Homeless May Get to Sleep Legally on City Streets

In an article in the San Diego Union, we learn that there are negotiations going on to let the homeless sleep on the sidewalks of certain neighborhoods between the hours of 9 PM and 6 AM without fear of being ticketed for illegal lodging. What an enlightened solution! Not even a vacant lot with astroturf? Not even a park? I'm sure the city authorities deserve a big thank you from the homeless for the privilege of sleeping on cement without being ticketed. Partly it's stupidity on the part of the homeless. Concrete is one of the hardest substances known to man. Have there been any studies done regarding how many nights one can sleep on it without having serious physical problems? Oh, my aching back just thinking about it!

If the city authoriries wanted to be truly humane, they'd set aside a certain area off the beaten path in the huge Balboa Park or in some other park such as Otay Valley Regional which would be ideal. Then you might say how would they get downtown to the social services agencies? Why like everyone else: the bus and/or trolley. Give them free bus passes if you have to. This would put them in a situation more conducive to a healthy night's sleep, and get them off the freakin sidewalks. From the point of view of those who live downtown, this in itself would be a major, major achievement. Then provide a few port-o-potties so that they have some primitive sanitation facilities. They have hundreds of port-o-potties at any paid-for city event. Providing a few for the homeless would cost the city practically nothing, but would give the homeless (who are not in shelters because there aren't enough shelter beds) a safe, legal and somewhat dignified place to sleep. Nothing is more disgusting than the thought of their urinating and defecating on the sidewalk, and downtown residents, such as myself, have to dodge the stuff as well as the results of dog crap. All this makes the city streets somewhat unpleasant and the odor, like the memory, lingers on even after the visible results have vanished. Power washing of sidewalks thus becomes a major necessity on a par with street sweeping.

On the left is the expansive, unused, relatively isolated, away from downtown Otay Valley Regional Park.

A lot of the homeless need a caseworker far more than they need a home. A lot of them are mentally ill. A lot of them are drug or alcohol dependent. A lot of them are very low functioning: on a scale from one to ten, they are close to zero. Still others are crafty enough to survive living on the streets, and to do that they have to have some wits about them. Some are quite industrious. Some of the can scavengers work rather diligently throughout the night to make enough to survive. In general  the homeless charities like Father Joe's Villages of St Vincent de Paul, the Alpha Project and the San Diego Rescue Mission work with the transient homeless, those who can be helped, the temporarily homeless. The hard-core or chronically homeless form a far different case. These poor folks have everything working against them. They are extremely low functioning or low IQ or mentally ill, or with no family or social ties or substance abusers or all of the above. These are the chronically homeless who need a supervised group home or a caseworker more than anything else.

Not ticketing the homeless for sleeping on city streets is really a half ass solution to the problem. Getting them off the city streets is the real challenge both from the point of view of the homed, and ultimately of the homeless themselves. In fact a lot of the homeless sleep rather securely off the sidewalks if they put their minds to it at all. The San Diego River basin provides a lot of sleeping room. The major problem with these non-downtown location, from the homeless point of view, is that they then need transportation downtown for free meals and services. Some of the more resourceful have acquired bicycles which solves that problem. From the city's point of view allowing them free transportation twice a day would facilitate a more general solution to the problem. And it would be a more humane solution. Camping under the stars in a secure, safe environment is not such a bad thing, and it's cheaper than providing shelter beds.

I have blogged about being homeless and how one can actually live a pretty good constructive life on little money if you approach the situation with even a modicum of intelligence and resourcefulness. Unfortunately, not too many homeless are high functioning enough to make intelligent use of meager resources. For high functioning people, homelessness amounts more to distributed living than to, well, homelessness. Being without a home is not the central fact of their existence. It's just that different functions are handled differently than they would be if one lived in a home. And one can enjoy the freedom that comes with not having a regular job and not having to pay rent, but this takes some intelligence and ability to function under somewhat adverse circumstances. Most homeless people don't have this. That's why I say they need a caseworker more than they need a home. An extremely low functioning, homeless person would still be extremely low functioning living in a home unless it was a group home presided over by a staff.

Until they develop the ability to be a higher functioning individual and without the prospect of being in a supervised situation, the low functioning homeless are better off being homeless because they wouldn't know how to take care of a home and pay the bills. That's why a lot of them are homeless in the first place. They can't function in modern society. But a humane society would offer them a better place to camp out than on the sidewalk even if they're not ticketed!

In a follow-on article Mayor Jerry Sanders and police chief William Lansdowne said in effect "not so fast." There would be no sleeping legally on city streets if they had anything to say about it. “My most immediate concern is that this does nothing to solve the systemic problem of homelessness,” Sanders said. “If anything, it sends the message that homelessness is an acceptable option. That we have given up – and so now, it's OK to sleep on the streets. That doesn't work for me.” That's typical of the conventional wisdom that the way to solve homelessness is to "home" everyone which of course no one including the city, the homeless agencies and the homeless themselves will ever do. I agree with the Mayor that the homeless should not be allowed to sleep on city streets which they do every night anyway whether it's illegal or not. However, I think they ought to be allowed to sleep somewhere in a sanctioned area similar to a campground. The little-used Otay Valley Regional Park (pictured above) would be ideal. Hardly anyone goes there and it's a large flat area perfect for a campground. But the word "encampment" is anathema to the city!

The city will never do this because they think homeless people from all over the world will flock here. San Diego will become a homeless magnet, a nirvana for homeless people. The city won't house them and they won't let them sleep somewhere in relative comfort compared to the hard concrete of city sidewalks. They'll never have enough shelter beds because they think that would be a homeless magnet also. They're philosophically opposed to the notion of giving legitimacy to homelessness by allowing it to exist somewhere in a legally sanctioned environment. So the smart homeless will continue to sleep off the sidewalks out of sight of the police and the dumb homeless will continue to sleep and urinate and defecate on city sidewalks while some highly paid city employees continue to try to work out a solution. The only humane solution is to let the shelter bed overflow have a safe, secure outdoor area or to put them all in supervised group homes on a committed basis like they used to do before they emptied out the insane asylums.

Father Joe 's Villages of St Vincent de Paul are doing a great job for some but not all of the homeless. Father Joe has his budgetary constraints too. The best thing about it though is that you can get a free meal there 365 days a year. I always tell the panhandlers asking for money for food to go there, something they seem reluctant to do, maybe because they don't really want the money for food in the first place. Most of them panhandle for money for drugs or alcohol. Even though they're the poorest of the poor, a lot of them manage to smoke cigarrettes, a luxury item for the middle class nowadays.

The San Diego Regional Task Force on the Homeless is a joke. All of these super smart people who go on endlessly with their meetings, but still can't manage to solve the problem. That's because they don't really want to because they don't want to admit that maybe it's better to give the homeless a safe, secure place to sleep out of doors and a case worker than to provide them with a roof over their head. Sharon Johnson, the Homeless Services Administrator for the City of San Diego also occupies herself with a meaningless 10 year plan to house the homeless. Even if you housed them, you'd still have to supervise them because a lot of the "chronically homeless" are close to zero functioning people who don't know enough to come in out of the rain even if they had a home. They don't even have the skills necessary to manage a checking account.

The HOT team (Homeless Outreach Team) is also a joke - underfunded, undermanned and inadequate to the problem. Another joke is "Clean and Safe" which is also supposed to deal with the homeless. Please note that Clean and Safe is funded by the Downtown Business Partnership and not by the city.

The city doesn't really want to deal with this problem. They just want it to go away, and it's not going to. Meanwhile, to the chagrin of "homed" downtown citizens, the city will continue to tolerate sleeping on sidewalks and in storefronts, urinating and defecating, all the while wringing their hands and saying, "We can only do so much." Be comforted by the fact that they are still searching, searching for the ultimate solution to the homeless problem which they will continue to do until they retire with a hefty pension.