Inside California's Tent Cities

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/03/25/us/20090326-TENTS_3.html

Who Are The Residents Of Tent City?

KCRA 3 is profiling some of the people who live in a large tent city at the north end of downtown Sacramento.

Alex Jones Tv : Tent City USA

Schwarzenegger Opens California Fairgrounds to Homeless Camp

By Michael B. Marois

March 25 (Bloomberg) -- California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said a make-shift tent city for the homeless that sprang up in the capital city of Sacramento will be shut down and its residents allowed to stay at the state fairgrounds.

Schwarzenegger said he ordered the state facility known as Cal-Expo to be used for three months to serve the 125 tent city residents, some of them displaced by the economic recession. The encampment may be shut down within a month, said Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson. The move comes after the Sacramento City Council last night agreed to spend $880,000 to expand homeless programs.

“Together with the local government and volunteers, we are taking a first step to ensure the people living in tent city have a safe place to stay, with fresh water, healthy conditions and access to the services they need,” Schwarzenegger said in a statement. “And I am committed to working with Mayor Johnson to find a permanent solution for those living in tent city.”

California, home to one of every eight Americans, has been particularly hard hit by the housing market collapse after many residents turned to exotic mortgages to afford homes. The tent city, which has long existed along the banks of the America River, gained national attention last month when some of its recently homeless residents were featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

The state has one of the highest rates of foreclosure, according to RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of real estate data. California home prices dropped 41 percent last month from a year earlier, more than double the U.S. decline, as surging foreclosures drove down values, the state Association of Realtors said today.

State Unemployment

The state’s unemployment rate rose to 10.5 percent in February, as construction, financial and manufacturing companies eliminated jobs, leaving the most-populous U.S. state with one of the nation’s worst job markets.

The shelter at Cal-Exp currently houses about 150 people. It will be expanded by another 50 beds, and will include facilities for families with children.

Camp Arnie: A Glimpse of Things to Come

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said a make-shift tent city for the homeless that sprang up in the capital city of Sacramento will be shut down and its residents allowed to stay at the state fairgrounds.

The homeless will be “allowed” to stay at Cal-Expo? More like they will be required to stay there, either that or hit the streets.

“Together with the local government and volunteers, we are taking a first step to ensure the people living in tent city have a safe place to stay, with fresh water, healthy conditions and access to the services they need,” said Herr Schwarzenegger, California’s Uber-gov.

	Livestock area at Cal Expo, the new home for Sacramento’s homeless.
	How government treats the homeless: New Orleans’ Super Dome in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

California, home to one of every eight Americans, has been particularly hard hit by the housing market collapse after many residents turned to exotic mortgages to afford homes. The tent city, which has long existed along the banks of the America River, gained national attention last month when some of its recently homeless residents were featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

In other words, the homeless, usually out-of-sight and thus out-of-mind, are a public relations disaster for Arnie and officialdom in California. Now that they will be forced to live in the deteriorating Cal-Expo, media access can be micro-managed by the state. “Too much media attention can be a bad thing. At least that seems to be the case for a tent city of 200 that sprang up a year ago in Sacramento,” the Los Angeles Times reported last week.

Cassandra Jennings, Sacramento’s assistant city manager, told KCRA 3 “what’s envisioned is a single, large tent with individual spaces or compartments and that there is no interest in recreating the existing tent city at Cal Expo.”

“Shelters are like institutions,” remarked one homeless man.

“At shelters you must share space with junkies, drunks, anti-social and emotionally deprived people. Shelters are dangerous, and violent. Rather than staying in a shelter and in order to preserve one’s sense of self, people stay in cars, crash with friends (’couch surfing’) or otherwise stay in the woods or on the streets somewhere,” writes Dana Szegedy, a student who experienced homelessness.

In the months ahead, as the economy continues its engineered implosion, local governments around the country may resort to the Camp Arnie solution to homelessness. Camp Arnie will reportedly hold a few hundred people (who are described as “chronic homeless,” not victims of foreclosure and unemployment) but it will stretch beyond capacity as unemployment and foreclosure homelessness increase.

As an example of what may be in store, consider the situation in New Orleans post-Katrina. Katrina produced a burgeoning population of homeless people who had lost their homes and were reduced to living on the street. In response, Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration cooked up a new public habitation law to move “vagrants” (victims) to a bunkhouse at the New Orleans Mission, according to the Lost in New Orleans blog.

What the mission calls its “bunkhouse,” an air-conditioned, heated Quonset-style tent erected at the back of its property, can hold 140 men. About 100 more men can sleep on the mission’s second floor, but only if the shelter hires a “firewatch,” because of its building’s current fire hazards. Women stay in a separate house, which has space for eight more, said Ron Gonzales, the shelter’s director.

Nagin planned to institutionalize the homeless. It looks like California is in the process of doing the same. Prior to this, Nagin “suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town.” Nagin’s frustration was a direct response to FEMA’s handling of the homeless crisis — the supposed emergency management agency put the displaced in toxic trailers and then dumped them on the street. “While some have moved to homes of relatives in other states, others are living in cars, or have joined the rapidly growing New Orleans homeless population,” Deepa Fernandes wrote for Mother Jones in 2008.

FEMA’s ludicrously (and maybe prophetically) named toxic trailer camp — “Renaissance Village” — was in essence a concentration camp. “When you first drive up on the FEMA site you see a chain-link fenced in property with stark crowded trailers and no trespassing signs posted along the perimeter. When you drive up to the entrance you will see security guards at the front gate. It doesn’t take much of a closer look to notice that the security guards are armed. FEMA requires all residents to carry Renaissance Village ID badges at all times,” explains a blog on the subject.

You will have to show your ID’s, tell them who you are going to see and their trailer number and they will write down your license plate number on your vehicle when you come in. Mark Misczak, the agency’s human services director for Louisiana said it is“private, like a gated community”. It is unlike any gated community we have ever known of, except a prison. When the site opened FEMA had a ban on firearms.

“It is wrong to force citizens to give up their constitutional rights in order for them to get a needed federal benefit,” said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

Of course homeless people reduced to entering a fenced FEMA camp surrounded by armed guards shouldn’t expect to exercise their constitutional rights. In fact, they didn’t have the right to talk to the media, either. At a FEMA concentration camp in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, in 2006 a reporter was prevented from talking to inmates.

Dekotha Devall, whose New Orleans home was destroyed by the storm, was in her FEMA-provided trailer telling the Advocate reporter of the hardships of life in the camp when a security guard knocked on the door.

“You are not allowed to be here,” the guard is quoted as telling the reporter. “Get out right now.” The guard reportedly called police to force the journalist to leave the camp, and even prevented the reporter from giving the interview subject a business card. “You will not give her a business card,” the guard said. “She’s not allowed to have that.”

Later, at another FEMA camp in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, the reporter attempted to talk to camp resident Pansy Ardeneaux through a chain link fence when the same guard halted the interview. “You are not allowed to talk to these people,” the guard told Ardeneaux. “Return to your trailer now.” The reporter said she and an accompanying photographer were “ordered…not to talk to anyone or take pictures.”

In September, 2006, renowned journalist Greg Palast was charged with crimes against the state for filming a FEMA toxic trailer concentration camp, deemed a “critical national security structure,” described by Palast as an ” aluminum ghetto in the middle of nowhere.”

Arnie Schwarzenegger (an admitted fan of a man who pioneered many concentration camp techniques) is attempting to drastically curtail media access to the growing number of homeless in his state by locking the down-and-out up in a concentration camp at Cal-Expo. Is it possible Arnie will post armed guards around the homeless containment pens at Cal-Expo to run off the media in the same way FEMA did? Bet on it.

Eventually this out-of-sight-out-mind damage control tactic will fail. As the economy implodes and the number of unemployed, foreclosed, and homeless increase around the country it will be impossible for government to sweep the problem under the rug — or in the case of California, sweep it into a livestock pen at the state fair grounds.

Is it possible the KBR constructed camps situated around the country — camps Glenn Beck tells us do not exist — are intended to lock-down millions of angry and desperate unemployed people in the months and years ahead?

If I was a betting man, I’d say so.

Research related links

1. Schwarzenegger Opens California Fairgrounds to Homeless Camp
2. Ontario, CA, Tent City Residents Required to Wear Wristbands
3. Illegal Alien Raid Part Of FEMA Camp Drill
4. News crew crashes Denver’s DNC concentration camp
5. FEMA: Trains To Take You To The Camps
6. Secretive FEMA Camp Drill Goes Live
7. Secretive FEMA Camp Drill Running In Iowa
8. America faces new Depression misery as financial crisis worsens
9. Camp memories: Obama and Reagan
10. Sarcramento struggles with spiralling homelessness problem

Sacramento and Its Riverside Tent City

Renee Hadley covered her bicycles with a tarp outside her tent on Tuesday in Sacramento, Calif.

Housing the Homeless? | 6:22 p.m. Several readers have commented that the city of Sacramento seems to have a lot of vacant housing and wondered if it might be converted for use by the homeless people living in tent city. My colleague Vikas Bajaj, who has written extensively about foreclosures for The Times, checked the numbers:

I looked up how many homes and apartments are vacant in the Sacramento area and here are the numbers: 10.4 percent of rental housing units are vacant and 4.8 percent of owned units are vacant. The vacancy rates are higher than the rest of the country.

It seems that the city/county/state should at least be considering putting the homeless in the people-less homes and apartments that plague the area, rather than making permanent these squalid tent cities. They can probably acquire foreclosed homes for very little money and turn them into low-cost, affordable housing.

I checked with Mayor Kevin Johnson’s spokesman, Steve Maviglio, about this idea of moving the tent people into vacant housing, and here’s what he said:

It’s been talked about a little bit, but it’s private property and we don’t have the ability to secure it. But we are looking at housing owned by the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency. The problem with that is that it’s low-income housing and is maxed out, fully occupied. So that’s not an avenue.

Still, he said, the city is exploring all ideas, both temporary and long-term.

Original Post | 3:19 p.m. A tent city is burgeoning in Sacramento, Calif., prompting local officials to consider whether such an encampment should be made permanent, with plumbing and all.

The primitive settlement sits in the shadow of the state capitol and is home to about 300 people who have no toilets or running water, creating unsanitary conditions that advocacy groups worry could promote diseases like cholera. With the downturn in the economy and more working-class people losing their jobs and their homes, the tent city is expanding.

The mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, said in an interview that he wants to create a permanent tent city for the homeless, although he is not sure where it should be. He said he recognized that doing so would be difficult politically. But he said a permanent site could bring sanitation services and regulations like a ban on drugs and alcohol.

Mr. Johnson said that the rise in homelessness was a regional problem, and that surrounding localities should help pay for any solution, like establishing a permanent tent city. He will also have access to $2.3 million that President Obama’s stimulus package is giving Sacramento to deal with homeless issues.

“We’ve tried to sweep the homeless under the rug and it’s been our dirty little secret for far too long,” said the mayor, who took office three months ago and whose status as a former Phoenix Suns basketball star has helped attract media attention to the tent city. “We’ve been relying on good Samaritans and nonprofits, but they’re overwhelmed now.”

Tent cities — much like the “Hoovervilles” of the Depression — have sprung up elsewhere around the country. But Sacramento, with one of the highest foreclosure rates, has one of the biggest, with a population of “easily 300,” said Rob Fong, a Sacramento city councilman, and it is “definitely growing.”
“It’s an unfortunate sign of the times,” he said.

This tent city is in a place of great natural beauty, between two rivers, with birds and open sky and a relatively mild climate. Homeless people have lived there for years, largely unseen, but as more working class people move in, the tents are multiplying and becoming harder to ignore.

The official count of homeless people in Sacramento is 1,226 people, and they are spilling out to the tent city because the housing shelters are full; one of the shelters is turning away more than 200 women and children a day.

“With the recession, the numbers of people who need help has gone up dramatically,” said Joan Burke, director of advocacy for Loaves & Fishes, a nearby privately financed, non-profit organization that provides survival services for people who are homeless and tries to help them regain a home.

“The number of unsheltered people here went up 26 percent in one year,” she said. “We have lots of folks living in their cars. People are buying storage units and living in them. People are trying to do what they can to put a roof over their head. Sometimes people romanticize camping, that they are free spirits. In fact, it’s an act of desperation.”

While some residents are neat and tidy and build latrines, she said, many others are mentally ill, alcoholic or have other problems and do not use latrines. This has created what she calls “third world” conditions.

She said her group was trying to encourage the city to provide space at state campgrounds with toilets and running water. Mr. Fong, the councilman, is working on a plan that might convert the horse barns at a nearby state fairground, which is empty most of the year, into temporary housing. He is also encouraging a project in which local churches, synagogues and mosques would adopt a family from a local shelter and find housing for them, thereby creating more space in the now-full shelters for those living in the tent city.

Establishing a government-sanctioned tent city would require the approval of the city council and Sacramento County Board of Supervisors. Some property owners and developers have already raised questions about the idea, saying a permanent homeless encampment would reduce property values, put an extra burden on those nearby and block off a portion of the



“Today” on Sacramento’s tent city.

The current tent city, along the American River, has prompted concern by The American River Parkway Preservation Society, which has written on its blog: “If local government truly wishes to establish tent cities they need to be some place where the surrounding communities are not materially and criminogenically degraded — as the first call of public leadership is to protect the public.”

Nationally, almost half the people who are homeless live outside, not in shelters, according to a study released in 2007, said Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
“There have always been people living outside in huge numbers because no city provides shelter to all of its people,” he said. “But now there’s so many people and encampments have been getting larger.” Most of the tent cities began as shelters for the regular or chronic homeless, “but there’s new faces starting to pop up because there’s no room at the inn.”

Ontario, CA, Tent City Residents Required to Wear Wristbands

Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Tent City residents gather as the city of Ontario starts the process of sorting out who may stay and who must leave. The city issued wristbands – blue for Ontario residents, who may stay, orange for people who need to provide more documentation, and white for those who must leave. The aim is to reduce the number of people living there from over 400 to 170.
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Officials begin thinning out the encampment, saying the city can provide space only for those who once lived there and can prove it.
By David Kelly, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 18, 2008
Dozens of Ontario police and code enforcement officers descended upon the homeless encampment known as Tent City early Monday, separating those who could stay from those to be evicted.

Large, often confused, crowds formed ragged lines behind police barricades where officers handed out color-coded wristbands. Blue meant they were from Ontario and could remain. Orange indicated they had to provide more proof to avoid ejection, and white meant they had a week to leave.


Many who had taken shelter at the camp -- which had grown from 20 to more than 400 residents in nine months -- lacked paperwork, bills or birth certificates proving they were once Ontario residents.

"When my husband gets out of jail he can bring my marriage certificate; will that count?" asked one tearful woman.

Another resident, clearly confused, seemed relieved to get a white band -- not understanding it meant she had to leave.

Pattie Barnes, 47, who had her motor home towed away last week, shook with anger.

"They are tagging us because we are homeless," she said, staring at her orange wristband. "It feels like a concentration camp."

Ontario officials, citing health and safety issues, say it is necessary to thin out Tent City. The move to dramatically reduce the population curtails an experiment begun last year to provide a city-approved camp where homeless people would not be harassed.

Land that includes tents, toilets and water had been set aside near Ontario International Airport for the homeless. Officials intended to limit the camp and its amenities to local homeless people, but did little to enforce that as the site rapidly expanded, attracting people from as far away as Florida.

"We have to be sensitive, and we will give people time to locate documents," said Brent Schultz, the city's housing and neighborhood revitalization director. "But we have always said this was for Ontario's homeless and not the region's homeless. We can't take care of the whole area."

Officials believe the local homeless number about 140, less than half of those currently in residence. Schultz wants to reduce Tent City to 170 people in a regulated, fenced-off area rather than the sprawling open-air campsite it has become.

No other city has offered to take in any of the homeless who Ontario officials say must leave.

"So far I have heard nothing," Schultz said.

Even before the large-scale action Monday, police last week moved out parolees and towed about 20 dilapidated motor homes. A list of safety rules, including one banning pets, has been posted. The city says there is a threat of dog bites and possible disease from the animals.

The no-pet order caused widespread anger and tears Monday as some homeless people said they could not imagine life without their dogs. Many have three or four and vowed to leave Tent City before giving the dogs up.

"I will go to jail before they take my dog," said an emotional Diane Ritchey, 47. "That's a part of me as much as anything. The dogs are as homeless as we are."

Cindy Duke, 40, hugged Ritchey, who was sobbing.

"I had to give up my 6-year-old son because I was homeless and I'll be damned if I give up my dog too," Duke said.

Celeste Trettin, 53, rolled up in a wheelchair. She and her husband have an Ontario address but have lived for years in a truck, parking wherever they found a safe place. Trettin, who got an orange wristband, said she believed she would be able to find the paperwork to prove she was from Ontario.

"We thought if we came here we could save some money, but now they have pulled the rug out from under us," said Trettin, who has fibromyalgia, a painful disorder.

Marty Tovar took it all in stride. The 53-year old Mentone man had fresh bumps and cuts on his face after being on the receiving end of a recent assault. He didn't seem to care if he had to leave.

"It doesn't anger me; it angers a lot of other people here but not me," he said, wearing no shirt under his blue overalls. "If I got to go I'll just catch the next bus to the next town. Every town has a park."



Still, by noon only one man had taken up an offer of free taxi rides back to their home cities, returning the 50 miles to Victorville, said Det. Jeff Higbee, spokesman for the Ontario police.

"By next Monday we should have everyone who is supposed to be gone out of here," Higbee said. "The wristbands are only temporary so we can identify everyone."

As the local homeless people were separated from the others, city workers were busy setting up fencing for the new encampment. Those who are approved will get 90-day renewable permits to stay.

Peter Bibring, staff attorney with the America Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, toured Tent City and spoke with local officials.

"We are concerned that however they go about trying to reduce this population they don't depend on arrests or property seizures for people who have no other place to go and are just looking for a place to sleep," he said. "We will continue to monitor the situation."

Although no one at the camp seemed happy about efforts to shrink Tent City, some tried to see Ontario's point of view.

Tina Gove, 39, was evicted from her Pomona home and has been at the encampment for three months. Like many others in Tent City, her life has been marked by drug problems and mental illness.

Her four children, she said, were taken from her because of a past methamphetamine addiction.

"If they throw me out I'll be back on the street, and I don't want to be back on the street because it's scary," she said. "But I think we should all be grateful because if Ontario hadn't opened this place for us, where would we be today?"