Homeless in Philadelphia

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We Remember

Posted by nancybragin on December 24, 2016
Posted in: Homeless Chronicles. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment

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We have a responsibility for our brothers on the street, and service to others is where we find happiness. ~ Mayor Kenney

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December 21 2016 Philadelphia PA — Across the street from City Hall, all lit up in Christmas splendor, a vigil was held on the first night of winter to remember the 200 homeless lives lost this year. We img_1971held candles and signs with names of those who lost their lives on the streets. My sign honored Gary Southrey.img_1978

All of the names were read and we bowed our heads in silence. Head Angel Sister Mary was there, and we watched as the former and current homeless lined up to hug and thank her. Mayor Kenney spoke, said he was committed to the cause. We ended the night singing “This Little Light of Mine.”

Maybe in time a Homeless Memorial Day won’t be needed.
This is our Philadelphia.

 

 

 

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Florida Couple Fined, Threatened with Jail for Feeding Homeless

Posted by nancybragin on May 14, 2014
Posted in: Homeless Chronicles. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

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Debbie and Chico Jimenez, who run  Spreading the Word Without Saying a Word Ministry  to help people in poverty.

“… that’s why we ask Good Samaritans to coordinate with our social service agencies, because they know who needs to be served.” – Police Chief Mike Chitwood

Really?  Are they God? Love All Feed All Serve All” – means ALL – we don’t get to pick and choose. They tried to stop us in Philly from feeding the homeless, the people were outraged and did it anyway. The ordinance was overturned.  Thank you Deb & Chico. They are Wednesdays, we are Tuesdays. Let’s all help them out and support these angels. Spread it. – Nancy Bragin

 

Florida couple who retired from their management jobs to care for the poor vowed Monday to wage a tenacious legal fight days after being fined more than $300 each for violating a local law.

Debbie and Chico Jimenez openly admit committing the act that earned them two citations apiece: feeding more than 100 people who are homeless in Daytona Beach.

Police in Daytona Beach also threatened them with arrest and incarceration, if they offer any more of their home-cooked meals at Manatee Island Park, a gathering the Jimenezes say they’ve hosted every Wednesday for the past year.

“The worst thing is, these are people we have grown to love, they’ve become like family to us, and now we’re not allowed to go down and do that anymore. It’s just heartbreaking. I have cried and cried and cried,” said Debbie Jimenez, 52, a retired auto parts store manager. She and her husband, 60, a retired construction manager, operate New Smyrna Beach-based ministry called “Spreading the Word Without Saying a Word.”

“One of our (homeless) friends said that Wednesday is just not going to be Wednesday anymore,” Debbie Jimenez added. “We were given 10 days to either pay the fine or tell them we’re going to court. We’re going to court. The police don’t like it. But how can we turn our backs on the hungry? We can’t.”

Debbie and Chico Jimenez, who run a ministry to help people in poverty, were were ticketed last week $373 a piece (along with four other people) for feeding about 100 homeless people at a Daytona Beach Park.
In all, police officers ticketed six people, including four volunteers who helped the Jimenezes on Wednesday – one of them, a man in a wheelchair who recently escaped homelessness and participated “to pay it forward,” Debbie Jimenez said. The fines levied by authorities total $2,238.

But Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood said the Jimenezes had been warned one week earlier to stop their weekly feeding sessions after local residents complained that some homeless people gathering in the park were defecating and urinating on the grounds, and that some were showing up drunk at dawn.

“We as a city have spent millions of dollars to turn that park into a place for families, kids and dog lovers,” Chitwood said. “We have an ordinance that says when people want to perform acts of kindness or charity that they must coordinate with our local social service agencies.

“They were told (the previous Wednesday) that if they come back there, they would be cited and they could risk going to jail,” Chitwood said. “There is a segment of the homeless population that is homeless by choice. I don’t want to impugn them all. But some are homeless because they are sex offenders, substance abusers and bank robbers. That’s why we ask (Good Samaritans) to coordinate with our social service agencies, because they know who needs to be served.”

“We as a city have spent millions of dollars to turn that park into a place for families, kids and dog lovers.

The big-buck investments made by Daytona Beach to rebuild Manatee Island Park include boat docks, kayak-

launching sites and spots to view families of manatees – plus playgrounds, picnic areas and a dog area.” – Chitwood 

The Jimenezes contend they never were warned to stay away.

“We’ve been down there a year, and the police have been around and not one of them has ever said one word,” Chico Jimenez said. “This time, the police said we are creating more homeless people by feeding them in the park, that we are enabling them by giving them one meal in a week. Does that make sense to you? It’s so crazy.”

Daytona Beach is not alone among cities that formally and legally restrict non-governmental individuals who seek to share food with homeless people in public or private spaces.

According to a report co-released by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, during the past seven years Gainesville, Fla., began “enforcing a rule limiting the number of meals that soup kitchens may serve to 130 people in one day;” Phoenix, Ariz., “used zoning laws to stop a local church from serving breakfast to community members, including many homeless people, outside a local church;” and Myrtle Beach, S.C., “adopted an ordinance that restricts food sharing with homeless people in public parks.”

The Jimenezes videotaped their final feeding event, and their interactions with police officers. During one portion of the tape, Chico Jimenez pans the long line of people waiting for a plate of chicken patties topped with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and onion, plus green beans with sausage, macaroni and cheese, pasta salad, chips, and sodas. He captures several of the volunteer food servers. And he shows police officers using a cruiser hood to write down the volunteers’ identifications.

One notable moment captures a Daytona Beach police officer telling Jimenez, “You’ve got to have permits,” as a woman plating food immediately widens her eyes.

http://www.nbcnews.com/watch/nbc-news/police-allegedly-ticket-volunteers-for-feeding-homeless-254306883659

“Each week, we celebrate somebody’s birthday. We have over 100 people every week – it’s always somebody’s birthday,” Chico Jimenez said. “On the tape, you can hear us singing ‘Happy Birthday’ as a group.”

On that videotape, the same police officer accuses the Jimenezes of staging “a permanent birthday party,” adding: “You can’t just call it a birthday party.”

First published May 12th 2014, 10:24 pm
BILL BRIGGS

The 1% wants to ban sleeping in cars because it hurts their ‘quality of life’

Posted by nancybragin on April 17, 2014
Posted in: Homeless Chronicles. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

In Philadelphia the mayor put armrests in the middle of park benches so the homeless couldn’t sleep on them, an eyesore for tourists visiting the “City of Brotherly Love.” Depriving the homeless of their last shelter is Silicon Valley at its worst – especially when rich cities aren’t doing anything to end homelessness. Shut your eyes America. The homeless are still there. – Nancy Bragin

 

There are nearly 90,000 homeless people live in Los Angeles County but only 9,000 to 10,000 beds available in homeless shelters, single-room occupancy hotels, and other facilities.

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Photograph: David McNew / Getty Images

Across the United States, many local governments are responding to skyrocketing levels of inequality and the now decades-long crisis of homelessness among the very poor … by passing laws making it a crime to sleep in a parked car.

This happened most recently in Palo Alto, in California’s Silicon Valley, where new billionaires are seemingly minted every month – and where 92% of homeless people lack shelter of any kind. Dozens of cities have passed similar anti-homeless laws. The largest of them is Los Angeles, the longtime unofficial “homeless capital of America”, where lawyers are currently defending a similar vehicle-sleeping law before a skeptical federal appellate court. Laws against sleeping on sidewalks or in cars are called “quality of life” laws. But they certainly don’t protect the quality of life of the poor.

To be sure, people living in cars cannot be the best neighbors. Some people are able to acquire old and ugly – but still functioning – recreational vehicles with bathrooms; others do the best they can. These same cities have resisted efforts to provide more public toilet facilities, often on the grounds that this will make their city a “magnet” for homeless people from other cities. As a result, anti-homeless ordinances often spread to adjacent cities, leaving entire regions without public facilities of any kind.

Their hope, of course, is that homeless people will go elsewhere, despite the fact that the great majority of homeless people are trying to survive in the same communities in which they were last housed – and where they still maintain connections. Americans sleeping in their own cars literally have nowhere to go.

Indeed, nearly all homelessness in the US begins with a loss of income and an eviction for nonpayment of rent – a rent set entirely by market forces. The waiting lists are years long for the tiny fraction of housing with government subsidies. And rents have risen dramatically in the past two years, in part because long-time tenants must now compete with the millions of former homeowners who lost their homes in the Great Recession.

The paths from eviction to homelessness follow familiar patterns. For the completely destitute without family or friends able to help, that path leads more or less directly to the streets. For those slightly better off, unemployment and the exhaustion of meager savings – along with the good graces of family and friends – eventually leaves people with only two alternatives: a shelter cot or their old automobile.

However, in places like Los Angeles, the shelters are pretty much always full. Between 2011 and 2013, the number of unsheltered homeless people increased by 67%. In Palo Alto last year, there were 12 shelter beds for 157 homeless individuals. Homeless people in these cities do have choices: they can choose to sleep in a doorway, on a sidewalk, in a park, under a bridge or overpass, or – if they are relatively lucky – in a car. But these cities have ordinances that make all of those choices a criminal offense. The car is the best of bad options, now common enough that local bureaucrats have devised a new, if oxymoronic, term – the “vehicularly housed”.

People sleeping in cars try to find legal, nighttime parking places, where they will be less apparent and arouse the least hostility. But cities like Palo Alto and Los Angeles often forbid parking between 2am and 5am in commercial areas, where police write expensive tickets and arrest and impound the vehicles of repeat offenders. That leaves residential areas, where overnight street parking cannot, as a practical matter, be prohibited.

One finds the “vehicularly housed” in virtually every neighborhood, including my own. But the animus that drives anti-homeless laws seems to be greatest in the wealthiest cities, like Palo Alto, which has probably spawned more per-capita fortunes than any city on Earth, and in the more recently gentrified areas like Los Angeles’ Venice. These places are ruled by majorities of “liberals” who decry, with increasing fervor, the rapid rise in economic inequality. Nationally, 90% of Democrats (and 45% of Republicans) believe the government should act to reduce the rich-poor gap.

It is easy to be opposed to inequality in the abstract. So why are Los Angeles and Palo Alto spending virtually none of their budgets on efforts to provide housing for the very poor and homeless? When the most obvious evidence of inequality parks on their street, it appears, even liberals would rather just call the police.

The word from the car: if you’re not going to do anything to help, please don’t make things worse.

As reported by Gary Blasi
theguardian.com Tuesday 15 April 2014