Want A Free Google Phone Number?

If you're homeless in the City of San Francisco, you can now get a free Google phone number and voice mail, thanks to Google's generous offer.

The goal is to help people struggling on the streets of San Francisco use these numbers and voice mail so that when they are looking for employment, they can list their phone numbers on job applications and they have a voice mail for employer call backs.

It's a great example of how technology can be used to address homelessness, and how businesses can provide creative solutions.

Kudos to Google.

Tent Cities Are Not The Answer

Thanks to a comment on this blog that points out a sad predicament in Ontario, a city about an hour east of Los Angeles.

Homelessness in the Ontario region is growing so fast that the tent city that I blogged about earlier has grown to 300-400 people. It is becoming a city in itself. It sounds to me like another squatter community, similar to poor neighborhoods in urban sprawls around the world. Except in this case, they are not using cardboard and tin to build their shanties, they are using tents.

Tent cities are simply not the answer to addressing poverty and homelessness. It is a sad sign that our society is not providing enough housing, living wage jobs, and services to help people from becoming homeless. Allowing people to squat on public land is not good public policy. It is failed public policy.

Last year, the City of New Orleans had 200 people camping out on the city hall lawn. Through a Project Y!MBY (Yes! In My Back Yard) type of community mobilization effort, the city was able to reach out to these people and help them find permanent housing. This is what is needed in Ontario.

The only positive perspective in having a 400 strong tent city, is that it might force public officials and community leaders to actually do something to prevent homelessness in their community.

Let’s hope so.

Will The World Turn Into One Big Urban Hive?

There is an editorial in a local Caribbean media outlet entitled, “Cities Or Slums?” It talks about how a scholar in 1961 was trying to predict whether the modern city would disappear in the future, or whether the whole world would become one big city.

Interestingly, the editorial goes on to say that big cities are taking over the planet. And along with these big cities has come homelessness. (Squatters or dwellers, precariously living in slums, favellas, shanty towns, barrios, projects, or in our case, “the streets”… you can call it what you want.)

Los Angeles is one of these sprawling urban cities that has 73,000 homeless people. (In the article they state 100,000). But L.A. is not alone in struggling with homelessness. Beijing has 200,000 “floaters” (migrants living in slums), 1.5 million in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, 10% of the citizens of Phnom Penh (Cambodia) sleep on roofs, 99.4% of the urban population in Ethiopia and Chad are slum dwellers, etc.

In most cities around the world, those living on the lowest end of the economic scale are just a given. They become a permanent fixture in the urban environment. Just like freeways, tall buildings, sprawling housing… there are homeless people. I remember standing on the balcony of a nice hotel in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil with a “perfect” view of the squatters on the hills. Slum dwellers were just a given.

Los Angeles has 73,000 people who are homeless—on any given night. Throughout the year, 250,000 people experience homelessness. Is there really hope? Can we build enough permanent affordable housing to house all of these people? Certainly, we are not going to put them in toxic trailers supplied by FEMA. But is the city and the county willing to invest billions and billions of dollars to house Angelenos struggling with poverty?

For those of us on the front lines helping people overcome homelessness every day, we have to continue to embrace hope. Without it, our city becomes another Third World urban sprawl infested with hopelessness.

Whether our world continues to become one big urban sprawl, is not the point. We need to make sure our urban space—whether large or small—can not be overcome by slum living.

(Pic from www.indiadaily.org)

Burbank Sees Glendale As A Model In Addressing Homelessness

The City of Burbank, home to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, is looking at its neighbor, Glendale as a model of addressing homelessness on a local level.

PATH Achieve Glendale is the primary housing and service provider in Glendale, and has developed a wide continuum of housing and services. From strategic street outreach, to rapid re-housing, to permanent affordable housing. It is a Project Y!MBY (Yes! In My Back Yard) approach that has galvanized the local community. The Executive Director is Natalie Komuro.

Let’s hope Burbank could partner with Glendale in addressing their regional homeless issues. Since collaboration is the only approach that is effective.


(We are having technical problems with posting pictures.)

"Not In My Lobby"

The LA Times take on gentrification in Skid Row...

The urban pioneers who've bought pricey downtown living spaces are understandably eager to see their rough-and-tumble surroundings gentrify quickly. Their investment in the neighborhood, however, doesn't guarantee that it will change. Poverty, homelessness and the services that address them have become institutionalized downtown, largely because the rest of the county wants it that way. The more buildings converted to live-work spaces, the more friction between new residents and the needier souls who preceded them.

Here's the whole piece.

Let Them Drink… Or Not?

It’s a cutting edge idea. Most cutting edge thought is controversial. This is certainly.

The paradigm? Provide an apartment to a person who is homeless… and do not have strict rules for residency. In other words, you get an apartment, and even if you’re struggling with alcoholism, you can still drink.

This is occurring in Seattle. Critics call it “bunks for drunks.” They think tax payers should not “reward alcoholics” with free housing, when the rest of society has to work hard to make ends meet.

Advocates of this new approach say this gets people who are homeless off the streets quicker, and it costs less than paying to keep these people in jail.

It’s a fine line. I think we all agree that we want people who are living on the streets, off the streets. But how we get there is always controversial.

I lean toward the “ends justify the means.” If this is what it takes to help people leave homelessness, and it’s cost effective, then go for it.

(Pic from www.hanaflavoredsake.com)