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I happen to live up here in this mini metro community. Pot growers started bringing up pitbull terriers about 20 years ago, now they are the most common dog or mix at the shelter. To the op, if you had gone just 4 blocks west and north of the plaza, you would have seen a lot of grand victorians rivaling most of Eureka's. Eureka peaked close to 29,000 about 15 years ago, but is now closer to 28,000. Arcata has been stable around 18,000, but balloons with students from fall to spring. McKinleyville is the fastest growing town in the county, absorbing 28% of the growth in Humboldt county. Since the last census, many homes have been built and the estimated population is around 19,000, in 2000 it was just under 14,000, in 1986 it was 7,500.
The homeless camp is behind BayShore Mall in Eureka and is call "The Devils Playground" it is even visible on Google Earth.
Thanks for letting me know where the nice houses are in Arcata. I'll go looking for them next time.
Well, I think your point of view is very kind hearted. But, I honestly can't imagine that mentally ill persons who won't stay on their meds, or drug addicts are going to be able to keep even free housing.
Of course there are exceptions. But, I think the exception is rare. And they have learned that people will give them money, so why should they work?
I envision that any housing facilities for homeless persons who are mentally ill and drug addicts, will be a very expensive on-going project. It would involve trying to control the behavior of people with uncontrollable behavior. And lots of paid people who are constantly cleaning up the messes.
I think the better model is the missions, for instance the one in Redding, that gives them the chance to turn their lives around. In Redding, they're given 30 days housing. If, in that time, they actually make a real effort to clean up and get a job, or get counseling, back on their meds, etc., then their housing is extended. And they will allow them to keep the money they earn, and help them with deposit money, etc., to help them get into housing. They'll give them training. They'll help them with rehab.
How many do you think succeed? I don't know, but I'm assuming it's not a huge number, because the mission never needs money to build a bigger facility for all of the successfully employed homeless people needing rooms at their facility beyond 30 days.
So, it would make better sense, in my opinion, to create this type of housing - temporary - where they are given the chance to get it together, given counseling, training, etc., but you have to hold them accountable, or they will continue to be a burden on the community.
The programs you mention may use the statistic of there being less homeless in numbers where they give them free shelter, but I'll bet that they are no less a burden on the community. They take them off the homeless statistic sheet, but they're still out there panhandling and stealing, etc., for easy money and/or drugs.
I think it's a crying shame that the state mental hospitals shut down. I know even mentally ill people deserve freedom of choice, but giving them freedom has created a big problem. We can't lock them up and force medication into them. But, it's sad to see them dirty and wet or hot, etc. They can also be scary, though, and dangerous.
I admit, I'm a NIMBY person now. I want them to go somewhere else. Politically incorrect, but honest.
Sometimes - well, often actually - personal opinions based on what seems obviously intuitive turn out to be mis guided. Studying the problem of homelessness over the years has seen an effective evolution away from of common assumptions and thinking. Housing First is the best, most cost effective, results proven approach to homelessness to date. Good illustrative summary article linked below, with a handful of quick quotes:
Quote:
In 2005, Utah set out to fix a problem that’s often thought of as unfixable: chronic homelessness. The state had almost two thousand chronically homeless people. Most of them had mental-health or substance-abuse issues, or both. At the time, the standard approach was to try to make homeless people “housing ready”: first, you got people into shelters or halfway houses and put them into treatment; only when they made progress could they get a chance at permanent housing. Utah, though, embraced a different strategy, called Housing First: it started by just giving the homeless homes.
Handing mentally ill substance abusers the keys to a new place may sound like an example of wasteful government spending. But it turned out to be the opposite: over time, Housing First has saved the government money. Homeless people are not cheap to take care of. The cost of shelters, emergency-room visits, ambulances, police, and so on quickly piles up. Lloyd Pendleton, the director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force, told me of one individual whose care one year cost nearly a million dollars, and said that, with the traditional approach, the average chronically homeless person used to cost Salt Lake City more than twenty thousand dollars a year. Putting someone into permanent housing costs the state just eight thousand dollars, and that’s after you include the cost of the case managers who work with the formerly homeless to help them adjust. The same is true elsewhere. A Colorado study found that the average homeless person cost the state forty-three thousand dollars a year, while housing that person would cost just seventeen thousand dollars.
Housing First isn’t just cost-effective. It’s more effective, period. The old model assumed that before you could put people into permanent homes you had to deal with their underlying issues—get them to stop drinking, take their medication, and so on. Otherwise, it was thought, they’d end up back on the streets. But it’s ridiculously hard to get people to make such changes while they’re living in a shelter or on the street.
... Utah’s first pilot program placed seventeen people in homes scattered around Salt Lake City, and after twenty-two months not one of them was back on the streets. In the years since, the number of Utah’s chronically homeless has fallen by seventy-four per cent.
... a recent Georgia study found that a person who stayed in an emergency shelter or transitional housing was five times as likely as someone who received rapid rehousing to become homeless again.
... Housing First has become the rule in hundreds of cities around the country, in states both red and blue. ...
... “People are willing to pay for this, because they can look at it and see that there are actually solutions. They can say, ‘Ah, it works.’ ” And it saves money.
... The success of Housing First points to a new way of thinking about social programs: what looks like a giveaway may actually be a really wise investment. ♦ Give the Homeless Homes - The New Yorker
Using yourself as the example of the bar to shoot for regarding my attitudes, is obnoxious.
I'm over being politically correct - at least on the internet.
And I don't buy for a second that you don't make a split second judgment when someone comes up to you asking for a handout. Your mind never looks them over and assesses whether they are someone who deserves your handout? Yeah, right.
I can remember being very young and some young men were outside a theater begging for change to get money to catch a bus somewhere. I fell for it hook, line and sinker.
So, my friend and I go sit down in the theater, and when the lights go down and the previews start playing, here come the beggars to sit with other friends in the row ahead of us, laughing and bragging about how much money they swindled out of people.
Some homeless people are good actors, and some may not even be homeless. Giving to the charities is always the safer bet.
You don't need to shoot for anything regarding me. (i'm not sure i understand that first sentence of yours).
I just tire of people complaining about homeless people. If that homeless person isn't doing bodily harm to you or stealing from you then why complain and / or disrespect? Really. Why?
I'm not someone who has any interest in being politically correct. That's not where i'm coming from. If you knew me, you'd know that. Compassion / empathy and political correctness are not the same thing.
And for me, it's not about judgement. It's about what i feel and sense. It's about my heart. There are good people out there that, for various reasons, are homeless and without money or food to eat. And yeah, some are addicts. So because they're addicts they don't deserve your care? They don't deserve to eat? Really?
I live in Santa Cruz county. There are marginal and homeless people everywhere. There are people with signs asking for money all over the county. They don't hurt me. The only reason i care that they are there is because i care that they're struggling and suffering. Now, like i said, if they mess with me, that's a different story.
I've struggled and suffered myself. Deeply. Often (and hopefully) that's one of the positive results of suffering. Compassion. Check it out.
You seem hard and cold to me. I'm not saying that you are. I don't know you. But that's how you come across ... at least to me.
It's dangerous to presume what someone else is experiencing, even with every appearance pointing toward that supposition.
Whatever the conditions, decisions, and situations that occurred in the lives of those we encounter, may be said to have happened for a reason, or not. We all could have dealt or been dealt with similarly, and yet due to chance or luck or providence or karma, are here now able to post or read on C-D in the relative comfort of our own big or little corner of the world, carved out of spacetime and window dressing.
Welcome to the here and now, please see this for what it is.
Who is to say that Mr or Ms Scufflegrit, holding their crude signs of beseechment, are any further from experiencing the empty fullness of the moment than we are right now? For sure, the element of compassion is essential to every interaction, but even this must be balanced with a dispassionate attentiveness. Meaning that there really is no difference, no separation, between any of us in all moments.
As far as pitbulls, feeling much the same way, if not moreso!
It's dangerous to presume what someone else is experiencing, even with every appearance pointing toward that supposition.
Whatever the conditions, decisions, and situations that occurred in the lives of those we encounter, may be said to have happened for a reason, or not. We all could have dealt or been dealt with similarly, and yet due to chance or luck or providence or karma, are here now able to post or read on C-D in the relative comfort of our own big or little corner of the world, carved out of spacetime and window dressing.
Welcome to the here and now, please see this for what it is.
Who is to say that Mr or Ms Scufflegrit, holding their crude signs of beseechment, are any further from experiencing the empty fullness of the moment than we are right now? For sure, the element of compassion is essential to every interaction, but even this must be balanced with a dispassionate attentiveness. Meaning that there really is no difference, no separation, between any of us in all moments.
As far as pitbulls, feeling much the same way, if not moreso!
True, true, true. (if i'm reading you right ... you have a very interesting / unique [i likey] way of expressing yourself in writing).
Years ago when i lived in a big city back east i was expressing pity for a homeless guy.
A wise friend of mine reminded me that it was ridiculous of me to assume anything about him and that the level of consciousness someone has or has attained cannot be judged by outer appearance, circumstance, etc. and he could be a sage for all i knew.
That was in my 20's. I never forgot that little / big lesson.
It's dangerous to presume what someone else is experiencing, even with every appearance pointing toward that supposition.
Whatever the conditions, decisions, and situations that occurred in the lives of those we encounter, may be said to have happened for a reason, or not. We all could have dealt or been dealt with similarly, and yet due to chance or luck or providence or karma, are here now able to post or read on C-D in the relative comfort of our own big or little corner of the world, carved out of spacetime and window dressing.
Welcome to the here and now, please see this for what it is.
Who is to say that Mr or Ms Scufflegrit, holding their crude signs of beseechment, are any further from experiencing the empty fullness of the moment than we are right now? For sure, the element of compassion is essential to every interaction, but even this must be balanced with a dispassionate attentiveness. Meaning that there really is no difference, no separation, between any of us in all moments.
As far as pitbulls, feeling much the same way, if not moreso!
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Are we here, or do we all just agree that we are here?
It's all just so profound. And yet, is any of what you said relative? On some plane, no doubt, the answer is yes.
IMO, pit bulls are low-class dogs, so seeing lots of pit bulls in any given community is an indicator that particular community has a generally low-class culture.
Go to Mission Viejo, Walnut Creek or Roseville and count how many pit bulls you see on the streets and trails, at the parks, etc. I'd imagine you wouldn't see very many in any of those communities.
The "it's the owner, not the breed" crowd I'm sure will step in and claim otherwise, but those dogs are cheap and have a tendency towards violence. People who can afford kinder, more reputable breeds or people who aren't into dog-fighting or putting on a false pretense of being "tough" or "gangster," do not adopt pit bulls. Sorry.
I'm on another road trip today, and I have to say that Willits looked really nice. Very clean, good shopping, and no homeless to be seen. I stopped at the Grocery Outlet there and there were a lot of white hairs, so I'm wondering if there are senior apartments there. Anyway, I was really struck by how attractive and clean Willits looked, and it's always been known for the cool old western-style buildings, but they also seem to have managed growth in a very attractive way.
People here have said in the past that there's a lot of meth around Willits. But it's an old agricultural town.
People here have said in the past that there's a lot of meth around Willits. But it's an old agricultural town.
LOL they say every town has meth. It looked really clean and classy along the 101 route anyway. I stopped for food at the new Grocery Outlet and mentioned to the young checker that I thought it looked so nice and clean, with no homeless in sight and mentioned it was the opposite of Eureka and Arcata. He said he's planning on moving there LOL. Too boring for young folk there, I suppose.
I thought you were all excited and happy to be in Crescent City. Ready to move so soon?
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