This week you read an article regarding homelessness in Silicon Valley most importantly it highlights a big issue faced currently in our state, the rise of homelessness. Check out the following links regarding homelessness in our state. Unfortunately there isn’t a solution to this growing crisis and the Pandemic has made it more of a challenge.
What could our state officials and we as Californians do to fight homelessness? Do you think California will succeed in lowering their homelessness rate or eradicate it by the end of the millennium?
In LA, poverty on Skid Row defies US’ humane reputation (Links to an external site.)
The Hidden Homelessness Crisis In California (HBO) (Links to an external site.)
Dispossessed in
the Land of Dreams
Those left behind by Silicon Valley’s
technology boom struggle to
stay in the place they call home.
BY MONICA POTTS
SOMETIME IN JULY 2012, Suzan Russaw and her husband,
James, received a letter from their landlord asking them to
vacate their $800-a-month one-bedroom apartment in
Palo Alto, California. He gave them 60 days to leave. The
“no-fault” eviction is a common way to clear out low-paying
tenants without a legal hassle and bring in people willing
to pay thousands more in rent. James was 83 at the time and
suffering from the constellation of illnesses that affect the old:
He had high blood pressure and was undergoing dialysis for
kidney failure and experiencing the early stages of dementia.
Their rent was actually a couple of hundred dollars more
than James’s monthly Social Security benefits, but he made up
the rest by piecing together odd jobs. They looked for a new
apartment for two months and didn’t find anything close to
their price range. Their landlord gave them a six-week
extension, but it yielded nothing. When mid-October came,
Suzan and James had no choice but to leave. With hurried help
from neighbors, they packed most of their belongings into two
storage units and a ramshackle 1994 Ford Explorer which
they called “the van.” They didn’t know where they were going.
A majority of the homeless population in Palo Alto—
93 percent—ends up sleeping outside or in their cars. In part,
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ZACH GROSS
that’s because Palo Alto, a technology boomtown that boasts
a per capita income well over twice the average for California,
has almost no shelter space: For the city’s homeless
population, estimated to be at least 157, there are just 15 beds
that rotate among city churches through a shelter program
called Hotel de Zink; a charity organizes a loose network
of 130 spare rooms, regular people motivated to offer up their
homes only by neighborly goodwill. The lack of shelter space
in Palo Alto—and more broadly in Santa Clara and San
Mateo counties, which comprise the peninsula south of San
Francisco and around San Jose—is unusual for an area of
its size and population. A 2013 census showed Santa Clara
County having more than 7,000 homeless people, the
fifth-highest homeless population per capita in the country
and among the highest populations sleeping outside or in
unsuitable shelters like vehicles.
San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area are gentrifying
rapidly—especially with the most recent Silicon Valley surge
in social media companies, though the trend stretches back
decades—leading to a cascade of displacement of the region’s
poor, working class, and ethnic and racial minorities. In
San Francisco itself, currently the city with the most expensive
housing market in the country, rents increased 13.5 percent
in 2014 from the year before, leading more people to the
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Suzan Russaw in Sunnyvale,
California, November 2015.
middle-class suburbs. As real estate prices rise in places like
Palo Alto, the middle class has begun to buy homes in the
exurbs of the Central Valley, displacing farmworkers there.
Suzan, who is 70, is short and slight, with her bobbed hair
dyed red. The first time I met her, she wore leggings, a t-shirt,
a black cardigan wrapped around her shoulders, and fuzzy
black boots I later learned were slippers she’d gotten from
Goodwill and sewn up to look like outside shoes. (She wore
basically the same outfit, with different t-shirts, nearly every
time we met, and I realized she didn’t have many clothes.)
Her voice is high and singsongy and she is always polite. You
can tell she tries to smooth out tensions rather than confront
them. She is a font of forced sunniness and likes to punctuate
a sad sentence with phrases like “I’m so blessed!” or “I’m
so lucky!” She wore a small necklace and said jewelry was
important to her. “I feel, to dispel the image of homelessness,
it’s important to have a little bling,” she said.
In the van, Suzan was in charge of taking care of everyone
and everything, organizing a life that became filled with a
unique brand of busy boredom. She and James spent most of
their time figuring out where to go next, how to get there,
and whether they could stay once they arrived. They found
a short-term unit in a local family shelter in Menlo Park that
lasted for five weeks. Afterward, they stayed in a few motels,
but even fleabags in the area charge upwards of $100 a night.
When they couldn’t afford a room they camped out in the van,
reclining the backseats and making a pallet out of blankets
piled on top of their clothes and other belongings. Slowly,
there were fewer nights in hotels and more in the van, until
the van was where they lived.
A life of homelessness is one of logistical challenges and
exhaustion. Little things, like planning a wardrobe for
the week, involved coordinated trips to storage units and
laundromats, and could take hours. The biggest conundrum?
Where to pull over and sleep. Suzan and James learned quickly
not to pull over on a residential block, because the neighbors
would call the police. They tried a church or two, 24-hour
businesses where they thought they could hide amidst the
other cars, and even an old naval field. The places with public
toilets were best because, for reasons no one can quite explain,
3 a.m. is the witching hour for needing to pee. They kept their
socks and shoes on, both for staying warm on chilly Bay Area
nights and also for moving quickly if someone peered into
their windows, or a cop flashed his light inside, ready to rouse.
Wherever they were sleeping, they couldn’t sleep there.
“Sometimes, I was so tired, I would be stopped at a red light
and say, ‘Don’t go to sleep. Don’t go to sleep,’” Suzan said.
“And then I would fall asleep.”
A few months in, a nice man in a 7-Eleven parking lot told
them about a former high school turned community center on
the eastern side of town called Cubberley. He’d walked up to
their van after recognizing signs of life in the car, tired faces
among the junk piling up in the back. Suzan and James were
familiar with the community center because they’d taken their
daughter to preschool there many years before, but they hadn’t
thought about sleeping there. Cubberley had a quiet back
parking lot, a flat grass amphitheater with a concrete paddock
for a stage, and 24-hour public bathrooms with showers in an
old gym. Rumor was that the cops wouldn’t bother anyone.
Cubberley was a psychic relief because it solved so many
basic needs: It had a place to bathe in the morning, a place
to charge your phone. The parking lot had also formed its own
etiquette and sense of community. People tended to park
in the same places, a spot or two next to their neighbors, and
they recognized one another and nodded at night. They
weren’t exactly friends, but they were people who trusted each
other, an impromptu neighborhood no one wanted to lose
after losing so much. It was safe, a good place to spend the
night. But it was next door to a segment of homeowners who
were fighting hard to move the car dwellers out.
Normally, wealthy people who move into an area don’t
see the results of their displacement because the people who
lose their homes don’t stick around; they move to cheaper
suburbs and work themselves into the fabric elsewhere. But
the folks at Cubberley, 30 people on any given night, were
the displacement made manifest. Most weren’t plagued with
mental health or substance abuse problems; they simply could
no longer afford rent and became homeless in the last place
they lived. People will put up with a lot to stay in a place they
know. “I’ve been analyzing why don’t I just get the heck on.
Everybody says that, go to Wyoming, Montana, you can get a
mansion,” Suzan said. “Move on, move on, always move on.
And I say to myself, ‘Why should I have to move on?’”
It’s a new chapter in an old story. In his seminal 1893
lecture at the Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner
summarized the myth of the American frontier and the waves
of settlers who created it as an early form of gentrification:
First, farmers looking for land would find a remote spot
of wilderness to tame; once they succeeded, more men and
women would arrive to turn each new spot into a town;
finally, outside investors would swoop in, pushing out the
frontiersman and leaving him to pack up and start all over
again. It has always been thus in America. Turner quoted
from a guide published in 1837 for migrants headed for the
Western frontiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin: “Another
wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The
‘settler’ is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise
of property, push farther into the interior, and become himself
a man of capital and enterprise in turn.” This repeating cycle,
Turner argued, of movement and resettlement was essential
to the American character. But he foresaw a looming crisis.
“The American energy will continually demand a wider field
for its exercise,” he wrote. “But never again will such gifts
of free land offer themselves.” In other words, we would run
out of places for the displaced to go.
Suzan was born in 1945. Her father worked at
what was then the Lockheed Corporation, and her mother had
been raised by a wealthy family in Oak Park, Illinois. Her family
called her Suzi. Though she grew up in nearby Saratoga—
and spent some time in school in Switzerland—she distinctly
remembers coming with her mother to visit Palo Alto, with its
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Suzan’s husband, James Russaw, pictured with two of their grandchildren.
downtown theaters and streets named after poets. Palo Alto
more than any other place formed the landscape of her
childhood. “It was a little artsy-craftsy university town—you
find charming towns are university towns.”
Like many women of her day, Suzan didn’t graduate from
college. When she was 24, after her last stay in Switzerland,
she moved to Mountain View, the town on Palo Alto’s eastern
border that is now home to Google and LinkedIn. She was
living off a small trust her family had set up for her when she
met James at a barbecue their apartment manager threw
to foster neighborliness among his tenants. James had grown
up in a sharecropping family in Georgia, moved west
during World War II, and was more than 17 years her senior,
handsome and gentlemanly. Suzan thought: “I can learn
something from him.” They were an interracial couple in
the late 1960s, which was unusual, though she says her
family didn’t mind. It was also an interclass marriage, and
it moved Suzan down the income ladder.
For years, James and Suzan lived together, unmarried.
They bought a house on University Avenue, just north of the
county line and blocks from downtown Palo Alto, in 1979,
and four years later had their only daughter, Nancy. It was the
area’s ghetto, and the only source of affordable housing for
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many years. It was also the center of violence in the region,
and, in 1992, was the murder capital of the country.
They never had much money. For most of their marriage,
James ran a small recycling company and Suzan acted as
his bookkeeper, secretary, and housewife. They refused to
apply for most government assistance, even as homeless
elders. “My husband and I had never been on welfare or food
stamps,” she told me. “Even to this day.”
Suzan’s parents died in 2002 and 2003, and her older
sister died in 2009. (“I thank God that they’re gone,” she told
me. “They would die if they saw me now.”) It was a hard time
for Suzan, who went to care for her dying parents and nearly
left James. She felt he’d checked out of the difficulties. In
retrospect, she thinks his dementia might already have been
setting in; James was already in his seventies. He had taken
out a second mortgage on their home, and they couldn’t
pay it after he retired. They sold the house at a loss in 2005;
it’s now a Century 21 office.
After they moved into the van, they settled into a routine.
On the nights before James’s early-morning treatments, they
slept in the dialysis center’s parking lot. Otherwise they
generally stayed at Cubberley. They were still living off James’s
retirement income, but most of it went to the $500 needed
to rent the two storage units where their furniture remained,
until they lost one for nonpayment. Finally, a few months in,
Suzan was able to use a clause in a trust set up by her mother’s
father to help her out in an emergency. It doubled their
income—much of which was eaten up by the costs of gas, the
remaining storage unit, parking tickets, and the other expenses
of an unsettled life. It was a respectable income, one that
technically kept them above poverty, but it still wasn’t enough
for rent.
James was increasingly ill and van life was taking a toll. In
addition to James’s other problems, both he and Suzan were
starting to experience some of the health problems common
among the homeless. The backseat of the van filled with bags of
clothes, papers, fast-food detritus, pens, old parking tickets, and
receipts. As the junk built up, the recline of their seats inched
forever upward, until they were sitting up all the time, causing
their legs to swell and nerves to become damaged, the medical
consequences of not being able to raise your feet at night.
Gentrification used
to be about poor
neighborhoods, usually black and brown, underdeveloped and
full of decrepit and neglected housing stock, run by the
occasional slumlord—often described as “blighted,” though
that designation has always been problematic—and how
they become converted into wealthier ones, usually through
the influx of richer white people and their demand for new
services and new construction. It’s a negative process for the
people who have to move, but there’s occasionally an element
of good, because neglected neighborhoods revive. But what’s
happening now in the Bay Area is that people who’ve done
nothing wrong—not paid their rent late, violated their lease,
or committed any other housing sin—are being forced out to
make way. Displacement is reaching into unquestionably
vibrant, historic, middle- and working-class neighborhoods,
like The Mission in San Francisco, a former center of Chicano
power. (The Mission alone has lost 8,000 Latino residents in
the past ten years, according to a report from the local Council
of Community Housing Organizations and the Mission
Economic Development Agency.) And it’s happening to such
an extent that the social workers who used to steer people
to affordable apartments as far away as Santa Rosa or
Sacramento, a two-hour drive, are now telling people to look
even farther out. The vehicle dwellers I spoke with said they’d
heard of friends living in places like Stockton, once a modest
working-class city in the middle of the state, receiving
notice-to-vacate letters like the one Suzan and James received.
For the most part, the traits that draw people to Palo Alto—
good schools, a charming downtown, nice neighborhoods
in which to raise a family, and a short commute to tech jobs—
are the very same things that made the residents of Cubberley
want to stay, even if it meant living in their car. The
destabilizing pressure of a real estate market is also felt by
the merely rich, the upper middle class, and the middle class,
because the high-end demand of the global elite sets the
The view inside a van parked outside a Palo Alto homeless organization.
market prices. “My block has the original owners, a retired
schoolteacher and a retired postal worker,” said Hope
Nakamura, a legal aid attorney who lives in Palo Alto. “They
could never afford to buy anything there now.” Most people
told me if they had to sell their homes today they wouldn’t be
able to buy again anywhere in the area, which means many
Palo Altans have all of their wealth tied up in expensive homes
that they can’t access without upending their lives. It makes
everyone anxious.
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The outcry from the neighbors over Cubberley was so fierce
that it reshaped Palo Alto’s city government. The city council
is nonpartisan, but a faction emerged that revived an old,
slow-growth movement in town, known as the “residentialists.”
Their concerns are varied (among them, the perennial
suburban concerns of property values and traffic), but their
influence has been to block any new development of affordable
housing and shoo people like Suzan and James away from
Palo Alto. An uproar scuttled an affordable-housing building
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for senior citizens near many public transit options that had
been proposed by the city housing authority and unanimously
approved by the city council. Opponents said they were
worried about the effect the development would have on the
surrounding community—they argued it wasn’t zoned for
“density,” which is to say, small apartments—and that traffic
congestion in the area would be made worse. Aparna
Ananthasubramaniam, then a senior at Stanford, tried to start
a women’s-only shelter in rotating churches, modeled after
the Hotel de Zink. She said a woman came up to her after a
community meeting where the same concerns had been raised
by a real estate agent. “Her lips were quivering and she was
physically shaking from how angry she was,”
Ananthasubramaniam told me. “She was like, ‘You come back
to me 20 years from now once you have sunk more than
$1 million into an asset, like a house, and you tell me that
you’re willing to take a risk like this.”
The trouble for Cubberley began when neighbors went to
the police. There’d been at least one fight, and the neighbors
complained about trash left around the center. At the time,
Cubberley was home to a 64-year-old woman who’d found a
$20-an-hour job after nine years of unemployment; a tall,
lanky, panhandler from Louisiana who kept informal guard
over her and other women at the center; a 63-year-old
part-time school crossing guard who cared for his dying
mother for 16 years, then lived off the proceeds from the sale
of her house until the money ran out; two retired school
teachers; a 23-year-old Palo Alto native who stayed with his
mother in a rental car after his old car spontaneously
combusted; and, for about six months, Suzan and James.
“They didn’t fit this image that the powers that be are trying
to create about homeless people. They did not fit that
image at all,” Suzan told me. “We made sure the premises
were respected, because it was an honor to be able to stay
there.” She and others told me they cleaned up their areas
at the center every morning.
Pressured to find a way to move the residents out, the police
department went to the city council claiming they needed a
law banning vehicle habitation to address the neighbors’
concerns. Advocates for the homeless said that any problems
could be solved if police would just enforce existing laws. Local
attorneys warned the city council that such laws could soon
be considered unconstitutional, because the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals was hearing a challenge to a similar law in Los
Angeles. Carrie LeRoy, an attorney who advocated on behalf of
the unhoused, and other attorneys threatened to file a classaction lawsuit if the vehicle-habitation ban ever went into
effect. The city council passed the ban anyway, in a 7–2 vote in
August 2013, and the police department and other groups in
the city started an outreach program to tell people about the
law. “All of them had received these notices from the city,”
LeRoy said, “And it was basically like, ‘Get out of our town.’”
A few weeks later, the city council also voted to close the
showers at Cubberley and give it a 10:30 p.m. curfew, which
made it illegal to sleep there. On their last night there, in
October 2013, Suzan and James left around 8 p.m. so they
wouldn’t get caught past the new curfew. They tried some old
haunts and got kicked out. The stress of living in the van was
hard on James. Around this time, James decided to end his
dialysis. “Of course, we knew what that meant,” Suzan said.
One night, about a month after leaving Cubberley, the
police pulled Suzan and James over. Their registration was
expired. “This officer, he got a wild hair, and he said, ‘I’m
going to impound your car,’ and called the tow truck.” Suzan
told me. They got out of the car. Without pushing and
demanding, she realized, she was never going to get out of
the situation. She told me she said to the officer, “This is our
home, and if you impound it we will not have a home.” He
insisted. “I said ‘That’s fine. You do that. We will stay right
here. I will put the beds out, I will put what we need here, right
here on the sidewalk.” Other officers arrived and talked to
them. They asked Suzan whether, surely, there was some other
place they could go. “I said, ‘We have no place to go, and we’re
staying right here.’ I was going to make a stink. They were
going to know about it.” Suzan told me people were poking
their heads out of their homes, and she realized the bigger fuss
she made, the more likely officers might decide just to leave
them alone.
Because James’s health had continued to worsen, he and
Suzan finally qualified for motel vouchers during the cold
weather. They got a room in a rundown hotel. “It had a
microwave and a hot bath,” Suzan said. In his last few days,
James was given a spot in a hospice in San Jose, and Suzan
went with him. “It was so cut-and-dry. They said, ‘This is an
end-of-life bed, period,’ ” Suzan said. “And I never said that
to James.” He died on February 17, 2014, and a few weeks later
a friend of theirs held a memorial service for James at her
house. Suzan wore an old silk jacket of her mother’s, one that
would later be ruined by moisture in the van, and a necklace
Nancy had made. They ate James’s favorite foods—cornbread,
shrimp, and pound cake. Suzan had a few motel vouchers left,
and afterward stayed with friends and volunteers for a few
weeks each, but she felt she was imposing.
That summer, she returned to her van. It was different
without James; she realized she’d gotten to know him better
during their van life than she ever had before. Maybe it was
his dementia, but as they drove around or sat together,
squished amidst their stuff, he’d started to tell her long stories,
over and over, of his youth in Georgia. She’d never heard
the tales before, but she’d started to be able to picture it all.
On her own, without his imposing figure beside her, Suzan was
scared, and more than a little lonely. Most nights, she stayed
tucked away in a church parking lot, without permission
from the pastor, hidden between bushes and vans. The law
wasn’t being enforced, but sleeping in the lot made her a kind
of a criminal. “The neighbors never gave me up,” she said.
Suzan told me
she was in a fog of denial after
James’s death, but it’s probably what protected her because
homelessness is exhausting. “You start to lose it after a while,”
she said. “You feel disenfranchised from your own society.”
The Downtown Streets Team, a local homeless organization,
had been helping her look for a long-term, stable housing
solution. Indeed, Suzan told me that at various times, she and
James had 27 applications in for affordable housing in Palo
Alto. (When he died, she had to start over, submitting new
applications for herself.) Her social worker at the local senior
citizens center, Emily Farber, decided to also look for a
temporary situation that would get Suzan under a roof for a
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few months, or even a few weeks. “We were dealing with very
practical limitations: having a computer, having a stable phone
number,” Farber said. Craigslist was only something Suzan
had heard of. She’d finally gotten a cell phone through a
federal program, but hadn’t quite mastered it.
For many months, Farber struck out. She didn’t think Suzan
would want to live with three 25-year-old Google employees,
or that they’d want her, either. She even tried Airbnb. Because
Suzan didn’t have a profile, Farber used her own, and wrote to
people who had rooms listed to say her 69-year-old friend
needed a place to stay in the area for a couple of weeks. “We got
three rejections in a row,” she said. Finally, in November, they
found a room available for rent for $1,100—about 80 percent of
“I said, ‘We have no place
to go, and we’re staying
right here.’ They were going
to know about it.”
her income from the trust and her widow’s benefits from Social
Security. Suzan would have her own bedroom and bathroom
in the two-bedroom apartment of a single mother. The mother
crowded into the other bedroom with her 16-year-old son and
seven-year-old daughter. The only downside for Suzan was
that it was in Santa Clara, another charmingly bland suburban
enclave in the South Bay, a half hour south of Palo Alto and a
world away for Suzan. “It’s out of my comfort zone, but that’s
OK!” she told me.
I met Suzan on the day she moved in, and the concept of
being able to close a door was almost as unsettling to
her as the concept of sleeping in the van had been. “I’m in this
kind of survival mode,” she said, and had found a certain
comfort in her van. “I’ve got this little cocoon I’m staying in,
and everything is within arm’s reach.” She had a big blue
mat in the back of the van, like a grown-up version of the
kind kindergartners nap on, but soon she’d acquire a bed.
She retrieved her old TV from her storage unit. She made a
comfortable room, with chairs and a bed and a small table,
and decided to eat her meals in there. She only signed a lease
for three months, because it wasn’t really sustainable on her
fixed income. She’d also applied for an affordable housing
complex being built for seniors in Sunnyvale, one that would
provide permanent housing for 60 senior citizens from
among the 7,000 homeless people in the county at the time.
She’d find out in April if she was selected in the lottery. All
her hopes were pinned on it.
In the first few weeks after her move to Santa Clara, Suzan
spent a healthy portion of her limited income on gas, driving
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the Explorer back and forth to Palo Alto. After all, her post
office box was there, and so were her social workers. Her
errands demanded a lot of face time, and in some ways, she
still filled her days the way she had before she got her room,
moving around trying to solve her problems. Her car was still
packed, too, as if she hadn’t let go of the need to drive in it,
to move forward, to keep her stuff around her within arm’s
reach, as if she were still without a home base.
Two afternoons a week she went to a Palo Alto food closet.
She usually made it right before it closed, in the early
afternoons. When her number was called, she went up to the
counter to watch the volunteer sort through what was left
on the shelves, finding the most recently expired items—these
were older goods grocery stores couldn’t keep past their
sell-by dates. Suzan’s politeness was, as always, almost formal,
from an earlier era, when being ladylike was a learned skill.
The volunteer would ask her if she wanted milk, or peaches, or
a serving-size Baggie of cereal, and she’d say, “Yes, very much
so!” These days, she got to take raw eggs instead of the boiled
ones, a treat reserved for those with kitchens. Her requests
were glancing rather than direct. “Have you any lettuce?” and
the answer was often no. I said it seemed like an efficient
operation. Suzan said, “I really know the drill!”
Suzan needed to visit her social worker, Julia Lang, at the
Downtown Streets Team office to get the form that allowed her
to go to an even better food bank. She asked the receptionist
whether her social worker was in. She wasn’t, and Suzan
explained she was looking for the food bank vouchers. Then
the receptionist asked for her address. That stopped Suzan.
The receptionist explained that the pantry was for Palo Alto
residents, and Suzan was considering, for the first time,
whether that counted her. Suzan explained that she and her
husband had gone to the pantry the year before, and said they
should be in the system. We waited while the receptionist
looked. Suzan waved at someone she’d seen around for years,
from her car-dwelling days. Suzan told the receptionist, again,
that they really should be in the system. But they weren’t.
Suzan said that was OK, and she would come back. The
receptionist said, “Are you sure? I just need your ID and your
address.” Suzan demurred. She needed to talk to her social
worker. This is what it meant to have to leave her hometown.
She was leaving the city where she and James had known
people, the city where James had died, the city where she’d
grown up and near where she’d raised her own daughter. It was
the city where she knew where to go, where she’d figured out
how to be homeless. It was the city where she knew the drill.
That homelessness persists in Silicon
Valley has puzzled me. It has an extremely wealthy population
with liberal, altruistic values. Though it has a large homeless
population relative to its size, in sheer numbers it’s not as large
as New York City’s or L.A.’s. Some of the reasons could be
found in the meeting on November 17, 2014, when the city
finally overturned the car-camping ban. It had never been
Suzan shows where
she stored food in her
car while homeless.
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enforced because, as predicted, the Ninth Circuit had
overturned L.A.’s ban. In the end, all but one person who’d
voted for the ban the first time around voted to overturn it. The
lone dissenter was councilman Larry Klein. “The social welfare
agency in our area is the county, not the city,” he said. “To think
we can solve the homeless problem just doesn’t make sense.”
This idea was repeated many times among city officials—
that homelessness was too big an issue for the city to resolve.
The city of Palo Alto itself has one full-time staff member
devoted to homelessness, and it coordinates with county and
nonprofit networks to counsel, house, and feed the homeless.
During the fight over the ban, the city tried to devise an
alternative—a program that would allow car dwellers to park
at churches—but then left the details up to the faith
community to work out. Nick Selby, an attorney and member
of the Palo Alto Friends Meeting House, said he and his fellow
Quakers met with community resistance when they tried to
accommodate three or four car dwellers on their tiny lot.
Neighbors circulated a petition listing concerns like “the high
prevalence of mental illness, drug abuse, and communicable
diseases in the homeless population” and the risk of declining
property values. But Selby said some of their concerns were
fair. “People who objected were saying to the city, ‘What’s
your program?’” Selby said. “And the city really had no
answer to those questions.” Without a solid plan and logistical
help from the city, other churches were reluctant to step
forward. “The churches weren’t prepared to deal with this,”
he said. After the church car-camping plan fell through, the
city council said it had no choice but a ban.
Santa Clara County, too, struggles to address the problem.
The county is participating in federal programs to build
permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless
population, the population of long-term homeless who
typically have interacting mental health and substance abuse
problems. But land is expensive here, and the area is
shortchanged by the federal formula that disperses funds.
California, ever in budget-crisis mode, provides limited state
funds. There isn’t a dedicated funding stream from the cities,
which don’t necessarily pay a tax to the county for these
projects, and local affordable housing developments are often
rejected by residents as Palo Alto’s was. In September, the city
of San Jose and the county announced a $13 million program to
buy old hotels and renovate them as shelters, which will make
585 new beds available. While advocates credit the county’s
efforts with cutting the estimated homeless population by
14 percent since 2013, the number of people like Suzan, who hide
in their cars, is almost certainly underestimated. But most such
efforts are centered in San Jose. Chris Richardson, a director
of the Bay Area’s Downtown Streets Team, said what needs to
happen is not a mystery: Other cities have to fund affordable
housing, they have to fund more of it, and they have to do it in
their own neighborhoods, without relying on San Francisco
and San Jose to absorb all of the area’s poverty and problems.
“You can’t just ship them down to the big, poor city,” he said.
When Palo Alto originally passed the car-camping ban, it
also devoted $250,000 to the county’s homelessness program.
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When they voted to rescind the ban, council members asked
for an update on what happened to the money. The city
staff was not prepared to report on how it had been spent at
that council meeting, more than a year into the funding.
Members of the council again reiterated their desire to help
the homeless. “Helping the homeless” was tabled, as a general
idea, for another agenda at another meeting, as it always
seems to be, or passed off to the county, or to someone else—
and so helping the homeless is something nobody does.
Through the winter, Suzan remained ill; it
was a bad flu season. She kept paying the rent on her room,
on her storage units, on her P.O. box in Palo Alto, and she tried
setting aside money she owed on parking tickets. Some
months she’d run out of gas money to drive the 15 miles to
Palo Alto and check her mail or visit her social workers. She
was waiting to hear about the affordable apartment.
In May, she was denied. Suzan had bad credit, both because
of the unpaid storage unit she and James had lost and because
otherwise her credit history was so thin. Julia Lang, one of
her social workers, told me she couldn’t even get a credit score
for Suzan. Lang said people get denied on credit, or because
they make too little for affordable housing that’s supposedly
intended for extremely low-income people, all the time.
“When you’re that destitute and have gone through so many
complicated situations, what are the chances that your credit’s
going to be good?” she said.
Suzan was livid and despondent, and she decided to appeal.
“I wasn’t going to take that lying down,” Suzan told me. “I
was proud of myself.” Catholic Charities helped her appeal.
Suzan had to write a letter showing how she intended to repair
her credit, and that she understood why it was bad in the first
place. During the months of back and forth, Suzan bought a
new Jeep, only one year newer than the Explorer, in case she
needed to sleep in her car again. In July, she learned she’d won
her appeal. She had two weeks to get her affairs in order, pay
the first month’s rent and security deposit, and move in. Her
social workers helped her with some of the move-in costs, and
she signed a lease for a year.
I saw Suzan again in August, about three weeks after
she’d moved in. Her hair was trimmed. She was wearing a
brightly colored muumuu, blue and green with tropical
flowers—“It’s a housedress but you can wear it out on the
street!”—and a green sweater tied around her shoulders.
She seemed relaxed and rested, and I told her so. Her bed
was full of folded clothes, and her room was still in disarray.
She was trying to cull her storage unit so that she could
get a smaller one and cut down on rent. Most of the people
in her complex had been in the same boat as Suzan, or
had been worse off. She pays $810 a month, the amount
determined to be affordable for her income. It had taken her
more than three years, help from at least three social
workers, and thousands of dollars, but she was finally stably
housed. At least, for a year.
a
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