Kenneth “Pops” Yarber became homeless in 1995, not long after a brain aneurysm put him in a wheelchair. Suddenly, he was forty years old and on disability. Not long afterward, the bank foreclosed on his house on 4th Street in Modesto, and he began bouncing from the streets to short stays with friends and relatives. A few years later, Pops was convicted of passing bad checks and using stolen credit […]
Homelessness Stanislaus County
Ninth Street apartments: “Worst I’ve ever seen,” says attorney
“Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members—the last, the least, the littlest.” Cardinal Roger Mahony, 1998 With fifteen years’ experience representing tenants’ rights, Joseph Tobener has seen a lot of dilapidated buildings and apartments, including the warehouse that was the location for Oakland’s notorious “Ghost Ship” fire. But when he saw the horrid conditions at the recently condemned 624 Ninth Street location, […]
Homelessness: Whose Failure is it?
As a rule, homeless people fall into three or four broad categories. The three most common, “vagrants, transients, and addicts” are pejorative terms based on the notion that “these people” have brought their troubles on themselves. A fourth category suggests homeless people are “victims” of cruel society that has abandoned its most vulnerable members. All these ways of looking at homelessness contain grains of truth, but none really does much […]