercury.

"The ordinance encourages arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement," says McShane,

McShane gave the Mercury two examples of mundane behavior that would in theory be illegal under the ordinance.

"A woman with a baby in a stroller who walks away from the stroller for a moment to get the baby strapped into the car would be breaking the law," says McShane. "Or a window washer who steps two feet away from his bucket while he is washing a storefront window."

McShane said Deputy District Attorney Brian Lowney was unable to convince him otherwise in court. Both Lowney, and defense attorney Maite Uranga are yet to return calls for comment.

The law, which has been controversial since its inception, is scheduled to sunset in April, with City Commissioners Amanda Fritz and Randy Leonard opposed to its renewal, and City Commissioner Nick Fish still firmly on the fence with the deciding vote.

McShane made the ruling in the case of state versus Steven Joseph Elias, yesterday. Elias, who is only 23 but looks a little older, has a reputation for looking just like Jack Sparrow in the movie Pirates Of The Caribbean, and is a renowned member of Portland's street community. Police cited Elias last fall for violating the sidewalk obstruction ordinance when he left his backpack outside Peterson's convenience store on SW Yamhill. During the citation, officers asked Elias to remove an asp from his belt, and saw a knife concealed behind it on his waistband. They charged him with carrying a concealed weapon, but Judge McShane ruled that the evidence should be suppressed in court yesterday, since he ruled that the original cite—against Elias' backpack, was unconstitutional.

Judge McShane's ruling runs contradictory to another ruling last September, ( http://streetroots.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/judge-rules-portlands-sit-lie-law-constitutional-reasonable/ )

...when another downtown judge, Terry Hannon, ruled the law "constitutional" and "reasonable" in another case.

It's unlikely the state will appeal the ruling, since it's not uncommon for downtown judges to make different rulings on the same law. If the state appeals McShane's ruling, it would have to go before the court of appeals. If the appeals court rules the law unconstitutional, then cops would have to stop using it. In the meantime, the city can continue enforcing a law that has been found unconstitutional, regardless.

Calls to Police Commissioner Dan Saltzman's office were not immediately returned, but I expect we'll have some comments later.

Permalink
( http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2009/02/19/judge_rules_sit_lie_law_uncons )

The Human Face: Stories from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

2009-01-14T20:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7PPsSENl7I&NR=1

Matt Davis ... Portland Homeless.... Nick Fish

2009-01-05T15:24:00.000-08:00

I have found the following article by Matt Davis of the Portland Mercury about the cold season and getting shelter. The article on 12.13.08 (titled "In the Shadows, Warming to Fish") can be found here:
http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/in-the-shadows/Content?oid=1011104

______________________

City Commissioner Nick Fish is standing among 150 mattresses and almost as many people in the gym of the Foursquare Church on SE Ankeny. He asks Red Cross Volunteer Supervisor Mohammad Ali about the challenges of operating an emergency warming center like this one.

"The personalities are the most challenging," says Ali. "These people live on the streets. Last night we had one fistfight and one inappropriate activity."

As Ali talks, another TriMet busload of homeless people pours through the doors. On Thursday, December 18, the center—which is open only when the weather is cold enough to make sleeping outside life-threatening—is on its fifth consecutive night. Regarding the "inappropriate activity" (what does that mean exactly?), Fish tells Ali he's already met with Police Chief Rosie Sizer to talk about stationing an officer in the center—but Sizer raised concerns about scaring off homeless people with outstanding warrants.

"Even if it were someone walking through once an hour, that uniformed presence would really help us," says Ali, and Fish says he'll see what he can do.

This emergency Red Cross center is in addition to two other winter-round warming centers Fish recently got funded by city council, in partnership with Multnomah County, to the tune of $300,000. Earlier in the evening, he toured the new family warming center, which has just opened in a former bridge club at NE 81st and Clackamas.

"We just scratched the playing card symbols off the windows last week," said the center's coordinator, Jean DeMaster, from the nonprofit Human Solutions.

The family center has 40 beds, and has thus far been catering to between 12 and 20 people a night. DeMaster anticipates an influx of clients in 2009, when homeless families tend to wear out their welcomes with relatives over Christmas. There are currently 2,500 homeless children in Multnomah County, but many homeless families sleep in their cars because of the stigma of this particular kind of homelessness, DeMaster says. There's also plenty more space in the building, including a former boxing ring in the basement, and Fish is abuzz with possibilities for it.

This reporter has had a few differences of opinion with Fish since he joined Portland City Council in June. For example, Fish is yet to formally take a position on the controversial sit-lie ordinance, and he ducked the Mercury's questions about oversight for rent-a-cops during our spring endorsement interviews. Despite past disagreements, Fish agreed to let this reporter join him on the warming center tour, if he promised be on his "best behavior."

Best behavior or not, it's time to give Nick Fish his due. His work to get the warming centers funded has been tireless, and shows an ability to cut through red tape to help those who need it most. Indeed, Fish seems at his best when faced with a human-scale problem, and the opportunity to solve it by drawing on his relationships in the homeless advocacy community. Like when Barry Lewis, a student at Portland Community College who is sleeping at the Clark Center men's shelter under the Hawthorne Bridge, lamented his inability to get into permanent supported housing because of his academic studies.

"Is that a federal rule?" Fish wondered. "Give me your details. I'll look into it, and get back to you. "That's the kind of commissioner Portland's homeless really need.

MENTAL BOUND

2008-12-29T22:24:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWwesAMPsLI

Mental Bound

A song about depression and despair.

MENTAL BOUND
by:
http://www.youtube.com/user/cuaroundclown

Twilight dances on midnight fright
Who and how are bound so tight
Hope never lasts and why I cry?
The blessed ones just wonder by
Yeah the blessed ones always wonder by
Please don't sit so damn near
My breathings hard when I'm in fear
but not a word you wonder why?
I'm just a coffin left to die
Yeah just a coffin waiting to die
Thought I was ready for the town
a big mistake had to turn around
my arms, legs, and mouth seemed bound
Reflections of a lonesome clown
Yeah reflections of a very lonesome clown
Not a face just a hole
An angry man thats lost his soul
The spiral down took its toll
Mental bound without control
Yeah mental bound with no chance of parole
A living hell with no rest found
My only hope is in the ground
Hope never lasts and why I cry?
The blessed ones just wonder by
Yeah blessed ones always wonder by
How can the blessed ones not care if I die

Warming Centers in Portland - Discussion in City Hall

2008-12-20T23:05:00.000-08:00

I filmed this discussion which was on TV ...about "Warming Centers" for the homeless in Portland Oregon durring this cold freezing weather

The YouTube video is a Ch.#30 Metro TV copy of the Portland City Hall council meeting on 12.17.08

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxzrSBebrVM

STEPHEN PIMPARE discusses Poverty with Amy Goodman

2008-11-29T14:16:00.002-08:00

Stephen Pimpare, author of a new book called “A People’s History of Poverty in America” (New Press). Pimpare is a professor of political science and social work at Yeshiva University here in New York. His previous book was titled “The New Victorians: Poverty, Politics, and Propaganda in Two Gilded Ages.”

INTERVIEW

on Democracy Now

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/25/stephen_pimpare_on_a_peoples_history

11.25.08

AMY GOODMAN: Share some of the stories, because its really the color, the power of this book.

STEPHEN PIMPARE: One of, I think, the things that comes through most clearly if we actually listen to those who are facing dire need of one form of another and looking towards institutions whether they are public or private, familial or neighborhood, for some sort of assistance, is the almost universal contempt and disdain for the manner in which they’re treated by those institutions. The notion their poor through some of their own moral failings and they need to be redeemed, they need to be rehabilitated, that they need to be made a respectable, normal . If we look at the experience of poor people over time, that independence is something they hold very dearly just as you or I would.

What they’re fighting for is dignity, independence. What they’re fighting for often access to a good job at a living wage that makes it possible for them to have some control over their own lives, some ability to support their families in the manner that they chose. It is perhaps some measure of how poorly—the narrowness we think about poverty, we focus our attention on welfare, which is absolutely essential as an interim measure while people are in between jobs, escaping abusive relationships, trying to put themselves through college. These are vital and essential programs as interim measures but they are used as interim measures. The notion that poor Americans are looking for a free ride, that they are looking for a welfare check so they do not have to work is simply not borne out by the testimony by offer over and over again about the need for greater choice in their own lives, the ability to make their own decisions of how they are going to put together the complex puzzle that is survival day-to-day.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about surrender a culture of poverty.

STEPHEN PIMPARE: We have historically understood poverty as a more failure. In fact, we have a whole architecture of language we use to talk about this, the culture of poverty. The notion that there is either something inherent in individuals that leads them to be poor selling them to be poor, some sort of moral emotional, intellectual failing, or some sort of collective culture that is born and bred in poor communities, in which we pass poverty around, almost as if it is some sort of disease.

To read the rest of this interview click Here

You can watch or listen on these links below:

LISTENWATCH
Real Video Stream
Real Audio Stream
MP3 Download

Counting the homeless who are serriously ill in Portland

2008-11-17T15:43:00.001-08:00

The following report is by Amanda Waldroupe

It was posted here on "Portlands" street newspaper called

"Street Roots"

Nov. 12, 2008 (from the October 31-Nov 13 edition)

http://streetroots.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/for-the-first-time-portlands-homeless-are-ranked-by-how-likely-they-are-to-die-on-the-streets/

Much thanks to Amanda for this well documneted article

___________________________________________________

Measuring our vulnerability
(by Amanda Waldroupe)
Forty-year-old Shannon Boat, who has been homeless on the streets of Portland for three years, was told that the bladder cancer she was diagnosed with would kill her.
“They told me I had two years, and that was six years ago,” she says.
She stops by at the Downtown Chapel regularly to stock up on Depends — adult diapers — because she can no longer control her bladder.
“It’s painful,” Boat says. “Being homeless makes my health problems worse… If I wasn’t homeless, I wouldn’t have to be worry about leaking urine all over the place.”
Boat’s story of becoming increasingly unhealthy while homeless is a common one on the streets, but her story — like many others — has largely remained untold.
That changed on Friday, October 24, when the results of a survey detailing the severe health problems homeless individuals suffer from was presented to an auditorium full of those charged with ending homelessness in Portland.
The survey created what is called the Vulnerability Index. Ranking homeless individuals according to the fragility of their health, the Index reveals how likely those individuals are to die on the streets if they do not receive housing, medical care, or other services.
Created by the New York non-profit Common Ground, the Index is based on the research of Dr. Jim O’Connell, a street physician with the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. O’Connell’s research found that having one, or a combination, of eight specific illnesses increased a homeless individual’s likelihood of dying (see sidebar).
The results of Portland’s survey are alarming (see results at right).
“Frankly, they shock me,” says City Commissioner Nick Fish, who oversees the Bureau of Housing and Community Development.
Altogether, 646 surveys were taken, far exceeding the housing bureau’s goal of collecting 400. Of those 646 individuals, 302 people, or 47 percent of those surveyed, have a high risk of mortality, meaning they reported having one of the eight illnesses increasing morbidity.
Most disturbing is the number of individuals who are “tri-morbid,” meaning they have co-occuring mental health, substance abuse, and medical issues.
“Your tri-morbidity rate is really high,” said Becky Kanis, Common Ground’s director of innovations, adding there are more tri-morbid people in Portland than in any other city the index has been taken in, including Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York City.
“The people we’re talking to are in very poor health,” said Sally Erickson, program manager at the housing bureau.
Creating the index requires surveying homeless individuals and asking them 45 questions about their personal health: Have you been diagnosed with HIV and/or AIDS? Have you ever been violently attacked while homeless? Liora Berry, program coordinator at the housing bureau, and the person who initiated doing the index here, describes them as “very personal questions.”
Gathering at City Hall at 5:30 a.m. on Oct. 21, 22, and 23, volunteer outreach workers, bureaucrats, and housing advcoates split into 13 teams led by an outreach worker and medical professional, and from 6 to 8 a.m. they hit the streets of downtown Portland and the inner quadrants conducting the survey. Each team, armed with clipboards, surveys and passion, surveyed the same area each morning, at the crack of Portland’s cold dark dawn.
****
5:30 in the morning on Thursday, 40 people gathered in City Hall’s Rose Room. It is the third and last morning of surveying. “By Thursday, I was exhausted,” says Dennis Lundberg, a Janus Youth outreach worker. “I was really feeling worn out.”
I walked in as Berry was giving a pep talk to people seated at the conference table, along the edges of the room, and standing in line to pour themselves Stumptown coffee from a box.
It is pitch black when we leave City Hall, following a team led by JOIN outreach worker Quinn Colling. Colling and his team have been covering the area around the Burnside Bridge, Burnside Avenue, and parts of Old Town.
First, though, Colling makes an important stop, out of consideration for the people he has worked with for the last year and a half: Voodoo Doughnuts.
“I wouldn’t want to be woken up without coffee and breakfast,” Colling says.
“Walking into someone’s camp uninvited at 6 a.m. and waking them up is generally an invasion of privacy,” says Dennis Lundberg, an outreach worker with Janus Youth.
Driving along SW Naito Parkway, we find three people. Three more people are found, woken up, and surveyed along Ankeny Street in Old Town. After finding no one sleeping on the Burnside Bridge, we arrive at the Downtown Chapel around seven in the morning, first light.
About a dozen people were already lined up outside the Catholic-based agency waiting for its hospitality center to open at nine-thirty, including Boat.
Boat was one who listed a myriad of health issues. In addition to having bladder cancer, Boat says she has had frostbite on her fingertips, vision and hearing problems, suffered from a past head injury, and used injection drugs in the past.
Boat tells me she is not hesitant to be frank about such personal matters; she prefers to “share my experiences out here to help the younger generation.”
“It’s the hardest thing to be out here and be homeless,” Boat says.
She echoes what a man who identified himself as Alan said earlier that morning. Homeless since December, Alan says he has lived in Portland for four years, after immigrating from Liverpool, England.
“It’s a good thing,” he says, of the survey. “If you don’t ask questions, you’re not going to find out what’s going on.”
A few feet away from Boat and me, Linda Klein, a Providence Hospital physician, surveyed a young man. He sat atop a wool blanket Colling had given him, his legs crossed.
An overpowering rancid smell thickened the air as he removed two layers of damp, dirt-stained socks. Klein shines a flashlight on his feet, revealing blisters covering his toes and bottom of his feet. Bright red lines circled his toes and meandered up his feet. As Klein looked, the young man’s body was racked by a loud, hacking cough.
“He needs to get treated,” Klein said.
Colling and Klein decide to take him to the emergency room at Northwest Portland’s Good Samaritan hospital. Colling drives, while I sit in the back of Colling’s van keeping a thermos of coffee steady between my feet to stop it from spilling. Klein continues to administer the survey on the way. The man responds by nodding or shaking his head, the only verbal sounds coming from him incoherent murmurs.
Arriving, he swung his legs out of the van to walk to the emergency room. Klein asked if he wanted to put his socks back on. He shook his head, said “thank you” and walked away.
Klein said the man’s feet had bacterial infections that were beginning to “track” up his feet. Klein also said he may be cachectic, a condition of extreme weight loss. “He looked like someone who could get sick fast,” she said. “He didn’t have the reserves.”
The man spoke so quietly, almost timidly, that I couldn’t hear why he would not put his socks back on. As we headed back to the Downtown Chapel, Klein repeated what the man said.
“He said (his feet) felt like they were on fire.”

****
At least twice as many people were at the Downtown Chapel when Colling, Klein and I returned. Shannon Rhodes, 39, said a woman staying at the Salvation Army’s women’s shelter nearby on 5th Avenue had taken the survey earlier and told the women about it upon returning.
As we got out, people asked us if we had surveys. Because I had a clipboard, people asked me as well. I’m a reporter, I said. I’m not doing the surveys. Well, couldn’t you? Someone asked, looking me straight in the eyes.
Sure, I thought. I know how to ask questions.
I ended up giving two surveys Thursday morning. One was to an African American woman only two years older than I am (twenty-five), responding to the questions mainly by shaking her head.
The woman, Rhodes, and many other individuals encountered by the survey teams, were more than willing to answer the questions posed to them. One of the unique things about the Portland survey, Kanis said, was that the ratio of people consenting to take the survey in Portland was, at 90%, higher than any other city the survey was taken in.
Lundberg, initially concerned about whether the survey would violate people’s privacy, said, “it felt comfortable and it felt compassionate.”
At the same time, some people were motivated to take the survey purely, it seemed, because of the $5 gift card to Starbucks, Safeway or Burger King given at the end of the survey.
“I need something to eat,” a homeless youth said to me as I questioned him. Shaking his head or droning no after no, at one point, as I asked him whether he was HIV positive or had AIDS, he said, “I’m only 18.”

****
“We will use the data from the Vulnerability Index to make sure that people with serious medical conditions receive priority for housing, medical care and other services,” Fish said in introductory remarks to the presentation of the survey’s results.
“We should serve the people who are the most vulnerable,” Erickson says.
Erickson sticks by those guns, even in what appears to be the current scenario where the net number of shelter or housing spaces does not increase, leaving those serving homeless individuals making difficult, moral choices regarding whether to perform triage, and house the vulnerable, at the cost of leaving healthier individuals still on the street.
“I have no problem with housing them first,” Erickson says.
“I recognize we have to make tough choices,” Fish says.
Despite being homeless for 25 years, and describing her experience as being “through hell and back,” Robin Tolbert, 48, agrees. “The ones who are really, really sick need to come first,” she says. “It doesn’t bother me.”
In addition to rapidly housing unhealthy individuals, the index will also enable some “problem solving” when it comes to how the city serves those individuals.
Shelters using a first come, first serve or lottery system may need to change the way individuals are admitted and receive priority. Erickson thinks the current system excludes those who are not organized or too unhealthy (mentally or physically) to “advocate for themselves,” effectively prioritizing one population over another, but the population is not the most vulnerable.
During the Friday presentation, Fish publicly charged the housing bureau to devise a plan on how to best serve those individuals by Nov. 10. Fish expects the bureau to “be as creative and enterprising as they can to come up with a menu of options.”
Dark lines of exhaustion etched underneath their eyes, Erickson and Berry were not sure on Friday afternoon what, exactly, the proposal would be.
“I don’t know what the full outcome will be,” Berry said. “The main thing is to regroup.”
Homeless on and off for five years and on the wait list for the Salvation Army’s women’s shelter, Rhodes knows exactly what she wants to see happen. “I want them to use the information to get more funding, more spaces,” she says.
Into the future, some see a major opportunity to use the hard data the Vulnerability Index provides as leverage for acquiring new resources and increasing the net amount of housing and service resources for the city’s efforts to end homelessness. “It helps our arguments,” Fish said.
“How can we be a great city when we cannot take care of our most fragile?”

Just found this website - Realty Company & Homeless

2008-11-03T00:25:00.000-08:00

I have only read some of this page
There are comments below the main story
It is interesting slant and I am sure I have my opinion
though I have not voiced it I still wanted to pass along this link
The site that is hosting this is a "Housing Realty" type of website

Portland has become a place for the homeless to come. The city embraces them, and even is willing to drive hard working mom and pop stores out in order to help the homeless. We have something called dignity village here that is a homeless camp, is on public land, and doesn't have to be up to code.

Maybe we should issue the homeless cell phones

Getting Soaked by Clean & Safe

2008-10-24T16:35:00.000-07:00

http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2008/10/23/in_safe_hands

Here is the complete story from The Mercury

Matt Davis Reporter from the Mercury tells us "whats going on" to the poor and houseless in Portland Oregon at 4am

__________________

Quote:

__________________

In Safe Hands Posted by Matt Davis on Thu, Oct 23 at 10:31 AM I was up at 4:30 yesterday to follow the city's Bureau of Housing and Community Development along on a vulnerability survey, looking for the people in Portland most likely to die on the streets over the winter. It's the first time the city has done a survey like this, and there'll be more on it in next week's paper. But in the mean time, I wanted to relate this incident. By 7:15, the volunteers I was with had surveyed about 25 people sleeping on the streets outside the Portland Rescue Mission on West Burnside, when a Clean & Safe van showed up to hose down the sidewalk:

Among those sleeping on the street outside the mission was a barefoot man, whom I'd estimate to be around 55-60 years old, whose hands appeared to be suffering severe infection. He seemed to be suffering, too, from confusion, was very difficult to re-direct, and when asked if he'd seen a doctor, said "God will take care of me." His hands were weeping pus and blood, and covered in these scales:

Nevertheless, come hose time, the Clean & Safe crew made no allowances for the man, and appeared to show no interest whatsoever in his medical welfare. He was forced to stand up and move along, just like everybody else:

About 10 yards further down the sidewalk, the Clean & Safe crew eventually had to stop hosing, while the cops were called to attend to a man who had passed out and at first, didn't seem to be going to wake up. After five minutes he was eventually roused and hauled off in a police car.
On the one hand, I can accept that the city's business leaders want to present an attractive face for downtown consumers. But when they're hosing down the sidewalk outside a shelter that's already full, and showing apparent disregard for the welfare of those on that sidewalk with severe medical conditions, I wonder what messages we're really sending to the suburbs? I wonder whether a Beaverton soccer mom would really be comfortable knowing that by spending money in our downtown shopping malls, she was inadvertently sponsoring that kind of activity?

Poem by Shannon Andrews

2008-10-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

I read this in the Portland Street Roots - Oct 17 2008 issue on page 7

The heat from the fire
Silhouettes the dancing shadows
Cast from us huddling to stay warm
My stiletto heels begin to dance with the pounding of my heart
And my hair weeps down my chest
So it calls a memory soaked after
The electrical storm as we
Sit in our helpless shelter
And bring on the infinite boredom
Beginning to appreciate
Each other's warmth
How I would spend this moment over and over
And hope this night would never end.

U N C E R T A I N D A Y S video

2008-10-16T21:24:00.000-07:00

Hello my friends,
I am passing along a link to a short "trailer" that looked really good
The video is only 10.oo$ ... I wish I could order it.
Maybe I will get it later
Meanwhile check out the short out-take
http://freedomtracks.com/udtrailer.wmv

Cinefocus & Media Productions presentsa film by Joseph Piner

"U N C E R T A I N D A Y S"
Living Homeless

Featuring music byNashville Session Players{ only $10.00 + $1.00 S&H }

Click below for Elkton, Maryland newspaper followup story
http://freedomtracks.com/elkton.html

Tent Cities on the rise

2008-10-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

The economic bailout plan being debated in Washington is coming too late for one small, but growing population of America.
In the shadows of Reno's high-rise casinos, one community lives with almost nothing. dwelling in tents.

Nevada's unemployment rate is at a 23-year high. In Reno, the number of jobless jumped 60 percent in the last year.

Now for 170 people, their home is nothing more than a tent.
"I know that god is going to take care of me," one resident said. "But some days, it's very scary."
Whether it is the blaring train or the blazing sun, life is not easy for the mix of chronically homeless, and those newly so.

Just last Christmas, Michael Moore and Marian Schamp (as seen in the video) lived in a rented house in Portland. After Mr Moore lost the job he had had for three years at a gas station, the pair moved to Reno in search of jobs. However, they never found any.

Across the US, tent cities have either popped up or expanded in places like Seattle, Portland and Columbus.

The problem got so bad in Reno that officials decided to organise the tent city and run it themselves.

They put up fencing, brought in security and fresh running water until they can move the people into housing or shelters.

CBS

The complete article is from here:
http://www.3news.co.nz/News/InternationalNews/IncreasingnumberofAmericanslivingintentcities/tabid/417/articleID/74225/cat/61/Default.aspx

Watch the video fro this story here:
http://www.3news.co.nz/Video/World/tabid/313/articleID/74225/cat/61/Default.aspx#video

Interesting Video

2008-09-09T21:30:00.000-07:00

The link for this is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYMnKRv4TH0
The Story Of A Sign

Nicklesville - Homeless in Seattle

2008-08-15T02:10:00.000-07:00

AUDIO:
"Nicklesville"

AUDIO TRACK CLICK HERE

http://images.indymedia.org/imc/seattle/media/2008/07/267957.mp3

http://images.indymedia.org/imc/seattle/media/2008/07/267957.mp3.shtml

author: Tara HayesJul 28, 2008 01:27

So what happens when you’re homeless in Seattle? Many find a doorway. Others, illegally camp out in various Green Spaces. And some are organizing to take matters into their own hands. A group of roughly 35 people gathered on a sunny University of Washington campus lawn to rally for a permanent homeless encampment. They’re calling it Nickelsville in response to Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and the city’s recent sweeps on homeless camps found on hillsides, in greenbelts and beneath freeways.

Nicklesville homeless and formerly homeless people make up the Nickelsville committee; they were inspired by Depression era Hoovervilles, shanty towns made of wood, cardboard and metal pieces, so named after then President Herbert Hoover. Unlike Seattle area Tent Cities, Nickelsville would be made of permanent structures to house up to 1000 people people who wouldn’t be asking permission to be there. One World Report’s Tara Hayes was at the gathering and presents this audio potpourri from the event.

Stealing from the Poor in Portland Oregon 7/27/08

2008-07-28T17:40:00.000-07:00

http://www. kptv. com/news/17005878/detail. html#

-Burglars smashed through a reinforced window and stole food from a Portland food bank Friday.

Investigators said the thieves broke into the Generous Ventures Food Bank and, in addition to food, made off with fire extinguishers and a rolodex that included names and phone numbers of employees.They also left behind shattered glass, broken venetian blinds and opened cooler doors.

Edna Ford, who started the food bank 22 years ago, said the stolen food was intended for elderly and homeless people."We help a lot of seniors, and I think it's just awful that they would attack places like this," she said.It's not the first time thieves have struck at the food bank. A year ago, a refrigerated truck was stolen.

Ford said the latest crime is the last straw, and she wants security cameras placed at the food bank."It's getting really old," Ford said. "(I'm) getting very tired of it."The food bank is left with the costs of replacing the stolen food and repairing the damaged building.Generous Ventures is asking for donations to replace the food, repair the building and to install security cameras.

Anyone with information on who may be responsible for the theft is asked to call police.

Homeless in Florida - Your not alone

2008-07-26T12:27:00.000-07:00

8000 Floridians ,Homeless in the Woods 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0V2MdklcAE&feature=email

POOR PEOPLE POWER July 9 2008

2008-07-17T15:29:00.000-07:00

The protest for human respect for the poor and homelss took their message to the streets
I have two Google videos of this afternoon action
Both videos are about an hour long

Video one starts in the park along Burnside in downtown Portland Oregon

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5728239920381017008

Video two starts when the march is just about to the police station and ends with a group - citizens / fourm in the parkblocks at PSU campus

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6044005549247939546

There is one YouTube outake that show the only arrest ... a token j walk ticket & blocking traffic is the topic in the Youtube outake

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZF09DwJkzQ

Portland Coalition Against Poverty July 9 2008 Invite

2008-07-07T21:13:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, July 9th 5 PM North Park Blocks Portland Coalition Against Poverty

On Tuesday June 24th, following the regular meal service under the Burnside Bridge, Portland Police awakened and dispersed over 50 people from above and beneath the Bridge. On Wednesday June 25th, the police and Clean and Safe awakened and dispersed 16-20 people from the East side of the Morrison Bridge and 10-14 people from the East side of the Hawthorne Bridge.

The people were removed with no alternative sleeping locations given. Alan Pyrah, who was sleeping on the Burnside bridge at the time of the sweep, asked an officer where he was expected to go. The unnamed officer replied, "Go across the river." Pyrah went to sleep under the Morrison Bridge, and was disturbed again the following evening. These aggressive acts on the part of the Portland Police highlight the continued contempt of the Portland Police bureau for the houseless and impoverished.

The police awakened the sleeping citizens using foghorns and boots, and gave them two minutes to collect their possessions. Clean and Safe, the security branch of the Portland Business Alliance, had brought large dumpsters with them, and all possessions not collected within the two minute limit were thrown into the dumpsters. A Portland Police officer stood by with a timer.

This method of dispersal is a break from standard Portland Police policy: Ordinarily, possessions are seized and taken to a central storage facility, where they can be claimed the next day.

Additionally, city policy requires the police to give 24 hour posted notice before enforcing the no-camping law. These dispersals are in accordance with the regular pattern of ticketing and harassment during the summer festival season. Interviews conducted at several nightly feeds immediately following the raids confirmed the worst suspicions of houseless advocates.
Larry Reynolds, a disabled veteran who sleeps outdoors, said, "They're targeting homeless people...taking people's gear and throwing it away. They're not posting notices or inviting social service agencies [as specified under the no-camping law] as they do it."

Two weeks before the Waterfront Blues Festival, the city has begun to increase pressure on people sleeping outdoors. It began with verbal warnings, and has been followed by ticketing and dispersal on a nightly or bi-nightly basis. This police aggression is intended to insure that attendees of the Blues Festival will not be confronted by the City's issues of poverty. Cheyenne, a houseless person affected by the dispersals, said, "It's the rich and the middle class stealing [sleep] from the poor."

In response to the targeting of poor and houseless people in the community, a demonstration is planned for Wednesday, July 9th. It will start in the North Park Blocks at 5pm. "Hands Off the Poor," a demonstration organized by the Portland Coalition Against Poverty demands an immediate end to police harassment and arrest of poor and houseless people in the community.

Homeless Protest Portland City Hall montage May 2008

2008-05-27T19:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dihmJAvSGN8

This is a few out takes from a few of the videos I have of the homeless protest in Portland Oregon

Kicked To The Curb Portland's Homeless Documentary

2008-05-25T16:15:00.000-07:00

There was no concern for Safety when the Protesters were "Kicked to The Curb"
There was more "blocking the bus access by police than those who had feet in the streets
There was police man power used to arrest people who have no where to go
There is people sleeping 6 inches from the street ...what kind of compassion or decency is that showing?

Watch - "Kicked To The Curb" a 16 minute documentary on the treatment of the homeless in Portland Oregon who try to stand up for their right to the sidewalks

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1909100529837440314

Homeless Protest at City Hall Jesus Loves the Homeless

2008-05-21T08:28:00.000-07:00

Filmed on 5-13-08 in Portland Oregon

In support of the Homeless Protest in front of City Hall

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja2zmk0IswQ

Portland Homeless Underground - Keep Movin

2008-05-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

Filmed in Downtown Portland On May 19 2008

Homeless Protest City Hall 5.13 Press Conference part 3-3

2008-05-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

This is part 3 from the mayors press conference on 5-13 -08

part 3 is the part that was outside the building on the front steps of city Hall 'after the meeting'

This is a discussion of the mayors opinion regarding not addressing their concerns appropriately

The protest continues....

as the city does not address any of the protesters issues or their conserns ....

This is a Community Issue that needs attention

I urge solidarity with this protest for Human Rights

Homeless Protest City Hall 5.13 Press Conference part 2-3

2008-05-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

Homeless Protest City Hall 5.13 Press Conference

This is part two of the 3 part series concerning the press conference the mayor had with the homeless protesters.

This segment is the last of the meeting.

I also talk with an activist outside of City Hall on the sidewalk.

Filmed in Portland Oregon on 5-13-08

I am filming this event to promote fair media coverage in the local Human Rights struggle and to help bring Dignity for all citizens in my community especially the home & house less

This is an Independent news service by

www.joe-anybody.com

and has no corporate interest or affiliation's!

Portland Homeless Protest Update 5-17-08 - Call To Action

2008-05-18T11:07:00.000-07:00

HOMLESS PROTEST IS STILL GOING ON

- CALL TO ACTION -

ON MONDAY 5-19-08

This is an update from the park

That is across the street from City Hall

SOLIDARITY REQUESTED

Homeless Protest City Hall 5.13 Press Conference part 1-3

2008-05-18T04:06:00.000-07:00

This Is Video One Of Three Clips from that afternoon at City Hall In Portland Oregon

A Reading From the Letter Of John a homeless man in Portland

2008-05-17T15:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a video I made of me reading (as I show the letter) about a call for help concerning Housing reform
It was given to me on May 15 at 9pm across the street from Portland City Hall
That morning the sidewalks were "CLEANED" so the protesters moved across the street to the park, john wanted me to get the word out and here it is
Please contact he Governors office asap, I have included the contact info at the end of this 9 minute video clip on YouTube
***********************************************

Waking Up at the Homeless Protest 530am

2008-05-16T09:37:00.000-07:00

Waking Up at the Homeless ProtestWorst Night of Sleep I Have Had all Yearhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMU_J-8l2Xw

Homeless Videos from City Hall Protest

2008-05-16T04:45:00.000-07:00

Videos from Homeless Protets City Hall - Portland Oregon

2008-05-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

I have a collection of videos from the City Hall Houseless Protest that has been going on for the last two weeks in Portland Oregon
It looks like the Police (City) is planning on removing the protesting homeless people on Tuesday May 13 (A notice was posted informing the folks with no homes or shelter that they would be arrested for being at this protest as of the day on the flier)

I just uploaded this 45 minute long video from the meeting of protesters on the sidewalk out front of City Hall in regards to the seven fellow activists/ homeless who were jailed earlier that day. This meeting was filmed on Saturday 5-10-08 around 7:30 pm
It is being uploaded to Google
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2805370982432599549

Here are some more shorter video links from this protest:

(1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbGS0vpAseU
2 of 7 Portland Homeless Protesters Released From Jail

(2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epbYron4VSU
HOMELESS on May Day 1,438 Flags

(3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm7OXtWuz1A
Homeless Protest at City Hall "Interview"

(4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIgdqcVdkSo
Respecting The Homeless Protest in Portland Oregon

(5) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGlvxXsy_I0
Jeff Bissonette City Council Candidate at Homeless Protest

(6) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-oe8BVtuGU
May Day March homelessness, immigration and profits 3 of 6

I spent the night there at the protest on Saturday night

I will be posting more video from that day asap (it will be posted RIGHT here***)

Homeless Protest Portland City Hall "Lone Vet" concern

2008-05-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

I have been going by the Portland Homeless (House Less) Protest just about every day
I have about 5 new video that I will be posting right here

This video is of Joe Walsh (The Lone Vet) that I filmed at the weekly Impeachment Protest at Earl Blumenauer's filmed on 5/8/08

Joe talks about the House less protest and suggests calling city hall to encourage a resolve
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1278082777739133627

Meanwhile check on YouTube for Zebra334 video to see them before they are posted here

Peace and Justice
Joe Anybody

Portland City Hall Homeless Protest Report from May 1st 2008

2008-05-03T21:50:00.000-07:00

It is May Day when I filmed this

The protest march I am with, swings by City Hall

I latter stop in and talk to lots of neat people at the Homeless Vigil

Some are homeless, some are activists, some are politicians, both the old and the young

Lots of diversity and an array of concerned people

I wanted to stay longer

I wanted to help ...just by being there in solidarity with my camera if needed,

to capture what ever important moment might need to be recorded.

But I did get these following YouTube video clips documented

It is May 3 today and I am still uploading video to the Internet from this vigil

In Solidarity filming for - Peace - Love - Justice

www.joe-anybody.com/id99.html

This is a collection of three (3) videos all from May 1st at the Homeless Camp Protest And as I finish the editing I will have a couple more still to post by tomorrow

(1)
I stop and talk with the first person I see, I also talk with one of the organizers named Art Rios: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asfvo0J6aMM

(2)
This is the continuation of the conversation with Art Rios who I believe is one of the organizers of this grassroots protest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dMdPfKxo58

(3)
Around 9:PM a group of high school students show up with hot coco, compassion, and some snacks I am inspired by the community spirit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2oxqPfvDDU

In Solidarity for Housing For The Homeless and safe treatment of those that are on the streets

2007-12-12T14:43:00.000-08:00

Iraq War Veterans

already joining burgeoning homeless population

http://www.veteranstoday.com/article324.html

Posted on February 14, 2005 by editor

Morgan Barker

Iraq war veterans already joining burgeoning homeless populationBy Ron Chepesiuk
Adjusting to civilian life after serving in the military has always been a daunting challenge for soldiers, but as the Iraq war continues with no end in sight, an increasing number of returning American soldiers are finding it tough merely to put a roof over their heads.

According to advocates for the homeless, about 100 Iraq War vets are currently homeless, and they expect that number to increase dramatically if US troops stay in Iraq for several years, as Bush administration officials have admitted they will have to.

"Americans think the VA [the U.S. Veterans Administration] is wonderful, but that's a lot of crap," said Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless Veterans (NCHV) in Washington, DC. "The VA doesn't have enough resources to take care of our veterans, and Congress doesn't want to pay for them." The NCHV has 350 member organizations in 46 states, providing shelter, food and other services to homeless vets.

Maria Fostarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty in Washington, DC, agreed that the VA lacks the resources to do its job well, and added: "Budgets are not acts of God. They are political choices. The VA needs to be out there making the case for veterans."

As some Iraq war vets become homeless, they join the approximately 300,000 veterans the VA estimates are homeless in the US at any given moment and the half-million who experience homelessness in the course of a year. Nearly 47 percent of homeless vets served during the US assault on Viet Nam and surrounding countries.

No organization, including the VA itself, keeps thorough statistics on homeless vets, but the agency has determined a profile of the homeless vet population. Nearly all are male and single. More than half suffer from mental illness or substance abuse problems; more than two-thirds were enlisted for three or more years; and about a third were stationed in a war zone.

Michael Stoops is Director of Community Organizing for the National Coalition for the Homeless, a separate organization based in Washington, DC. He stressed that homeless vets are not "losers," as some people might think. About 89 percent of homeless veterans received honorable discharges from their branch of service, Stoops noted, citing an NCHV statistic. "It's outrageous that anyone who has put their life on the line for their country should have to live on the street," Stoops commented.

Estimates of how many homeless vets are currently served by VA-affiliated programs and services vary greatly, but the VA itself admits the number taking advantage of its services of any kind is only a minority, with around 40,000 benefiting from housing-related programs each year, mostly through on-the-ground outreach organizations like NCHV. According to most estimates, hundreds of thousands of veterans who experience homelessness at some point during the year do not receive any VA benefits at all.

The White House's 2006 budget proposal includes a small increase in funding for programs that help homeless veterans. Boone said NCHV is pleased with the increase, but said her group estimates that at least twice the amount -- or about $200 million -- would be required to help shelter all the veterans currently looking for assistance. She said the new budget will add an additional 1,073 beds for homeless veterans nationwide and provide three times that many with other services.

In the future, many homeless Iraq war vets will need mental health treatment, Boone predicted. "Studies show that mental health issues for homeless vets begin later in their lives -- as much as twelve years later," she explained. "They will seem to be doing well mentally, despite being on the street, and then some event will trigger a problem. The public should be really concerned about that because the VA doesn't have the facilities or resources to treat the current number of homeless vets with mental health issues, let alone any new ones."

Statistics from the VA show that as of July 2004, nearly 28,000 veterans of the current Iraq war sought health care from the federal agency and that one in every five was diagnosed with a mental disorder. A study that appeared in the July 2004 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that 17 percent of service members returning from Iraq met screening criteria for major depression and general anxiety disorder.

A recent NCHV survey shows that combat veterans who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq are beginning to request help from homeless volunteer service providers. The survey was conducted in response to the growing number of inquiries from journalists and government officials involved in veteran and budgetary affairs, Boone said.

Meanwhile, say veterans' advocates, the Pentagon appears to be a in state of denial. While admitting to some problems in treating soldiers returning from Iraq, Pentagon officials have told the press that the situation has been addressed.

Homeless vet advocates remain unimpressed. "The military has done a terrible job easing vets back into American life once their tour of duty ends," Stoops said.

In a recent NBC nightly news report, Dr. Alfonso Batres, head of the VA's transition assistance program, said it was up to retiring veterans to seek help. "You may offer all the programs in the world, but if they don't come in to receive those services then it's very difficult to provide them access," Batres said.

Homeless advocates said the VA is wrong to put the onus on vets and expect them to know what services are available. "Isn't it the job of the VA, as a federal agency, to make the people it serves aware of how [the VA] can help?" Boone asked.

Stoops said, "That type of attitude shows that the system is broken and why we will see more [returning] vets from the Iraq War end up on the streets of America."

As Congress gears up for new term, the NCHV has adopted a comprehensive political agenda that focuses on homelessness prevention strategies and on adequate funding levels for community based veteran service providers. The organization and its allies are lobbying Congress to provide an increase for the Homeless Veterans Revitalization Program (HVRP) and the Veterans Workforce Investment Program (VWIP), the only federal projects specifically dedicated to providing employment training and placement services to American veterans.

The NCHV warns that, without an increase in government funding, a number of programs receiving government grants will decrease and there will be no new grants for new programs.
Meanwhile, advocates for homeless vets would like to see Americans who have strongly supported US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan step forward and get involved with the issue. "You see all those cars with yellow ribbons saying Support Our Troops,'" Boone said. "What you don't see are signs saying 'Support Our Veterans.' But when those men and women take off their uniforms, that's when they need support the most."

Suspicious Death Of Homeless Woman in Fresno

2007-08-21T15:25:00.000-07:00

I copied the folowing story from this link

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/08/18/18441458.php

Justice for Pamela Kincaid

by Mike Rhodes ( MikeRhodes [at] Comcast.net ) Saturday Aug 18th, 2007 5:01 PM

Justice for Pamela Kincaid By Mike Rhodes A friend of mine died under disturbing and suspicious circumstances last month. I’m determined to find out the truth and discover what led to her death. Here is what I know: Pamela Kincaid was the lead named plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by the homeless against the City of Fresno, because the city was taking and immediately destroying their property. This sometimes included their IDs, clothing, tools, kittens, and in one case the urn containing the ashes of a grandchild. Pam stood up against this injustice and was willing to put herself on the line to protect the rights of all homeless people in this community. A federal court issued a preliminary injunction to stop the city from conducting these raids on the homeless and on July 30 ruled to certify the suit as a class action lawsuit. That means that all homeless people affected by the city’s policy will be compensated if the lawsuit prevails in court. On the day the class action lawsuit was certified in Federal Court, the attorneys visited Pam in UMC, the long-term care facility she was in. A day and a half later at 1:30 AM on Wednesday, August 1, Pam fell from the fourth floor, under suspicious circumstances. Pam was in this facility because she had been beaten, nearly to death, in mid July. Pam had been telling me for months that she felt she was being targeted by the police and others because of the lawsuit. She was very upset about being arrested and put in jail for several days without charges ever being filed. Pam described what happened: “You know why they arrested me, don’t you? It was retaliation for the lawsuit.”

The arrest occurred when Pam was driving around with friends in downtown Fresno. “All of a sudden there was this swarm of cop cars,” Pam said. “They got us all out of the car but they seemed mostly interested in me. One of the guys I was with had an open can of beer, which they just totally ignored. They arrested me on a probation hold. I’m not on probation and they knew that!” Pam spent the next several days in jail. No charges were ever filed. As she was being released, Pam asked one of the sheriff deputies why she had been in jail. Pam told me the officer rolled her eyes and said, “There ought to be an investigation.”

Pam thought she knew exactly why she was arrested and put in jail: she believed it was because she was the high visibility plaintiff in a very controversial lawsuit that put the City of Fresno and the Fresno Police Department (FPD) in a bad light. Al Williams, another named plaintiff in the lawsuit against the city, was also arrested and released with no charges ever being filed. The day after Al was put in jail, the encampment he lived in was raided and his disabled wife was forced to move. Later, Sherri (Al’s wife) was arrested for trying to use the restroom at McDonald’s restaurant (see page one story in the August 2007 Community Alliance). Life on the streets is hard on homeless people. If you are a woman and homeless, you can double or triple the difficulty factor. There are very few beds for homeless women in Fresno and Pam had given up trying to find a safe place where she could stay at a shelter. She was streetwise, but living in a tent in downtown Fresno can still be dangerous.

She told me that there were people on the street that were upset with her because of the lawsuit. Specifically, she said the drug dealers, who are a small part of the downtown homeless community, were angry with her. They were angry because the lawsuit had increased law enforcement’s presence around some homeless encampments and the drug dealers blamed her. On one occasion, Pam and I talked about the drug situation downtown. She said it was just unexplainable how the police will come in and arrest one person who is dealing drugs and leave everyone else alone. She said, “All they would have to do is to come in here with a drug sniffing dog and it would be all over.”

She believed there had to be some kind of payoff going on so the police protected some dealers and arrested others. A couple of months ago Rev. Floyd Harris was at the corner of G and Santa Clara streets talking to homeless people. He was surprised at how openly drugs were being bought and sold. He too questioned the motivation of the police to selectively enforce drug laws. The drug wars, as they play out in downtown Fresno, are making some people rich, other people vulnerable, and some people end up dead. Pam Kincaid usually lived in very remote locations in the old industrial section of downtown Fresno (south of Ventura). She often lived with other people because that provides a homeless woman with some protection.

Pam, like many homeless women, also had a dog. It is notable how often Pam, and the encampments she lived in, were forced to move. Even after the preliminary injunction and victory in court, homeless people are endlessly harassed and told to “move on.” The City of Fresno conducted one of their raids on homeless encampments on Santa Fe (just south of Ventura) in early July. Pam was living there at the time. This was the fourth or fifth time she had been forced to move in the last six months. Pam ended up in an encampment on Mono, just east of R Street.

On or about July 13, 2007, Pam and a friend (we will call him Mario -- not his real name) started walking toward a store on Ventura. According to Mario, they saw a FPD patrol car cruise by, turn around and pull up beside them. This is not unusual if you are living on the street. The police are always stopping homeless people and asking them for their ID, running their names through the database, and seeing what comes up. It is like fishing. Every so often the police catch someone who is in violation of parole, has an outstanding warrant, or for some other reason is being looked for by law enforcement. Cynthia Greene, who is homeless and another named plaintiff in the lawsuit against the City of Fresno, told me she was stopped four times on one day in mid July. Cynthia said, “I was out trying to collect cans for recycling and the police came up and asked me for my ID. I would get done with one stop and a few minutes later I’d get stopped again. This is unusual even for Fresno.”

Cynthia said she felt uncomfortable with all of the stops and was concerned that she was being targeted. According to Mario, the police officer checked Pam and his ID and let them go. As they were leaving, a group of about six or seven people (at least one them has been identified to me as a drug dealer) walked by and went to the police car. Mario said that he looked back and saw the officer pointing at him and Pam while he talked to the group.

Pam decided to stay at her encampment and Mario continued on to the store. Feeling something might be wrong, Mario returned (without going to the store) to see four of five women from the group savagely beating Pam. Mario said, “Pam is on the ground and one of them has these boot heels, you know like these dress boots, you know what I’m talking about? With the big heels? And they are just. . . ." (Mario jumps up and down as if stomping something on the ground.) According to Mario, they were saying, “Drop the suit, drop the suit, you’re hurting us, you’re hurting them, now we’re hurting you.” Mario says that after he stopped the assault on Pam he tried to flag down a police patrol car. T

he first police vehicle that went by on R Street did not stop. Within 15 minutes another patrol car came by. This time the officer stopped and Mario explained what had happened. The officer left, saying he was going to find the perpetrators of the crime, but he never came back to follow up on the victim or write a report of the assault. I talked to Jeff Cardinale, the Fresno Police Department Public Information Officer, about police involvement in this incident. Cardinale insisted that there is no record of any contact with Pam or Mario on R or Mono street. Pam was admitted to Community Medical Center on July 13. The nurse who attended to Pam said she was black and blue from the waist up. “It was clear that Pam had been beaten,” the nurse told me. The police report issued at the time she was admitted to CMC was more vague. The police report suggests that Pam had a bad sunburn, might have a mental illness, and did not want to press charges.

A man with extensive contacts in the homeless community confirmed, at least in part, Mario’s version of what happened to Pam. He said three young women were bragging about how they had beaten Pam up. Fearing retaliation himself, he did not want to identify those involved. I didn’t find out that Pam was in the hospital until about a week after she was admitted. She was still black and blue and it did not look like she had a sunburn to me. She was clearly disoriented. Her attending physician, Dr. Ossia, told me that Pam did not know what city she was in or what year it was. He explained that she had sub dermal hematoma, which causes swelling inside the skull, and the pressure can cause the disorientation and delusions she was experiencing. He was cautiously optimistic that she would regain her memory.

After Pam was at CMC for over a week it was agreed that she needed to move to more long-term care. But without insurance or any resources the options were very limited. UMC was one of the only long-term care facilities that would take Pam. On the day before she transferred to UMC, I talked to her nurse again. She told me that Pam was starting to remember what had happened and said that the attack had to do with the lawsuit against the City of Fresno. She was put on the fourth floor of the long-term care facility at UMC. At about 1:30 AM on Wednesday, August 1, she went through the doors to a balcony and fell four floors to her death.

The doors were supposed to have an alarm that would alert staff if they were opened and the staff knew that Pam was disoriented due to the attack. Something, we don’t yet know what, went horribly wrong. Several of Pam’s friends saw her just before she died. Those that I talked to said she was doing better, she was not suicidal, and her nurse said her memory was starting to clear up.

We are left with a lot of unanswered questions like:

* If what Mario is saying is true, what did the police officer say to the group that attacked Pam? * Why did the police officer who Mario stopped not return to help Pam or write an incident report? Why does the police have no record of this contact? * Why did the police who talked to Pam at CMC not conclude that a crime had been committed and try to find out who attacked her? * What went wrong at UMC? How could a patient who is known to be disoriented walk onto a balcony, and fall from the fourth floor? * Why was a repairman working on the alarm system leading to the fourth floor balcony the morning after Pam fell? * Why does Fresno not have more shelters for homeless women? Jeff Cardinale, with the FPD, told me they are not investigating either the beating incident or the suspicious circumstances of Pam’s death. He suggested I talk with the sheriff’s department.

After being initially told by the sheriff’s department that they did not have an active investigation either, I called back again. This time I was told that they are investigating Pam’s death. I called the detective investigating the case but have not heard back from him yet. Fresno mayor Alan Autry often talks about this town as being “A Tale of Two Cities.” I can’t help but wondering if the mayor had shown up at Community Medical Center, beaten nearly to death, would they have concluded that he was sunburned, delusional, and that no investigation was necessary?

Maybe this is a tale of two cities - one where there is justice and fairness if you are well to do, but if you are poor (especially if you are a homeless woman) you can’t even get the police to open an investigation after you have been beaten. At least the Coroner’s office and the sheriff’s department are looking into the suspicious nature of her death. I demand justice for Pamela Kincaid. I want the Fresno Police Department to open an investigation and find out who savagely beat Pam leaving her disoriented and brain damaged.

I applaud the Coroner who ordered an autopsy (we are still waiting for the results) and encourage the sheriff’s department to conduct a vigorous investigation into the suspicious circumstances of her death. Pam was a hero.

She stood up for her rights and the rights of all homeless people. As the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the City of Fresno, she sometimes became a lightening rod and vilified by those who would continue the system of bigotry and hatred against the homeless. Pam took pride in being a recognizable leader of an effort that will result in better conditions for Fresno’s homeless.

Being a part of the lawsuit was something Pam did, not for herself, but for all homeless people. It was, in part, that spirit of selflessness that made Pam such a wonderful person and a friend I will miss.

For a list of articles and documents about the struggle for civil liberties for homeless people in Fresno, see: http://www.fresnoalliance.com/home/homelessness.htm

http://www.fresnoalliance.com/home/homeles...

(picture at top of page)
Pam spoke at the Press Conference on the steps of Fresno City Hall. The Press conference announced the lawsuit against the City of Fresno to stop them from bulldozing homeless encampments.
http://www.fresnoalliance.com/home/homelessness.htm

No Sitting On The Sidewalk Here Pal

2007-06-05T17:42:00.000-07:00

THE PORTLAND ,OREGON CITY COUNCIL ADOPTED AND PASSED THE RECOMENDATIONS OF THE S.A.F.E. COMMITTE ONE MONTH AGO. They take effect on June 9th,2007. Unless you are sitting down on a parade route,or at a "permitted" event,you will be given a warning by a Portland Police Officer.

After that, one time warning, you will be given tickets with fines attached. You can not sit down on pavement in Portland,Oregon from 7:a.m. - 9P.M. at night. This is in effect for 2 years. Unless you are having a medical emergency,that is the only allowable excuse for being on the ground,(passed out drunk,counts too)

I asked the question of the Chiefs Forum,yesterday during citizen imput time,and Assistance Chief Lynn Berg,Stated the above. My follow -up question was ,"whom will write the tickets? Berg's response,was ,"only the Portland Police.

Clean and Safe Officers, do not write tickets,nor are suppose to search you,ever!. Their Boss,Director of Clean and Safe, Bill Sinnot(retired from PPB last April to take this Postition) was present as I asked the question, so he knew and knows all along, what his Officers can and can not do.

When you start getting those citations,and any force is used,that is questionable, and or an arrest is attached, contact the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center @503-295-6400 or pop in for guidence at 520 SW 6th Ave #1050, downtown Portland , Oregon. As always,check in with The "Sisters of the Road" cafe staff,and they too will assist you.

Or contact "Street Roots" newspaper.

They did have complaint forms about a month ago, to list the contact some of you have had with the Portland Police that was of concerning/questionable behavior. Feel free to contact "Mayor Tom Potter" with complaints,as to the lack of Bench's and Bathrooms, and SERVICES in Portland to meet your needs.

As well as your City Ciommissioner Erik Sten, whom is your housing commissioner.

Commission Randy Lenord is your- public safty commissioner,Police complaints etc...

Commission Dan Salztman is over- City Parks, clean and safe complaints or harrashment of the homeless

Commissioner Sam Adams is over -transportation...sidewalk movement etc.

Now if any of you, clearly see anyone whom seems like they are the "Blue collar" type of people,sitting on sidewalks,and a cop is near them, and does nothing to them, note the time, Officer name, and tell Street Roots, newspaper or call the N.W. Constitutional Rights center so they can start tracking the patterns of discrmination.

This ordinance is a clear attack upon the downtrodden in life...And it is going to create a lot of hostility between Police and homeless and mentally ill persons whom could not begin to comprehend.

BE Safe everyone....Bless -You all. Teresa (article copied from Portland Indy Media)
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/06/360532.shtml?discuss

I new website I just came across is here

2007-04-14T23:19:00.000-07:00

Just found this website and wanted to share it with my Zebra 3 readers

The story I just read and am commenting on my blog here is found at this link about the iceman:

http://www.street-people.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&amp;id=87&Itemid=35&mosmsg=Comment+saved+to+content+item%21+If+the+comment+is+not+related+to+the+topic%2C+it+will+be+deleted.

The only one word I heard used that was somewhat "an itch" to read was the use of the word "bum" in the context and the line itself seemed to poke humor or somewhat a yuppie sentence with the word bum being used" (( Fashion week may be over in New York but I am sure one of those young funky designers would have jumped on this urban retro look creating a line of bum couture. ))

I have done it my self but i personally feel it carries a slight if not well contended (not saying intended) notion this is a degenerate a sub standard or un-excepted type of person.

It is just my opinion that this using of the word is derogatory is in sort of a "political correct" correction.

Now in my vocabulary I do use the word "bumming" like he was bumming around or he was begging and bumming food and water" ....more in the line of an adjective of an action taking place

Yes ... I used to but no longer like to refer to the people who happen to be homeless or are "street people" as bums ...... it's my opinion....that I am trying to not use this word as in a way to show dignity and respect.

SO ..........HEADS UP Z3 READERS!!

As I read more of the next few stories on this website I start to see sort of continuing use of the word "bum" and a sort of callous sarcasm. In fact i am not alone ...

At this link which i found on their very website in a boastful way seems to me like it may be hitting the nail closer straight on.

http://www.wmctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5319386

I bet within a few minutes you may feel like I am starting to feel

And I am not sure this website street people .com it is all peaches and cream!

Homeless Story And Insight ~ By Jody Paulson

2007-04-07T02:35:00.000-07:00

I have been technically homeless since January and truly homeless (by that I mean homeless and broke) since June. I woke up yesterday morning and realized that this condition might present a good journalistic topic on Indymedia, so here it is.First of all, in advanced countries (I'll be generous and include my own nation, the United States, in that category) it's not all that bad.

For as much fear as it inspires in the heart of man to keep working at their horror of a job, the hells of homelessness are definitely overrated. The worst things about it are boredom and daily rituals of pride-swallowing. Sounds like your typical low-end service job to me. I'm a good person to ask about this: in the span of a year I've gone from working so much I didn't have a life to not working at all and thus not being able to afford a life. I honestly can't say which is worse, though the latter definitely carries the greater stigma in my country.In point of fact, there are several benefits to homelessness that man "home-guards" fail to appreciate:1) Lots of exercise2) Great opportunity to work on your tan3) Feel more like JesusSeriously, homelessness is a great way to work on your materialist hang-ups.

One thing I've discovered is that my fellow homeless people are far less likely to rip me off than your average Fortune 500 CEO. I'm also much more likely to toss things that I don't need because I simply can't carry them every place I go. In the past few weeks I've given away a cassette player, paints, clothes, and thrown out stacks of old love letters. They just weren't worth the weight and space they were taking up in my knapsack.One also has ample opportunity to work on that most boring of the seven virtues: patience. If there's one phrase that I could use to characterize the experience of institutionalized homelessness, it's "hurry up and wait." For example, I spent six months waiting at a free health clinic last Monday in a bid to obtain a month's supply of badly needed thyroid medicine. I was sent away with an appointment for a week and a half later. Then there's the Salvation Army, who kicks you out at eight in the morning and lets you back in at 6:30 pm. At 5:30 you see people who honestly have nothing better to do gather like crows on a telephone wire near the Salvation Army's back door. The entire day they've been waiting - at the library, the park, the public square - for the precise moment when they can roll out their bed, claim that space as their own for the night, and collapse there from exhaustion.

I still don't understand why, but there's something about lugging your earthly possessions over pavement all day that saps every ounce of energy a human being has.I would like to stress, however, that even in the US (at the time of this writing) there is no real reason one "has" to sleep outside on a park bench. There are shelters and soup kitchens in every decent-sized American town (admittedly easier to find if you are female), and there are always ways to get from town to town. Hitchhiking is considerably more dangerous and less common in the US than it is in Europe, but other homeless people are your best ally in this regard. Everyone always knows somebody who's going somewhere and can hook you up with a ride to the next shelter in an old beat-up van. Most shelters only give you 2-4 weeks to stay and if your time runs out before you can get a decent job you can always pack up and move on to greener pastures (or at least more shelter time). Some people would rather do this than work and this lifestyle is known as "shelter hopping." I think this gives homeless people in general a bad name and I can't understand why anyone would find this existence less exhausting than, say, cleaning toilets for a living ... but on the other hand, it does let you see more of the world ... sort of.If you're the type of person who prefers to suck but not swallow, however, homelessness is definitely not for you. In this lifestyle one must force down one's pride on a daily basis: Petty bureaucrats will look at you the way they'd look at a pet poodle they suspect of piddling on their carpet. You will be directed through a series of hoops and rules, which often seem to exist for the sole pleasure the enforcer gets from enforcing them. If you smoke (which, fortunately, I do not) you may find the experience of homelessness an excellent incentive to quit -- failure to do so means constantly bumming from strangers and "hunting for snipes" in the gutter.

Finally, there is no dignified way of waiting in line to receive a free lump of mush from a server with a condescending smile. If you know how to zone out in the midst of a deafening crowd, you'll soon find this to be a valuable skill.As disheartening as it is to inevitably smell bad, feel chained to your change of clothes and constantly chastise yourself for getting angry over being made to wait for charity, in this day and age there is one side-effect of homelessness that can definitely be avoided: the feeling of being invisible, ineffectual, and unimportant. Trust me, I know how to get around this one.

Here's what you do:1) Sell one of the bus passes they give you at the Salvation Army (or panhandle, or beat your bongos, whatever) and buy an 89-cent box of chalk from Walgreen's and write "Bush Knew" and "9/11 = Reichstag" in front of a prominent government building.2) Spend all your allotted Internet time at the public Library railing against the US government and multi-national corporations.Before you know it, important people will be paying very close attention to you.

Caution: this plan may be as hazardous to your health as smoking cigarettes, only quicker!
By Jody Paulson

https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6649125871844502857&postID=1227967344895143859

Homeless Sex Offenders in Florida now-live Under the Overpass

2007-04-05T14:05:00.000-07:00

I found this story today in a MSN headline
Homeless and a sex offender - Florida sends them under the overpass
Here is the link to the original article:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/04/05/bridge.sex.offenders/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Florida housing sex offenders under bridge

Story Highlights• Sex offenders can't live within 2,500 feet of places children might gather• In an urban area like Miami, this leaves few options for the convicted criminals• A handful of sex offenders are now living under a bridge
By John Zarrella and Patrick OppmannCNN
MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- The sparkling blue waters off Miami's Julia Tuttle Causeway look as if they were taken from a postcard. But the causeway's only inhabitants see little paradise in their surroundings.
Five men -- all registered sex offenders convicted of abusing children -- live along the causeway because there is a housing shortage for Miami's least welcome residents.
"I got nowhere I can go!" says sex offender Rene Matamoros, who lives with his dog on the shore where Biscayne Bay meets the causeway.
The Florida Department of Corrections says there are fewer and fewer places in Miami-Dade County where sex offenders can live because the county has some of the strongest restrictions against this kind of criminal in the country.
Florida's solution: house the convicted felons under a bridge that forms one part of the causeway.
The Julia Tuttle Causeway, which links Miami to Miami Beach, offers no running water, no electricity and little protection from nasty weather. It's not an ideal solution, Department of Corrections Officials told CNN, but at least the state knows where the sex offenders are.
Nearly every day a state probation officer makes a predawn visit to the causeway. Those visits are part of the terms of the offenders' probation which mandates that they occupy a residence from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
But what if a sex offender can't find a place to live?
That is increasingly the case, say state officials, after several Florida cities enacted laws that prohibit convicted sexual offenders from living within 2,500 feet of schools, parks and other places where children might gather.
Bruce Grant of the Florida Department of Corrections said the laws have not only kept sex offenders away from children but forced several to live on the street.
"Because of those restrictions, because there are many places that children congregate, because of 2,500 feet, that's almost half a mile, that's a pretty long way when you are talking about an urban area like Miami, so it isn't surprising that we say we are trying but we don't have a place for these people to live in," Grant said.
For several of the offenders, the causeway is their second experience at homelessness. Some of them lived for months in a lot near downtown Miami until officials learned that the lot bordered a center for sexually abused children.
Trudy Novicki, executive director of Kristi House, said the offender's presence put the center's children at risk. "It was very troublesome to learn that across the street there are people who are sex offenders that could be a danger to our children," she said.
Keeping the rats off
With nowhere to put these men, the Department of Corrections moved them under the Julia Tuttle Causeway. With the roar of cars passing overhead, convicted sex offender Kevin Morales sleeps in a chair to keep the rats off him.
"The rodents come up next to you, you could be sleeping the whole night and they could be nibbling on you," he said.
Morales has been homeless and living under the causeway for about three weeks. He works, has a car and had a rented apartment but was forced to move after the Department of Corrections said a swimming pool in his building put him too close to children.
The convicted felons may not be locked up anymore, but they say it's not much of an improvement.
"Jail is anytime much better than this, than the life than I'm living here now," Morales said. "[In jail] I can sleep better. I get fed three times a day. I can shower anytime that I want to."
Morales said that harsher laws and living conditions for sex offenders may have unintended consequences.
"The tougher they're making these laws unfortunately it's scaring offenders and they're saying, 'You know what, the best thing for me to do is run,'" Morales said.
A Miami Herald investigation two years ago found that 1,800 sex offenders in Florida were unaccounted for after violating probation.
Florida's system for monitoring them needs to be fixed, says state Senator Dave Aronberg, who proposed a bill to increase electronic monitoring and create a uniform statewide limit that would keep them 1,500 feet away from places where children go.
'We need to know where these people are at all times," Aronberg said after CNN invited him to tour the bridge where the sex offenders live. "We need residency restrictions, but just don't have this hodgepodge of every city having something different."
State officials say unless the law changes their hands are tied, and for now the sex offenders will stay where they are: under a bridge in the bay.

Thnks for reading this far
~ joe anybody

Homeless protest the sit-lie law in Portland Oregon

2007-03-16T01:00:00.000-07:00

Over on my ZEBRA 3 Report blog http://zebra3report.tripod.com/zebra3report/index.blog/1657008/homeless-protest-and-joe-anybody-is-there/

I have posted a link to some of my videos on this isue

They were taken while a homeless protest was going downtown

It was peaceful and to the point, I support their agenda

So far I have two videos One is on YouTube and is the first part

The second is on Google and is the City Hall part

This ordinance I think will target homelessness in a criminal way

So zip on over and check it out there is links to the Indy Media post on this too.

~joe

Homeless In Portland? Is it getting better in 2007?

2007-03-03T18:21:00.000-08:00

So here in Portland in Oregon
There is some chatter in the local paper
That there are improvements in getting
People of the streets, some what debatable
In the detail.... Yet I think maybe we are seeing
Some slight change ..... I am a million miles up ....
Maybe I am being optimistic.......
Here is the story that I am basing some of my opinion by:

City Commissioner Erik Sten, who spearheaded the plan in December 2004,
said last month’s unduplicated count of people sleeping outside in Multnomah
County and the cities of Portland and Gresham came to 1,438. In 2005, the number
was 2,355. That’s a drop of 917 people, or 39 percent.
Both counts were taken during the last week of January. Fifty-seven outreach agencies took part in the count two years ago, tallying everyone who slept on the street, in a vehicle or an abandoned building.

About 200 agencies took the most recent count, so if
anything, city officials expected to see a much higher number of people
identified as homeless this time around. The city saw an even greater drop in
the number of people identified as chronically homeless, which means having a
disability and being homeless for more than a year or four or more times during
the last three years. In 2005, that number came in at 1,284. This year, it was
386. That’s a decrease of 918, or 70 percent.

Sten said he’s pleasantly surprised by the results, and credits the work of outreach agencies and the city’s new “housing first” strategy – which shifts the focus from shelters to permanent housing, where people can stabilize their lives before they are
connected with jobs and other services. “It’s really energizing,” Sten said.

“The community’s been working hard; we know we’ve been making progress, but
sometimes you make progress but the bigger trends keep getting worse.”
Some people on the front lines question the numbers.
Israel Bayer, director of the Street Roots newspaper, which covers homeless issues, said he hasn’t noticed any dramatic drop-off of people downtown. “I think that while they’re doing a great job at putting people in housing through the 10-year plan … I’d find it hard to believe there’s a 40 percent drop in homelessness in Portland,” he said.
While Street Roots took part in the count, he said, “I would question
how well they did outreach on the ground level. … I would argue there’s as many
people entering homelessness as there are being housed.” Marc Jolin,
executive director of the nonprofit Join, one of the lead agencies that took
part in the street count, said he his organization alone has helped place over
750 people into housing over the past two years, and he has no doubt that the
city’s plan is working.

But he cautions against using the latest numbers as a true account of what’s happened on the streets. There were differences in the way the surveys were worded each year, and a more stringent definition for chronically homeless was used this time around.

Sten admits there are a lot of external factors, but the drop of about 900 people does correlate with the number of chronically homeless the city moved into housing during 2005 and 2006: 1,039 people. Some of those people moved into the 480 new units of city-supported housing. Others moved into other affordable housing or private units throughout the city.

With the city’s lack of affordable housing, Sten said it’s getting tougher to find spots to place people. But he hopes to work more with private landlords to move people into vacant units by providing rental assistance.

In the city’s current budget process, Sten said he will ask for $3 million in ongoing funds for homeless programs, in place of the $3 million in one-time funds that have been supporting many of the pilot programs. He’ll also look for continued support from churches, jails, hospitals and corporations such as the Portland Trail Blazers.

jenniferanderson@portlandtribune.com
http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=117252992371878100

St Petersburg Police Tear to Shreds a Homeless Camp

2007-01-30T23:26:00.000-08:00

The police tear, slash, and trash tents from a homeless camp.
Yet the mayor endorses it and the fire department joins in by blocking off the area with their trucks.
Let me tell you folks this is one TWISTED town.

Watch this YouTube video and Notice the police woman "Bevin" try to clear the area when a news camera asks her questions......she is embarrassed.
She should be ashamed.

A true description of a pathetic destructive city government and its rouge police force.

I really wanna write the mayor and let him know this is disgusting.
I would hope that this town gets rebuked for its callous actions!
I would hope that a few creeps "loose their jobs over this" atrocity.
I am appalled at the total disregard for human dignity, and destruction of peoples homes.
This is not how authorities treat people.

In fact I am infuriated

Shame on them!

Here is the Link to the short FOX news video clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tPXytkhfI8

........ Good Greif!

Here are my notes and many more links::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Rick Baker
Mayor
St Petersburg
1-22-07

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tPXytkhfI8 video of tents being cut

http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/myfox/pages/Home/Detail?contentId=2115501&version=3&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=1.1.1 FOX new website

http://sticksoffire.com/2007/01/22/homeless-shelter-or-media-debacle “Homeless Shelter or Media” blog - “Stick of Fire”

http://www.stpete.org/email.htm email address for St Petersburg City Office

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/01/20/Southpinellas/Police_slash_open_ten.shtml SP TIMES article on this issue

Police slash open tents to roust the homeless
ABHI RAGHUNATHAN and ALISA ULFERTSPublished January 20, 2007
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/01/20/Southpinellas/Police_slash_open_ten.shtml
ST. PETERSBURG - City officials raided two homeless camps Friday afternoon, seizing more than 20 tents and further rattling a community still shaken from the slayings of two of its own.
Those who refused to get out of their tents or remove their belongings watched as two dozen police and fire officials sliced the tops of the tents away from their bases, tossed them into a truck and drove off. Some said they didn't have enough time to get out before the officials began to cut with scissors, box cutters and other blades.
"I was in the tent when they started cutting," said Ken Argo, 54, who said he was asleep when police arrived. "It was very reckless of them."
The whole operation took less than 10 minutes.
The raid was the city's latest attempt to deal with the highly visible tent camps that have sprung up in recent weeks and a homeless population that is becoming increasingly organized and close-knit. Last week the city shut down a tent city on Fourth Avenue N after it said it helped about 100 of its residents get social services, including rent vouchers and bus tickets to cities where relatives or friends could help.
Those who didn't get or refused services soon set up their tents at one of two locations, Fifth Avenue N at 15th Street or Fifth Avenue N at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street.
But fire officials soon observed a host of fire code violations at the two satellite tent cities, said Lt. Rick Feinberg, a spokesman for the Fire and Rescue Department. People were smoking and cooking in their tents, he said. The tents were too close together, too close to public thoroughfares, and they didn't have fire extinguishers, he said.
Feinberg said the homeless also failed to get the required permits for their tents, which were set up on the public right of way.
"They were all in violation of codes," Feinberg said. "No one submitted plans for preparations for these two tent cities."
It's not clear if all the fire codes the city cited indeed apply. The code requiring a permit specifies tents greater than 120 square feet, which is larger than the tents used by most of the homeless. And a state fire statute initially cited by the city doesn't deal with tents, said a spokeswoman for the state fire marshal.
Still, city officials said their job is to protect and that there were significant safety concerns at the two locations, including danger from heavy traffic. City officials also said the homeless were given the chance to remove their belongings from the tents and were offered mats at a nearby shelter.
Rather than arrest or get in physical altercations with those who refused, the officers cut the tents, said Deputy Mayor Dave Metz.
"The tents were retained for evidence," Metz said.
The city's action outraged the homeless community, which said that instead of taking away tents, the police officers should have been searching for the people who killed two homeless men early Wednesday.
"And now they're putting all these people in jeopardy again," said Rev. Bruce Wright of Refuge Ministries. The reason the homeless cluster in tents is for safety, Wright said.
Metz acknowledged the criticism but said the city did what it had to do. "I think you always have those implications, but our primary concern was safety."
Wright said that advocates for the homeless, who met Friday with the city to discuss things like getting fire extinguishers, plan to sue the city over the destruction of the tents and will seek an injunction to prevent another raid.
"We're getting more tents," Wright said.
"We're bringing down the big guns now. We're gonna sue 'em."
Abhi Raghunathan can be reached at araghunathan@sptimes.com or 727 893-8472. Alisa Ulferts can be reached at ulferts@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2379.

(( from DIGG.com ))tp://digg.com/world_news/Police_slash_tents_of_homeless_people_Video
Lots of comments here too ...... CHECK THIS DIGG LINK OUT!
The web pakes a few minutes to load

Being a local resident here and following the story as the tent city had just recently been moved, i could not believe this when i watched the news - society continues its declination - unbelievable that this even occured - the night before 2 homeless men were murdered in the same area the NIGHT BEFORE the tent city slashing, so as i see it the police are now encouraging murder of the homeless but tearing apart the only place that they have to keep them safe for the night.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/sptimes/access/1196623351.html?dids=1196623351:1196623351&FMT=FT&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Jan+18%2C+2007&author=ABHI+RAGHUNATHAN&pub=St.+Petersburg+Times&edition=&startpage=1.A&desc=Homeless+men+found+slain+in+early+hours

The Transition Project In Portland Oregon For The Homeless

2006-12-18T02:02:00.000-08:00

There are insufficient services, shelter and housing for the estimated 750 women who are homeless in Portland on any given night of the year.

Over the next several months, as the temperature drops and the weather worsens, the need for homeless women’s services will be more acute – but the need will not go away after the weather warms. Portlanders can and must support permanent solutions to address this crisis.

I have been privileged to serve on the board of Transition Projects for the last nine years. Transition Projects is a locally based nonprofit agency that helps people transition from homelessness to housing.

Full article here:
http://www.tprojects.org/press.html

Homeless Used By Deceptive Republican In Philadelphia

2006-12-10T19:21:00.000-08:00

Homeless Man to GOP Pol: "No One Has the Right to Use Me That Way"

By Justin Rood
- November 9, 2006, 12:59 PM

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001973.php

A Philadelphia Daily News columnist tracked down one of the unfortunate locals who had been tricked by the Michael Steele for Senate campaign to hand out deceptive pamphlets outside Maryland voting places.

The result: a refreshingly candid indictment of the failed GOP candidate Steele, who now hopes to head up the Republican National Committee.

"I might not have a home," an outraged Yusuf El-Bedawi told the Daily News' Ronnie Polaneczky, "but that doesn't mean I don't care about right and wrong. No one has the right to use me that way."

The Steele campaign recruited six busloads of poor and homeless Philadelphians to hand out flyers to Maryland voters portraying Steele and his ticketmate, governor Bob Ehrlich, as Democrats. Steele is currently Maryland's lieutenant governor; Ehrlich is governor.
"People started screaming, at us, 'Do you think we're that stupid? What are you trying to pull?' " El-Bedawi told the writer. "I said, 'I didn't know it was a lie! I'm from Philly!' And they said, 'Then go back to Philly!' "

"I am so angry and upset, I don't know what to do," said El-Bedawi, who's particularly shattered that he and at least 200 other Philadelphians didn't get home from Maryland in time to vote here.
"These people think we're too stupid to understand the magnitude of what we did."
What they did, said El-Bedawi, was cheat an entire community of unsuspecting voters.
And just because they didn't know they were doing it doesn't mean it doesn't feel awful.

FULL COMPLETE STORY CLICK HERE

71 Year Homeless Lady in Portland Or Dies on Park Bench

2006-12-05T13:02:00.000-08:00

PLEASE NOTE:
Click this link to
PORTLAND INDY MEDIA
Which has a good discussion
going about this issue below

In today's Tribune in Portland Oregon,
I read the front-page article below the fold that is titled:
"Mourners will gather at a site of a friendly, familiar face."
The link is here-->
http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=116527805479570300
I will repost the article following my short introduction, which you are reading now.

Z3 Readers, I was shocked/upset to read that Anita Floyd who was seventy one.... that is 71 years old and homeless! And she died on a bus bench on a cold fricken street corner on November 29 2006. And that is -- well .... that is just fricken rotten. .....
What a nice little article in the Tribune today..... In reading it I almost get the idea she liked to live on the bench outside in 30 degree winter weather, heck she was on the streets the paper said for the past four years. They make it sound like this is all just dapper.

In reading this article it spoke of all the people that enjoyed her presence there from day to day...... "Sitting on that bench year after year...day after day "Seventy One Fricken Years Old and living on a bench.......
Zebra 3 Readers, would you want to be there when you are 71? How about your mom sitting there "sharing smiles and a half of a sandwich"? Yes the nice people that smiled and waved or talked with her or shared a coin or part of their lunch all deserve a "GOOD JOB GUYS".
But am I wrong to think she deserved MORE?

But ......BUT ......BUT .....why did she have to spend her last 4 years on a sidewalk? Why does an elderly woman in this "great country" have to die on a bust stop bench that she called Her Home? I am angered and distraught that society can tell this story ..... that the local free paper can write about it with a warm glowing feeling. Hey it could of not even been reported. Like most homeless topics it could of been scrapped and not a word said, so yes some credit is due for the aspect of at least reporting this sad story. Its the whole overall fuzzy way this sad story is told that irks me, and in the very same breath I say this:

"It is dispictable and disgustingng that this happened as it did" It is a deplorable fact that at 71 years old you don't even have a pot to piss in and its "your own tough luck"...... and that as a memorial is set for tomorrow at 2 at the very bench she called home...the very bench her heart stooped performing for her, people will gather to give some kind of last respects and she deserves that, it sad the caring is "too late". I may be there my self.

What wont be there are solutions and answers as to why we all watched this happen. There will be no "lets make sure this doesn't happen again" speech, because it will happen again ... and again .....right in this same friendly neighborhood of churches, synagogues, and mosques, and kitchen supplies, and parking garage attendants. The fact that elderly ladies die on the street gets a warm salute to her friendlinessss...is nice and heartwarming in this holiday season.

I salute with my middle finger to all that don't care or are not willing to help or make changes to rectify this type of homeless attrocity. I salute with my middle finger to a government and city that cant even care for the people who have nothing ...people who are cold and dieing ....people who are 71 years old and are given a bench on a downtown corner to live and die on. I salute you shamless warm healthy officials that allowed her die in the street of our beautiful city of roses!

Tomorrow will be not much different - it will just be another face another few coins in a tin cup and some 1/2 sandwiches shared, and a cold, cold body that needs compassionon and love and warmth and security and privacy and some humanity ....and something we all take for granted, its called .... a HOME!........

"Sorry Grandma I cant help you with a "HOME" .... but, do you want these 1/2 eaten french fries or can I wave at you on your bus bench and give you a smile instead?"

~Joe Anybody

For More Comments on this topic check out PORTLAND INDY MEDIA by clicking here

***********************TRIBUNE ARTICLE HERE*****************************

There are places in a city that become holy ground.
The people behind churches and synagogues and mosques would have us believe their buildings provide sanctuary. But in the life of a city, sanctuary is just as often marked by water-stained notes and bouquets.
Anita Floyd, 71, lived on the wooden bench at Southwest Alder Street and Sixth Avenue the last four years, lived there as much as she lived anyplace, passing out bits of her life to people who hardly knew her, in exchange accepting bits of theirs, and spare change if they wanted to give it.
Floyd was homeless most of the four years she spent in Portland before her death last week.
On Friday one small purple flower remained on the bench outside Kitchen Kaboodle. The day before there were bouquets and coins and notes with tape that just couldn't hold on through one more rain-filled night.
A single white lily had stood tall and straight, wedged into the bench's slats. People stood in front of the bench Thursday, and some of them cried. Others stood there just long enough to remember an elderly woman who seven days a week smiled and said hello to everybody.
Tom Ayres at the Star Park around the corner remembered that just two months ago the red-haired Floyd had confided, "My birthday's next Saturday." He brought her a card and necklace to mark the day.
Employees at Kitchen Kaboodle recall watching as strangers would strike up conversations with Floyd, who always sat at one end of her bench, as if the rest of the seating was an invitation.
"People would sit down and talk to her at lunch and give her half their sandwiches," says Eileen McDaniel, store manager at Kitchen Kaboodle.
McDaniel also remembers the young man who took the memorial lily off the bench Thursday and walked away with it, and the city Clean and Safe patrol officer who chased the man two blocks and made him put the flower back.
Floyd was a panhandler, though barely, holding her silver cup in a way that said she was willing to accept money but unwilling to make it an issue.
"One time I loaned her some money," says Virginia Howard, manager at the Oregon Health & Science University behavioral health clinic down the street. "And she paid it back. Another time I loaned her money, and she wasn't able to pay me back and she told me. And she never asked for money after that."
Two weeks ago Floyd suffered a massive heart attack right at home, on her bench. The paramedics revived her, but Floyd never made it out of the hospital.
A memorial service will be held for Floyd at her bench at 2 p.m. Wednesday.
http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=116527805479570300

Gentrification - Article (INDY MEDIA)

2006-11-23T00:21:00.000-08:00

This full ongoing thread can be found on Indy Media in the link below
It has a originating story by Howl along with my comments and others:
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/11/349599.shtml

The following four paragraphs are from the original poster (Howl)
He brings up a good subject.
My comments (well Ben Waiting was me also) were emotionally written and heartfelt.
As I am sure others who posted were too.

"I call it a squat because it is the only place that about a dozen of my neighbors have to live, but really it is just a covered sidewalk in front of where the old Safeway used to be and Top to Bottom and a Big Five now inhabit. This area provided a mostly dry area for these good people to sleep, lock up their bikes, and hang out with friends. For the past year that has been the extent of what they have done there. I have never seen any violent activity nor drug use/selling from any of these kind folks. In fact I have never even seen the police called on any of them, EVER.
Today something was different. As the Portland Development Commission or PDC continues their quest for urban renewal they have managed to attract new business to the area. These businesses are looking to benefit from the new light rail train that will run down I-205, the new farmers market, and of course the increased property value a lifeless commercial look brings. One of these interested businesses is Big 5 Sporting Goods. This week is Big 5's Grand Opening.
As I rode my bike past the cop cars and stopped a comfortable distance away to keep an eye on the officers I couldn't help but stand in awe at how quickly gentrification changes the face of a neighborhood. The police had formed a barrier between the consumers that were happily streaming in and out of the new retail establishment and the people whos' very existence our society has declared as illegal.
From what I could see. The cops did not physically attack anyone nor did they make any arrests. However, they did destroy the only home these people knew when they declared that if they returned they would be trespassing."

The stark reality of spending a night in the cold
....would change many a mind if one found himself firsthand feeling the pangs and restless chill

The poster Howl also latter about after a dozen comments..... sends this eye opening comment and enthustically starts collecting info from the community at large to help the issue of homelessness and gentrification and livilibity in his neighborhood. In an inspiring rightous move he post the following excerpt I found on INDY MEDIA (see link at top of this page)

Anyone interested in forming a mutual aid network?
22.Nov.2006

by Howl

It sounds like there are a lot of available resources, but not all are well known in the community. I just made an email address lentsmutualaid@yahoo.com if anyone is interested in networking the available resources we have here. Perhaps you can donate a few bucks, expired but edible food, an old coat, some extra space in your garage, a meeting space, or a few hours of time to volunteer each week. Imagine if we made a flier with all the resources that are already available from lunch programs like Food Not Bombs to drug treatment programs. We could then look to see where are neighborhood is lacking and work to fill the cracks before more people fall through them. With it being Thanksgiving tomorrow, and more holidays on the way. Try to think how you could help out our neighborhood however big or small the contribution might be. By the way, I have an 8'x8' tarp you can have. It spent some weeks out in the woods with me, but it's in good shape. Just email me.

What is A homeless lady to do ...you can only hide so long

2006-10-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

Women's shelters fall by wayside
Emergency facilities dry up as city sticks with 'housing first'
By Jennifer Anderson

Portland Tribune 10-24-2006

http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=116164454350380800

A year ago, city Commissioner Randy Leonard came to the rescue of the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Shelter, which was providing the only public emergency shelter access for homeless women in Portland.

Leonard had seen the Salvation Army’s full-page ad in the newspaper, denouncing the city Bureau of Housing and Community Development’s decision not to renew its $164,000 grant to fund the 34-bed dormitory program at the shelter, located at 30 S.W. Second Ave.
This year, however, Leonard isn’t stepping in and the Salvation Army has been left with empty shelter space and a gap in covering its facility costs.
When the city funding ran out in March, Harbor Light Director Lt. Ron Owens kept the shelter going until July, while he looked for other funding sources. There were none.
Now, the city of Portland officially has no public emergency shelter space for women, and Owens finds that troubling.

“Let’s say your boyfriend beats you up, puts you on the street and you’re an active drug user, burned all bridges with your friends,” he said. “You’re on the street. You need a place tonight to stay. You’re not going to find it with a seven-week waiting list” for other available women’s shelters.

According to the city, there are about 750 women classified as homeless in Portland at any one time – sleeping in a car, at someone’s house, under a bridge or in a doorway.
Heather Lyons, the city’s homeless program manager, said it’s true that there are now no public emergency shelters for women, but there are 56 year-round emergency beds for women that are run by nonprofit agencies.
The agencies also provide support including motel vouchers and help finding and retaining permanent housing.

But Lyons acknowledges it’s not enough. The beds are constantly in use, she said, so she is working on securing about 20 to 30 more emergency beds for women this winter. She’s looking for a nonprofit agency to run it, and “the Salvation Army is a potential candidate,” she said.
Lyons said Mayor Tom Potter will probably request about $90,000 in one-time funds from the city to get the beds open by Nov. 1.

Shelter doesn’t fit model

The city decided to end its funding of Harbor Light for a number of reasons, Lyons said, including disagreements over the operation of the shelter and the city’s 10-year plan to end homelessness, adopted two years ago.

The plan follows a nationally recognized “housing first” model of placing people in housing before working with them to help them find other services and become self-sufficient.
“The focus is on creating housing and not more emergency shelters,” Lyons said. “We were making progress on the 10-year plan, instituting changes with a lot of providers, including the Salvation Army. We moved in one direction, and the Salvation Army wasn’t moving in that direction … connecting women in the shelter to housing.”

Owens said he understands that the city has a new strategy but says the emergency space also is crucial.
“It’s much like a hospital who said we’re a hospital, we have hospital beds, we have doctors and nurses, we really don’t need an emergency department because that’s not our emphasis,” he said.

Several groups offer help

While the beds at Harbor Light sit empty, the city is partnering with several nonprofit agencies who’ve joined forces to get women off the streets and into housing.
Unlike emergency shelters – which provide bare-bones services such as meals, showers and toilets – they provide wraparound social services to tackle the issues that put the women on the streets in the first place.

For details on those programs, visit portlandonline.com/bhcd.
Meanwhile, Lyons noted that many providers say they’re seeing more homeless women on the streets, which – if true – may be due to the closure of Harbor Light and of Rose Haven, a day shelter for women that shut down recently after seven years when it was forced from its Old Town location and couldn’t find a new home.

Run by the nonprofit Catholic Charities, Rose Haven provided a safe place for women and children; it served about 80 people a day.

Sister Cathie Boerboom, who ran Rose Haven, said that since Catholic Charities adopted a new focus on housing programs for women, she’s decided to establish Rose Haven as its own nonprofit and resurrect the program in another location within a mile of Old Town, where other social services are.

In the meantime, Boerboom said the situation is bleak.

“There’s no safe place to go at all, and less shelters to go to,” she said. “You can only hide for so long, and then you have to find something to eat and find a bathroom.”
Nick Budnick contributed to this story.
jenniferanderson@portlandtribune.com