The Way of the Wanderers (Part Five)

Between the three major Californian cities, there was a wide range in the efficacy of handling the pandemic among unhoused populations.  Los Angeles was, and still is, the clear and present front runner in quantity of homeless residents and number of non-profit initiatives to address them. An expected mishmash of differing policy opinion and how to appropriate resources consistently converges to stagnation over the years, generally speaking.

SoCal hosts a quintessence of the lost American dream.

San Francisco runs a close second. You’d think chillier NoCal temperatures and condensed urban proximity would convince drifting souls to head down south. However, Frisco’s status as the most liberal city in the world might have street level appeal to unhoused people suffering mental health disorders.

HUD’s point-in-time counts in San Francisco weren’t enough to accurately reflect the shocking increase in homelessness. In 2020, better than 35,000 people were homeless in the Bay Area. According to Kevin Fagan at The San Francisco Chronicle, about 4,500 of the sickest or most vulnerable were sheltered in hotel rooms or temporary trailer parks. Hand washing stations and toilets were installed near the most common areas where the unhoused tended to congregate. An emergency RV park was set up near the Oakland Coliseum. Many residents at Berkeley’s University Avenue encampment – “The Island” – off the I-580 held a sentiment common to unhoused peoples across the nation regarding Covid-19. The pandemic didn’t rank too high among their priorities, since they were constantly preoccupied with finding food and safety each and every day. They had enough survival concerns on their too empty plates.

Several years ago in San Diego, the police cooperated with local advocate organizations to attempt to relocate and re-home the unhoused residents of their downtown tent cities just south of PetCo Park. It resulted in noticeable changes; many sidewalk camps were gone due to an opening of storage centers for belongings. Re-housing efforts helped as well. In early 2020, in response to combating the spread of Covid-19, San Diego’s city council opened the halls of the downtown convention center and set up hundreds of socially distanced cots to temporarily house street residents. It had mixed results, as it sheltered those peoples, yet crime and ongoing addiction cycles continued to hamper staff abilities to manage crowds and care for infections.  

At the end of the pandemic, how did California really handle their unhoused peoples in the era of Covid-19?

About the same as before Covid-19.

Experts knew there was going to be a marked increase in homelessness, with unemployment at an all time high and renters getting evicted. Best estimates from studies at Columbia University put the newly homeless rate at peaking to over 180,000 by the end of summer 2020, a 20% increase over a few months. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority pushed for a recovery plan that would rapidly house 15,000 people and then work on finding long-term housing and addiction treatment. As always, finding funding for the plan's $600 million price tag proved difficult. 

Additionally, the unhoused were challenging to test for Covid because of their resistance to authority figures, making them more vulnerable to the virus, and that on top of their frequent chronic health conditions and lack of safe quarantine options.

Governor Newsom announced efforts to expedite a move of thousands of transients into government-funded hotel rooms via an initiative called Project Roomkey. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti also announced a city initiative to send medical teams to the streets to offer fast result Covid field tests. Infected individuals were to be sent to shelters and hotel rooms for quarantine.

You might imagine how all that panned out. On the fly, reactionary resource allocation to a traditionally underfunded, undermanned social service system in the face of a sudden pandemic was destined to be a splatter of spitballing, in a state network already woefully taxed in its limited budgets. Support was scant from federal or state sponsored assistance programs for people living in homeless shelters, skilled nursing homes, meat-packing plants, assembly line factories, or prisons, a despairing reality in that those group setting infrastructures by definition were spreader seed locations of new outbreaks. More basic logic – the less cultural mobility a group of people had, the more likely they were gonna get the bug, be it unhoused on the street, in a nursing home bed, working in confined crowded spaces, or locked up behind bars.

Policy had to catch up stat, as in right there and then, backed by funds and actions. As you can guess, upper class folks were more concerned with saving their own asses than worrying about lower class others. The existing system was a patchwork series of half measures already on life support within state budgets. Imminent change is hard enough to implement under normal circumstances. In that global emergency, people died needlessly because of old school bureaucracies. Civic leaders needed to adjust the speeds at which they usually operated and executed matters in a timely and efficient fashion. As typical for American bureaucracies, that didn’t happen.

About 14,000 unhoused Californians did indeed end up finding state sponsored shelter, far short of those 170,000 people who needed assistance. Yet as with all complicated issues, any little bit helped in the interim, and some at-risk folks likely dodged the viral bullet because of those efforts. It tended to be less about a lack of ideas and more about broadening the scopes of those ideas to address the bulk of the problem, again requiring increased funding for extensive support.

Most homeless shelters across the state reserved Covid tests for people showing symptoms, or only tested everyone after an outbreak, a reactive measure rather than proactive. Early projections among researchers pegged desperate numbers for mortality rates among the unhoused. Others claimed their respective isolation from mainstream byways might have protected them to a certain degree.

Shana McDevitt, a researcher out of the University of California at Berkeley, noted in an article penned by Amy Maxmen in Nature, an online journal:

“The shortcomings in contact tracing and services aren’t necessarily due to a lack of testing ability, but rather that it’s possible doctors and health officials are reluctant to recommend wide screening in shelters or on city blocks because there’s a lack of plans for how to follow through with courses of action when infected people have no health insurance, money or housing…surveillance of homeless populations can also inform policymakers about whether an outbreak is waxing or waning in their communities, because people there are so vulnerable to infections. They’re kind of a canary in the coal mine.”

McDevitt was spot on about the unhoused community being one of the litmus tests for Covid-19. The unhoused serve that purpose for several other measures of our society, the most pertinent being a glaring byproduct of class division comprised of its top two contributors: the lack of representation of minorities in power structures, and the ongoing aversion to allocating resources for the mentally ill.

Yeah, I know. Now you’re really thinking I’m a raging libby sympathizer. I’m not. But I don’t give a rat’s ass about the world’s insistence on assigning sociopolitical tags to philosophic constructs. If believing that being born in this world ought to come with certain naturalized rights, like free education and free health care and guaranteed shelter, makes me look like a beret-wearing beatnik that wants disadvantaged folk to get handouts who ‘supposedly’ don’t want to earn their keep, that’s something I can live with, because that perception is cultural propaganda created long ago by a greedy ruling class who romanticized the extremes of cowboy capitalism as a legitimate measure of success.

I don’t care how much shit you have, or how big your house is, or how many promotions you’ve been offered, or what kind of designer jeans you wear. I care about you. Just you. Not your career frameworks, or your Pottery Barn knickknacks, or how many likes or followers on social media you’ve accumulated. The way you empathize to others makes you who you truly are.

Here’s a hush hush secret I’m willing to impart if it serves the greater good: it matters how you love all others, not just your sphere of family and friends.

It particularly matters how you treat strangers, and more than that, how you treat folks who believe in different things than you do. That’s something I struggle with myself, quite often. That condescension thing, it haunts me. I get too impatient when I believe someone’s taking too long to understand something, and if I verbalize it aloud, as I sometimes am known to do, I sound like an arrogant prick.

My occasional smarmy language doesn’t help, that much is certain, and it’s one of the yokes still preventing me at times from becoming more sapient. We each evolve at our own different individual rates. Some take quicker roads, some take slower ones, some coast for long periods, some take shortcuts. But everyone gets there, eventually.

Knowing that gives me some solace because everyone deserves peace.

My politics won’t mean a thing after my lifetime here. Neither will my possessions, nor the earthbound institutions I decide to adopt or bastardize or cherry pick. Even our cherished belief systems are, at the end of all days, only aesthetics to who we really are underneath our bags of bones.

What we think is not as vital as how we feel, and sure, sometimes one dictates the other, yet ultimately most all decisions we make are a binary consideration between the head and the heart.

All that matters will be how I treat those I loved, how well I loved, my family and children and friends and any and all fellow humans I come across during the course of my existence. It’s probably the only universal truth I’ve managed to discover in my half century on earth…well, that and the straight dope that chicks are smarter than dudes. There’s just no getting around that maxim. Sorry, guys, if the world was matriarchal instead of patriarchal, we’d be in a lot better shape.

Ha! Yes, I surfed a bit of a patchouli wave there for a bit. Pardon the drift.

There is far more to this world than what we’ve created for ourselves. If you’re not looking out for others, you’re doing it wrong. So the next time you see a wayward drifter asking for tiny generosities…be generous.

Don’t qualify it by guessing at the reasons why it’s a bad idea, how that person might use your efforts to further their bad habits. Maybe they’ll spend it on a pint of Jack Daniels, maybe they’ll buy a brick of top ramen, maybe they’ll get a vial of meth, maybe they’ll sock it away for a rainy day, maybe they’ll pay it forward to someone even more down on their luck. Who knows?

But it doesn’t matter. You added to the karma of kindness just by extending a brief grace. Your intent was golden. What the end result of your generosity is for them is irrelevant. That’s their journey and their choice to step forward or backward in the manner they feel most serves them, even if they choose a self-destructive option. You did right by them, and that’s that. You acknowledged their marginalized existence. A buck, a blanket, a happy meal, a ride, a smile or a greeting, whatever you can spare, and if you want to take it steps further, volunteer at a soup kitchen or a street outreach program.

Whatever you do, stop ignoring the problem and remember it could just as easily be you there in that cardboard shanty on the street. Bad luck can happen at any time to anyone. That grizzled old Gulf War veteran riddled with bio-weapon cancer asking for change is somebody’s son, once a kid who played on a grade school playground, same as you did.

It’s a long, lonely crawl if we’re not helping our brethren up the hill. It’s kind of a gutless move, looking out for only ourselves and nobody else.

We Americans like to claim we’re heroic.

Do we really ascribe to the Warrior Ethos as we say we do?

If you still feel like that unhoused person on the street corner isn’t really your brother or sister, that may be because you’re not quite in tune with the web that binds us all. It’s a common malady. It will, eventually, correct itself, when you’re ready, able, and willing to feel it.

Never leave a fallen comrade behind.

*Compiled from June 17, 2020