Skip to main content

Bee Reports on International Attention Given Sacramento's Tent City


Picture that appeared with today's Bee story, showing an Australian TV crew conducting an interview in Tent City.

Great interest and attention and benefits and detriments and wild factual errors have come in conjunction with the international media frenzy that has descended on Sacramento's Tent City.

Sacramento Bee homelessness reporter Cynthia Hubert writes about it all in a frontpage story, today, titled "Spotlight shines -- and stings" [in hardcopy] and "Some feel burned as media spotlight falls on capital's homeless camp" [in the online edition of the Bee]

Reporter Hubert does an excellent job at targetting the weirdness and inaccuracies in reports that are going out around the country and around the world. What's most troubling are great inaccuracies in the reporting of local TV stations, which couldn't be more out-of-touch if they were headquartered in Zanzibar and their News Directors were seriously psychotic.

One local TV station reported that the population of Tent City was 1,200 with 100 new residents coming to the encampment daily. Later, for its website, the station re-edited its report to say that only 50 new residents were being added daily. This data is wholly bogus. As Hubert properly reports, the true population of Tent City is between two and three hundred folks, with only a smattering of new residents getting added, daily.

Hubert also does a great service to Sacramento and the public view of this new phenomena of tent cities by writing about the true nature of the population. Tim Brown of Sacramento Ending Chronic Homelessness Initiative is quoted saying "While it's very true that we are seeing increasing numbers of middle-class familities hitting the streets, it's still a very small percentage. At tent city, 90 percent of the people are chronically homeless."

National news stories -- on Oprah and the Today Show [video] -- have misrepresented Sacramento homelessness. While these Big Media TV shows certainly sometimes-unconsciously skew their reporting such that it seems to most-directly impact their audience, it is possibly also the fault of so-called leading Sacramento homeless "advocates," such as L&F's chief executive Libby Fernandez, who steer reporters to usually-young, caucasian, formerly upper-middle-class families. Fernandez has "found" Deanna Van Slate, Favor Whitesides and her children, and nice, white Tent City families for reporters.

Judging by what makes national and international news, and news over our local TV stations, people would have to come to think that burgeoning homelessness in Sacramento comes mostly from recently displaced white families, when in truth most Sacramentan homeless people have been in the circumstance, on and off, for many, many months if not years. Most of the so-called chronically homeless are solo men. [Many of these men do have families they are not now living with, or with whom they have a strained relationship.] Most solo men are black, though you would never guess this from news reports.

What's more is that most recently-rendered-homeless Sacramentans are solo men who live in shelters, or parked cars, or sleep on the streets, or in tents within or outside the Tent City encampment.

One thing that is worrisome about the Bee report is the continuation of concentration on Loaves & Fishes as the fulcrum of homelessness and source of spokespeople regarding homeless issues. Both L&F Executive Director Libby Fernandez and Director of Advocacy Joan Burke appear as sources of "objective" information when, in fact, the situation and their leadership at Loaves & Fishes is troubling and ought to be the target of some reporting. It seems clear to SacHo that L&F is angling to benefit directly from city and county contracts that will be forthcoming to provide care for the burgeoning Sacramento homeless community.

Loaves & Fishes is beloved by the great majority of homeless people, but this comes without an understanding of the great amount of donations that come to the organization, much of which is not utilized efficiently. Despite its public face, a great many on-staff at Loaves & Fishes are not compassionate toward the homeless people the organization is meant to serve.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Mission Five Years Ago, And Today

I have spent the night the past two weeks plus at the Union Gospel Mission and am having an excellent time of it -- not only regards to sleeping in the dorm that the mission has, but also listening to the sermons that are delivered in the early evening. The Christmas music that is performed is also splendid. [And the food -- the FOOD -- has been fantastic during my stay so far! A happier Tom there couldn't be.] I chatted with a pal last night about The Mish – about how things were about five years ago when we both used the mission’s services frequently, and how thing are, today.
Five years ago, there were a lot scuffles between the guys when the front gate was opened in the early afternoon and in the area near the contact window there were some brawls as guys fought over where guys were in line to get a bed in the dorm.
Nowadays, however, the mission is very much a peaceful place both on the grounds of the facility and and out on the street.
I do not know what transformative eve…
Post a Comment
Read more

Homeless Sacramentans lose case that would have given them the right to set up outdoor camping

8/11/13 I certainly give attorneys Mark Merin and Cat Williams credit for pursuing a case against the city of Sacramento to give homeless Sacramentans the right to set up tents and a campsite. I wanted them to win their case, but they didn't. They lost it.

BUT, it is also necessary to look at the particulars of the case that Merin and Williams brought and see that the situation underlying the court case was not very compelling.

During the period eight years ago when 22 homeless campers set up their tents and brought in supplies to Mark Merin's vacant lot at C Street, near 12th, there was loud noise and plenty of other mayhem. Drug dealers were on the street encouraging buys from the campers. The Hernandez couple that lived in a house nearby were constantly being taunted by the campers, disrupting their lives.

Per always with Safe Ground camps, calm was deserted for the sake of boisterousness.

Leader John Kraintz and the other Safe Grounders would claim to have signed strict a…
Post a Comment
Read more

After a Three-Month Hiatus, a Fall from a Ladder & a Broken Wrist, Evangelist Jimmy Roughton Returns to Union Gospel Mission to Preach

After being away from Union Gospel Mission for a quarter of a year, Jimmy Roughton returned to preach at UGM on the cold night of December 13 -- despite suffering [a little? a lot? dunno.] from a fall from a ladder that likely immediately preceded a significant injury (a wrist that was broken).


It was good to see his group from Capital Free Will Baptist Church up on the pulpit, with Roughton rough-and-ready to seduce and inspire the happily-captivate crowd at UGM.


Roughton told us in his opening words that he was now in his 27th year coming to the mission.

I recall the first preaching I had heard from Roughton on June 13, 2009. At that time and up to the current time, Roughton is the only preacher I had ever heard evoke Pascal's Wager -- which is something he would do, occasionally thereafter at the mission. He would evoke Pascal's wager, yet again, last night [12/13/17].


Pascal's wager

Last night, Jimmy evoked Pascal's Wager. He did so near the end of his talk, citing …
Post a Comment
Read more