LA City Homelessness Plan.. OR LACK OF?? CITY IS TOO BUSY WITH PROTEST !!

Report on L.A. City Homelessness Plan Gives Sobering Picture of Struggle Ahead

POSTED 9:26 AM, NOVEMBER 12, 2016, BY LOS ANGELES TIMES

Nine months after the Los Angeles City Council unanimously adopted a comprehensive plan to end homelessness, the first progress report on the plan, released this week, offered a sobering picture of the long and difficult path ahead.

Proposals for storage lockers and toilets for street dwellers are stalled, new shelter capacity is being added at a trickle, and the city bureaucracy moving more slowly than some council members had expected.

“I don’t get that. There’s so much red tape and process in that, ” Councilman Michael Bonin said of an item in the report citing a study of shared housing. “If there are beds available today, I would like us to be moving on it.”... 

http://ktla.com/2016/11/12/report-on-l-a-city-homelessness-plan-gives-sobering-picture-of-struggle-ahead/

Homeless in LA Living in Cars.

Homeless people face L.A. crackdown on living in cars

Homeless veteran Gordon Frapp Jr., 57, stands next to a Venice canal the city inadvertently marked for homeless people to park. Enforcement of a new law is set to begin Feb. 6 restricting overnight parking for people who live in their vehicles to 10% of city streets. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

By: Gale Holland Contact Reporter

Los Angeles’ new ordinance on living in cars was billed as a boon to homeless people, making it legal for the first time to park and sleep in half the city’s streets.

But with the measure set to kick in Feb. 6, a new map suggests the law could trigger a crackdown on some of the city’s 28,000 homeless people.  

The map, which police will use to enforce the measure, shows only 10% of city streets cleared for car lodging. Other posted restrictions on overnight parking and oversized vehicles are not on the maps, but will be enforced.

One Venice block inadvertently marked safe is actually a canal, accessible by amphibious vehicle only.

“This isn’t a street. I’m not sure what it is,” city parking enforcement Officer Hector Chun said as he patrolled the neighborhood last week.

Many jurisdictions have moved against homeless people living in their cars in recent years, with 40% of 187 cities surveyed in 2016 by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty having adopted curbs. L.A.’s difficulty in finding places to put its occupied vehicles underscores its continuing failure to rein in its burgeoning homeless population as it heads into its annual homeless count, which begins Tuesday night.

Voters in November approved $1.2 billion to build 10,000 affordable and homeless units over the next decade, and the city is planning to build on city-owned lots and in converted nuisance motels. But for a second year, street encampments cling to neighborhoods from Los Feliz to North Hollywood. More than 6,600 vehicles countywide are occupied.

Earlier this month, Mayor Eric Garcetti scrapped his timetable for housing homeless veterans, saying 1,200 remain outdoors a year after the deadline he had set to bring them in.

“The city seems to be resting on its laurels passing a homeless housing bond, and meanwhile it has created not so much as another cot,” said retired UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, who has studied and litigated homeless issues for decades.

Garcetti’s press secretary, George Kivork, said the vehicle dwelling restrictions are a stopgap measure while the city develops a parking program for homeless people. Kivork added that the mayor knows current strategies will not solve the homelessness crisis overnight, but remains “committed to working to solve it as quickly as possible.”
CONTINUE READING: 

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-rv-dwelling-20170113-story.html

HOMELESSNESS: THE FORGOTTEN IN AMERICA!!

There are now more homeless kids and parents in D.C. than homeless single adults 

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) addresses a community meeting at Friendship Baptist Church in Ward 6 on Feb. 11 in Washington, where a discussion was held about replacing the D.C. General shelter with family housing facilities. (Amanda Voisard/For The Washington Post)

By Aaron C. Davis May 11, 2016 

The number of homeless families in the District has soared by more than 30 percent compared with a year ago, according to a federal estimate released Wednesday.

For the first time since the annual census began in 2001, homeless children and their parents in the District outnumbered homeless single adults, a population beset by mental illness and disabilities that historically has loomed as the larger and more in­trac­table problem in cities nationwide.

On one day in late January, officials counted 4,667 homeless children and their parents, compared with 3,683 single adults.

It is impossible to know precisely what is driving the increase. But city officials and advocates for the poor agree that rising costs in one of the country’s hottest real estate markets, combined with a policy of helping families without a permanent place to call home, has produced record numbers at city shelters.

“We are in the midst of a very serious affordable-housing crisis,” said Kate Coventry, an analyst at the left-leaning D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute.

[Real estate decisions could imperil Bowser’s new shelter plan]

The District, New York City and Massachusetts are the only major U.S. jurisdictions that guarantee homeless residents a right to shelter. All three are grappling with a substantial increase in the homeless population.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/there-are-now-more-homeless-kids-and-parents-in-dc-than-single-adults-for-the-first-time/2016/05/11/d4d256c2-16f5-11e6-9e16-2e5a123aac62_story.html?utm_term=.f22a29c356bb

The newborn child of a homeless woman found death at a bus stop in Portland

These big cities (LA, SF, Portland, Seattle) are quiet incapable of dealing with homelessness. The newborn child of a homeless woman found death at a bus stop in Portland :'( (cold and freezing temperatures.) 

 Tribune•January 17, 2017

The newborn child of a homeless woman in Oregon died last week after the two were found at a bus stop amid freezing temperatures.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/baby-dies-being-found-homeless-165027850.html

Yes, We Are Doing Great... While You Were Celebrating...

Oregon Woman Evicted Over $338, Freezes to Death

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/us/201701111049459157-oregon-woman-misses-rent-freezes/

Two people die of hypothermia in Portland within a week

A 51-year-old man died of hypothermia under a blanket on East Burnside Street at 99th Avenue last week.

Woman evicted from low-income housing died of exposure three months later..

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2017/01/after_refusing_help_and_evicti.html

In the last five years, hypothermia caused or contributed to seven deaths of homeless people, including the two most recent ones, according to Multnomah County. Eighty-eight people died on the street in 2015 Multnomah County in overall, mostly from either drugs and alcohol or diseases.

Our Good Government....Federal Fumbles Report Exposes Wasteful...

Federal Fumbles Report Exposes Wasteful (Okay Stupid) Federal Programs

by Jeff Dunetz | Nov 28, 2016 | U.S. News

Some of the worst programs (or best depending on your perspective) include:

#1 $180,000 grant for the development of a method to count and tag the sea duck population in America.

#2 $495,000 to fund a temporary exhibit for sights, sounds, tastes and yes, even smells of the Medieval period.

#3 $2 million, multi-year study about kids’ eating emotions, and how they don’t like to eat food that’s been sneezed on.

#4 $1 million contract for a photograph of a Yosemite waterfall to be cut up in six pieces and displayed on different floors.

#5 $200,000 to study “fish bone and ceramic fragments from a selection of households representing diverse levels of social standing to understand how the consumption of food “

#6 $250,000 to Sunsweet, a privately owned cooperative which has revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually, to help them to market a new prune supplement.

#7 DOJ gave over 300 million in grants to sanctuary cities to help them fight crime. Of course one way to fight the crime would be not grant sanctuary to illegal immigrants, er.. criminally trespassing aliens.

#8 Obama’s $1.7 Billion in “ransom” payments to Iran.

http://lidblog.com/federal-fumbles-report-wasteful-spending/

In the agony of childbirth, a homeless woman finds help

We can agree that a sidewalk in San Diego is no place to give birth. Yet amid the city’s lost tribe of homeless people, a woman’s body had other plans.

“I hear a woman screaming in a tent, and it sounds like something awful,” said Phillip Denton, who was working as a security guard for downtown’s Clean and Safe, a quasi-government agency that scrubs pavement and patrols the neighborhood.

Denton was making his usual rounds on the afternoon of Sept. 10, a Saturday, when a dispatcher directed him to check on the welfare of a homeless woman camped in the East Village, near the corner of 14th and G streets.

Clean and Safe rules prohibit its “ambassadors” from delivering first aid or even touching the homeless. So Denton and his supervisor gently persuaded the soon-to-be mother to submit to a rudimentary exam, conducted by a homeless woman who lived nearby.

“The tent was dirty; blankets, roaches and probably mice,” Denton said.

The prognosis was obvious: Ready or not, a baby was coming soon.

This reality changed the mind that mattered most. Within minutes, the woman consented to be scooped up by paramedics and transported to Scripps Mercy Hospital.

Here the story trails off. Citing privacy regulations, no hospital, fire department or nonprofit official will disclose what happened next. On the bright side, county records show no deceased homeless infants that day.

I picked up clues that a mother and newborn baby survived, and landed a day or two later in a shelter for homeless women and their children. Here again, strict privacy rules prevent me from confirmation. And I’m not naming the shelter, which also hides victims from violent domestic abusers.

But that was more than two months ago. At least once a week I’ve walked a grid in the East Village area where the security guard may have saved a life, or two. Nobody claims to know the pregnant woman, street name “Lady,” who went into labor on the sidewalk.

Are they OK or back on the street? Getting decent food and clothing? What about checkups for that baby?

Forget about answers for a second. Even such questions can bring me to tears.

We can suppose that this mother was disabled by mental illness, at least temporarily. After all, experts estimate such illness afflicts 80 percent of the chronically homeless people living outdoors.

Yet we don’t need experts for this one. Rational people don’t refuse medical attention while enduring the agony of childbirth inside a filthy tent.

Perhaps her moment of clarity will persist. Studies suggest that about four-fifths of homeless people are unhoused only temporarily, and soon muster the resources to return to traditional society. About 10 percent skip off the bottom, while the remaining 10 percent never recover.

CONTINUED TO READ THE FULL STORY:

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/dan-mcswain/sd-fi-mcswain-homeless-baby-20161123-htmlstory.html