Time to look in the mirror: Sacramento tent city attracting national media attention

Sacramento's homeless population is front page news on the New York Times website. Homelessness is not a new issue in Sacramento. Neither is the fact that the city regularly shuffles people who build temporary encampments between several locations along the Sacramento River near highway 160, Discovery Park, and the industral area near Loaves and Fishes and the Salvation Army. The homeless population is visible along Richards Boulevard and 7th Street.

Their tents, either along the river under the 16th street bridge or in the railyards, are regularly raided by police and their belongings confiscated. Ostensibly this is to keep settlements from becoming too permanent, which, in the eyes of city officials, could raise issues about tenure and code enforcement.

One idea that has been floated recently is creating a permanent shelter, basically a warehouse site with basic services like a roof and bathrooms, modeled on shelters in Portland, OR. According to the Times article and Good Morning America, this idea has gained traction with Mayor Johnson. Foreclosure rates in the Sacramento Valley are among the highest in the nation. Increases in homelessness have, apparently, become too embarassing to the city to ignore any longer. To be seen is how a "permanent shelter" would be implemented- whether homeless people with pets would be accomodated (a major barrier for many to seeking formalized shelter) how safety would be provided for, and whether people would even want to live there.

The idea that we would need a "government sanctioned tent-city" speaks to the fact that we treat homeless people as sub-citizens, criminalizing their very existance and ability to meet their own basic human needs. We exclude them from the streets with loitering laws, by removing park benches, and puting spikes on the ground under window ledges where someone might sleep. The very word "homeless" indicates that someone is deficient because they are "without a home" or "without a roof" as some romance languages put it.

As Berkeley Professor Nezzar AlSayyad is fond of saying, Americans have a "right to safe and sanitary shelter, not a right to shelter." This means that although we make sure that a "formal" housing structure meets strict codes, we don't make sure that everyone is housed. In other words, if a homeless person erects a tent or a shanty without proper plumbing and insullation, it will be torn down even if it means that the person is sleeping on the ground in the rain with nothing over their head.

There are bigger problems of inequality, a broken economic system, and government indifference that fuel homelessness and turn the problem and the stigma on the individual, rather than society. We will see if Sacramento decides to address both the immediate housing crisis and its underlying causes.

E. Mattiuzzi

Right to Shelter

The Los Angeles Times this week reported on a competition to create a portable homeless shelter:

"Eric Lindeman and Jason Zasa took the honors, with a mobile shopping cart-like apparatus. The cart features bins to hold cans, bottles and other recyclables collected by day. It folds out to create a sleeping platform, topped by a canvas cover with zippers and windows."

The idea is to mass produce shopping-cart shelters for homeless people, and goes as far as to lobby cities to set aside vacant land for tent encampments with running water and special telephones.... Sound like something out of bad movie? Not surprising, since the creator of EDAR is a B-movie producer and philanthropist based in Los Angeles. In reality, however, these fold-up devices would do more harm than good to anyone involved in the process.

They have less storage room than a real shopping cart ( are much heavier and less mobile (key critique) than a tent, and cost ten times as much than a sturdy tent and duffel bag. The immobility issue would weigh heavy on the mind of anyone whose daily existence depends on motion- walking, shifting in and out of sight/participation, escaping threats, looking for items.

EDAR even expects the end-users of its product to call a toll-free number and update staff on the function and even location of their unit. While I don't believe this is an effort to relegate homeless people into permanent, docile, visible can collectors happily shuffling our streets as underclass by day, returning to their tent camps at night- it sure looks like that's what will be accomplished. While the full-scale implementation of the EDAR vision faces a host of legal issues (ordinances, privacy versus enforcement, NIMBYism), it faces one much more obvious one-- a $400 price tag.

A sturdy duffel bag and a dome tent would provide the "upgrade" in living conditions at a fraction of the cost, without the social and legal question marks of EDAR. Upgrading from a cardboard box doesn't need to be so complicated.

K. Drain

hostile urban environment

Today at the Powell Street BART (light rail) station in downtown San Francisco at 2:00 pm, I saw a man wearing a bright yellow vest reading "clean and safe downtown" pour an oversize Burger King cup of water onto a waist-height ledge by the station entrance. Walking past at 10:00 AM, I had noticed that the ledge was wet while the surrounding area was dry (ruling out rain or a morning hose-down of the sidewalk by a nearby business).

No, this was a periodic, targeted action designed to make the urban environment inhospitable for the homeless or other persons who might wish to sit or vend or beg at the transit entry-point to the city’s busiest shopping area, much of which is indoors and therefore subject to private security. His ‘official’ looking uniform suggested that this was an unofficial municipal policy in a city that is known for outlawing panhandling.

The man poured slowly and with purpose, careful to cover any possible dry space on this would-be seating area on Market Street, which has no nearby purpose-built street furniture for anyone who might wish to sit down. As in many cities, the luxury of sitting comfortably anywhere comes at the price of consumption. “Safety” and “cleanliness” are buzzwords for excluding bodies out of place through spiky pavement under windows, benches divided by arm rests, spinning bus-shelter seats, and this latest tactic.

E. Mattiuzzi