Homeless metrics

While everyone rather-intimately involved with Homeless World Sacramento is joyful that many shelter beds for the chilly season will be there to boost the count of beds to keep more people safe and warm and dry, it is a curious calculus how the number of beds came together.

Counting homeless people and knowing who needs what is an odd business. Homeless people are, basically, shooed away, pushed aside, outside the public's averted gaze, ignored. Those who are sleeping rough are hard to count, except by rough methods at the frayed edge of statistical validity.

How many of us are there?

If 419 beds are added to the supply of shelter beds in November, will they all be used? Will demand consistently be close to supply? Or will demand overwhelm supply? Or vice versa?

In years past 150 beds were added to the normal count of beds for the chilly months, which run roughly from mid-November till the end of March. Last winter (running through spring and into summer), so-called Overflow beds were provided through the end of June with the number of beds increased to 200 on April 6. The fifty extra extra-beds were there to sop up demand after Tent City [better known as Wasteland in Homeless World] was rousted and the SMUD property it was on was fenced off.

The need for shelter beds in Homeless World Sacramento is subject to constant fluctuations due to many factors, central of which are these:

• The number of people in Sacramento who would have to sleep rough* were there no shelters in Sacramento. This does not include the number of homeless people who chose to camp or sleep rough in all conditions and refuse to go to shelters, for various reasons.
• The weather. Cold and rain increase the number of homeless seeking shelter as do weather reports predicting cold or rain. The severity of conditions or predicted forthcoming conditions increase the numbers of those desiring to be inside rather than out.
• The time of the month. Many homeless people have disablity or other checks that come early in the month. As a result, many homeless people take a room at a motel or intentionally stay out of a shelter to utilize their substance of choice. Other homeless people with disablity or pension checks near immediate head out to Reno or an Indian casino to gamble.  By about mid-month, homeless people will have used up their monthly stipends and will have returned to any shelter they were using.
• The time of the year.  The chilly months are not just those with bad weather.  They are those with lots of dark.  It's less safe outside from mid-autumn til mid-spring. 

Recent roustings of rough sleepers and encampments have put matters in disarray.

Val Jon Farris of iCare-America recently put out a general letter – "a humble plea" –  telling us "City forces are driving the homeless deeper into the woods, places where they’re less visible, thus creating an illusion that the [so-called problem of homelessness] is lessening, when in fact, the numbers of homeless are increasing. My [homeless] leader friends tell me that every day at least ten to fifteen “new” homeless folks join the community of over 1,500 just in the metropolitan Sac area."

My experience, from being 86ed from the mission for two weeks and thus sleeping downtown in a law-firm's parking lot, tells me that homeless people are curiously absent in some number from the downtown area. It is perhaps the case that our perceptions of homeless population changes come just from movement where people are needing to, or choosing to, sleep.  The diaspora of the homeless, wearing out shoe leather as we visibly trek the streets and woods, is mistaken for population growth.

Too, this could all be like the Jain story of the Blind Men and the Elephant.  Six blind men touching different parts of an elephant come to differing conclusions of what an elephant must be like.  The trunk is like a snake; the side is like a wall; the tusk is like a spear.  Knowing just a bit of what is going on isn't enough to inform you about the whole of it.

Only, a comprehensive count of some sort that endevours to know the whole of what is going on in Sacramento can hope to get a snapshot of homelessness here.  "Street Count" is done each year in January in Sacramento county, and must be our best guide.  But Street Count uses sampling techniques to do its job on the cheap, and then fills in holes, as it can.  It's NOT an effort at getting an accurate count; it's just an effort to get the best count possible.

Wee days ago, the Los Angeles Times announced the count of homeless in Los Angeles county, reporting the population dropped a whopping 38% in two-years time.  How can that be in the severe recession we're in!?  And the most curious thing of all is that the count was taken last January, yet it's taken a full nine months for information from the count to become public. [Sacramento county's Street Count was also taken at the end of January.  I was whining about not having the numbers in the middle of last April since data was "due" six weeks after the count was taken.]

Once we have these numbers there comes this immediate need to justify them, to explain them.  We accept the numbers as true -- despite that we are given no stats on how valid they might be.  The data report ought to say, something like, the total homeless we extrapolated to in our count, give or take 300, has a 90% chance of being correct.  Right?  Ain't that how statistics works?  Anybody reading this take Statistics 101 in Junior College?  Shouldn't there be a standard deviation? the roominess for the numbers to wiggle in? But no.  The number comes down like they were directly handed to Moses.

The "feel" on the river is that homeless numbers in Sacramento are up up up.  The economy is bad.  The economy is bad.  Then, when we hear that the economy is improving, we hear that unemployment is a lagging indicator and that must mean, simply must mean, that gloom and doom is ripe, that homelessness must be up up up.  So an urgency for shelter space is justified.  We need 400+ shelter slots this winter up from less than half that last winter.  The end is near.  The clouds roll back like a scroll.  The scroll reads, "your number's up."
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* sleep rough: to spend the night in the open; be without a home or without shelter [per Collins English Dictionary]

Glitch in plans for shelter this winter could cut bed count by 105

The Bee is reporting that cottages at Mather, which, as part of the winter-shelter plan, were to house 105 people, including children, are in disrepair. The story tells us, "Rancho Cordova's economic development director, Curt Haven, said the 35 bungalows proposed to house homeless families have been vacant a long time and are 'uninhabitable,' requiring an estimated $150,000 in repairs."

If the story is true, a huge component of the plan to shelter homeless during the chilly season was done on the fly without gaining knowledge of the condition of stuctures included in the plan and without getting in touch with officials in the area.

According to information this blog received from a mayor's aid on Sep 21, the members of the task force were then

• Bob Erlenbusch: former director of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, he is believed now to be working as a consultant in Sacramento for VOA and other organizations and government entities.
• Cassandra Jennings: Sacramento Assistant City Manager. 
• Suzanne Hammer: County of Sacramento, Department of Human Assistance, Homeless Services Program Manager
• Leo McFarland: Volunteers of America, Greater Sacramento Area; President/CEO
• Michelle Steeb: Executive Director, St. John's Shelter Program
• Libby Fernandez: Executive Director, Sacramento Loaves & Fishes
• Tim Brown: staff member, Ending Chronic Homelessness Initiative of the Community Services Planning Council
• Anne Moore: Sacramento Policy Board to End Homelessness

Rapid re-housing will help in shelter-in-winter effort

An article by Kathleen Heeley in the Sacramento Press sets the boost in the number of beds for area homeless this winter at 419, which is quite a significant increase from the 150 beds the county has paid for in winters past.

This coming late fall and winter the city, county, federal government, nonprofit organizations and private donors will all fund a robust effort to give homeless people in our community places to sleep at night. Details on the funding and how new and pre-existing shelters will be constituted will be learned, from the mayor's office, with an event on Nov. 5.

Reporter Heeley's count of beds is up 150 from the 269 that had been reported at a mayor's news conference on Oct. 23. Ms. Heeley tells us, in her new article "Agencies plan to set up 419 winter shelter beds" and first comment to the article, that the 150 beds are paid for via "stimulus money ... coming through the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP)." The "beds" through this program are in rental units for homeless people with jobs. The rental units [apartments, rented houses] will be heavily rent-subsudized for three months, freeing-up shelter beds for other homeless people.

Certainly this rapid re-housing program is a boon to relieve suffering in the homeless community, whether or not there is a direct correlation, in all cases, of working homeless moving into an apartment or house and thereby a shelter bed being made available elsewhere.

Yellow is the new green

The Atlantic is one of those magazines that can be haughty and abstruce. Not the best source for information on homeless issues. But the new November issue has information of value to any rough sleeper who is an avid conservationist.

On its backpage "What's you problem?" feature the first question asked about the affect of urinating on plants. "I often relieve myself in the privacy of nature. But if I go several times in the same place, I notice that eventually all the vegetation in that spot dies. I thought I was making a healthy contribution to nature, but no ... What’s up? What’s the toxic ingredient in urine?"

Jeffrey Goldberg, writer of the feature, responded by first quoting Thoreau in Walden, "I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons."

The bottomline? Goldberg tells us, "Your urine helps trees grow, as long as you water each one in moderation—urine’s high nitrogen content makes it dangerous when applied too liberally to a single plant."

An article in Treehugger provides more rationale for saving your bladderfull for plant friends: "Is Peeing in Public Green?"  A few of the article's encouraging words: "... urine is an important source of phosphate. I also pee around the flower beds and chicken coop to keep deer and raccoons away. And if you want to do more, check out how to use urine as a fertilizer.

The dismissed charges against the C Street campers

There was an article in Friday's Bee that a homeless friend and I greatly disbelieve.

The piece, " Sacramento County DA drops homeless camping charges," is disbelieved since it is absurd to suppose, as must be inferred from the story, that the DA's office was continuing to contemplate prosecuting illegal campers at attorney Mark Merin's C Street property after already dismissing charges against Merin, who is their lawyer and the property owner who conceived and directed the homeless actors in a conspiratorial crime of illegal camping. [Oh, all right. As conspiracies go, this wasn't a huge deal. Admittedly.]

Let us backtrack and recall briefly the history of the C Street camping misadventure:

On August 21 homeless people involved with the so-called Safe Ground Campaign set up tents, provided by Loaves & Fishes, on a small parcel of property on C Street near 13th owned by Mark Merin.

On September 11, City Attorney Eileen M. Teichert asked for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction against Merin to close the camp.

On September 19, Mayor Johnson met with campers at the site, persuading them to leave in exchange for his pledge that he would pursue solutions to homelessness in the city. [Of course, had Merin asked the campers to leave, they'd have done so immediately.]

A September 22 story in the Bee, titled "Camp closure won't end Sacramento homeless issue," tells us that Homeless World Sac consigliere Mark Merin was off the hook for ringleading the C Street misadventure: "According to an e-mail from City Attorney Eileen Teichert to Johnson and the City Council, the city and Mark Merin – the attorney who owns the vacant property and was being sued by the city for allowing the campground – agreed to the terms of a settlement to the case Friday."

Yet a small fly was abuzz around Merin's head. The story tells us: "Still on track is a lawsuit filed by Pedro Hernandez, who lives next to the lot and is suing Merin. Hernandez's attorney could not be reached for comment Monday, but Merin said that suit 'would make no sense.'"

But, truly, it's Friday's story that makes no sense.

Only now are the C Street campers' 32 citations being dropped by the DA's office!?  The big fish [so far as this small-pond story goes] was Mark Merin, who was off the hook four weeks ago.

The campers did as Merin or the safe ground logistics committee [which included Mrs. Merin] instructed.  The campers are all guppies; not the big fish.  Grunt soldiers, taking orders, in the campaign, controlled by the Sac'to homeless-help industry and a couple of P Street lawyers.

Did cowardly Merin first save his own skin, leaving the campers to dangle in the DA's net?  It quite possibly wasn't like that.

Here are other scenerios:

1. So long as the campers were still charged with a crime, it benefited Merin with his effort to settle the suit with the neighbor, Pedro Hernandez.  Thus, charges against the campers were left out there to cause Hernandez to think something was being done to punish those who tomented him.
2. Charges against the campers were left on the books for a period of time until it was clear they weren't returning to the C Street location. And, possibly, to send a message to the campers from the DA that in any "next time" the DA's office won't be so kindly.

Quick update on shelter this winter

I was able to hear only the last two minutes of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson's 17 minute, 10:45am news conference outside City Hall, but that was enough to gather some important news:

Shelter this winter for the homeless will add 269 beds. That is a stunning achievement, more than th 150 beds added early last winter and in winters past and more than the 200 beds that existed at Winter Shelter at Cal Expo last spring, from April 6 to June 30.

In addition there will be a modest number of motel vouchers to supplement the 269 beds this winter.

There will be an event on November 5 providing additional information about winter shelter and safe ground.

Update. Other sources of news about shelter this winter and safe ground from facts revealed today:

• Sacramento Bee article posted before the mayor's news conference, "Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson proposes plan to shelter homeless" 10:18am
• KCRA channel 3 report: "Money Found For Homeless Shelter Beds." 12:38pm $500,000 found to fund shelter space, from city, county and federal govt. Locations for the shelter beds are still being worked out.
• Sacramento Business Journal: "Mayor Johnson unveils plan for winter shelter." 2:26pm [Plan will also] "help more than 100 families move from shelters into permanent housing." [Funds come also from] "local service providers and private donations." "The City Council and county Board of Supervisors are expected to approve the proposal next week." "Locations will be ready for use around the city, in the county and throughout the region by November."
• News 10: "Sacramento Announces Winter Shelter Plan for Homeless."
• CBS 13: "Mayor Johnson Reveals Winter Homeless Shelter Plan."
• From the Capitol blog: "Sacramento homeless will have shelters this winter."
• KJFM - Mayor Kevin Johnson's blog "Homelessness program to house over 200 this winter." "Given the desperate conditions of state, county and city budgets in California, our ability to create emergency winter housing is a triumph of hard work and cooperation."
• Sacramento Bee, "Sacramento-area homeless plan needs funds," "…there's still another barrier to cross: persuading local governments to cut a few checks."

The elusive nature of Homeless World Sacramento [HWS]

In an Oct. 16 interview on Bill Moyers Journal, much-heralded war-zone reporter Mark Danner was talking about his new book, Stripping Bare the Body, when he was asked about Iraq. The elusive nature of understanding Iraq or, for Danner, other war-torn areas in his career, is similar with the elusiveness of understanding Homeless World Sacramento.

… as you get closer, as you set foot on the ground, as you talk to people, tens of people, you know, scores of people, as you travel around, as you see what's going on the ground, bit by bit, your certainty is stripped away, and you know less and less. Until you reach a moment, a couple weeks in, usually in my case, where you've been bombarded with sense impressions.

You've been bombarded with opinions. You've been bombarded with descriptions. And you suddenly think, I know nothing. I know nothing about this place. And that is a wonderful place to reach because you've achieved a kind of tabula rasa. You know, now I can try to understand it on my own terms. It's a wonderful thing about reporting, but unfortunately, it's not necessarily very good at understanding the ultimate ontological questions …

I bring all this up because I think after "being here," enmeshed in HWS for a good while, you can tell what people understand what it's like and you can tell when people are overdependent on the stereotypes of bums & hobos & homelessness in formulating their understanding. And you can recognize those that are blinded by their political or spiritual prejudices or just believe strongly in and trust the homeless-help industry.

Some columnists in our area choose to write about homelessness a lot. Whether the writer employs wisdom, or not; comes to great conclusions, or not -- it can be a separate issue whether they seem truly, intimately in touch with the subject.

I'm going to use as examples the most recent writings on homelessness by Bee columnists Georgia Rutland and Marcos Breton.

In her Oct 4 column in the Forum section, Rutland seemed correct to me in her conclusions regarding the idea of going forward with Safe Ground, but ignorant of the experience of being homeless and the feeling of being stuck in that Big Muddy Muddy.

It's a safe guess that her knowledge of Homeless World Sacramento comes largely from her conversations with the usual suspects from the homeless-help industry and not from intimate conversations with those trapped in the street & shelter life.

Rutland wrote "...some of the 'emergencies' that [result in people becoming homeless] are self-inflicted -- alcoholism, drug addiction and, yes, laziness and irresponsibility. Others such as mental illness, domestic violence and a collapsing economy are beyond the victim's control." It strikes me that this effort to separate the good homeless from the bad homeless is a fool's errand.

Whatever brings each person to the street or to a shelter is individualized. I am troubled that Rutland presumes to call addicts or those who appear to be unmotivated to improve their lot in life "self-inflicted," with the implication that they are in some way necessarily bad or less deserving of our help.

Recent science has shown addiction to be highly powerful. This so-called New Science of Addiction tells us that it is "a chronic disease" and not a selected lifestyle, and that addictions can easily sneak up on you. Drugs or drink will establish in the brain a reward pathway, "driving our feelings of motivation, reward and behavior" toward maintaining our addiction.

Genetics, too, is an important factor. And it's a sure guess that poor people are more likely than others to be carrying combinations of genes that make people susceptible to addictions.

And the biggest component of ongoing homeless addictions has to be that there is little in Homeless World to replace the pleasures derived from feeding one's addictions. The Rehab Program at Union Gospel Mission, the Clean and Sober program, N.A., and A.A have some success, of course, but theirs has to be a tougher slog in getting people off their chosen substance compared to middle- or upper-class neighborhoods.

Sure, there are lazy and irresponsible people in Homeless World Sacramento, but I don't think the culture is a hotbed of couch potatoes. For one thing, few homeless people have couches. And for most such people, just getting around during a minimum-accomplishment day is taxing and time-consuming. People out here walk (or bike) for miles and miles and miles, typically.

While we all are sympathetic with "victims"  - among the mentally ill, persons subjected to domestic violence and those undone by the economy  -  among these individuals there are greatly varying stories.

Mentally ill people truly deserve a better deal than being dumped onto the streets. And, they deserve much better attention and understanding from personnel in the homeless-help industry.

Regarding those homeless involved in domestic violence situations, studies show how we are prone to see these circumstances, sharply sorting out victims from victimizers, when, in reality, the actors in family (and other) disputes often share responsibility. Wrote John Haidt regarding Roy Baumeister's words in Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty:

Baumeister examined evil from the perspective of both victim and perpetrator. ... The disturbing part is that Baumeister shows us our own distortions as victims, and as righteous advocates of victims. Almost everywhere Baumeister looked in the research literature, he found that victims often shared some of the blame. Most murders result from an escalating cycle of provocation and retaliation; often, the corpse could just as easily have been the murderer. In half of all domestic disputes, both sides used violence.

Homeless World Sacramento, you see, is a very mixed culture and community, not easily boxed by false and easy stereotypes that persist from decades past.

If you want to know homelessness, there are writers who present it well. Stories in Homeless Tales are helpful. John Dolan's words about homelessness in Vancouver ring true. Also, Sean McGlynn of Sacramento speaks eloquently about being homelessness. [Sean knows homelessness!] [See the last four paragraphs of this post in SacHo.] And if you're a Sacramento reporter, c'mon down [to Loaves & Fishes; the mission; VOA] and let any false certainties get stripped away.

Re Marcos Breton, I don't know the politics of things, but otherwise I agree with the thrust of his most recent column, "In Sacramento homeless debate, reason is drowned out." My only complaint comes at the end where Breton endorses the mayor's call for "tough love" to fix matters homeless.

In the mayor's blog, called Kevin Johnson, our city's leader defines tough love as both "enforcement of the laws we have, but also an understanding of the difficulties [homeless Sacramentans] face" and as "both compassion and a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to public health and safety." Breton says tough love can take us to "where the goal is getting people into housing and back into productive lives."

There are a couple connotative problems with "tough love" that won't go away for me:

(1) The term is pretty much universally reserved for dealing with juveniles, while the folks under discussion here are Homeless World Sac's adults.

And (2), "tough love" instructs that people should be manipulated emotionally to extract some sort of behavior that is sought. This approach attempts to utilize love as if it were a crowbar.

My experiences tell amateur-psychologist me that many in the homeless community need to learn not to use emotions in any manipulative way (and, thus, manipulative emotions should not be used on them); rather they should hope to feel and properly deal with genuine emotions that arise.

Homeless people simply aren't spoiled brats who need to be taught respect via tough love.  A huge portion of us are figuratively beat up and staving off being further hurt.  We're striving to find a path out of homelessness in a period of recession in a world of many so-called homeless-help agencies that are disordered and gobble up our time making us wait in queues.

So, yes, something should be done about enabling-and-entrapping non-profits, like Loaves & Fishes, that allow/trap people in their circumstance of woe and self destruction. 

Perhaps, rather than imposing tough love on people, the approach should be one of incentivizing steps we homeless people can take that move us in the direction of more maturity, stability, wholesomeness and independence.

I'm a longtime fan of Chan Buddhism which promotes the idea that a person should feel an obligation to work in the world. We must work to compensate society for the bounty of others' efforts taken in bringing us the food we eat and creating the clothes we wear.

I think it would be a good idea if homeless people took on most of the roles of people who come to Loaves & Fishes as volunteers. It is quite odd, it seems to me, that homeless people, many of whom are looking for jobs, should be served by volunteers who drive to the L&F complex.

Work need not be narrowly defined as paying jobs. People can "work" by volunteering to help at charities and by taking practical, challenging classes. People can "work" by further developing their best skills and allowing them to be utilized in a helpful project.

Twenty or twenty-five hours of pleasant work of some sort, for those not having a job, would be healthy for us each.  But to achieve this, it ought to be possible for the Sacramento homeless-help industry to organize itself such that people can "get their day started," early and easily.  Most all L&F services should be frontloaded -- commencing at the start of the day, 7am -- such that people who need to can get out of L&F's Friendship Park to where they need to go, to accomplish something.

A Moveable Sleep

I received an email, today, from Joan Burke, Director of Advocacy, of Loaves & Fishes, signed by both Ms. Burke and attorney Mark Merin. The gist of it is this paragraph that was in bold in the center of the text:

We are asking owners of empty lots, parking lots and any other unused space to permit homeless campers to pitch tents on their property for ONE NIGHT. The “campers” will clean up the property and leave it in better condition than they found it; a porta-potty will be provided. The “campers” will then move to the next property owner’s property where they will pitch their tents, again, for ONE NIGHT.

By having homeless campers be constantly on the move in a rotation of camping sites, they don't break the anti-camping ordinance. Unhappily, this is perhaps the only way left for unsheltered homeless people to stay within the law. [Shelter space is tight! Unconscionably, the police rousted campsites throughout the city on the 11th just before the big storm, putting people's lives in disarray. I, myself, couldn't get a shelter bed and was "on the street" on the two rainy nights of Oct 12th-13th and 13th-14th. I was probably in violation of the law.]

For more info or to allow use of your property for this effort, call or email Mark Merin at 916-443-6911, mark@markmerin.com or Joan Burke at 916-446-0874, advocate4loaves@yahoo.com .
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Update 10/15 @ 2:30pm: According to a Bee article today:

Sacramento police spokeswoman Officer Laura Peck said the department has been working with community leaders and homeless advocates to address the issue [of camping space for homeless people]. …

"The intent of the camping ordinance is to prevent camping within the city limits," Peck said. "If the community provides locations for these folks to camp and they don't stay in the same location for more than one day, they are still violating the intent of that law.

"However, it is not as though we are not compassionate to the problem. It is not as though [we] are going to go out and target these things."

… [Joan Burke] said that the ordinance states a person cannot camp in one place for more than 24 consecutive hours.

"It's pretty explicit."

I believe I understand from the article that Joan Burke's reading of the ordinance is that it is crafted explicitly in such a way that, whether or not there was any underlying intent, the law amounts to just a definative rule that homeless campers may strive to satisfy.  If they satisfy the rule of the ordiance, meeting the 24-hour limitation per location, their action in camping continually in Sacramento would be legal.

The utopia that will never be

	Artwork at Loaves & Fishes' website envisioning "Eden," a safe ground [ie, legal encampment for the homeless] utilizing sixty Tuff Sheds at a 3½ acre location behind Union Gospel Mission and VOA's Bannon St. shelter in the River District.

The idea of a legal encampment for the homeless has both gained traction [the mayor proposed Stepping Stone; the Safe Ground Campaign has grown more militant], and become more grandiose [from $2/night rented domes with just toilets and garbage to wooden structures with utilities, showers, onsite cooking and laundry, and a paid staff].

But as the idea of a homeless village has expanded it has taken on the weighty encumberment of a far-left political movement (The Safe Ground Movement), that is indistinguishable from communism. [If it quacks like Trotski and talks like Marx, isn't it communist?]

Not that it has ever been likely, but with the leftist, myopic leaders of safe ground/Safe Ground/SafeGround getting ever-more ambitious and feeling the oats of imagined success, the whole project is highly likely to soon crumble.  The public, beyond the idealistic left, and the city council, outside our good-hearted mayor, have not "bought in" and have not been courted.

Besides this, the real leaders of Safe Ground [how ever you capitalize or spell it, or in whichever of its aspects, from legal encampment to nationwide revolution], executives of core Sacramento homeless-help-industy nonprofits and their lawyer, don't want to accomplish anything, they want to gripe.  Only with the hope of a legal encampment being dashed in a vote of the city council can they continue to whipsaw their donor bases and mine the ore of supposed unrealized entitlements for the undercaste.

Don't get me wrong:  We in the undercaste deserve a better deal.  But it has to begin with an overhaul of the inefficient, chaotic, compassion-lacking homeless-help nonprofits that are meant to provide needed services.

Loaves & Fishes, first, needs a REAL Board of independent Directors who are there to widen the road to meaningful lives for the population L&F serves AND it needs to cease stockpiling cash, which in now has in the amount of approx. $2.5 million.  Volunteers of America needs to cut back on the number of press and publicity people it has, needs to pay its executive director less [He made over $300,000/yr according to the latest Form 990 report at Charity Navigator.], and should learn and teach organizational skills to its staff.  Ben & Jerry's needs to stop funding SHOC [Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee (of one)].  And a couple rich attorneys on P Street need to realize that if the country were ever to become what they want it to be, they would be two of the first to be disappeared [or, "vanished" in Orwellian terms].  [As Ethel Long-Scott said at the Homeless Power Forum at Loaves & Fishes on 10/6/09, "As a freed slave, I have no worries about what happens to the rich man."]

News10 reports city and county have provided $360,000 between them for shelter this winter

A News10 report earlier today tells us that, between them, the city and county have now contributed aproximately $360,000 for a winter homeless shelter, with the mayor's policy board hoping to, somehow, raise another $80,000 for the effort. That would bring $440,000 total to the effort to shelter 150 or 200 people for four months.

Michelle Steeb, leader of an ad hoc committee for the city/county to figure out how to provide chilly-season shelter, and director of St. John's Homeless Shelter, is quoted, saying, "Cal Expo is an option, but it's much more expensive than some of the other options that we're looking at."

"Because we're not going to have as much money as we had last year or in years past, we need to be more economical," Steeb said. "We need to look at more economical solutions. Cal Expo is not off the table, but it's just very expensive to run winter shelters out of Cal Expo."

Last year, Overflow at Cal Expo, run chaotically and with daunting inefficiently by VOA, acted as a night jail, keeping homeless people off the streets from 4:00pm until about 7:00am the next morning. Shelters that act to "warehouse the rabble" [using John Irwin's phrase] will be fought by many in the homeless community if they come again. Homeless people should not be subjected to lock-up if they haven't been convicted of breaking the law.

At the end of the 2008-2009 chilly season, a million dollars was provided by the city to shelter refuge homeless from Tent City which was rousted and closed. That money was misspent, with the homeless getting little in the way of services for the huge amount in funds passed forward to VOA.

It is expected that VOA will get the contract to run whatever shelter for the winter is created for the 2009-2010 season.

Little support for safe ground on city council, says the Bee

The Sacramento Bee tells us that safe ground, a legal homeless encampment, has little support on the city council.  Too, an in-the-know source told me Friday there is no one other than the mayor on the city council who is for legalizing a homeless encampment.

From Tuesday's Bee:

In coming weeks, the council is slated to discuss creation of a legal campground for the homeless, a proposal that has had little support on the council beyond the mayor.

After the homeless debate, the budget will take center stage, as council members grapple with where to make additional program cuts at the mid-year point. [SacHo note:  Mid-year for the budget comes on January 1.]

Councilman Ray Tretheway said friction among council members has diverted attention from important issues, including the failure to find "real-world solutions to the homeless problem."

Tretheway, who is running for re-election against two challengers, said it's not too late for the council to start getting along.

"The focus of the City Council needs to be on important issues, such as jobs and public safety and flood control," he said.

In today's Bee, we're told that Tretheway has determined he will not go along with the mayor's plan of reorganizing committees to punish those who were against putting his strong-mayor initiative on the ballot and rewarding those who voted to put the initiate on the ballot.

Rather curiously, in Sunday's California Forum section of the Bee, a boffo five pieces on "safe ground" were included.  It was an array of opinion, yet none opposed safe ground. The five opinion pieces were these [Ayers's op-ed was OK with safe ground, just not in his River District, where there are already a couple shelters]:

• Ginger Rutland column "Homeless 'safe ground' not quite Eden, but a step"
• Op-ed: "Officers' View: Proper support must be focus" by Mark Zoulas and Mike Cooper [aka, Batman and Robin]
• Op-ed: "Homeless' View: A way station to recovery" by John Kraintz
• Op-ed: "Designer's View: Proposed 'safe ground' provides a foundation," by Kerrin West
• Op-ed: "Business Owner's View: River District bears too much of problem," by Steve Ayers

Generally, this barage of opinion pieces, without dissent on safe ground, would seem to move the Safe Ground Campaign forward.  But without support on the city council, any effort may be moot.  Plus, there's a lot working against Safe Ground that these opinion pieces don't address: For one thing, the radical politics at the core of the Safe Ground Movement [See the SacHo post "Far-left visionaries at 'Homeless Power Forum' hope to transform America [into Bulgaria?]."

Far-left visionaries at "Homeless Power Forum" hope to transform America [into Bulgaria?]

	Poster from "Hobo Art Show" at Western Regional Advocacy Project website.  Paul Boden, a keynote speaker at the Homeless Power Forum, is WRAP's Executive Director.

Yesterday, "Homeless Power Forum: Vision & Survival" was held at the Delaney Center at Loaves & Fishes. Thinking it was about to end (I should read my literature, dummy!), I stayed for only the first hour-and-a-half of a 5 1/2 hour program. But that was enough to hear the "keynote speakers," Ethel Long-Scott and Paul Boden, and to sound alarm bells about the direction of the Safe Ground effort.

Today, I believe that the confusion that is implicit in the many meanings that have been given to safe ground, also spelled capitalized [Safe Ground], and as one word [SafeGround], is intentional: to lead people in the homeless community in Sacramento from the most positive and favorable meaning, a legal homeless campground, to a hopelessly-naive political far-far left Utopian vision of an easy-living paradise.

Lowercase-s-&-g safe ground [a vision of a legal homeless encampment] is connected with Safe Ground [illegal homeless campgrounds, protesting the the lack of legal homeless campgrounds] is connected to the Safe Ground Campaign [getting a legal homeless campground in Sacramento] which is connected with The Safe Ground Movement [revolution in America]. I submit that the vulnerable homeless at Loaves & Fishes [that is, those who yearn to see themselves as victims, instead of acknowledging, to themselves, the degree to which they are responsible for their circumstance] are being lured into a wacky political movement that is — insane as it sounds — clearly communist.

Yep. They're baaaaack. Only ten years into the 21st Century and the Central Lesson of the 20th Century, that communism DOESN'T WORK, is forgotten. It is forgotten that communism is a murderous debacle, tested twenty times with the same result. That as good as it may sound superficially, it is ruinous economically. Communism turns the incentives to do work on their head, making laziness pay and good effort and creativity meaningless. And, too, it ultimately results in miniacal totalitarianism and the deaths of untold numbers of fully innocent people.

With Cathleen "Cat" Williams hosting and writing notes for us on large sheets of white paper in the background, the two keynote speakers for the Power Forum spoke in the A.M. session.

Ethel Long-Scott, cited in the program as a "nationally recognized leader in the campaign for universal single-payer healthcare and Executive Director of Women's Economic Agenda Project [WEAP]" was the first speaker.

Ms. Long-Scott believes "It's time to build a new economic revolution" and in "new political movements aimed at the radical reorganization of society."  She called for the homeless to take on a "new identity," "the Class of the Dispossessed," so as to be better packaged to confront how "power is held" in this country.

She said there was a "connection between safe ground [the effort to create a small legal encampment]" and seeking to establish "income and security as a human right."  "As a freed slave," she said, "I have no worries about what happens to the rich man" in the advance of The Movement.

Ms. Long-Scott spent a lot of time on the scourge of corporations, seeing in them conspiracies to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor.  "We have corporations writing the new social contract [in this country]," she said.  "[We need] a technological and economic revolution."

In tune with what can be found in People's Tribune [see the article "Revolutionaries Must Rally the People to a Vision of a New World"], Ms. Long-Scott believes in stopping advancing technology because, in her view, it "replaces human beings," takes jobs and "causes whole industries to shut down."  She asked the audience at the Forum, rhetorically:  "Can you compete [for a job] with a computer that doesn't need health care, doesn't need a break!?"  "We the People should run the resources!" she exclaimed.  People of all races and backgrounds, indigents and undocumented immigrants, should band together, she said.  We mustn't allow the rich and corporations to continue to set us apart.

Cat Williams wrote on a clean, huge sheet of paper: "Nationwide Movement"

We must coalesce around "new values, new priorities, new tactics," said Ms. Long-Scott.  "This must be a unitied poor people's economic-rights campaign." Cat Williams wrote on her sheet: "economics 4 social justice."

Ms. Long-Scott told us, "We've got to link-up the causes: from safe ground to healthcare for everybody.  We must get private gain out of public need," and bring about a "quiet coup."

Paul Boden was up next.  In the program, he is described as "Executive Director of Western Regional Advocacy Project which fights [at] the street level … for unhoused people's civil rights."

"You have to go in with a sense of entitlement, [and not go in] asking the politicians for favors," Boden told us. "At issue is power."

He derided any idea of keeping poor people apart from "what they deserve."  The current political system "doesn't give poor people [their] money because they [ie., the politicians/the system] don't know what they [ie, the poor] are going to do with it.

Boden spoke, then, of a rally [ie, protest march] planned for January 20, 2010 — the first aniversary of the Obama Administration — that, it is hoped, will include homeless people from cities throughout California.

Much else of what Boden spoke about related to statistics his organization has amassed in a book titled "Without Housing: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness and Policy Failures."
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Notes:

• Use of Bulgaria in the title of this post is in reference to the country when it was behind the Iron Curtain. I was not meaning to disparage the country as it is today: a free, democratic republic and member of the European Union and NATO.
• Ms. Long-Scott did indeed say of herself that she was "a freed slave." She is a black woman of about forty years of age with progenitors that can have been slaves, literally [instead of figuratively].

More Hector Marquez weirdness and other stuff from last night

On the way back to the mission last evening, I ran into a friend [whose name, oops, I've forgotten] who calls me Stretch. [The moniker is warranted; I look a lot bit a tiny bit like the toy, plus I'm tall, stretched out, though I'm a bit bowed, higher than even Danny Fisher or Justin Whitaker.]

One thing me and my friend talked about on our walk along North B Street was the sermons at the mission and my observation that the preachers avoid the "soft" topics of Christianity, like they were the plague. The Sermon on the Mount; Paul's words regarding love [I Corinthians 13]; and Christ's Two Commandments [Love God & Love Others] are just-next-to-absolutely avoided.

The homeless congregants at the mission are told in 90%+ of sermons that they are loved by Jesus or God. We're told to praise God and fear Him and Hell. But for us to love or be compassionate? Why, that's for girlie-men.

Before the sermons each evening, The Rules are read, usually by Brother Bill. Since it was a weekend night, Brother Bill was away and, for last night, Donnie read the rules. [The Rules comprise rules of conduct for guests at the mission; times when various services are provided; and other information and instructions.]

The first thing Donnie told the congregation, reading off-script, speaking to the so-called Bannon Street Irregulars, who sleep on the street in front of the mission, was that they mustn't hang clothing and stuff on the mission fence. I don't remember Donnie's exact wording, but I got the impression that if things were found hanging on the fence, mission staff would take them.

That got my dander up a bit. Donnie and the mission higher-ups may not be up-to-speed on hot topics in Homeless World Sacramento, but confiscation of homeless people's property, as if homeless people aren't accorded the same rights of general American citizens, is near-settled law: Homeless people's property cannot be summarily taken any more than can a rich man's. While mission administrators can take steps to secure their fence and property, now, really, isn't the time: The economy's in meltdown; it's cold outside; the homeless population is up, exceeding shelter space, which is down, in Sacramento.  Let homeless people dry their drawers by hanging it somewhere!

As Donnie read from his script, he included this line, which I've heard many times before from him: "Any item left on mission property becomes mission property." For whatever reason — maybe just me being cantankerous — I decided I was going to ask Donnie to stop saying that one sentence. As much as homeless people are, obviously, THE great beneficiaries of Union Gospel Mission's services, it should not be the policy of the mission to confiscate any of our few belongings. This is America, for crying out loud, where it is universally against the law to unilaterally take possession of something someone else misplaced or forgot.

I should mention, too, that it is easy for guys to forget things: Nowadays, and until next March, guys staying in the guest dorm dress in the morning in the dark. Lights are turned on, and the morning bell for chow [breakfast] call is at 6am weekday mornings, and we have a lot to do to get ready and eat before the bus leaves [at 6:15am] or we are shooed off mission property [by 6:30am]. Sometimes, guys can forget what stuff they had with them that was left in the dining hall. And on Fridays, our belonging are moved out of the dining hall and placed in the courtyard to facilitate special services for the Rehab guys. If guests brought more than one parcel, they can get separated; thus, something can easily be forgotten.

So, after Donnie read the rules, I asked to talk with him. I told him, first, that I had learned that the Baptist Church has a great history, especially with respect to the origins of our country and with respect to Black citizens.

[Had I time to be long-winded, I'd have expounded on my point: The Baptist church was central to the establishment of the concept of separation of church and state in America. One of the Four Freedoms of Baptist belief is that the individual be free to choose whether to practice their religion, another religion, or no religion. While the Baptist church has a terrible past among many Southern Baptist churches in the 20th Century, relating to race relations, other Baptist churches were very welcoming toward Black communities in the 19th and 20th Centuries which is why, to this day, a great proportion of Black American protestants are Baptist.]

Then, I told Donnie the line in the rules he read that I thought was a problem. I told him it was something he said that Brother Bill did not say when the rules were read. Donnie, irritated, said he could guarantee me that the rules he read were the very same as what Brother Bill read, and he turned the script he read from toward me, momentarily. Thenupon, he sent me back to my seat in the chapel.

[What Donnie doesn't realize is that his line, that Brother Bill doesn't read, in The Rules is ridiculed; sometimes the first thing guys refer to when they voice objection to the mission.]

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Funny thing, the musical group that performed for the first half hour included a song based on the words of the first eight verses of Paul's words about love in the first book of Corinthians. That put a crimp in my sense that any notion of love is utterly avoided at UGM. [Still, it's mighty, mighty rare.]

The sermon last night was delivered by "the inimitable Hector Marquez," [as he's sometimes introduced by the Gideons] whom, when last seen, achieved notoriety for his hysterics about The End Times and the persecution of extreme right-wingers, like himself, and Christians, generally, by the Satanic secularists in America.

Hector was in full, blooming bloviating paranoid wingnut mode, again, last night. As was the case in August, Hector seemed to make oblique and hateful reference to President Obama. The word president came up many times in the early part of his sermon, which talked about the oppression of Christians and the courageous acts of preachers to spread the Word in a hostile world. Christ can help us "to look up" and not be bowed down in despair, outside the Lord's providence.

Then Hector wended his way to saying something that was not oblique.  He said that the world's leaders — the presidents, the kings, the dictators — would die and rot and be forgotten unless they paid homage to Jesus. Hector pounded the podium, furiously, his bald head dripping sweat.

"Wouldn't it be glorious," Hector said, "if President Obama would say 'Jesus Christ is Lord of Lords and King of Kings. Let's bring Jesus Christ back to America. Let's bring Jesus Christ back to the classroom and prayer back to the schools." [Hey. So much for the Baptist Four Freedoms, I guess.]

Near the end of his spiel, Hector talked about some of the Hateful who, when they die, have themselves buried face-down, under concrete. And he talked about The Rapture. Very theatrically [Here, I have to give him a bit of credit], he demonstrated how he would one day soon be swept up to a place beyond the parted clouds. He stood at a 30-degree angle with his arms straight down, pressed against his body, looking like a rotund Puerto Rican torpedo.

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After the sermon, there was dinner, per usual, and a shower, required of guests staying the night.  When I got out of the shower room, I found that someone had dropped his cellphone in my shoe.  What to do?  Donnie's words rang in my ears:  "Any item left on mission property becomes mission property." While I didn't really think that the mission would claim possession of somebody's cellphone, that is directly, overtly what Donnie says will happen every time he states his rule.

Fortunately, after a couple minutes, Greg, the owner of the phone, came down from the dormroom to claim his phone.

Bee story provides news on effort to find homeless shelter for winter

A Bee story this morning, "Sacramento County homeless advocates race to find new winter shelter site" gives us some news on the effort by the city's/county's task force to pull together a shelter for chilly nights in late autumn and winter.

One important bit of news: The county will provide $138,000 in funding, the article tells us. Which is better than the nothing I thought they'd provide!

The story mentions 200 beds as the number of beds sought, which was the number of "Overflow" beds from mid-April to the end of last June, paid for by the city.  Earlier last winter, and in chilly-seasons before that, 150 beds had been funded (by the county).

Likely, with reduced funding, a shelter with 150 beds will be the goal for the coming late fall & winter.

The article mentions as possible shelter sites the Comprehensive Alcohol Treatment Center on North 5th near Richards Blvd., which will be available since its use as a detox center lost its funding for this year; and Mather Community Campus. The Mather campus had been in the news three days ago because county Supervisors had restored funding for the facility. [Possibly making the campus unavailable as a shelter!?] Cal Expo, the site used in the past, would be too expensive to use during these cash-strapped times. [Besides that, use of that site makes conditions like that of a jail. A shelter like VOA's Winter Overflow at Cal Expo would not be tolerated. A lawsuit would be filed.]

More funding for a shelter will be needed, and the task force is properly begging for more from any source. But the obvious source of additional funding is Loaves & Fishes, which is cash rich. [See SacHo blogpost from yesterday, "Gimme Shelter, Redux."]

Gimme Shelter, Redux

Now that we, the Sac'to Homeless, have that possiblity of no winter shelter thing hanging over us like a swinging sword of Damocles, other issues seem tamed and trivial in comparison. As Shakespeare could've said, "Uneasy lies the head that doesn't have a pillow." Yes, Bill, especially so on cold, rainy nights.

It is probably the case that the homeless-help agencies and possible funds providers are playing a game of chicken.



Eventually, either the county or the city or the stimulus fund or Loaves & Fishes or Bill Gates or William Buffett will pony up and allow the homeless to survive. Maybe. Each thinks in regard to the other: It's your problem!

Woe, the homeless: We have no political power! We donate so extremely little to campaign funds and nonprofit charities! And agencies that advocate for themselves – I mean "us" – are so slimy and morally compromised. The latest weird thing is that Sister Libby Fernandez 'tweet'ed the following to her twitter account, "Sacramento has 1200 homeless folks who are not in shelters-we need a Winter Overflow Shelter and Safe Ground!" while, at the same time, SHE is the very person who is preventing each from happening!!  Libby is on the mayor's Winter Shelter Task Force and her first lieutenant, Joan Burke, is on the mayor's Tent City Task Force, according to information I've received from the mayor's office, in reply to a freedom-of-information request.

While the city and county of Sacramento are both flat broke (and let us face it, they ARE NOT going to come up with the scratch to fund a night out at Colonel Sanders', much less the 200 Big Ones it might cost to get 150 people in bunk beds for four months), Loaves & Fishes has been stockpiling funds for the last five-and-a-half years and now has millions in cash and liquid assets! [See L&F's Form 990 for 2008 at the bottom of this article in Sacramento Press. The total of cash, savings and temporary investments was $2.3 million on Dec 31, 2008, and can only have increased after the Oprah Tent City thing last spring.] [From the Revenue/Expense Trend chart on L&F's page at Charity Navigator, you can see that Loaves & Fishes has been amassing a fund balance consistantly since Jan 1, 2004.  Also, down a little ways on that Charity Navigator page, you can see L&F's mission statement, the first line of which is "Founded in 1983, Loaves & Fishes feeds the hungry and shelters the homeless."]

And don't tell me that Poor Libby can't do a thing because city or county legislators need to legalize a homeless encampment.  If Loaves & Fishes puts itself on the line to pay the expenses and guarantee campers' safety, the project will be approved if it is ever going to be.

And don't tell me Libby's mountain of cash is tied up because of a warehouse Loaves & Fishes hopes to build.  If some of the organization's funds are restricted, L&F can write donors to the "warehouse fund," or whatever it is, and have some of the donors release the restriction to their donations. A measly 8% of L&F's Everest of Cash would be enough to pay for no-extras shelter space.

So ... when Sister Libby chirps  "Sacramento has 1200 homeless folks who are not in shelters-we need a Winter Overflow Shelter and Safe Ground!," to whom is she complaining, ... to herself!?  Who else can it be.  Have things gotten so weird and craven in the Loaves & Fishes Administration building that taken-a-vow-of-poverty [but certainly doesn't live in poverty] Sister-of-Mercy Libby is yelling at herself for not funding what only she may be able to pay for and make happen!!?

The delusions on North C Street just keep on comin'.

[This blogpost is a redo, with a significantly different ending, of a SacHo blogpost from last May called Gimme Shelter.]

Sacramento International Airport shows the way to avoid the spread of disease

Homeless-help organizations, take heed! Cold-and-flu season is here! The Sacramento International Airport does things you all should think about doing to deter the spread of colds and flu.

Quoting from the airport news release, issued today:

"Maintaining a clean and healthy environment for our customers has always been a consideration," said G. Hardy Acree, Director of Airports. "Regular cleaning schedules in addition to hands free flush toilets, faucets, soap dispensers and towel dispensers have been the norm at Sacramento International Airport for years. We added hand sanitizer stations prior to flu season last year and have increased the number of the stations and adjusted the locations to ensure that they are readily accessible to our customers."

Let us now compare the above to what goes on at Loaves & Fishes and Union Gospel Mission:

Loaves & Fishes has a pair of bathrooms immediately before people walk through the piazza to the two lunchtime diningrooms. Both are always locked. While there are usually-pretty-dirty bathrooms in L&F's Friendship Park, the park is closed on weekends (and many other days). Other than a spicket without soap outside the park, there is nowhere to wash one's hands on days the park is closed.

I've never seen hand sanitizer at Loaves & Fishes. Dirty, if not filthy, hands are the norm for denizens of the facilty who eat lunch at tables where people are seated very close together.

Union Gospel Mission is not a lot better. Until "chapel call" the place to wash one's hands is a spicket at the side of the building. Often, but not always, there is a slip of soap.

After "chapel call," men's and women's bathrooms are available during the first half hour of the evening's hourlong sermon.

Lining up for the evening meal occurs immediately after chapel. It's not easy [and, I don't know; almost not possible, maybe] to use a bathroom after chapel and before the meal. Guests at the mission never know what will be served. Sometimes, it's finger foods like hotdogs or chicken burgers.

I've never seen the availability of hand sanitizer at the mission.

Both L&F and the mission should strive to do much better with respect to hands cleanliness. I know firsthand from sleeping in the mission's dorm, that many colds spread quickly among the guest population. [But, likely, that comes from airborne mists from sneezing and coughing in the tight dorm quarters.]

Incident in Friendship Park

This morning, around 8am, a man in Loaves & Fishes' Friendship Park had a seizure of some sort. This is decidedly not an unusual occurrence at Loaves & Fishes or in Homeless World Sacramento.

I know of many people who have had seizures or who have abruptly been hospitalized because they are subject to seizures, or because they have blood-sugar-maintenance problems or MS or frailty from the cancer they're living with. Others faint and fall and are transported by ambulance to a hospital due to abuse of alcohol or heroin or another substance. Yet others, suffering from emphysema, can't get up in the morning at the mission, so an ambulance is called to take them away.

Within the last week, while I was getting my mail at Union Gospel Mission, a man accross the street from the mission was seen rolling on the ground and foaming at the mouth, so 911 was called.

[You get the idea.]

Anyway, it was very crowded in Friendship Park, and the man, whom I would later learn was named Michael, was in a coffee line when he was stricken.

I was at my locker, talking to my friend Dave, when we began to realize something bad was happening not far from us. Through the blur of shuffling legs, about fifteen yards away, I could see a man, face-down, on the gravel. His complexion looked a little bluish, and if he was breathing, it was shallow and inevident.

Two park denizens were trying to aid the man. They put an unfurled sleeping bag under his head and otherwise desisted from moving him. Nurse Suzi came to the scene [or was there all along and I hadn't seen her], and seemed OK with was was being done. They waited for the fire crew from down the street to arrive.

I played a tiny role. The man who owned the sleeping bag is one of the many cognitively impaired people who are abandoned to the streets. He was demanding his sleeping bag, and I was trying to calm him and assure him he'd get his bag back in a few short minutes.

The fire crew arrived after tense minutes. A woman fireperson with the crew seemed a bit unhappy as she attended the stricken man. I think I heard her tell Suzi that the "man fell and nobody helped him," which would seem to be incongruous with what I'd witnessed.

Soon, though, all was clearly, relatively well. Suzi had a file on the stricken man which pinpointed the probable problem. Michael's blood sugar was checked and he was given a shot of some sort. Over the next couple minutes, as his neck was fixed in place with a brace of some sort and he was strapped to a board and placed on a gurney, Michael became increasingly coherent and responsive.

Lying on his back on the gurney, we could see that one of Michael's hands was slightly injured and his face was bloodied. Thereupon, Michael was taken away.

So, why I am telling you all this?

I think things easily can have gone awry. What if the stricken man shouldn't have been moved but had been? What if Nurse Suzi hadn't been in the park, as she often/sometimes isn't?

Why isn't it a requirement that the Green Hats, the staff that works in the park, have some basic medical-response training and the fortitude to manage things when incidents like these occur?

I submit that the culture of the Loaves & Fishes employees is one of emotional empathy for the homeless people they are meant to aid, and not compassion.

Emotional empathy is defined thus by Daniel Goleman [taken from a blogpost I put up in Homeless Tom on types of empathy]:

• Emotional Empathy, refers to someone who feels within herself the emotions of the person she’s with. This creates a sense of rapport, and most probably entails the brain’s mirror neuron system, which activates our own circuits the emotions, movements and intentions we see in the other person. This lets us feel with the other person - but not necessarily feel for, the prerequisite for compassion.

Compassion is defined thus at wikipedia [I've included a big chunk of Buddhism in this blockquote since Buddhism is so extremely cool]:

• Compassion is a human emotion prompted by the pain of others. More vigorous than empathy, the feeling commonly gives rise to an active desire to alleviate another's suffering. It is often, though not inevitably, the key component in what manifests in the social context as altruism. Compassion or karuna is at the transcendental and experiential heart of the Buddha's teachings. He was reputedly asked by his secretary, Ananda, "Would it be true to say that the cultivation of loving kindness and compassion is a part of our practice?" To which the Buddha replied, "No. It would not be true to say that the cultivation of loving kindness and compassion is part of our practice. It would be true to say that the cultivation of loving kindess and compassion is all of our practice."

A great many in the army of employees at Loaves & Fishes are able to get energized for marches and protests that whipsaw donors to empty their purses, but have a far reduced interest in things during the mundanity of an ordinary day's work. IMHO.