Current News You Can Use

  We have a big problem across this country.   We have failed to serve the bottom of the housing market for over 50 years.   Grants Pass now has people camping in our parks, protected under court order, because we have no place for the vast majority of them to go.   There are well over 1000 people in this county who have no secure place to live.   Grants Pass has a little project run by a non-profit with people sleeping separately in a dozen sheds and walking through the cold to a bathroom.   There are plans for an urban campground that can’t find 5 acres where the neighbors will tolerate them.   There is a shelter that sleeps 27, mostly couples.   And there is the Gospel Rescue Mission, an 80-bed residential rehab that calls itself a shelter but takes only people who ask help for their addictions.   All of these have a high barrier in that they are small, and only take people vetted and referred by police.   They can be parts of a solution but cannot be the entire solution.   They

In our last meeting, a Councilor asked where huge hostels have been done.   This Councilor asked some time ago where any city has restored the rate system that for fifty years kept water and sewer rates throughout the world low and stable.   To some public servants, any new idea that has been tried somewhere else is a good idea whether it works or not, but old tried and true ideas from their own constituents cannot be good. Huge, cheap places to sleep are not new; they are an old business that is occasionally mentioned in song and historical fiction.   They were called flophouses.   They were not comfortable, private, or safe, but their customers were out of the weather for a nickel or a dime. Flophouses disappeared in the first half of the Twentieth Century with the advent of cheap used cars that people could sleep in.   In the eighties, states started mandatory car insurance, which kicked a lot of people out of their cars and into doorways, alleys, and bushes.   Nobody was servin

              Rogue Retreat is not ready to take on an urban campground.   Maybe the City should build a real solution for the homeless that will satisfy the federal judge that has put our city under an injunction to allow sleeping through the night in the parks because the city lacks low-barrier shelters that can handle all comers.   You don’t need a non-profit to do this.             None of the solutions you have considered is adequate to cover the problem, helping too few people and having too high of a barrier for most.   Non-profits are not willing to do anything big, and they want to help only those who pass muster.   We have a homeless population that is around a thousand.   As long as we have too few shelter beds, or are too picky about who gets them, we will have people sleeping in our parks.   Tiny houses and urban campgrounds take too much land per person.   Warming and cooling shelters are nearly useless for those who need a place to sleep every night or day.