Little Sherry Lopez can’t go to the park. Everyone calls her “Little Sherry” because she’s the smallest Sherry they know. Little Sherry is well short of five feet tall. She’s closer to four feet tall. She’s a few years past forty years old. Little Sherry is developmentally and physically disabled. She walks haltingly and often has difficulty with simple concepts. Other than “little,” the most common word people use to […]
Beard Brook Park
Homeless: The Covid Correction
For many of us, the cause of homelessness is simple: “It’s the drugs.” Not far behind drugs as a cause of homelessness is the belief that, “They’d rather be homeless than work for a living.” This explanation goes back to Ronald Reagan’s declaration in 1982 that, “the people who are sleeping on the grates — the homeless who are homeless, you might say — by choice.” Neither explanation is going […]
Beard Brook Village: The End Game
The last days of Beard Brook Village were like the aftermath of a natural disaster— people pawing through the rubble of discarded clothing, bicycle parts and cooking utensils, a stream of humanity pushing shopping carts, baby strollers, and wheel chairs to and fro, and loose dogs everywhere. The debris-strewn chaos of Beard Brook was in stark contrast to the city’s new encampment, tentatively called Gateway Village, where uniform rows of […]
Homeless: Stanislaus County Workers Bring Christmas Spirit
A bevy of Stanislaus County service workers, many wearing purple T-shirts emblazoned with the motto, “Together We Rise,” brought food and comfort to the homeless encampment at Beard Brook Park Saturday, just three days before Christmas. Working off the clock, many of the workers are part of the county’s outreach effort and know village residents by name. They helped distribute pizza, pillows, blankets and Christmas cheer to the hundreds of […]