Skip to main content

City scuttles "Housing First" for "Housing Twenty-Third"

The Sacramento City Council announced last week, from their gurneys with the morphine-drip, that they have embraced a new, stunning, colossal, vibrant, plan to help the homeless – called Housing Twenty-Third.

"We’ve scuttled Housing-First, you see, for Housing Twenty-Third because it’s 23 times better!" exclaimed Councilmember A, “We've determined that rushing to give homeless people things was making us queasy, so we decided, instead, to greatly slow things down to one-tenth of a snail’s pace, which is as much as we can handle.”

“The public shouldn’t worry though,” said Councilmember B, “We still intend to often mention really, really high numbers with dollar-signs in front of them to keep homeless do-this-or-that charities’ administrators assured that they can keep up with their mortgage payments on their homes in Granite Bay or Wilton or Rocklin."

“Instead of going off on a lark and working ourselves silly,” said Councilmember C, “we are beginning a program to help weary police-men and –women and jail employees with a new Right2Rest in Jail program for the homeless. This will keep our brave police officers and jail guards employed without them having to worry about any reduction in real crime.”

"Meantime, we’ve suspended our interest in housing and are, instead, going to stuff more beds into existing shelters, and keep them open 24/7, making shelters more like jails," said Councilmember D, gleefully. "These are structured places where homeless people are ordered to do arbitrary time-wasting things – something they are accustomed to. It’s homey for them without that unfamiliar being-at-home and in-charge-of-your-life feel. The shelter will also keep homeless people off the streets where they might be hit by cars or breathe fresh air or feel any pesky sense of independence."

"Also, our Triage program that is always in the works is something we want to assure people we will always be tinkering with in advance of it never being implemented," said Councilmember F.

"The housing that we will pursue will come in the future," said Councilmember G, "for the progeny of today’s homeless people. Homeless people of the current day can stand proud knowing that the City Council will be seeking real honest-to-gosh housing for their great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren."

"This is something where the ragged, smelly citizens of Sacramento have our sacred word," said Councilmember H. "Long after the homeless of today are totally gone and completely forgotten, the City Council of Sacramento will be doing the same thing it’s doing today: keeping our noses to the grindstone and never, ever looking up such to know what’s really happening. Honest injun."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sex, Lies and Exegesis

Definition: exegesis [ek-si-jee-sis]: critical explanation or interpretation of a text or portion of a text, especially of the Bible. Painting by He Qi , a prominent artist from China who focuses on Christian themes. This piece is inspired by The Song of Solomon. In his May 21 column, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stirred up a hornets’ nest. His column wasn’t really a column, it was a quiz, titled “ Religion and Sex Quiz .” The questions and what he provided as the answers were provocative, to say the least. We would later learn, in his follow-up, a post to the Times online in the afternoon of the same day, “ Reader Comments on my Religion Quiz ,” that the information that was used to create the quiz came with the help of Bible scholars, “including Jennifer Knust, whose book inspired [the quiz], and … Mark Jordan of Harvard Divinity School.” Kristof doesn’t name Knust’s book, but a quick googling reveals that it must certainly be Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s...

In an act of Collective Punishment, Loaves & Fishes closes its park in the morning on New Year’s Day

Calvin [a "green hat" in Unfriendly Park] makes the argument for continued incompetent management. Hobbes represents me — only, in real life, I don't have that good a coat . In an act of Collective Punishment, Loaves & Fishes closes its park in the morning on New Year’s Day In one respect — and only one — that I can think of, Loaves & Fishes is NOT hypocritical: The management hates the way America is run and wants to turn it into a backward communist country . Consistent with that, Loaves & Fishes’ management runs its facility like a backward communist country. The People’s Republic of Loaves & Fishes. A seemingly minor thing happened on New Year’s Day. A couple of people smoked a joint in Loaves & Fishes’ Friendship Park and one of the park directors, or both of them, determined, at about 10am, that, in retribution, they would punish all the homeless there by closing the park for the day. This is something the managers of the park do all the ...

Loaves & Fishes implicates Buddhism and Jack Kornfield in its June Donations Plea.

The Sukhothai Traimit Golden Buddha was found in a clay-and-plaster overlaid buddha statue in 1959, after laying in wait for 500 years. It's huge and heavy: just under 10 feet tall and weighs 5 1/2 tons. At the beginning of their June newsletter , Loaves and Fishes relates a story, taken from the beginning of renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield's 2008 book The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology . The first part and first chapter in Kornfield's book is "Part I: Who are you really?" and chapter 1 is called "Nobility: Our Original Goodness," which ought to serve as a clue to what the beginning of the book is about, not that that sentiment isn't strewn through-out the chapter, section and book such that what Kornfield is telling us should be crystal clear. Somehow, the not-ready-for-primetime management at Loaves & Fishes have managed to use Kornfield's wise and kindly words in a way that mangles th...