In the last two years, City Council as passed a variety of homeless-removal measures masquerading as “public safety” actions, relabeling life-sustaining behaviors like sleeping as crimes needing more intensive police pressure.
\nCitations and stay-aways (still the one-day kind) for being a “closed area” (i.e. a park after dark), “camping”, and smoking have escalated substantially.\u00a0 And target those who are homeless or traveling.<\/p>\n
National outrage at exposed police\u00a0 violence and its rubberstamping by authorities local, state, and national may give us new hope for some changes if Santa Cruz can move from symbolic protest to meaningful and locally-focused direct action.\u00a0 The new “performance pens” outlined by the “dots for dodos” on Pacific Avenue are an example of the liberal sell Mayor Lane and Councilmember Comstock that criminalizes\u00a0 98% of the downtown sidewalks\u00a0 for vending,\u00a0 tabling,\u00a0 speaking, performing, and displaying artwork.\u00a0\u00a0 It is packaged as “reform” because it doubles the previous 1% available.\u00a0\u00a0 Meanwhile huge swaths of the sidewalk have been leased to private businesses,\u00a0 with another 14′ penumbra around those “sidewalk cafes” made illegal\u00a0 for\u00a0 non-commercial street activity.\u00a0 All the while illegal free-standing merchant signs occupy public spaces that human beings are barred from sitting or tabling at.<\/p>\n
Do-It-Yourself New Year’s Parade is coming up on December 31st<\/span><\/span>–usually around 5\u00a0 p.m.<\/span><\/span> in the Saturn Cafe parking lot.\u00a0 And an angry protest against the Council’s BEARCAT Xmas gift to the SCPD of a militarized “Rescue” vehicle on January 13th<\/span><\/span> is also focused on the anti-homeless “we don’t need no stinkin’ courts to get rid of you, just a ‘stay-away’ order from a cop or ranger” law. \u00a0\u00a0 On January 24th<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 Sin Barras and other groups will protest the deaths of prisoners locally\u00a0 (see www.http:\/\/sinbarras.org\/<\/a> ).\u00a0\u00a0 And HUFF is still shining a strong light on the local SCPD to assess Officer Bill Azua’s alleged racial targeting and the department’s use of force policies.<\/p>\n Happy New Year–here comes 2015. SAN JOSE, Calif.\u2014When San Jose dismantled the “Jungle,” the nation\u2019s largest homeless encampment, many of its residents with nowhere to go scattered. They found hiding places in the scores of small, less visible encampments within the city, where more than 5,000 people sleep unsheltered on a given night.<\/span> San Jose, by all accounts, is experiencing a crisis in homelessness. Even with dedicated non-profits working to stem the tide, the city\u2019s homeless problem, like that of other booming cities\u2014New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, to name a few\u2014has grown markedly worse in recent years. San Jose is the nation\u2019s 10th largest city (with one million residents) but the San Jose\/Santa Clara County area, home to 34 billionaires, has the nation\u2019s fifth largest homeless population, after New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Diego.<\/span> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NORSE’S NOTES:\u00a0 The series of comments following this article at www.alternet.org\/comments\/some-sort-hell-how-one-wealthiest-cities-america-treats-its-homeless#disqus_thread is unusually homeless-positive.\u00a0 The posters–at least the first bunch–highly critical of authorities and supportive of the despoiled rights poor people outside.\u00a0 In Santa Cruz, San Jose’s bedroom community, … Continue reading
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‘Some Sort of Hell’: How One of the Wealthiest Cities in America Treats Its Homeless<\/span><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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226 COMMENTS<\/a> <\/span><\/div>\n
\nThe city refuses to provide affordable housing, yet won’t tolerate people living outdoors.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ci5.googleusercontent.com\/proxy\/WIhZ-wmiyVwIrqlTmocxvH66h4GQhK5c2mMlgxQyk21-IqIY2jwWD4cL2aZwDihPh_tPIN-l5VqcKEmYVQdg8limhJRsFsCH-XosVXrvXqUvNJ3vrUO_Y5Q4qoX3RvHPr6fcQWzY44pdgwVXtkOsnOvef7yKIFevC7Xc8XtEdHzg8q3N=s0-d-e1-ft#http:\/\/www.alternet.org\/files\/styles\/story_image\/public\/story_images\/screen_shot_2014-12-25_at_10.23.15_am.png\")
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\nBut one group of about three dozen evictees gathered what they could salvage in backpacks and trash bags, and crossed a bridge to a spot about a mile away. They found a clean patch of grass near Coyote Creek, the same creek that the Jungle abutted. There, they pitched tents donated by some concerned citizens, assigned themselves chores and hoped for the best. \u00a0<\/span>
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\nInstead, they got marching orders. After weathering the hardest rains to fall in these parts in a decade, the campers found 72-hour eviction notices on their tents. Once again, a little more than a week after their forced flight from the Jungle, they had no idea where they might live.<\/span>
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\n\u201cThis is some sort of hell,\u201d said Raul, 57 (who didn\u2019t want his last name used), a life-long resident of San Jose who had lived in the Jungle for nearly eight years. He had nothing left of the home he had created, just a knapsack, his chihuahua Pepe, and a new pup tent. He was so depressed, he could barely lift his head.<\/span>
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\nTo an outside observer, the eviction was predictable. The state\u2019s threat to sue Santa Clara County over the pollution in Coyote Creek caused by camping spurred the closing of the Jungle, a winding, 68-acre shantytown under an overpass with upwards of 300 people. With the state\u2019s environmental agencies\u2014and the public\u2014watching, San Jose could not allow another Jungle to spring up.<\/span>
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\nBut the city could offer no viable alternative to the people it was expelling for the second time in a week. San Jose, the self-described capital of Silicon Valley, the largest wealth generator in the United States, lacked the resources.<\/span>
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\nThe Jungle had become a symbol of the growing divide between the nation\u2019s rich and poor. But its December 4 dismantling\u2014a spectacle of crying residents struggling with shopping carts, Hazmat-suited cleanup crews tossing furniture into dump trucks and hordes of police and reporters standing watch\u2014only underscored the problem, since so many Jungle residents were literally left out in the cold.<\/span>
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\nResidents of the neighborhood in Central San Jose that abutted the Jungle were glad to see the encampment go. But dismantling the Jungle is already creating new problems. Just days after the Jungle was torn apart, San Jose police and other city departments began fielding calls from people in different neighborhoods complaining of former Jungle residents setting up camps near them. Some ended up in a Walmart parking lot before being booted. Others were congregating near the airport, also under threat of eviction.\u00a0At least one hospital reported an upsurge of emergency room visits from former residents of the Jungle, sick from weathering the elements, having misplaced medications in the eviction.<\/span>
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\n\u201cWhat the city is saying is that it refuses to provide affordable housing, but it does not tolerate people living outside,\u201d said Sandy Perry, an organizer at the Affordable Housing Network of Santa Clara County, who has worked with San Jose\u2019s homeless population since 1991. \u201cThis is a willful, wholesale violation of human rights.\u201d<\/span>
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\nSan Jose\/Santa Clara County also has the nation\u2019s highest percentage of homeless people living on the streets. More than 75 percent, upwards of 7,600, are unsheltered, according to the 2014 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, compared to five percent of the homeless people in New York City.<\/span>
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\nRay Bramson, San Jose\u2019s homeless response team manager, said the city did all it could for the Jungle. It earmarked $4 million and spent 18 months, with contracted non-profit organizations, to find housing for 144 Jungle residents, using housing vouchers that expire in two years. But another 60 residents, vouchers in hand, could not find apartments, even with social workers working on their behalf.\u00a0By the end, just weeks before the dismantling, the population of the Jungle was still between 200 and 300 people, according to housing advocates and volunteers who worked with jungle residents. That\u2019s because every time a resident of the Jungle moved out, another person, or more, took their place.<\/span>
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\nCritics of the way the city dismantled the Jungle, both professional advocates for the homeless and citizens registering their opinions on social media, have decried the city for creating a two-year voucher program that inadequately served the population.<\/span>
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\n\u201cWhen a city decides to built a park, it doesn\u2019t build until it has the funding to finish it,\u201d said Anthony King, a volunteer outreach worker who was homeless for more than 10 years. \u201cSo why did the city decide to undergo a program that addressed the needs of only some of the people in the Jungle?\u201d<\/span>
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\nThe city said it was forced to close the camp for its environmental risks and hazardous conditions. But Bramson himself has said that there are many other homeless camps along the waterways. In fact, the Jungle was part of a string of 247 tent cities along Santa Clara County\u2019s waterways that contain 1,230 people, according to a recent county census.<\/span>
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\nChris Herring, a Ph.D candidate in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley who has extensively researched homeless encampments on the west coast, said the eviction \u201cwill not mitigate the ongoing environmental damage to Coyote Creek by homeless habitation\u201d\u2014only move it around.\u201d<\/span>
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\nIn an essay in Beyond <\/span>Chron.org<\/a><\/span>, Herring also said the eviction \u201cwill exacerbate rather than improve unsanitary conditions faced by the evicted, pushing them further from clean water, recycling centers and toilets.\u201d<\/span>
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\nResidents of the Jungle, well aware of the growing trash and sanitary problems caused by so many incoming residents, had appealed to the city for help. In November, they waged a protest for better sanitary services. The city had provided three port-a-potties, eight hours a day, for the Jungle\u2019s 300 residents, and handed out portable sanitary bags for them to use the rest of the time\u2014bags of human waste that competed with all the other trash in the Jungle for a spot in the few trash bins on site.<\/span>
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\nIn the few days that former residents of the Jungle spent in their second location before receiving eviction notices, they began organizing.<\/span>
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\n\u201cWe\u2019re creating a community,\u201d one woman said. People were assigned to clean up trash, run errands and the like. The group wanted to stay together, monitor activities so the site could stay clean and not generate complaints.<\/span>
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\n\u201cI just know that if we keep a place clean, have the bags for the trash, and stay away from the public, they won\u2019t bother us,\u201d said Raul, the former Jungle resident. Living in the Jungle was a hard life, he said, but it was stable. He had his shack, he knew everyone, had friends and support.\u00a0Like most homeless people, Raul said he preferred to be with other people he knew, rather than fend for himself.<\/span>
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\nHis sister, who had a housing voucher but couldn\u2019t find an apartment, was staying with her three dogs\u00a0in a tent next to Raul’s. Almost everyone at the encampment had at least one small dog, often several.<\/span>
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\nThe city came at the crack of dawn the day the new camp was evicted. Workers began taking their possessions before residents had even woken up, according to a report by ABC7 news. It quoted Bramson, who did not return requests for an interview for this story, saying, \u201cThere are services available. There is support available.”<\/span>
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\nBut the only support was a limited number of shelter beds the residents could try to get into\u2014if they gave up their dogs.<\/span>
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\nA day after their expulsion, most of the group had moved en masse to a new location, far from the public eye. But it was still near Coyote Creek. It wouldn\u2019t take long, they said, for the city to find them again.<\/span><\/p>\n
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\nEvelyn Nieves is a\u00a0senior\u00a0contributing\u00a0writer and editor at AlterNet, living in San Francisco. She has been a reporter for both the New York Times and the Washington Post.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n