Drawing comparison with common practice in the United Kingdom, non-profit, community and/or charitable organisations provide the much of the crisis engagement services for the chronically homeless community in America. Pro-active outreach is a critical element of homelessness response, with the hardest to reach members of society living away from urban areas and out of sight from the general public. Many members of this long-term rough sleeping community rarely engage with authorities and there is an impending sense of divide between the parties. This means that rapport building and relationship development via volunteer-led outreach services is crucial.
For more than fifteen years, faith-led group CHAM Deliverance Ministry has brought together a diverse community to worship and serve. CHAM, its volunteers and associates minister on the front lines to the homeless in Silicon Valley; assisting with emergency care needs, running shelters for homeless families and raising awareness of the plight of those sleeping outdoors. In addition to this, the group work pro-actively to find solutions to homelessness as part of the mayor’s task force. I joined Pastor Scott Wagers and volunteers from Santa Clara University as they made their weekly pilgrimage into the dense jungle to assist with food and water.
‘The Jungle’ in San Jose was one of America’s largest temporary homeless encampments, hosting up to 300 inhabitants at any one time. The city spent more than $4 million over an 18-month period to address problems arising from within the camp, eventually beginning their demolition process in December 2014ci. Whilst authorities obtained move-on accommodation for some 135 people from the site, visiting these smaller off-set camping areas gave a sense that many of the ‘Jungle’s’ inhabitants had simply dispersed across the region and were still experiencing homelessness and crisis, albeit in a less contained and concentrated environment.
I was astounded to discover how vast and well-established the ‘tent cities’ are; well hidden behind the busy streets, this is a side of Silicon Valley that the majority of its visitors and locals rarely see. Conversing with members of the community, I learnt that the temporary dwellings are habituated by homeless campers and many people had been existing this way for extreme periods; some, up to ten years. Prominent notices forewarned of planned authority ‘sweeps’, where sites will be cleared of all items and possessions; however, interviews conducted with inhabitants highlighted that there is no viable solution on the horizon to look forward to.
San Jose is grossly under served by both temporary and permanent accommodation options and Section 8 vouchers – the American near-equivalent of Housing Benefit (or Local Housing Allowance) – are vastly misaligned with market rental values, which themselves are disproportionate to average entry-level employment incomecii. What this means in practice, is that it can be near-impossible for a person experiencing homelessness to obtain a rental property – or, adequate and sustainable financial resources in order to pay for it.
The Housing Authority of the County of Santa Clara (HACSC) operates separate waiting lists for the following federal programmes:
The authority state that the average wait for a household to receive a housing voucher is 8 to 10 years and the people I interviewed didn’t seem to know what to do with the time; other than remain camping in the area, hoping that something, somehow, will change.
When structured encampments are regularly bulldozed, inhabitants simply salvage whatever possessions they can before moving on to another area in attempt to rebuild their lives and meagre shelters. Non-profit and faith-led organisations continually supply those affected with replacement essential items such as blankets, clothing and food, before the barbarous enforcement and removal process will begin again. A costly, and highly emotionally-charged game of cat and mouse, which from an objective eye, appears to have no benefit of substance to either party. It simply moves the problem from one place to another, understandably agitating the subjects - and their increasingly acute mental states - further and further each time.
Society’s most vulnerable residents are constantly living on their nerves, not knowing whether they are to be forcibly moved from one week to the next. How can we countenance this underhand, dispassionate treatment of people who, often through misfortune that can beset any one of us, find themselves living on the streets?
ci https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/12/04/homeless-evicted-from-the-jungle-in-san-jose/
cii https://affordablehousingonline.com/section-8-housing
ciii. http://www.hacsc.org/section-8-housing-programs/waiting-lists-applicants/ (Web version unavailable)
Copyright © by Amy.F.Varle, January 2018.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
The views and opinions expressed in this report and its content are those of the author and not of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, which has no responsibility or liability for any part of the report.
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