It has been six months since the city dissolved the long-standing homeless camp in the Palco Marsh. The fall’s first storm has visited, bringing with it ripping winds and record rain. At least 30 people spent the storm newly housed, thanks to the efforts of Betty Chinn, the city of Eureka and the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services. But many more weathered the storm outdoors, on benches in Eureka’s Old Town, hidden in the greenbelts or at a city-owned parking lot at the foot of Del Norte Street.
The parking lot is one of three spaces the city has been using as a rotating designated sleeping area, where people can set up their tents between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. Due to the inclement weather, on some days, the tents have been allowed to remain standing. The recent decision to move the Blue Angel Village – a shipping container shelter project for the homeless run by the Betty Kwan Chinn Foundation – to the city’s parking lot at Washington and Koster streets spurred concerns from local business owners that there would be an even greater impact on their customers and employees. Problems with theft, litter and troubling encounters have been pinned on the sleeping areas, which were implemented by the city after the Palco Marsh eviction, partially as a means to defend allegations contained in a lawsuit brought by local attorney Peter Martin, and partially to address widespread concern that those living rough in Eureka would move into residential areas once shifted from the marsh. Currently, the location of the temporary sleeping area rotates every two weeks.
With the move of the Blue Angel Village to the parking lot on Koster, only two sites remain for use as temporary sleeping areas – the parking lot at the foot of Del Norte and the parking lot of the Wharfinger building. Another site, at the foot of T Street near the Samoa Bridge, was proposed at the Oct. 18 city council meeting, but the council voted unanimously to let the motion die. Residents and business owners of the northern “Bridge Distict” spoke extensively against the idea during public comment.
Although four councilmembers reached the same decision (with councilmember Natalie Arroyo absent), their commentary on the issue revealed a wide spectrum of opinion.
Councilmember Linda Atkins, who originally proposed and pushed for the declaration of a citywide shelter crisis in January, said a more permanent, sanctioned camp would be a better solution.“I would really like to see us consider having a permanent location where people could be,” she said. “It would have to be supervised.”
Although the declaration of the shelter crisis received heavy criticism when it was first proposed, including a very public squabble between Atkins and city staff over its omission from the council agenda and its language as originally written by City Attorney Cyndy Day-Wilson, its passing ultimately proved to be provident for the city. Without the declaration, which eases some housing and public safety regulations, neither the Blue Angel Village nor the temporary sleeping sites would have been possible, the existence of which have allowed the city to honor the ruling of a federal judge that the 11 plaintiffs named in Martin’s case be must provided with shelter if they were to be removed from the marsh.
Councilmember Melinda Ciarabellini, who along with Atkins will leave the council in 2017, cautioned future council members to look closely at the money being committed to the issue. The city paid $80,000 for a report from Focus Strategies, an outside consulting firm, in 2014. Focus Strategies recommended a Housing First strategy, saying that money put in other stop-gap solutions, including a sanctioned camp, would detract from the ultimate goal of getting homeless people into permanent housing.
“Other cities have established camps then torn them down because of problems,” said Ciarabellini. “We need to stay the course.”
Councilmember Marian Brady said she believed that the Koster Street neighborhood would acclimate to the Blue Angel Village, and echoed the rhetoric expressed by many business owners about the temporary camp dwellers, that they had been offered options and refused them.
“Betty took people in,” said Brady. “Some people chose not to accept that hospitality.”
The Blue Angel Village, a collection of shipping containers converted to house up to 40 people, is currently not accepting new clients as it prepares to move.
On Thursday, two days after the council meeting, those camping at the foot of Del Norte were also preparing to move, down the road to the Wharfinger Building. Around 30 people, roused by the Eureka Police Department at 6 a.m., were taking down tents and loading belongings onto carts at 8:30 a.m. as EPD officers, Parks and Recreation staff and a crew from the Sheriff’s Work Alternative Program stood by.
Nezzie Wade and Janelle Egger, both members of the nonprofit Alternative Homeless Housing Alternatives, were also on scene, loading belongings into their vehicles. Despite having an earlier proposal for a small house village rejected by the city, AHHA is still advocating for a permanent camp
“Moving people weekly from one site to another for ‘sleeping’ is not a solution for either the homeless or the community,” said AHHA member Edie Jessup in an email. “It is inhumane and an attempt to wear the social fabric of the houseless community. The investments applied to city ordinances, projects, and law enforcement to move people daily is not cost effective, nor does it meet people’s needs.”
Jessup added that until there is “adequate affordable permanent housing for all,” the group is still encouraging Eureka to consider an organized Tiny House Village as part of its Housing First options.
Meanwhile, everyone involved in the process of the temporary rotating sleeping areas seems to agree, for varying reasons, that they are an imperfect solution.
Wayne Rabang, EPD’s designated homeless officer, expressed frustration with the pace of the move on Thursday morning, adding that those assembled at the camp had sufficient notice. He said the garbage left at the site was the most he had seen. As he spoke, a SWAP crew was standing by, as was the company that cleaned the Porta Potties. They were blocked by several tents and piles of belongings. An impatient Porta Potty employee finally threw a rope around one of the plastic bathrooms and, tying the rope to a harness around his torso, dragged it closer to his truck so he could clean it out.
The money spent on cleaning the sites, on officer time and on porta potties and dumpsters has already exceeded that which the city spent on the Focus Strategies report, with $60,000 spent on hard costs including improvements and the facilities, and substantial personnel costs accruing daily from the work put in by EPD, Public Works and the Parks and Recreation departments.
Both Rabang and Capt. Steve Watson indicated that the sleeping areas had been a resource-intensive endeavor for EPD. In an email, Watson wrote that his department has been auto-dispatching daily patrol checks to the city lots, at roughly every two to three hours.
“These patrol checks not only include the city lot itself, but surrounding businesses that have had associated crime and nuisance problems,” Watson said. “Officers have to wake everyone each morning at the designated lot between 6 and 6:30 a.m. and remain on scene until everyone has largely packed up and cleared the lot by 7 a.m. As you can imagine, this process is challenging and the work is often still being done well after 7 a.m.”
Watson added that dozens of totes provided by the city for the storage of personal property also have to be moved when the camp rotates and that, on moving days, the officers are often there until 9 a.m.
Rabang and his fellow officers were there long past 9 on Thursday, and Rabang said that the number of people camping overnight seems to be increasing, along with fights and tensions.
“I think homelessness is an epidemic,” said Rabang, adding that, like Brady, he did believe many people chose to be there when there were better options. “What kind of life is this, when every two weeks you have to move?”
Among those moving was Scott Dean, recently of Redding, who relocated to Humboldt when he heard there was work to be had at Pacific Seafood. He arrived “with nothing,” he said, and the $255 a week he earns gutting fish isn’t a whole lot, but he was able to buy a tent for $20 and keep himself and his fiancé, who is disabled, out of the rain. They would stay at the Eureka Rescue Mission, he said, but when they checked there wasn’t room for her in the women’s section.
“I can’t have her sleeping here alone,” he said, adding that he has begun looking for housing but he finds the rental prices cost-prohibitive.
There is no indication, either from the city council or city staff, that AHHA’s call to action will be heeded. There is also no end date in sight for the temporary sleeping areas.
In an email, Eureka City Manager Greg Sparks said the city would like to phase out the parking lot sleeping areas, but “no better option has presented itself to date.”
“We continue to see success in getting people housed, and are now starting to run into more of an issue of finding housing,” Sparks wrote.
According to Sparks, who said he had spoken to DHHS, the 3 percent vacancy rate estimated by Focus Strategies had tightened considerably. Even people with Section 8 vouchers were having trouble finding places to live. Sparks said he did not know why the housing stock had decreased so significantly.
“Some of it might be the people who have been housed from Betty and the 30/60 campaign,” he wrote. “Not sure what the other drivers might be.”
Sparks added that the Greater Eureka Chamber of Commerce would be meeting with landlords Nov. 1 to try and locate more housing.
At a little after 9 a.m., Dean and his fiancé joined the procession of people leaving the Del Norte parking lot to make their way toward the Wharfinger building, pushing bicycles and baby carriages loaded with their belongings. They would wait on the sidewalk or in sheltered places until the evening, when the temporary sleeping area technically opened up.
Left behind were pallets and sandbags, which were donated to help the campers shelter from the storm. AHHA members said they would help move them; officers on the scene said the pallets fell under the city’s Open Space Property Management ordinance, which forbids building materials on public land.
During Tuesday’s city council meeting, Councilmember Kim Bergel called the search for more camp locations “really unfortunate … and really frustrating.”
“We have looked up and down,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to go here, but I think I will,” Bergel continued. “I really, really take exception to this idea of ‘these people’ and they’re somehow different. It just really bothers us when we digress into this idea that it’s us and them. It’s not us and them.”
Editor’s Note: This post was updated to more accurately reflect Bergel’s comments. The original post quoted her incorrectly.
This article appears in CLOSED.
I hope that the voters read this article and vote according to how they think the city of Eureka and County Supervisors have spent tax dollars in the best interest of all citizens of this City and County. The problem with the homeless is they dont take responsibility period. In three months in Palco Marsh, they accumulated what 60 tons of trash, 4000 needles, etc. Moving them keeps the trash down. The problem is not where they live, but how they live. They dont clean up after themselves. As a tax payer I resent that. They have all the time in the world to clean up their camps. They would rather live in filth than do anything for themselves. They leave it up to the good citizens to pay for cleaning up after them. What does the council and supervisors behavior teach them. It teaches them to be irresponsible and dependent. It teaches them the council can not commit to their own decisions. I have read repeatedly this does not cost the City of Eureka anything. That is pure bullshit and everyone knows it. I have not seen any accounting for the money spent by the City or County for policing, sanitation, clean up, maintenance repair and staff time devoted to this issue. There is no accounting for the funds given by both the City and County to Betty Chin. Now someone tell me of any governmental program where there is no accountability. I worked in social services for 30 years as a manager and any program I was involved in, we were required to show how the funds were spent. We had specific goals to accomplish that lead to improving a problem. So when you go to the polls and vote in the future vote for those that support your view of how this situation should be handled.
At least the city is trying some things, and the things it’s trying are based on some evidence, not just opinions.
It’s not that helpful to constantly criticize other people’s efforts and not offer any constructive suggestions or ideas or even help out. Got a better idea? Pitch in with it. Problems are rarely solved by punitive and judgmental attitudes.
I agree that it would be helpful to see an accounting for what was spent and by whom.
I’d like to see some way to make it easier for homeowners to add units, like MIL or extra bedrooms, to existing houses. I’d like to see support for developers who want to build infill housing, near the bus lines, services, stores, schools.
The poor will always be with us. Obnoxious people are just as frequently rich as they are poor, the poor don’t have a monopoly on being irresponsible, disgusting, whatever negative human characteristic you can think of. They just have less ability to cover it up or hide it or pay people off or move to another town.
There IS a grim national housing and homelessness epidemic for now zooming along for over forty years that parallels the 1%, .1%, .01% economic wars on every aspect of life for our common good. We do not live in a democracy at all anymore. We live in a booming totalitarian
economic tsunami rising.
Fact: $10 minimum wage is impossible living income for just one healthy person. Gross $1600, net $1400 for Full time employment and you cannot even make enough unless you live in your parents basement and ride a bicycle or? Modest apt costs at least $900-$1200.
Fact: $15 minimum wage…now you’re in the Fed Income Tax range, you gross over $24,999
Per year… So now you get taxed big whack for crossing the $24,999 tax line even barely, a big
chunk of your raised income gets withdrawn…even the $15 wage nets about $1800 max. Hey that is not enough for average rent, food, car, insurance. No matter how creatively poor you are. There’s always the hump of 1st/last/deposit, utilities fees deposits, etc.
Fact: mental health is toxic sick and broken and not working for many citizens who are victimized by dangerous psyche MEDS causing more harm than good. CA is the leader of National Forced Vaccines agenda for we the 99%. Yes 200 new toxic vaccines for everyone from newborns to all adults rolling out now in CA totalitarian world gov medical totalitarianism.
200 new unproven vaccines which BIG VAXX cannot be sued for harms, disabilities or deaths due to vaccines. CA has always maintained our rights to waivers religious, medical and philosophical, but gov Brown has signed away all our rights and Brown quietly a couple years ago signed a new law that allows officials, schools, etc to vaccinate any child 12 years old or over, without ever informing parents or disclosing medical records. Right on the tails of first phase we are in now for all babies, pre-schoolers, K-12, college age… Comes the first time ever new 200 Forced vaccines for all adults. Do your research this is going National with CDC public comments closed oct 14, 2016. People wake up SICKCARE is coming for you and everyone on earth VAXX, VAXX, VAXX. NO DAMM WAY!!! The details are way into threatening healthcare professionals, daycare owners and staff, pre-schoolers, everyone may be taken into custody and held against your will for 72 hours for inspections and treatments, without contact with your family, doctors, lawyers, etc! People recently took this law to a court in San Diego County where it was heard by a judge heavily funded by BIG VAXX!
Fact: many many residential properties that used to be available for rentals to local residents are now: 1. Custom luxury bed & bath furnished rentals for well to do visitors and locals willing able to pay very hefty prices of $140—sky’s the limit—per day. Lots of rentals all over Humboldt County serving people from all over the world, not locals. Big time difference over past 15 years! Very hard to find Sec. 8 landlords!
Fact: many many residential properties that used to be available for rentals to locals residents
are now Grow houses. Tons of grow houses. People bought for hefty prices and/or pay big rent over priced for housing, but growers pay high.
Fact: our national, state and county funding for affordable healthy housing funding has been cut way back by Bushes, CLINTONS, OBAMA. Every year in these economic and environmental wars of establishment oligarchy over past 40 years have caused more and more needs for low income earners, disabled, military vets and seniors, while at same time BIG gov cancelled and cut cut cut Section 8s to the bone in spite of rising needs. Long term locals are on waiting lists for sec 8 and/or senior housing for 3, 4, 5 years!
Hey USA fed gov has stolen $trillions from Social Security Trust Accounts for decades and given our citizens SS funds to oh so bloated wasteful totally unaccountable pentagon military complex… That audits show find over $8.86 Trillions “missing” from Army unaccountable accounts from just the past year! There are mega $trillions missing from USA military forever! Rise up and BreakThroughPower.org PeopleForThe AmericanWay…paw.org How many years we are terrorized by USA fed gov at war on our citizens by planning to cut (steal), privatize, evaporate, devalue our Social Security trust accounts and lie, rob, cheat, cut, lie, loot, steal and kill. Social Security has been denied actual cost of living increases by USA fed gov for decades and recent years NO COLA! If you think minimum wage is low, try SS income $1000 per month
=$6.25 per hour for 160 hours.
Time for NEW DEAL PEACE, PEOPLE AND PLANET REVOLUTION RISING NOW!
Vote Jill Stein launch 3rd Party of Greens conscience now. Ca DEMS rigged for HRC so vote your conscience.
Our County General Plan has been held up for way too many years, by Humboldt County General Plan failures over and over to meet our state’s requirements to provide “affordable housing”.
My 501(c)3 had a mission to provide ECO demonstrations site ECO-co-housing with safe healthy methods and materials ( cob/straw bale/adobe) and solar power. We need healthy nontoxic green affordable housing. Many low income residential rentals are very toxic from materials such as ply woods, wall panelling, carpets, paints, concretes, floorings, heating sources, molds,
and other “sick building” syndromes cause indoor air to be 10 times more polluted than even outdoor air. Materials new especially are OUTGASSING 100,s of air borne poison PETRO chemicals and curtains, sofas! bean bags! stuffed toys full of poison “flame retardant chemicals”
Causing serious harms. Our goal was to develop a Certified construction team with Solar Energy International they come here and assist building and solar as trainers and the enrollees pay tuition and perform labor as volunteers students who are certified while we learn and build.
Many referrals of their successful endeavors. SEI.com in Colorado goes worldwide.
Still giving camping tickets to handicapped people for $1000 fine and 6 months in jail? ADA is now self help.simple enough for retarded people,like me.it starts in small claims court.$140 fees are waived.same can be used for environmental damage.once learned it can be done by rote.small demands can be very expensive to defend against.one could sue for $140 every day.between $2500 and $10000,you are limited to two a year.you can use your friends names and split up to $10000.
Recently my husband and I were looking at different cities as possible retirement options. I loved Eureka, found a lovely Victorian home for sale well within our budget. Then I started reading about their homeless problem. No thanks. meo