Sacramento Homeless blog

Click on picture to see it in a readable size. In the past, news media in Sacramento would bite at any worm-baited line Loaves & Fishes threw into the swirling news waters.  But recent non-events that Loaves & Fishes has tried to promote have been left untelevised and un-otherwise-reported on. For example, last March, L&F promoted the idea that it would soon be feeding Lee Majors in its chow hall. Well, not Lee Majors, exactly, but some other “6 million” man or woman. Here, quoting L&F's March 2011 Newsletter : This month, Loaves & Fishes will quietly serve our 6 millionth meal to some hungry and perhaps ill person. Loaves & Fishes staff and volunteers will care at least as much about this meal, we think, as our corporate friends at McDonald’s did about theirs. Needless to say, as we have said for the past 30 years, we could not accomplish this act of service without the extraordinary generosity of the people of Sacramento. “Quietly” my ass. All this c...

The 10 zillion dollar warehouse. It's so macabre, it would be funny if it wasn't tragic. Loaves & Fishes abandoned the warehouse that it rented that was smack dab in the middle of the Loaves & Fishes Mall and Homeless People Tormenting Compound . Why? Because they wanted to bulk up their empire. Why? Because Loaves & Fishes under the "leadership" of Libby Fernandez is wholly in the business of bureaucracy maintenance. It's a closed loop. A loopy closed loop that exists only to exist to exist. It's a bureaucracy to self feed that bureaucracy that is all that there is. It is a madhouse, a Looneyvillle run by crappy people. The Loaves & Fishes Grand Wasters of Money spent over $1.5 million to build their fancy schmancy heavy-security new warehouse/Welcoming-Your-Donation Center/Administraitors' Offices & Spa. So, what is to become of the abandoned warehouse in the very middle of the L&F Maul? It is to become a homeless...

Buckner as pictured online at SN&R 's webspace. There is an amazing first-person essay in this week’s Sac’to News & Review that ‘hits on’ central crimes of Loaves & Fishes and its disgraceful leader. The crimes are those of “ Warehousing the Rabble ” and “ Collective Punishment .” The essay, titled “ Sacramento's coldest season ” [online; in hardcopy it's titled, simply, "the coldest season"], by Christopher Lee Buckner, relates suffering he endured at Loaves & Fishes and at Sac Steps Forward’s Winter Sanctuary during this winter when he was homeless. Happily for Christopher, he is now back in an apartment and back in college – otherwise, for the outrage of saying something negative about the horrors of the Libby Fernandez administration at Loaves, he would be subject to denial of survival services. Some Overlords in Homeless World don’t tolerate essential American freedoms. For the record, I have never met the writer, and I don’t know...

Without giving notice to the homeless until the middle of this morning, Loaves & Fishes announced that it is cancelling many of its services, tomorrow, for a Staff Retreat for the purpose of discussing its mission. Let me clue you in, Libby:  Your mission begins with offering services reliably. It is fortunate for America that you bombed out of the Air Force or the security of the United States would be imperiled. This happens over and over and over again. Loaves & Fishes is not a legitimate organization; it is a whorehouse. A legitimate organization thinks of its customers or those it serves. It has a desire to satisfy the very people it is there for. It wants to do well and bring something of value to the world. Hmmm, come to think of it Loaves & Fishes is much much worse than any whorehouse. I would need to catalogue all the idiocy that comes from Loaves & Fishes' Board of Directors and Administration, but I am concerned that it would be thicker than a ...

The beginning of today's Bee Board Editorial on matters homeless, in its online manifestation. The Sacramento Bee publishes some of the goofiest editorials I have ever read whenever the topic is homelessness.  Today's is titled (online) " Editorial: Time to alter how we talk about 'homeless' ." It is nice that the Bee is compassionate and disposed to help the homeless and find solutions to every situation, but the knowledge-base of what homelessness is like “out here” always seems to be absent in the writer. I think the writer needs to get out more; away from the desk at 21st & Q. Too, the writer’s thinking is odd and strange and, frankly, ultimately, unhelpful. The Bee ’s editorial writer -- whom one commenter to today's editorial tells us is (today) Ginger Rutland -- is, clearly, mentally ill, based on the Bee 's standard of what mental illness is. Today’s editorial writer has to be the same person who has been writing the Bee ’s offici...

A handout that Loaves & Fishes gave to all those asking for lunch tickets, yesterday.  CLICK HERE OR ON PHOTO for large, easy-to-read view of text. SafeGround is nothing if not predictable. The river parkway is trashed and they are indignant about it.  And they conveniently forget it is they who helped trash the American River Parkway. The woeful thing about all of this is that I know that, in Egyptian terms, the SafeGround crowd sees itself as the noble, historic protesters in Tahrir Square. "We want our rights, and we don't care how. We want our revolution, NOW." But, truly, they are more like Mubarak: Incapable of seeing the other side of an issue; fully lost in the mirror hall and echo chamber of their perception of complete victimization. A comment to a Sacramento Bee ’s article yesterday “ Homeless must leave parkway ” has been getting positive attention in Homeless World for stating very well the contra-position to SafeGround (and that niche...

It has been a long-standing complaint from this blog that those suffering the most in Homeless World Sacramento — homeless people who are mentally ill, a great many of whom are schizophrenic — have been abandoned by both local government and the homeless-help service providers in our metropolis. A Sacramento Bee headline article on Sunday, " Sacramento officers take fewer in crisis for help " [titled "Cops seek help for fewer in crisis" in hardcopy] tells us "In the last two years, the number of incident reports showing people taken into custody as 5150 s [Involuntary psychiatric hold] dropped nearly 40 percent in the combined territory of the Sacramento police and county sheriff's departments, going from 2,215 during 2008 to 1,352 during 2010, records show." The article goes on to say, "… the effects of declining 5150s involving police are disputed. Some professionals said it shows residents slipping through the cracks, endangering themselves...

Loaves & Fishes Problems, centering on Loaves & Fishes' now-stinting and nutrition-lacking midday meal, have many upset at the homeless services nonprofit. Many lower-level employees and homeless and recently-homeless volunteers at Loaves & Fishes are particularly peeved at oblivious upper-management in the Ivory Tower [a common name given to the second floor of a central building where administration has its offices] Complaints have been met by hard-hearted responses from senior management.  It is felt that upper management is now wholly focused on Safe Ground issues and completion of the nonprofit's new multi-million dollar warehouse — that many see as a boondoggle — rather than important day-to-day matters. Also, I am told that the warehouse, on the northwest corner of Ahern and N. C Sts., which is now about three-quarters completed, will cost out at much more than the $1.7 million price tag that was disseminated. I was given no specific final-c...

Entrance to Friendship Park as seen from the cul-de-sac on North C, abutting 12th St. I have been given some details about the closure of Loaves & Fishes’ Friendship Park on New Year’s Day. The park was closed at about 10am, after it had been homeless people’s understanding the park would be open regular weekend hours on the holiday. The marijuana incident was thus: One of the Green Hats, Park staff people, had smelled the strong scent of pot coming from the men’s bathroom in the park. When he went inside the restroom no one was the there, but the scent was strong and undeniably that of marijuana. This Green Hat had the authority to close the park; neither of the co-directors of the park was there that day. I am told that since the individuals who had been smoking in the bathroom weren’t there to be identified and then punished in some way, it was the determination of this Green Hat to close the park, then, rather than keeping it open until its announced closure time of 1pm....

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 ...

On July 29, 2010, I was charged with trespassing at Loaves & Fishes property. Getting the police report, relating to events when I was at Loaves & Fishes on that date, proved to be exceedingly difficult. I received the police report only on October 26, nearly three months after ‘events’ and just ten days prior to the scheduled Trial Readiness Conference [11/5/10] at Superior Court, which was just five days prior to the my trial [11/10/10] on the charges. [But I must note, I didn’t make an effort to get the report until October.] I tell you all this, not because my fate is on the line; I’m OK, now. But I have to think that other homeless people, without my inclination to write things and keep records would have been totally screwed by the false [i.e., lying] report to the police that Loaves & Fishes provided. I was told, on October 27, that the DA will drop the trespassing charges, coming from a complaint/ticket Loaves & Fishes filed. The DA formally cl...

Joey Garcia My favorite columnist, relationships-genius Joey Garcia who writes "Ask Joey" for the Sacramento News & Review , has posted a follow-up Q&A on the matter of a homeless person shoplifting, in the latest edition of the tabloid-size weekly. In her Dec. 2 column , Joey offered advice to a person who witnessed a homeless woman shoplifting in a grocery store.  Joey's advice was spot-on right, I thought and think:  be compassionate toward the homeless woman, but also alert the store owner or manager that a theft had been attempted.  [I wrote about that earlier column a month ago.] In Joey's column in the current, Dec. 30, edition  of the SN&R , a homeless person writes in, saying that "[i]f someone is shoplifting in front of you, it's none of your business."  This argument is justified, politically, thus: "[I]f the store is part of a corporation that rakes in money from tax breaks, who cares? They're ripping us all off....

Loaves & Fishes — the soup kitchen with a $1.7 million warehouse to store stale pastries — didn’t give out $5 McDonald’s giftcards on Christmas to those who came for its Christmas meal. At its website, you can see that the McDonald’s card tops the list of those things Loaves & Fishes asked to be donated 1 as “Christmas Stocking Giveaways.” The first line of text reads: “Each year, as part of our holiday meal, Loaves & Fishes offers each of our guests a Christmas stocking.” Now, what people are wondering is What happened to the giftcards that Loaves & Fishes begged to have donated, but weren't in the stockings and are now — poof! — gone? Did Loaves & Fishes misdirect its donors and take the valued items to use for another purpose? [Yeah, like, what else is new in LibbyLand.] Did the cards go to employees? I have been given the information that hundreds of cards were received or paid for at Loaves & Fishes' administrative office. What w...

Loaves & Fishes' new warehouse, pictured last month while in the middle of being constructed. A new warehouse is under construction at the Loaves & Fishes Mall of services 'for the homeless and otherwise poor' that costs an astonishing $1.7 million. The new warehouse will replace rented warehouse services across the street from the Loaves & Fishes Administration building, that was costing the homeless-services nonprofit $5,000/mo. That rented space also included space for Loaves & Fishes’ library; and Genesis, a homeless counseling service staffed by a pair of social workers. The library will move to space at the Delany Center, a building L&F owns at 12th & Ahern, and Genesis will be moved into new space in or adjacent to the new warehouse. An apothegm this year by L&F's Safe Ground has been "House Keys Not Handcuffs."  While the new warehouse will be spiffy, with amenities not available in the rented space, it is hard t...

"Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases." The above is a much-quoted quote, today, from an article titled " A reversal on carbs ," by Marni Jameson in the Tribune-owned newspapers. The story tells us "a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat — for America's ills. They say cutting carbohydrates is the key to reversing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension." The article quotes Dr. Stephen Phinney, "a nutritional biochemist and an emeritus professor of UC Davis who has studied carbohydrates for 30 years", saying that, over time, our bodies get tired of processing high lo...

Loaves & Fishes has opened its Friendship Park on weekends through Christmas — or, from the report of another source, through Easter — for a foreshortened period each day. This will be helpful for many homeless people who have a tough time pulling their day together on weekends, for lack of a place where they’re allowed to spend time. This report will be updated with more specifics, including hours open, and what services are offered, when I receive those important details.