No one with experience with local systems of care is ever surprised when a homeless person ends up back on the street after an emergency visit to a hospital or mental health facility. The widespread belief that “services” are available for poor people in need belies a harsh reality: For the neediest people, there is too often no realistic help — the few available options are inadequate or useless. Want […]
Homelessness in Stanislaus County
Homeless: One City, One County
By October 1, 2015, homelessness in Modesto and Stanislaus County had become the region’s most urgent social and political issue. That’s when Stanislaus County Supervisors hosted their “Focus on Prevention” symposium to announce, “a ten-year journey of Stanislaus County toward community transformation and prosperity. A primary focus….is to reduce homelessness.” At the time, a few observers noted that “prevention” wasn’t possible for the hundreds of people already in the region […]
Endangered Homeless Woman Safe, United with Daughter
Cheryl Littlefield’s daughter, who prefers to remain anonymous, was stunned when she found her mother on the street last Thursday. “The last time I saw her was in November,” said the daughter. “She still had her room then. It was packed full of her belongings and a lot of trash, but her rooms have been that way for years.” According to her daughter, Cheryl has a history of mental illness […]
Homeless: Coming Soon to a Park Near You
It took a couple dozen specialists in hazardous waste removal, several Caltrans officials and workers, and three or four Highway Patrol Officers to remove a homeless camp along Highway 99 on Monday, January 4. That’s in addition to the 18-wheel trucking rig that was needed to haul off the tents, lean-tos, and accumulated trash. Most of the campers along the strip had moved across south Seventh Street in Modesto from […]
Poor and Homeless: The Plague after Corona
And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand Our New Normal Just a little over eleven years after George W Bush signed the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to save banks and financial institutions from defaulting on mortgage backed securities, the Trump administration is into a second round […]
How to Think About Homelessness
Few people would argue that releasing mentally ill people from institutions of care into the streets would have good consequences. That policy—closing mental institutions—is usually attributed to Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California, but it began in the 1960s, well before the Reagan administration. Today, the consequences are all around us; the best estimates show 25% of homeless people are seriously mentally ill, and up to 45% have […]
Homeless: “Ready or not, here we come”
When local authorities shut down the Modesto Outdoor Emergency Shelter (MOES) early last December, no one pretended the numbers were going to work. With 450 or so people at MOES and the new low-barrier shelter in the Salvation Army’s Berberian building serving only 182, the math was simple. Even after the Salvation Army added 50 beds, the spillover was about half—over two-hundred people were left with no place to go. […]
Homeless in Modesto: The Tide Rises
Two days before last Christmas, Mary was sitting on the curb at the intersection of Morris and Sycamore, scratching lottery tickets. Alan Davis, the wheel-chair bound amputee, had once again bolted from the new county shelter in the Berberian Building on Modesto’s south 9th Street. He was downtown on J Street, between 11th and 12th Streets, eating a sandwich from the nearby Subway Shop. A block or so away, across […]
Homeless? The future for many is a tent
Despite concerted efforts to get people into shelters and affordable housing, homeless numbers in the west have been increasing rapidly. In Stanislaus County, the numbers haven’t worked since experiments with tent encampments ended a few weeks ago, when the Modesto Outdoor Emergency Shelter (MOES) closed down. City and county authorities decided MOES wasn’t needed after expansion of the city’s Salvation Army Berberian Shelter. The expansion added 182 beds to the […]
Wheelchair-bound Amputee Back on the Streets of Modesto
Alan Davis, the homeless man who was taken to the Modesto Outdoor Emergency Shelter (MOES) in late September is back on the streets. Davis had spent a little over two months at MOES and seemed to be doing well when he was moved to the new shelter in the Salvation Army’s Berberian building on 9th and D Streets. Prior to arriving at MOES, Davis had spent many months haunting the […]