Julia Orlando came to town Friday. Orlando is the Director of Bergen County’s Housing, Health, and Human Services Center. She achieved nationwide fame in 2017, when the New Jersey County became the first officially recognized county in the United States to end chronic homelessness, defined as including people “who have experienced homelessness for at least one year or repeatedly while struggling with a disabling condition.” With decades of experience developing […]
History
WALL STREETIN’ McCLATCHY: Will debt bury the Bee?
Steve Ringhoff’s Modesto Explained presents local investigative journalism on a range of subjects. Here, Steve offers an insider’s look at the McClatchy corporation’s precarious debt load and what it might mean to the future of its newspapers. Reprinted with permission. Do the 19 or so descendants of the founders of The McClatchy Company—whose media empire includes The Modesto Bee—feel the hot breath of a hedge fund wolf on the backs […]
Homeless: Alan Davis Gets a Shower
Frank Ploof, who coordinates services at the Modesto Outdoor Emergency Shelter (MOES), probably wasn’t thinking about fate or destiny as he was pushing Alan Davis uphill last Wednesday, but he could have been. Ploof was pushing Davis toward a rendezvous with his own brainchild. At least that’s the story according to Dean Dodd, the high-energy force behind the Cleansing Hope Shower Shuttle, a rolling marvel of a brilliantly-executed but simple […]
Homeless: Alan Davis Checks In
Alan Davis, the homeless man who haunted downtown Modesto and over the years was befriended by passing strangers who handed him food and money, has found a temporary home at the Modesto Outdoor Emergency Shelter (MOES). Davis checked into the shelter Tuesday morning, after a volunteer found him sleeping on the corner of 18th and G streets in Modesto. Frank Ploof, a coordinator of activities and outreach for MOES, was […]
Homeless: The Kindness of Strangers
Homeless outreach worker Randy Limburg came across Alan Davis a couple of weeks ago. Davis was frequenting downtown Modesto in an area roughly from the old Modesto Bee building, at 1325 H Street, to five points at J Street and Downey Avenue, near Ralston Towers. Davis said he was fifty-four years old and had been on the streets for a few months after waking up from surgery at Memorial Hospital. […]
Is the Bee an Endangered Species?
Way back in 2011, the Columbia Journalism Review published an article about Modesto’s dire need for news. This was when the Modesto Bee still had hundreds of employees, slightly down from its peak of almost seven-hundred, but still a respectable number for a local newspaper. Today, Bee employees number in the low dozens. The paper still includes national news, and the local range of coverage still extends throughout the northern […]
Homeless: “It’s different these days.”
Many believe today’s system of care and recovery for homeless people is antiquated and inadequate. For the most part, they’re right. Nevertheless, some people just need an intervention and chance to get back on their feet, especially those with income and a place to go. Efren Torres is one such person. Efren Torres had been clean for three years when he lost his wife in a tragic automobile accident in […]
Homeless: It’s going to get worse
Every year, the community Continuum of Care (COC) does a Point-in-Time (PIT) count of homeless people throughout California. Thus far this year, 9 of the 13 most populous regions have reported. Of those 9, 8 regions counted more homeless people than last year. Conducted last January, the Stanislaus County count set a record of 1,923 people; the previous high of 1,800 people was in 2009, during the Great Recession. Still, […]
Acts of Human Kindness: A Rescue at MOES
Ordinarily, Modesto Police Sergeant Mike Hammond has more pressing things to do than rescue cats. But Friday, May 2, Hammond was the only uniformed person in sight when a persistent cat lover kept urging him to do something about a treed cat near the entrance gate to the Modesto Outdoor Emergency Shelter (MOES), near Modesto’s Beard Brook Park. Hammond looked at the cat, some thirty feet up a sturdy oak […]
Yadegar Shooting Comes into Focus: It Doesn’t Get any Prettier
A report from Steve Ringhoff at modestoexplained.com The .45 caliber bullet did exactly what it was designed to do. It killed. Entering the body of Evin Olsen Yadegar at the left rear shoulder, expanding, mushrooming, fracturing bone and lacerating vessels, organs and muscles, slowing from about 600 miles per hour—the speed at which it left the gun fired by Deputy Justin Wall—until, its energy spent, coming to rest in her […]