A Perspective on the Homeless Housing Response

Three years ago, there seemed to be little possibility city and county both would permanently deny scraps of land to homeless men and women, particularly those with evident frailties, that the court would step in and recognize that born people had some minimal right to be.  Simply to exist with a modicum of permanent place.  There was no reason to doubt that the enthusiastic christian support of our friend, who was certain small, stranded private parcels could be found and nominally rented, would vanish in the face of unified hostility to the homeless.  We misunderstood the sustained antagonism to homeless and their advocates.

Given the implacable inhumanity of city/county, the sharp alienation of CC to homeless advocates, and mining  Roseland camps to deprive those homeless of leaders, it is evident that all-with-hands-on-levers-of-power believe the homeless can rot and die in the bushes, that jails and hospitals can run up unsustainable costs bringing the homeless back from the edge of death to be returned to the rough as non-persons in a scene straight from Gogol, a bleak lesson on the human condition.  

This Santa Rosa insanity echoes the erratic, inexplicable White House inhabitants boiled down to Rodota Trail, creeks and the river, sites the RVs have been evicted from, epitomized by a traditional English song, ’Tis the Soime the Hull World Ovah’.

’Tis the siome the hull world ovah, It's It’s the poor what gets the bliome, While the rich has all the pleasuh, Now ain't that a bloody shoime?

The inhospitality of churches and synagogues to Safe Park could not have been anticipated when we began working four years ago to enlarge that low-impact, essential, now dead program, but has been a harbinger to the bruising all homeless advocates have had since.  This is an endemic problem from across society and will change only when lever-pullers sit down with homeless and get to know their story, when those stories and faces become familiar with Rotarians, housewives and school kids.  Today, nominally tender hearts are stone.