Sacramento Homeless blog

The clock is ticking. Unless something changes, 346 people will be dumped out onto the street on the morning of July 1. Things may, already, not be as bad as that sounds. Many are likely to get placement in temporary housing. That was the promise of the city for the Tent City evacuees which number, perhaps, fifty. Plus there is stimulus money out there. It's not targetted for the established-homeless, but some funds may come our way, if only as a result of other funds being "released" as a result of usages the stimulus money is directed toward. In more-normal times, Overflow [aka, Winter] shelter would already have closed. This year it's set to close after the last day in June. Since the weather is already warm and many have tents and sleeping bags, we can expect that closure of Overflow will result in what happens every year: people find a place for themselves on the streets or along the river. What's unusual this year is that people now in VOA's A Street and...

According to the eviction notices Tent City residents are getting today, their instructions are to move to shelter – the one at Overflow [aka, Winter shelter at Cal Expo ]. But there's no room or next to no room at Overflow! The 154 beds that pre-existed the April 9 expansion have always been taken, or nearly all taken, since Overflow opened on Nov 24. Sometimes those beds were overbooked with men sleeping on couches in the movie room. The expansion added just fifty more beds. The great majority of those were taken by Tent City immigrants on April 9, leaving just a few – maybe six – that were assigned to the "regular" population of Overflow sheltered. Update: According to a Bee story on 4/14 , quoting VOA V.P. Christie Holderegger, fewer than half of the fifty new beds had been taken thus far by former-Tent City people. I got confirmation that the Bee story is correct, SacHo's "great majority" is wrong. My bad. Here's the text of the eviction notice ...

Val Jon Farris appears in the center of this photo [wearing an American-flag headband] while distributing items to residents of Tent City. This picture appears in slideshows at both SFGate and MSNBC 's webspaces. A fellow, purportedly from nearby Grass Valley, Val Jon Farris, with his upstart homeless organization, iCare-America , has been successful at making a local-media splash in Sacramento. He's appeared on KCRA, channel 3, [On Feb 25, here and here .] and the ABC affiliate, News10 [ on Mar 13 ]. He's also gotten the attention of the San Francisco Chronicle in its online source, S.F. Gate. Farris is the author of a 1999 book Inca Fire! Light of the Masters [ amazon page ] which, it is claimed, won the Independent Publishers Book Award of 2000, in the category of New Age publications. Purportedly, Farris's book won out over 500 other nominees for the award. This award cannot be verified since the webspace for the book awards does not list archives going back...

An area in Tent City, as pictured by KCRA . The encampment east of Loaves & Fishes in Sacramento is getting enormous attention nationwide for being emblematic of the souring economy. It many ways, this is unfortunate since the encampment is real, not a symbol. The people living in tents there are actual, factual, and not iconic -- not empty husks for Media and others to use to frame other problems. Still, Media attention, for all its hype and falseness, brings welcome benefits (even if they come for wrong, misguided reasons). Right now, there are people and organizations with a fount of unalloyed compassion that are lovingly giving to homeless Sacramentans. There are others who may or may not be just as compassionate who have an angle -- an organization they belong to that needs a revenue source or a job they want funded down the road. Homeless citizens of Sacramento, particularly those in Tent City [aka, the Wasteland; the Snakepit; Smudville; Libbyville; Almond encampment; Sacra ...

The video, below, [from a 2/25 late-evening news broadcast on channel 3 in Sac'to] is featured on the homepage of iCare-America . In all ways it shows Val Jon Farris, the founder and president of iCare , to be a friend toward and, even, a new member of the metropolitan-Sacramento Homeless community. Here, a second KRCA video where reporter Brian Hickey interviews Farris , which I cannot embed. This, from a report broadcast earlier on the day of 2/25 than the embedded video, above. Recently, Farris was involved in a bit of a dust-up with Loaves & Fishes chief executive Libby Fernandez and Sacramento Assistant city manager Cassandra Jennings, as reported in a KCRA text article . In the article we are told that Farris was distributing tents, sleeping bags and cots to people living in the Wasteland encampment, but Fernandez and Jennings objected. Fernandez said. "For one thing, you have to have trash pickup. You bring things out there like clothing, suitcases food, water ... i...